Your path begins here.

Phil

I grew up learning that the safest thing I could be was small and invisible, and I carried that into adulthood without knowing it. Whatever I achieved, and I had my achievements, I toiled for, and it never lasted. I would rise, then falter, or quietly sabotage myself. For years I called that misfortune. It wasn't. It was a pattern, my pattern, and I couldn't yet see it. Not for lack of trying. I had been reading books, taking courses, earnestly doing the work of self-improvement for years. Nothing held, really. It was as if an invisible force were holding me down.

By my fifties, a mid-life crisis was approaching a free fall. My health was deteriorating, my career was disintegrating, and my marriage of twenty years was following, because the man Rachelle had married was getting harder to find. In the summer of 2019, just after our anniversary, she told me, quietly and without anger, that our marriage was over. It had been coming for years. I had watched it, like a slow-motion train wreck I felt powerless to stop. This was rock bottom. Pain became numbness. It was quietly surreal.

I had two decisions to make. The first was about my love for Rachelle, and whether it depended on what she did next. What was love, really? Receiving, or giving? I had to sit long with that. Once I stopped making her leaving about me, I could finally see her, perhaps for the first time: the weight she had been carrying, the loneliness she had felt inside our own marriage, all the things I had been too lost and too selfish to notice. The hurt turned into compassion. My love for her transformed instead of ending.

The second was about my own life. Would this be how I let my story end? A continuing slide into mediocrity, then oblivion, the quiet surrender of the man I knew I was deep inside? One evening, on my back porch in July, staring into the woods, I made the decision: this would not be how my story ends. I felt the power of love inside me like never before, and for the first time I could feel for myself what I felt for Rachelle. I was worth fighting for too. We both needed me to find a way forward. My determination to overcome the invisible force was now fixed, with a fresh intensity.

Life soon handed me a place to practice. When Rachelle's mother died, she came home to be near our son. We were still separated, in separate rooms, and within weeks the pandemic locked us in the same house. I had one question to live by each day: what would love do? Mostly the answer was small. I made her coffee every morning. Somewhere in that long winter we became friends again. By spring we chose each other, on purpose this time, and deeper than before.

The work that unfolded over the years that followed became MIND CONTROL. I finally understood what the invisible force was, where it came from, and how to work with it instead of against it. A complete framework emerged: for awakening to our truest nature, which is Love itself, and for creating, on purpose, the life we long for and are capable of. A way of living, not just healing. It's what I'm still practicing today. That's what this community is for: the framework, and the company to practice it with.

I still slip into the old stories, every day. And I keep returning to myself. The returning is the practice.

Rachelle

I was born in 1973 in a small town to an eighteen-year-old girl. The man who fathered me wouldn't marry her, and his family wanted nothing to do with either of us. Facing her strict Catholic parents alone, she almost placed me for adoption and chose, at the last minute, to keep me. Still, I absorbed a story early: I wasn't wanted. I carried it for most of my life.

I've lived with major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation since I was a teenager. Therapy never quite reached it, and medication didn't bring it under control either. It took me many years to learn how to manage it on my own, without therapy or medication. I came to recognize its arrival as fall turned to winter, and slowly learned how to get through those seasons.

I met Phil when I was twenty-four. I was practicing and teaching Ortho-Bionomy and Reiki, gentle forms of bodywork and energy work, and I loved it. He had four children, and I became a stepmother overnight, a role I wasn't prepared for. I had hoped he would take care of me. I learned quickly that his stories ran as deep as mine. We were two wounded people doing our best together.

I went into nursing because it was steady and our family needed it. Part-time became full-time. Full-time became leadership. I earned a Doctor of Nursing Practice from Duke and worked my way from unit manager to market vice president of clinical quality and patient safety. In a profession built on medical records, I learned to hide my lowest days. I knew how to wear a mask.

In 2019, I left. I took a job in another state and told Phil our marriage was over. It gave me something I'd never had: room to focus on my own needs. I took off my old life like a coat I'd outgrown. I started to remember who I was.

Then my mother died, and I reprioritized my life again, this time around our son. I came home just before the pandemic hit. Phil and I were living in separate rooms. During that long quarantine I began working with plant medicine, and I first saw it: my life wasn't happening to me. It was happening for me, and I was creating it. Phil and I became friends again, and in time we chose each other, with our eyes open.

Healing wasn't a straight line. In December 2023, during my last major depressive episode, I made my last suicide attempt. It was interrupted by a phone call from a friend. I'm not sure she knows, even now, what that call meant.

A few months later, an ayahuasca ceremony changed everything. When Mother Aya came to me, she filled me with love, and for the first time in my life, I loved myself. Self-love became something I could feel. I came out of it with an understanding that reached across my whole life: I am the creator of my life. The story is mine, and so is the power to write what comes next. To me, that was sovereignty. It wasn't another reason to condemn myself for the past. It was the deepest sense of agency I'd ever felt. This December marks three years without a major depressive episode.

The experience opened something in me that I'm still learning to live. In the years since, Phil and I have been thinking partners, exploring what I'd experienced and what it meant in everyday life. Those conversations helped shape the framework in MIND CONTROL. Working through it together became a major part of my integration: giving language to what I'd understood, questioning old beliefs, and bringing that understanding into my choices. That work continues in the practice: choosing on purpose and returning when I forget.

I narrated the audiobook because I wanted the voice you hear to belong to someone who has lived it. I co-founded Ask Althea because what I needed most was company: people who understood what I was carrying and didn't need me to be different. That's what we're building. I'll be there with you in it.

I'm still choosing. One decision at a time.

If you're struggling right now, you don't have to carry it alone. In the US, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.