the neuroscience of becoming someone new

I’ve been called a spoiled brat since I was four.

I’ll take it. I came out of the womb knowing exactly what I wanted out loud about it, no apology in my body for it. and in a culture that treats women who know what they want as dangerous, especially young ones, that kind of clarity rattles people. It rattled the women in my family unit. teachers. dance teachers. friends’ moms. an entire chorus of people who needed me to be smaller so they could feel more comfortable in the room.

I never took the note.

back in my single-and-dating era I had a favorite line. somewhere between the small talk and someone trying to pick me up, when they’d ask me about myself, I’d say it:

“one thing you should know about me — I’m a woman who always gets what she wants out of life.”

and I’d watch people flinch. every time.

My boyfriend didn’t. He loves that I’m a little bratty, a little bitchy, intimidating. He wouldn’t use those words for me, but he loves the energy underneath them. I’m a realist though, so let’s call a spade a spade.

but when I say I get what I want, I’m not talking about good circumstances. the best deck of cards. some inherited privilege that made the whole thing easy. I’d argue the opposite, actually. and no I’m not unpacking my trauma for you here. If you want the intimate details, there’s a time and place for that. I gatekeep that shit. The dark-night-of-the-soul material needs a foundation this post isn’t built to hold.

what I will tell you: there have been so many Tower moments in my life. thresholds. long, disorienting walks through feeling completely lost, no map, no compass, just the walk. and those moments are the actual load-bearing structure of where I’m standing now.

I know that from the outside, my life reads like most people’s vision board. dream city. never worry about money. a business that runs whether I’m precious about it that week or not. a relationship that’s easy in the ways that matter. friendships with real weight to them. health. most of my family relationships intact. I travel when I want to. it’s a privileged life and I won’t pretend otherwise.

but I also built it. on purpose. with a mechanism underneath it, not a wish.

let’s sit with that word — work — for a second, because it ruffles feathers in these circles. Achieving something doesn’t always mean hustling for it. There’s a whole other essay on the difference between healthy ambition and the kind of chasing that’s really just outrunning yourself. That’s not this one. What I want to hand you today is the actual mechanics. The neurology sitting underneath getting what you want out of life, once you strip away the vision boards and the checkout-cart wishing.

wellness culture is obsessed with your thoughts. Change your mindset, change your reality, journal it into existence. and I love a mindset upgrade as much as the next woman with a Notes app full of affirmations.

roughly 80% of the signal traveling through your vagus nerve, the nerve running the entire conversation between your gut, heart, lungs, and brain moves body to brain. only about 20% runs the other direction, brain down to body. This ratio isn’t a wellness stat someone made up for a slide deck. It’s one of the more well-established facts in vagal physiology, confirmed across decades of research.

which means your brain is constantly gathering intel from your body and building meaning out of what it finds there. This is the part that gets me fired up, genuinely, every time nervous system work gets flattened into “just shift your mindset.”

you cannot think your way out of a body that feels chronically unsafe. You cannot affirm your way out of exhaustion when your body is broadcasting depletion on every channel it has. Your brain takes its cues from your sleep, your hormones, your digestion, your breath, your relationships, the actual physiological weather system you’re living inside. The thoughts are downstream of that, more often than they’re driving it.

This doesn’t mean your thoughts don’t matter. It means the conversation runs both ways, and most of us were only ever taught to work the 20%. mindset is part of somatic work it’s one lever, not the whole machine. neuroplasticity itself isn’t purely subconscious work either. but that 20%, the conscious, mind-facing piece, is still worth tending closely. it’s just not the floor everything else stands on. The body is the floor.

So before we get to the practical part, the actual how I want to give you the frame I use to think about the body itself, because not all somatic work is built the same.

nervous system alchemy — western influence. regulation as the floor, not the finish line. trauma-informed practice that builds real safety in the body, not performed calm for an audience. polyvagal theory as a map for activation, freeze, and expansion. tracking and shifting body states with actual precision, not vibes.

energetic embodiment — tantrik and yogic influence. subtle energy worked through breath, movement, sound. sensation mapped through chakras and meridians. masculine and feminine harmonized within the body — not projected onto a partner and left there to rot. presence built through somatic meditation and pranic awareness.

ancestral and earth-based somatics — shamanic influence. the body remembered as an extension of nature and lineage, not something separate from either. ritual and cyclical living as a way of attuning to the body’s own seasons. healing through elements, earth connection, animism. intergenerational trauma released through the body — not just narrated in a therapist’s office and left to live in the nervous system anyway.

expressive bodywork — artistic and creative influence. stored emotion unlocked through intuitive movement and self-expression. sound, rhythm, art, used to deepen the mind-body connection. perfectionism dismantled in the body, one degree of fluidity at a time. self-trust rebuilt through play, voice, sensation — the parts of us that spreadsheets can’t reach.

four different lineages, one throughline: the body isn’t a subplot to the mind. It’s the main character. and once you actually believe that, the entire question of “how do I get what I want out of life” changes shape.

I usually to call this the areas of success, but since you all aren’t my female business clients scaling their work let’s call it areas of life:

• financial — wealth, income goals

• work — career, business, service, contribution

• inspiration — travel, creativity, adventure, passion

• social — connection, community, fun, relationship

• spiritual — soul, being, expression

• mental — mind, learning, wisdom

• physical — health, fitness, wellbeing

when I’m looking at upgrading my own life or walking a client through it inside the mastermind — I zoom all the way out first. holistic lens, all seven categories on the table at once. The question was never “which one do I optimize this quarter.” it’s which one, tended, would lift the other six.

These areas are interconnected. Not a to-do list where you check boxes one at a time. It’s closer to structural engineering. You find the beam that’s actually load-bearing, and you reinforce that one first, because reinforcing the wrong wall doesn’t save the house.

I run this audit on myself every quarter, at every season shift. This past summer, physical wellbeing was the one flashing red. Specifically, my training. I could feel it creating a kind of suppression across my entire energy: lack of mobility, lack of strength, a low-grade static I couldn’t meditate my way out of. and my nervous system was responding by bracing. Which meant more meditation was actually the wrong tool. What the moment needed wasn’t more stillness. It was lifting. strengthening and lengthening the body, structurally, to resolve something happening in my nervous system. You can’t have a healthy nervous system if your physical body is weak.

The compounding effect showed up almost immediately. focus at work sharpened. more strength in the body translated, directly, to more inspiration in the mind. one wall reinforced, and the whole house stood straighter.

find the one area quietly asking for your attention. Start there. and this is where I want to get a little more honest than the standard manifestation conversation usually allows I’m not fully talking about manifestation the way it’s typically sold to you.

If I’m being honest, my process was never purely “what do I want out of life.” and I think that’s exactly where mainstream manifestation culture breaks down. It gets so obsessed with self, self, self, that it forgets to drop into soul — into a relationship with something bigger than the self doing the wanting.

I respect everyone’s relationship to that bigger thing, whatever they call it, however their gnosis gets them there. I’ve used mother earth, goddess, universe, over the years. lately god is the word that feels most true for me — not religiously, but as the closest language I’ve found for a relationship with something beyond myself.

Religion tends to say the most fulfilling life is the one god asks of you. I think there’s real truth buried in that kind of surrender that genuinely works, when it’s not weaponized. but that framing on its own leaves out our own gnosis. Our inner knowing. the thing I’d call intuition. I’m less interested in picking a side of that equation and more interested in where the two actually meet.

picture a venn diagram. what I want for myself, on one side. what god the universe, whatever word does it for you wants for me, on the other. I don’t care which language you land on. I care about the overlap.

and in my experience, that overlap is where the real growth lives, not the vision board. (Although I did just update mine so I do love that practice) but I don’t manifest off a checklist. I don’t ask for what I want the way you’d build a cart on a shopping site, adding line items until the total feels satisfying. My life got richer the moment I stopped adding to that list and started asking which of those wants were actually self-serving, versus which ones held something deeper if I let myself sit in them a little longer.

so instead of saying “I’m manifesting 10k months,” I started framing it as an ignition. The number is still the number, sure. But underneath it is an intention almost a prayer about the character of the woman who can actually hold that wealth. the energy. groundedness. the capacity to not spill it the second it arrives.

That reframe is what actually grew my business. because for years I’d been settling for a version of my desires so much smaller than what was already available to me checking a box on a list, when the room I was standing in went so much bigger than the box I’d drawn around myself.

So as you’re naming what you want, treat it less like a checkout cart and more like tuning a frequency. Where do you and that bigger current actually meet? That’s the question worth sitting with not “how do I add this to my life,” but “who do I have to become to already be a match for it.”

Here’s where science stops being backdrop and starts being something you can actually use.

learn something with zero mastery. a new language, an instrument, a style of dance you’ve never attempted. I’m learning Portuguese right now ahead of a trip to Portugal this fall partly practical, but mostly because nothing forces new neural pathways to form quite like being a total beginner again, on purpose, as an adult who’s used to being good at things.

break your own pattern. Humans are creatures of habit. How much depends on your particular wiring, whatever framework you use to describe it. but novelty itself is the lever. a different walking route. a genre of music you’d normally skip past. small, deliberate disruptions that keep the brain actively building instead of running on autopilot.

give your mind actual resistance. puzzles, sudoku, anything that makes the brain work for it. mental fitness follows the same law as physical fitness; it doesn’t grow without load.

move your body, specifically. Exercise is one of the most well-documented drivers of neuroplasticity there is. It raises BDNF, a protein that supports the growth and survival of neurons, essentially fertilizer for new neural connections. This is not a wellness girl talking point. This is one of the more replicated findings in the research.

reduce your stress, actually, not performatively. obvious on paper. still the piece most people skip in practice, every single time.

protect your sleep like it’s revenue. because functionally, it is. sleep is when a huge amount of that neural reorganizing and consolidating actually happens you don’t get the rewire without the rest.

None of this is new information. It’s almost embarrassingly basic. but the most reliable magic I’ve ever found has never been the elaborate process. It’s the compounding of the basics, done consistently, for long enough that the brain actually rebuilds itself around them.

That baseline — solid, well-tended neuroplasticity — is what lets you re-pattern cognitive function and lay down a genuinely new baseline identity. and that’s the bridge into the deeper subconscious work: EFT, meridian point work, hypnosis, and the kind of mindset work that actually has a body underneath it, holding it up, instead of floating free of one. It also supports us in building capacity for discomfort and doing the hard things in life aka building towards the dream life that’s not just a dream but an insight into the timeline we’re meant to be on.

every season every quarter, or whenever the shift is loud enough that I can feel it in my body before I can name it I run the same audit across all seven areas of life. money, work, inspiration, social, spiritual, mental, physical. I rate each one, gut-level, no rationalizing my way to a number that sounds better than what’s true. I find the one wall that’s actually load-bearing of the house of me.

this is where I’ll actually reclaim the word quantum for a second, because I think it’s earned itself back here. not in a bypass-y, thoughts-become-things, skip-the-reps kind of way I’m not skipping the training, the structural work, the actual hours in my body or my business to get there. I mean something more specific: the real, compounding effect of doing this on purpose, every season, instead of by accident once a year when I’ve burned out enough to finally notice something was off. one wall reinforced makes the next wall easier to see. that’s the entire mechanism. done with enough precision and enough repetition that it starts to look like magic from the outside.

it’s the difference between hoping your life adds up eventually, and actually running tending to it.

so here's the actual invitation: become a paid subscriber and I'll hand you the full practice. not a summary of it the exact audit, the rating system, the questions I ask myself for each of the seven areas, and the sentence structure I use to write my own ignition every season. the same process behind every upgrade I've just described to you, laid out so you can run it on yourself before this season turns into the next one.