Collapse.

Comfort food, multidimensional paradigm shift, and the value of love.

Maybe it is or isn’t happening, societal collapse.

But I want to ask some questions, make some observations, and share some thoughts that are bubbling away beneath the surface. Pull up a chair, make yourself a hot drink, and don your favourite pjs. The world has gone mad, but we still have chocolate. And Mexican food. I’m Taurean, so these things matter to me. Maybe your comfort is a warm bath with candles, or a glass of wine with dinner. No judgement here. End of times comfort is different for everyone.

Whilst I would be remiss if I didn’t at least observe the incredible turmoil that we are navigating on the planet right now, I will refer you to others for some brilliant critiques and in-depth analysis (see footnote).¹

The story I’m telling here is, like your reading-accompaniment-of-choice, less lament and more comfort: it includes conscience and unburdening, resonance and hope. And cats.

What’s happening?

Yesterday was the full moon eclipse and client sessions were hectic. At home, the kids were separately and collectively freaking out. Somehow this turned into a baking spree. There were muffins and cinnamon scrolls and cookies in containers on all the counters. On the floor were crumbs and lines of ants. From upstairs came cackles and howls of laughter and doors slamming. My small ninja cat began stalking my left leg, which bears proof two days later in the form of small bite marks.

Saving her life from a paralysis tick nearly cost me my solvency last year, but save her I did. Love demands faith, and sometimes deep pockets, or credit cards, as it turned out. Her crisis became a personal cross I bore, one that blinded me to the world’s troubles for a time. The kids and their antics also distracted me.

Just for a time.

Before I was in the healing business, before I was a mother, I did a degree in international relations. Crazy. So long ago. This means I understand the world all too well, and yet I pay it cursory attention (possibly because in my undergraduate days it became evident that humans just never learn history’s lessons, that mass consciousness remains alarmingly low). I prioritise the deep one-on-one work of the psyche, keeping news at a distance—for self-preservation, yes, and also so that I can show up for all the people I love.

Maybe you can relate. It’s a fine line between knowing enough to understand the world we share, and exposing oneself to so many details that fear, disgust, hopelessness or despair take over.

It’s difficult to ignore a world on the brink of … let’s call it collapse, which is, incidentally, a state which precedes transformation. Always. Just something to bear in mind. We know this from history, chaos theory, and basic thermodynamics. In chaos theory, for example, when a system is pushed far from equilibrium, it reaches a bifurcation point—a moment of total unpredictability where the system either dissolves into heat death or spontaneously reorganizes into a higher level of complexity. It’s a shattering of all that we know. I’m holding out for reorganization at a higher state of complexity.

First, a collapse, then—a crossing. A choicepoint.

The crossing is the shattering place, where the one becomes many. ~ K.I. Gutov, Ikona

from Chapter 26, IKONA

The Shattering ~ What Future Will We Choose?

My parents visited me in Australia recently. On their way home, they got caught in the chaotic airport queues, as all flights through the Middle East were cancelled and passengers were re-routed. What is there, is also here. It’s not a war that exists at such a distance, when systems collapse everywhere because of it.

Meanwhile, I feel terribly distanced from the beautiful beaches I call home, because it’s so calm and peaceful and safe here, and yet elsewhere, my human family suffers. I have not felt this suffering so acutely before. Why does it feel that it IS mine?

What is far is close, and what is close is far.

I have had more than a few moments lately when I think my novel IKONA was preparing me for a future no one could have imagined a decade ago. I’m not sure what to feel about that. Cognitive dissonance, mostly.

In my novel, I refer to collapse, choice points, and a century of … turmoil. And hope. And awakening.

Life is art, and art is life.

Today, while my cat was at the vet having urine extracted (another cat, not the ninja) — suddenly and for no apparent reason, gratitude filled me, until the very boundaries of my body dissolved and I felt … love. Not as a force that entered me, but as a force that is me. Ah! All was well. Gentle joy-like-grief moved me to tears. Gosh, the world looked different, too. Utterly changed. Like I was in an alternate universe.

After numinosity, I was handed the vet bill. And very nearly did cry.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

*Noting here that so many planets in Pisces. No wonder it’s all water.

How can I hold hope in one hand and disappointment, anger, despair in the other?

What’s going to happen on this cherished blue planet of ours? How can we be, do, think when our seeming powerlessness as individuals is the nervous system-freezing factor that begs the question—what can I do about it? Many are going numb from sheer overwhelm.

(Incidentally, dorsal vagal freeze² is the number one most common nervous system state I’m seeing in clients for the past month. It’s like I’ve been thrown into a specialist dorsal-vagal-freeze intensive.)

I created my podcast, the Shattering Place, to talk about these things.

I want to offer a perspective that blends real world pain with multidimensional thinking, somatic insight, and something else I can’t quite define. Pessimistic optimism. Optimistic catastrophizing. Dystopian hopefulness. You get the picture.

I almost didn’t write this article. I thought my podcast on collapse and multidimensionality would be enough. But we are all readers, first and foremost. I wanted to let you know the story behind the story, behind the podcast.

Multidimensionality

When Rupert Sheldrake wrote about morphic resonance³, he was giving us the key to something that people are only beginning to understand across many disciplines and movements. That the change in a species can happen species-wide, regardless of time or distance: for example, when the blue tit bird in the UK learned how to pierce the foils of the milk bottles, pretty soon that species of birds in Continental Europe was doing the same thing, without ever having had contact with their English brethren.⁴

What hope does that give humanity when humans in a family or in a community hold onto love, to hope, to healing?

I go into the science of this at length in my podcast, so I don’t want to repeat myself here—but I do want to say that how we think, our own connection to the Divine inside us, how we relate to other people, this matters, and never more so then now.

The work you do to heal your own trauma and attend to the intergenerational trauma in your family not only helps you and your family, but is a stone thrown into a pond whose ripples reach the collective.

When I was doing research for my doctoral thesis, interviewing the descendants of a genocide in Crimea, Ukraine, there was one particular woman whose husband had died in a resettlement camp, whose parents had perished in the genocide. She was raising her three sons alone. The way she loved her boys, a passionate commitment forged in the fires of loss, this fierce love planted a seed in my heart, one that blossomed years later—

… when, as a mother with 3 small children, I knew that being able to be available to them was life’s greatest gift. Not to be taken for granted. Cherished.

The hard won lessons on love and mothering that she learned, lived in me.

I worked with a client recently on her intergenerational trauma. As the field between us softened, I saw her carrying a backpack heavy with stones. Each one was a burden she’d voluntarily taken from her children and grandchildren to lighten the weight of the abuse and addiction that had followed the family line.

She was a lighthouse of love in her family system, yet she was sinking.

As we worked, the image shifted: the stones tumbled out and the pack filled with seeds and flowers. The realization was clear—she was never meant to carry anyone else’s weight, but rather, her mission had always been to disperse love, and plant the seeds of care that would grow for generations to come.

It’s easy to mistake containment for release.

Holding onto another’s burden, whilst protective, does not transmute pain. Resonance does. When a mother and child, or a therapist and client, are in a state of limbic resonance, their heart rates and nervous systems actually begin to regulate one another.

The HeartMath Institute shows that a shift into heart-centered compassion moves our physiological rhythm from a jagged, disordered state into coherence. The heart’s electromagnetic field radiates this harmony outward, allowing the nervous system of the other to entrain or sync with that steady frequency.

By leading with love, you create a shared field that lightens the load of all you share your heart with, near or far. You cease to be a container for others’ pain; instead, you become a conductor for everyone’s healing.

This internal shift is the foundation of Joanna Macy’s Active Hope. Active Hope is a practice of participation in what she named the Great Turning, towards a life-sustaining civilization. Macy’s work relies on honoring our grief for the world as an essential step toward healing. Heartbreak, she taught us, is evidence of our interconnectedness; we feel pain for the world because we are part of its living web.

When ordinary people allow their love for each other, for life, for the Divine, for hope itself—to outweigh their fear, they move beyond paralysis and become a vital, stabilizing force. This groundswell of quiet, integrated integrity provides the resilient soil for a new world to grow.

By stabilizing your own inner world, you create of yourself a tuning fork that allows the surrounding environment to reorganize itself into a higher state of order.

In whom can we trust?

I’m pretty over seeing giant images of pedophiles and rapists and certain once-revered gurus linked to certain now-released files.

Here are some faces that we should gaze at instead. Their eyes speak their powerful, loving words directly into our souls, through time, from beyond the veil.

“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” ― Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sermon, “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968.

And Joanna Macy, eco-philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist, who created “The work that reconnects.” She passed away mid-2025.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is... that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.” —Joanna Macy

Thanks for reading everyone. New Shattering Place podcast episode out Sunday night (US time)/Monday morning (Australia).

1. Writers I’m reading on this current collapse. On Epstein revelations: Lisa rankin, Scott Mills; From an astrology pov: Erin Reese, and Molly McCord; On geopolitics John Pavlovitz, and Li’l Bean for poignant illustrations on everything.

2. Dorsal Vagal Freeze: A state of the autonomic nervous system characterized by immobilization and metabolic shutdown. Triggered by overwhelming stress or life-threat, this branch of the vagus nerve induces numbness, dissociation, and physical paralysis—a physiological collapse designed to conserve energy and dull pain when escape is not an option.

3. Morphic Resonance: A theory proposed by Rupert Sheldrake suggesting that "morphic fields" carry a collective memory inherent in nature. It posits that the form and behavior of organisms are influenced by the past actions and structures of similar organisms through a non-local resonance. When a new pattern is learned or a structure is formed in one location, it becomes easier for that same pattern to recur elsewhere for future iterations of that species or system.

4. On Sheldrake’s research: https://open.prodir.com/en/2019/02/all-blue-tits-are-connected-at-least-somehow/