Letter 24: The Journey Home - Preparing for Transformation

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

—Carl Rogers

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Dear Future Human,

For the past few months, we have traveled together through the landscape of human conditioning. I’ve shown you how childhood carves pathways in the brain, how protective patterns harden into prisons, and how suffering passes from one generation to the next. You’ve seen how personal wounds become collective blindness—how individual patterns ripple outward, shaping families, communities, and entire societies.

You have met the Flailing Child—frozen in terror and confusion. You discovered the Fraudulent Adult, performing competence while cut off from what we truly want, value, and have to offer. You have witnessed the Liminal Space of defense mechanisms that keep us reactive and prevent us from experiencing life directly. And hopefully, in these descriptions, you have glimpsed some of your own patterns reflecting back to you.

Here we are at a threshold.

Everything we have explored has been preparation—mapping unconscious living so that we might begin to make better sense of our lives and find a path to greater meaning. All the analysis, understanding, and pattern recognition I have shared with you has been to create the conditions for your genuine transformation.

Before we move forward, let’s pause. Let’s remember a crucial fact: understanding is not healing. Insight is not integration. Knowing why you are trapped doesn’t automatically set you free.

In The Gap Between Knowing and Being, I described how we can know all the mechanics of swimming and still not be able to swim once we are in the water. Trauma researcher Peter Levine discovered that trauma doesn’t live in your understanding; it lives in your body’s incomplete survival responses. When something feels threatening, your body gears up to fight or run—muscles tense, your heart speeds up, your breath changes. If that response gets cut off—if you freeze or shut down—your body holds onto it, still waiting to finish what it started.¹

Imagine a child who wants to yell or run when a parent explodes in anger but instead stays silent and still. The moment passes, but the body never gets to complete that response. Years later, as an adult, a raised voice from a boss or partner can trigger the same tight chest, shallow breath, or urge to disappear—even if the situation is objectively safe.

This is why insight alone doesn’t change our reactions. You can understand your patterns and know your triggers—and still feel hijacked in moments of stress. The nervous system doesn’t change through explanation. It changes through lived experience, when the body is shown, again and again, that the danger has passed.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges explains why. He discovered that your nervous system isn’t a single on/off switch; it runs on a few different tracks. One supports connection—conversation, curiosity, and eye contact. Another kicks in when there’s danger, preparing you to fight or run. The oldest pulls the brakes entirely, shutting you down when escape doesn’t feel possible.²

Your nervous system is constantly scanning—Is this safe? Is this dangerous?—and responding instantly, before thought even arrives. That’s why you can be sitting in a meeting, logically knowing you’re fine, and suddenly feel your chest tighten, your stomach drop, or your mind go blank. Your amygdala is activated, flooding your body with stress chemicals and preparing you to defend yourself, often before you even know what has set it off.

Porges discovered something else crucial: “Safety is the treatment.” The nervous system doesn’t respond to the idea of safety—it must experience actual safety through real environments and real connection with regulated others.³ This is why you can’t think your way into feeling safe. Your body has to feel it.

This is the challenging predicament we find ourselves in as a species. By now, I hope you are getting a sense of where we are in our evolutionary history. We’re navigating adult realities with perception and emotional responses formed when we were children. We are only pretending to be grown-up. In reality, we are plagued by the same emotional limitations as little children.

We unconsciously expect our friends, partners, or the world itself to play the role of an ideal parent—or we brace for the same hurt and rejection we learned to expect as children. We see the world in black or white, good or bad, either/or terms. We over-personalize.⁴ We are prone to wishful thinking: desiring and even ruminating on certain outcomes and yet taking no responsibility for the work of achieving them.⁵

It’s not pathology. It’s evolution. It’s adaptation.

But to do more than simply survive, we need to adapt differently. Childhood once demanded quick, protective adaptations, but it occupies only a small portion of our lives. Most of our time is spent navigating adult worlds with far greater capacity, choice, and agency than we had back then.

To meet these adult realities, we need new adaptive tools—ways of retraining our brains and literally rewiring our nervous systems—so they align with who we are now and the environments we live in. In adult life, rejection does not equal death. Not knowing does not mean we are helpless or alone, even though it can feel that way in the body. Learning this difference, at a nervous-system level, is essential for real growth.

Transformation requires something beyond understanding. It requires embodied practice—the slow, patient, often uncomfortable work of teaching your nervous system new ways of being.⁶ It requires what I call “in-the-moment interventions”—specific tools and practices that interrupt old patterns as they arise and create space for new responses to emerge.

The work of re-wiring the brain is a lifelong journey. This work asks you to slow down and become more attentive in your everyday interactions. It also asks for patience—because repetition is how change actually happens. Think about how a child learns: how many times they’ll play peek-a-boo before it lands. That repetition isn’t random; it’s how the brain wires itself.

Neuroscientist Donald Hebb captured this simply: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Every time you repeat a pattern—helpful or harmful—you strengthen that pathway. And every time you interrupt an old response and choose something different, you begin laying down a new one.⁷

Those new pathways take time. Research suggests anywhere from 30 to 300 or more repetitions, depending on the complexity, before a new response can truly compete with an old habit. So when you slip back into familiar patterns, it isn’t failure. It’s part of the process, while the new wiring is still under construction.

In the letters that follow, I will share interventions I have developed and refined over four decades of clinical work. These practices are designed to bridge the gap between who you have been and who you truly are. Not theoretical concepts but practical tools, tested in the crucible of real human suffering and transformation. Over the past twelve years, with the development of the Leap Forward community, we set out to prove that these practices work. We have witnessed some extraordinary transformations in our community. In the process, we have experienced breakdowns, meltdowns, and backsliding—but of course, that is all part of the process.

Some practices may feel immediately accessible, even natural to you. Others may stir resistance or feel overwhelming. This, too, is part of the design. Transformation rarely happens in the comfort zone; it happens at the edges of what you are willing to bear.

The nervous system doesn’t rewire all at once. It learns gradually, step by step, breath by breath, as you practice staying present with discomfort, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Each time you stay with something that once felt unbearable, you show your body that it can be both safe and alive at the same time.

Over time, those small moments add up. Slowly, new pathways begin to form. Your window of tolerance widens. What once felt overwhelming becomes more manageable.

For example, you no longer avoid a conversation with a partner that used to make your stomach knot or heart pound. You may still feel uncomfortable—but now something is different. You can stay with it. You can breathe through it. You can respond instead of shutting down or snapping back.

Before we get to specific practices, we need to talk about the conditions necessary for optimal change. Real transformation doesn’t happen alone or in a vacuum. You need what I call “the container”—safe people, supportive relationships, and environments where you can actually let your guard down. Trying to rewire yourself without this is like doing physical therapy on a broken leg while someone keeps kicking the injury. The very defenses that once protected you end up keeping the system locked in place.

Remember, when we are born, our brains become wired through interaction with our childhood environments. We adapted to fit into those early worlds. But as adults, we are living in very different environments with much greater capacity to physically, emotionally, and cognitively navigate them. To flourish now, we must rewire the automatic neural reactivity from our childhood adaptation and create neural pathways that meet the needs of our adulthood environments. Only then can we begin to experience our old environments from a wider-angle perspective.

This may be the most challenging part of genuine healing. You cannot rewire yourself in the very environments that wired you in the first place. The people, systems, and settings that once shaped your nervous system continue to trigger the same reactions unless something changes.⁸ Family dynamics, work cultures, social circles, and even the internal stories you repeat about who you are and what’s possible must be consciously examined and, in many cases, courageously altered if real transformation is to take hold.

Pursuing transformation requires great courage. In fact, it can stir in you the very survival fears we have been exploring. You may feel the old terror of abandonment rising, the fear that if you change, the people you depend on will leave you. This is normal.

These fears aren’t in the way of transformation—they’re a natural part of the work itself. The practices I’ll share are meant to help you relate differently to fear, discomfort, and uncertainty, meeting them with curiosity and care instead of avoidance.

This is hard, painful, painstaking work.

It requires learning how to identify the patterns and the loops that have shaped you, usually without your awareness. It means revealing what has been invisible to you your whole life, naming it and organizing it so that it no longer controls you. It means creating a little space between what happens and how you react, between the experience itself and the story you tell about it. That space allows the Witness Self to show up and help you choose differently.

Viktor Frankl discovered this space even in Auschwitz. He wrote that we retain “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”⁹ Psychologist Rollo May reaffirmed Frankl’s teaching with a quote he read, “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose.”¹⁰ If that space existed even there—under starvation, terror, and systematic dehumanization—it exists in your life too. The real question isn’t whether the space is there, but whether you’ve learned to notice it and step into it.

When the Flailing Child takes over, there is no space—only immediate reaction. When the Fraudulent Adult steps in, there is narrow and controlled space. When the Integrated Self is present, there is real space—room for awareness, choice, and response. That is where transformation happens.

And it means intentionally creating new environments, relationships, and practices that can hold and support your growth as you take these new, uncomfortable steps.

It is not only possible, but essential if you want to live an organic, free life and not a mechanical one.

The journey ahead requires courage, not the kind that eliminates fear, but the kind that allows you to feel afraid and act authentically anyway. You will need to be willing to disappoint others in order to finally stop disappointing yourself. The radical act of choosing your own wholeness over the comfort of familiar patterns.

In upcoming letters, I’ll introduce the idea of creating a conscious community, surrounding yourself with others who are committed to their own growth, and who can witness, support, and challenge one another in the process of becoming whole.

I’ll also share specific practices for developing your Witness Space—the observing part of you that can notice your patterns with curiosity and care, rather than judgment.

Most importantly, you’ll learn to trust your Signal—the innate wisdom that guides you toward what truly serves your growth and the growth of all life. This Signal has been obscured by layers of conditioning, but it has never been destroyed. It’s waiting for you to remember how to tune in and listen.

The work ahead is about remembering who you’ve always been beneath the layers of protection and performance. It’s about coming home to your true self—not who you think you should be, but who you are when you stop trying to be anyone else.

This work is not about getting somewhere; it’s a moment-by-moment choice to practice showing up honestly in your life. You will need to be patient with yourself as you learn new ways of being. You will have to forgive yourself for the years you spent asleep. Cultivating deep humility and faith will be essential to overcome all your conditioning and trust that you are worthy of love, that you belong.

As we enter this next phase of our journey together, I want you to know that what I’m about to share comes not from theory, but from lived experience—my own and that of thousands of people I’ve witnessed in their transformation. These practices work. But they work only when you engage with them, patiently and honestly.

Change is possible. Healing is possible. A life lived from authenticity rather than adaptation is possible. But possibility becomes reality only through practice, patience, and the daily choice to show up for your own transformation.

As anyone who has ever seen renderings of the bizarre, chimerical creatures that lived in our ancient oceans knows, evolution does not move in a straight line.

The Signal that’s been calling you toward wholeness throughout your entire life is about to get much clearer.

Are you ready to listen?

All love,

Ronit

1. Peter Levine, “Somatic Experiencing: Using Interoception and Proprioception as Core Elements of Trauma Therapy,” Frontiers in Psychology, February 2015.

2. Stephen W. Porges, “The Polyvagal Theory: Phylogenetic Substrates of a Social Nervous System,” International Journal of Psychophysiology, 123–146, 2001.

3. Stephen W. Porges, “Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety,” Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, May 2022.

4. Joseph Cooper MD and Barbara Schildkrout MD, “Breaking Down Binary Thinking in Neuropsychiatry,” The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, December 2024.

5. Marcus Bishop, “Approach-Avoidance Conflict: Understanding the Psychology Behind Decision-Making Struggles,” A Battle Within, March 2025.

6. Pete Farley, “Long-Term Learning Requires New Nerve Insulation,” UCSF News, February 2020.

7. Donald Hebb, “The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory,” 62 -70, New York: Wiley, 1949.

8. Patrícia Marzola et al., “Exploring the Role of Neuroplasticity in Development, Aging, and Neurodegeneration,” Brain Sciences, December 2023.

9. Viktor E Frankl, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” 65-69, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

10. Alex Pattakos, PhD, “Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and in Work: Prisoners of Our Thoughts,” Foreword by Stephen Convey, VI, Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010.

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