Erin and Aparigraha

I teach yoga classes. I do yoga therapy, somatic therapy, all in this little place called the Vault. We call it the vault 'cause there's an old bank vault door in it weighs about a million pounds. It's pretty awesome. If you're interested in learning more about what goes on at the vault, shoot me an email at W-I-L-I-T with Jamie at Gmail. So that's what I learned in therapy Acronym with Jamie at gmail.

It's located in the show notes, or you can just head over to the Vault's website also located in the show notes, and you can contact us there too. I'm really excited to continue to share all the healing that happens here. Um, and now it can happen with you wherever you are with the digital course podcast meditations. It's all there for you. So going over to the website and begin a really profound journey of healing.

Speaking of the retreats that I do over the last couple of months, I've had four retreats at the vault, two with one group, and two with another group. So they're separate and they're in different stages of the curriculum that I've built, and it's been so profound. The groups are very different. They learn differently, they love on each other differently, and I get to experience all of that in a very intimate way. I'm so lucky sometimes I just feel like the luckiest woman in the world.

At one of our most recent retreats, a woman named Erin was really struggling with the concept we were studying. We were talking about Aparigraha, and it is the wisdom. Of letting go, and the wisdom isn't the letting go part. The wisdom is that it's really fucking hard. So stay with it. Stay with it. There is nothing that you need to lose because you cannot lose any parts of yourself. There is just transformation waiting for you around every corner. And I'd like to talk about Aparigraha today.

And also this woman, her name is Erin, that's not her real name, but she has given me permission to speak about her experience, um, as long as I change her name.

Um, and I think it's one of the most beautiful things in the world. Honestly. We simply know that we are drawn, pulled, tethered to people who seemed to bring us home, and a home not designed just for comfort. Also someone with whom to walk into the unfinished rooms of our childhood. The places where we were left waiting, unseen, and often unheard aparigraha. The wisdom of letting go is often misinterpreted as detachment. But it is not about removing ourselves from life.

It is about releasing our grip on the illusion of control. It is about recognizing that love is not possession, and healing is not domination over another, but rather surrendering to the truth of the present moment. There is no amount of suffering that is going to change the past. However, there is a tremendous amount of suffering when desperate to modify the present. Erin is a part of the newest group of women moving through my curriculum.

I. throughout the curriculum, we meet seven times a year, each meeting for a two day weekend retreat at the vault. She has a 48-year-old woman and a five year relationship with her boyfriend Jack. Erin came to the retreat carrying a lifetime of illusion, the illusion that control gives her what she needs as a child, she learned that survival meant being seen that love was not given freely, but fought for whether through. Laughter, performance control, fear.

Her father left and her mother turned toward many men turning away from Aaron, and so she learned to grasp. To anticipate, to orchestrate, to manage the chaos so that she would never be forgotten again or to reject before being rejected. And now she has Jack. He is everything. She was denied. He is present. He's patient, willing to listen without demand, without pulling away.

In fact, the last time I spoke with her, she said something like, he's the kindest, most patient person I've ever met, but it terrifies her because to love Jack, I think as he is, means that Aaron will be able to accept that love does not have to be chased or controlled, that it can simply be. That she can simply be. She was expressing some frustration with Jack at our retreat, and I stopped her and said, Aaron, we pick the partners. We do because they hold the medicine we need.

Jack is not your father. He's here. Right now, in this moment, he's with you here, and the question is, can you be with him? Can you let go of the illusion of control and simply receive aparigraha is the hand that slowly uncles, it is the hand that releases the tension of grasping for whatever we already have. It asks us to see the ways we hold onto pain because it is familiar. The ways we try to shape our partners into ghosts of our past so that we might finally rewrite the ending.

But healing, I assure you, does not come from rearranging the past. It comes from choosing in this moment to let the story continue to transform you and continue to become. Aparigraha does not mean leaving. It does not mean detaching. It means surrendering to what has already been constructed. It means surrendering to love as it already has been constructed, and let it transform you again and again and again. And so Aaron is learning slowly, carefully, painfully it hurts.

It hurts to realize the thing that saved you is now harming you. We choose the partners, friends and mentors we do because they have. The salve, the particularly constructed medicine to nurture our healing. There is no coincidence in our deepest relationships. We are drawn to those who unconsciously reflect our unresolved wounds. Not as a punishment, but as an opportunity for integration. Buddha once told the story of a man who clung to a raft after crossing a river.

I love the story he had needed it to survive, but once he reached the shore, he refused to let it go. He carried it with him on his back through the forests fields, believing that because it had once saved him, it would always be necessary, but clinging to the raft only slowed him down. It was no longer needed. What once kept us safe can often become our burden. Aaron's need to control was once raft.

It helped her survive a childhood of neglect, but now in the presence of love with Jack, it weighs her down. She must lay down the illusion if she is to move forward. Neglect is not just a lack of care. It is an absence that takes up space. It is a void that a child tries to fill in any way they can. Neuroscience shows us that children who experience neglect, whether emotional, physical, or psychological, develop brains wired for hypervigilance.

Their nervous systems become finely tuned instruments, always searching for signs of rejection, abandonment, or harm. Instead of growing into a world that feels safe and predictable, they adapt to one that feels uncertain and dangerous. For young children. For little girls, neglect carries a unique imprint when a father is absent, either physically or emotionally. A girl learns to question her own worth.

She internalizes the message that she is not important enough to be prioritized that love is something to be earned rather than received freely. If a mother is emotionally unavailable or immersed in her own pain, a daughter learns that her own needs are secondary, that she must take care of others before she is allowed to take care of herself.

And when exposure to sex comes to soon, whether through inappropriate conversations, witnessing adult relationships, or direct exploitation, the effect is profound. This happened to Erin. Her developing brain was not equipped to process sexuality before it was ready. Research shows that early exposure to sexual content can blur boundaries, confuse a child's understanding of love, and create deeply rooted associations between attention and desirability.

Instead of learning that love is built on trust and respect, they learn that love must be earned through performance, through compliance, through making oneself desirable. A young girl exposed to sexual power too soon learns that her body is a tool, a currency of connection. Even if no physical violation occurs, the psychological impact is lasting. She absorbs the unspoken message that her worth is in, how she is seen, not in who she is.

That power comes not from her voice, but the shape of her presence, that to be wanted is to be safe, even if that safety is an illusion. Fast forward into adulthood, and these early lessons manifest in relationships. The neglected child becomes the adult who is terrified of being unseen, who tries to control love, because love once felt like an unpredictable force that could be taken away at.

Any moment the girl who learned that love must be earned through pleasing others now struggles to set boundaries. Fearing that saying no means losing connection, and that anyone that says no to her doesn't want her. And the one who was exposed to sexuality too soon may unconsciously seek validation through desirability. Even as it perpetuates her fear of being abandoned. In Erin's case, her relationship with Jack is not just a love story.

It has become a battleground between her past and her transformation. She reaches for control, not because she doesn't love him, but because her nervous system does not yet believe in safety without it. To let go of the illusion means to risk vulnerability, to trust in something that has never felt reliable. When a child experiences consistent neglect or abandonment, their developing nervous system must adapt.

The amygdala responsible for detecting threats becomes hyperactive, always scanning for signs of rejection or danger. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and emotional regulation struggles to develop fully. This imbalance means that as an adult, even small triggers of uncertainty or distance in relationships can feel catastrophic as if survival is at stake. But there's good news, the brain and the body.

Are malleable healable through neuroplasticity. We know that new relational experiences, ones that are safe, consistent, and nurturing, can rewire these old patterns. Every time she takes a risk and allows Jack to hold space for her without controlling the outcome. Her brain is building new neural pathways. I. Each moment of trust, each breath where she chooses to soften rather than grasp is literally rewiring her nervous system to experience love as something stable real here.

Aparigraha is not just a spiritual practice, in my opinion, it's a spiritual necessity. To let go of. The illusion of control is not to surrender to chaos, but to trust that love has existed long before you came to this earth, and it will exist long after, even without our grasping for it. It is to believe that we can be chosen without performing, that we can be held without begging, that we can be loved for who we are always becoming.

And so Erin is learning not just through words, but through experience. Every time Jack stays, every time he listens, every time she loosens her grip and finds that love does not disappear, but deepens. She's changing. She's becoming yet again. Letting go of illusion is terrifying. I know I've had to do it several times in my life, especially with my own partner, but what I've come to learn is that when I let him, he's exactly who I've needed most of my life.

The hands we unc Unclench have already become. You have always been becoming, and you always will. There's nothing to grasp before. Why stand in the way when it's always been? Thank you for listening. Now go spray. Paint that big old world out there with all of your love.