From Frozen Meals to Future Self: A Beach. A Journal. A Deep Inner Shift. And the Science of Why It Worked.
My position was eliminated at my nonprofit job on a random Tuesday in July. A job that looked and sounded good on paper. But felt very wrong in my body. And was costing me more than it was giving.
There was no panic, no spiral. Only relief felt through out my whole body. It knew immediately that I was going to be okay. I walked out of that building for the last time with a smile on my face and a bag full of barely edible frozen GF meals I'd kept at the office. To eat at my desk every day, while continuing to slog through my inbox of insane emails. Now all a thing of the past.
I went home, got my dog Arlo, grabbed my journal, and headed to the beach. While Arlo frolicked in the sand — scampering into the waves and then sprinting back to dry land like a game of cat and mouse, where the water was definitely winning — I wrote.
I scripted the exact life I wanted. How I wanted to live, what I wanted it to feel like, who I wanted to be in it. Not as a wish. As a memory of something that had already happened.
I wrote about waking up with calm, gentle presence, where my first action wasn’t to grab for my phone, it was to breathe. Taking Arlo for a sunrise walk. My morning cup of coffee. Doing work that felt like mine.
I wrote a full day: good food, time to create, to move, to be in nature, to feel. Clients who felt aligned. Work that lit me up and felt good in my body. Space for the things that make me me.
I also wrote this: I am delulu with a dash of practicality. I love the way I spend my days. I am already me.
I didn’t edit it. I didn’t wonder if it was too much. I just let the pen move toward what I actually wanted, which turned out to be simpler and more specific than I’d been letting myself admit.
Two days later, my mentor posted a special on her certification programs.
I signed up immediately. Clinical hypnosis. Sound. Later, breathwork. No deliberation. No spreadsheet of how I was going to pay for it or ten-step process for what I was going to do with it. Just an immediate response from somewhere underneath my logical brain.
That was my first step toward the life I'd written on the beach. Not a plan. Not a decision made from logic, willpower, or discipline. A response. My subconscious had already been there. My brain and body simply followed.
Before I started subconscious work, I'd spent decades trying to think my way to change. Yet always ended up in the same cycles, exhausted, depleted, and wondering what was wrong with me.
What the beach made clear was how far the work had already taken me (the clinical hypnosis, breathwork, sound and yoga nidra) and why these practices worked when nothing else had.
Why the beach worked
Here’s what was actually happening that day, underneath the journaling, underneath the relief, underneath Arlo losing his ongoing battle with the Pacific.
The job loss interrupted a pattern I was in. The noise of the chaotic environment I’d been in went quiet. And in that quiet, my subconscious had room to show me what it already knew.
The two days between the beach and the enrollment email were different from any two days I’d had in years. I wasn’t bracing for the 5 AM email. I wasn’t running calculations on how to best show up for myself and my team. I was just present. Lighter. Like something had already been decided at a level below my thinking mind, and all I had to do was show up when it knocked.
When my mentor posted that offer, I didn’t deliberate. There was nothing to deliberate. My subconscious had already been living in that future for two days. My body just followed.
That's what this work does. In a grounded, physiological, this-is-how-the-brain-actually-changes way. And it doesn’t require a job loss or blow up your life interruption. It can start small. An intentional choice to try something different. An experiment. An exploration.
The short version of the science
Each of these principles of science behind the practice deserves its own post. But for now, here's what you need to know:
THE CONSCIOUS MIND v. THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND: Your conscious mind, the planning, deciding, disciplining part, runs about 5% of your daily mental activity. The other 95% is your subconscious, determining what feels safe, possible, and most like you based on prior experiences. When your goals conflict with what the subconscious believes, the subconscious wins.
BRAINWAVE STATES: Clinical hypnosis, breathwork, sound, and yoga nidra slow your brainwaves from alert, waking state beta to alpha and theta (the states just before sleep) where the critical filter between conscious and subconscious relaxes. New images of who you are and what is possible can land without being rejected.
NEUROPLASTICITY & REAL V. IMAGINED EXPERIENCES: The brain rewires itself based on repeated experience, including imagined experience. A vivid, sensory-rich scene of your future self, visualized or written in present tense as felt reality, is processed as evidence. The neural pathways associated with that identity begin to form.
IT STARTS WITH INTERNAL SAFETY: Your nervous system has to feel safe in the future you're building. When a goal feels too far or too unfamiliar, the brain registers it as a threat. These practices create internal safety first. So your subconscious stops treating your goals as threats and starts treating them as the next natural step.
This is why willpower runs out. It's operating in the 5%. The beach worked because I wasn't trying to think my way there. I was already there, in my body, on the page.
FREE PRACTICE
Your Future Self Session.
This is what I did on that beach, made into a practice you can do today. The audio brings you into the same receptive state I was in when I wrote. The scripting guide gives your subconscious the same kind of prompt I gave mine; a future memory to move toward. A place to begin your experiment, your exploration. Your first step in.
