Tidbit to Threads No. 12

Grounded Spirituality, Unfolding

As the energy of summer arrives, so too does a feeling of openness and expansion, both internally and externally. There is something about this season that, as I watch life unfold around me, seems to gently coax people outside of themselves. Windows are thrown open, doors are left ajar, and life begins to spill outdoors. I’m reminded of this each time I catch sight of the beaded curtain hanging in my doorway. It sways gently in the breeze, keeping the bugs outside while welcoming the fresh air in.

For me this summer is a time when I my calendar becomes less structured inviting me to explore more of what life has to offer. I picture a door opening before me, and all I need to do is cross the threshold into this window of time called summer.

There is something about crossing a threshold. Once we step through, something shifts. We begin to notice what we couldn’t see before. We become more open to new conversations, new ideas, and sometimes even new ways of understanding ourselves.

Summer, with its openness, invites exploration. New conversations, new sights, sounds, and experiences. Expansion, for me, begins to look less like hours spent behind my desk and more like mornings with a book on the patio, watching up close the nest just built in my planter. I wonder if she is a first-time mama bird. Then there are walks along the water, visits with friends, and travelling to and fro with no particular urgency, while Andrew counts the days until our planned vacation arrives and with it plane trips and new memories.

And already, only a short way into summer, I’m noticing a theme.

It’s not one that I would have intentionally chose, but this one seems to have chosen me.

Spirituality is that theme.

It has surfaced in almost every meaningful conversation I’ve had. It has quietly woven itself through the pages of nearly every book I purchased at the Vancouver International Writers Conference in June. As I read, one book after another, without realizing it, I found myself drawn toward stories of transformation, stories about women who had walked through trauma, questioned everything they once believed, and somehow emerged with lives that looked nothing like the ones they had left behind.

The first book I read after the conference captured my attention. Glenda, share’s her journey that led her from childhood trauma into the study of realms beyond. Today she describes herself as a healer, she has even been ordained into this work, I read how it happened at the same timing as releasing her book. Timing? Or is it synchronicity? (we’ll talk more about that in another tidbit).

Then there was Keri, my conference buddy. We first met at last year’s conference. I knew she was a published author, not once, but twice. I wanted to get to know her story more deeply, so I chose her second book to read. I had no idea then that Keri, too, had experienced religious trauma as a child, and that her second book spoke to her journey into freedom, both physically and spiritually. When I opened her book, I realized we had both reached for the same metaphor to describe what healing had felt like.

The caterpillar.

The butterfly.

When I read the chrysalis quote at the beginning of Kari’s book, I smiled because it was the same metaphor I had used years earlier at my first women’s meeting, the meeting where my body was doing what I affectionately now call “the shaky wakey.” My legs trembled, my voice quivered, but I still gave my talk.

Back then, I spoke about grace and breakthrough, and how it was God’s grace that was helping us emerge from the chrysalis. I still believe grace may be part of the story, but I also realize now that I didn’t yet have the lived experience to understand that perhaps an even better word than grace is: becoming.

And I certainly didn’t understand then what becoming actually requires.

A caterpillar doesn’t simply wake up one morning as a butterfly.

There is the chrysalis.

The in-between place.

The place of darkness, compression, uncertainty, and profound change. Where everything that was once solid, liquifies. The place where everything familiar dissolves before something entirely new can emerge.

And when the butterfly is finally ready, it doesn’t drift effortlessly into the world.

It pushes.

Again.

And again.

And again.

The struggle of emerging is not a mistake in the process.

It is part of the process.

The effort strengthens what is needed for flight. Without that struggle, the butterfly would never fully become what it was created to be. I think that’s true of us, too. For a long time, I confused survival with the necessary life skill of healthy struggle. I thought if life felt hard, I must be growing, pushing my boundaries, and getting closer to my breakthrough.

But survival and struggle are not the same thing.

Survival is what happens when our nervous system has learned that safety is uncertain and it takes it roots in our earliest attachment wounds. Survival keeps us scanning for danger, anticipating rejection, pleasing others, staying small, and remaining hypervigilant. Its purpose is protection.

It asks:

How do I get through this?

How will I survive?

Those questions became the hook that Velcroed me to people, groups, and systems that profoundly shaped who I was becoming.

But becoming asks something entirely different of us.

Healthy struggle doesn’t ask us merely to endure, it invites us to participate.

In healthy struggle, we may find ourselves stretched beyond what is familiar, but it is also where struggle begins to partner with understanding. Through psychoeducation, deconstruction, and compassionate curiosity, we slowly begin to undo what was done to us. We start to make sense of our stories rather than simply surviving them. It is here that grief finds its rightful place. We begin to let go of what no longer serves us, to allow ourselves to mourn what was lost, and, when we are ready, to embrace what it takes to begin again.

Here, we begin to learn about boundaries, which gives us the bravery to tell the truth about what works for us and what doesn’t. We learn that we could never authentically be a we if we haven’t first learned to be an I. Healthy individuation begins to take shape. For many of us, this developmental stage was missed, so we begin now and watch what happens as it takes shape. Words like differentiation begin to make sense.

Survival kept us alive. It was the extraordinary work of a brain and nervous system designed to protect us. But while survival helped us endure, it was never meant to become the place where we permanently lived.

Healthy struggle, held within safety, helped me become more alive. It connected me to my values and gave me the courage to make choices that aligned with them. My wobble became my stride as struggle became a foundational life skill. Practiced in healthy ways, struggle gradually transforms into resilience, not because life becomes easier, but because we learn we can meet it differently.

Internal first.

Then external.

Living from the inside out allows us to bring our fuller selves into the world. Looking back, I can now see that what I once called struggle was often survival wearing a different name. I wasn’t building wings, I was living on automatic, doing whatever my brain and nervous system believed was necessary to keep me safe.

I'm sure you've heard the terms fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. I moved through each of them, but more often than not I found myself in freeze and fawn, long before the phrase window of tolerance wasn’t yet part of my vocabulary. Back then I didn't have the language to understand what my brain and nervous system were doing, I only knew I was trying to make it through.

The answer for me was finding safe enough relationships and safe enough spaces that allowed me to acknowledge what I was experiencing. It was within those relationships that I could begin to see my experiences of joy, grief, disappointment, love, loss, and healing not as proof that life was against me, but as part of what it means to be human.

As I came to understand the power of healthy struggle, those experiences became the raw material from which a stronger, wiser, and more wholehearted version of myself could emerge. Not because becoming is quick or easy, but because it reminds me that becoming has never been about escaping the chrysalis, rather it has always been about trusting what is being formed within it, even when I can’t yet see who I am becoming or where the journey will lead.

Perhaps that’s why this butterfly theme keeps appearing.

As I think back to that doorway and its threshold I imagined crossing, representing summer, and I have to wonder if this season, this summer of 2026, is inviting me into something more...perhaps it is inviting me to notice. From the conversations that found me, to the books that I chose and within those books, the stories that mirrored in many ways, parts of my own.

As I’ve mentioned, summer has a way of opening windows and doors. Maybe it also opens something within us. A little more curiosity, a little more bravery, a little more willingness to step across another threshold and trust what waits on the other side. Not because we know exactly where we’re going, but because, little by little, we are learning to become more fully ourselves.

So, drum roll, please…

This summer, I’ve decided to write about what I’m learning as I continue exploring spirituality. And let me be clear: I’m calling this journey grounded spirituality. I’ve done the other. I’ve chased certainty, ignored my own instincts, and learned where that road can lead. There’s no need to hit repeat.

This time, I want to explore a spirituality that is rooted rather than reactive, curious rather than certain, embodied rather than detached from real life.

Having deconstructed prophecy, prophetic words, and the power they once held over me, I’m ready to say yes to something new. Not to another system or another person who carries the aura of certainty, but to the invitation to discover what grounded spirituality means for me. Whatever this summer holds, I want to be present enough to notice it.

If these are questions you’ve been carrying too, perhaps you’ll join me.

I’d love the company.

Thank you for reading Tidbit to Threads where small moments, insight and deep threads become a return to self-trust, reflection and healing.

Small moments. Deep threads. A return to self-trust.

Author of Velcro Kisses: prophecy, trauma bonds and Reclaiming narrative.