The rain was hitting the skylight of my studio with that persistent, grey rhythm that only Portland can manage in late April. Usually, it’s a cozy sound—a backdrop for drawing and deadlines. But that morning, it felt like someone was tapping a rhythmic finger directly against my prefrontal cortex. Two years into this weird, unexpected spiritual shift, and the volume still gets turned up to eleven at the most inconvenient times. It’s like someone took the gain knob on my nervous system and just... cranked it.
I sat there, holding a mug of coffee that had gone lukewarm, looking at a stack of half-finished illustrations for a client who had ghosted me since January. My heart was doing that fluttering thing—not a full-blown panic attack, but that low-level ‘too muchness’ of being alive that comes with a spiritual awakening. I realized then that my ‘spiritual practice’ had become another thing on my to-do list that I was failing at. I had a stack of unlit candles that cost way too much, three different meditation apps with ‘streak’ notifications that felt like tiny digital daggers, and a bag of crystals I’d bought in a panic last winter that mostly just collected dust next to my charcoal pencils. It felt like a performance. And I was exhausted.
The Trap of the ‘Spiritual Aesthetic’
I need to be honest about something. For a long time, I thought that to handle this awakening, I had to look like the people on my feed. I thought I needed the white linen, the perfect morning sunlight, and the ability to sit perfectly still for an hour without thinking about whether I needed to buy more ink or if my car insurance was going to bounce. I’ve talked before about how this shift hit me right in the middle of a work drought—it wasn’t pretty. It was messy. Yet, somehow, I tried to polish the aftermath.
Here is the thing: spirituality can easily become another way to perform ‘wellness.’ We buy the stuff, we learn the vocabulary, we try to ‘raise our vibration’—a phrase that makes me cringe a little now, even if I get the sentiment. But for me, as a freelance illustrator just trying to keep my head above water, that wasn’t sustainable. It was just another source of stress. I felt like a failure because I couldn’t find ‘bliss’ while my bank account was sitting at forty-seven dollars. I was stuck in what many call signs of a Dark Night of the Soul for creatives, where the old ways of working—and the new ways of ‘healing’—both felt broken.
Around mid-March, I decided to scrap the performance. I stopped trying to do the hour-long guided journeys that left me feeling more disconnected than when I started. I stopped trying to force myself into specific breathing techniques that made me feel like I was auditioning for a play I didn’t want to be in. I needed something that felt like my creative process—honest, a bit messy, and grounded in the actual world. I’m not a healer, a guru, or a doctor—I have zero medical training. I’m just someone trying to stay in her body. If you’re feeling physically unwell or overwhelmed, please, talk to your own doctor or a professional. This is just how I manage the static.
The 35-Minute Reset: A Breakdown
I started experimenting with what I call the 35-Minute Reset. It’s not a ritual. It’s not a ceremony. It’s just a way to let the ‘volume’ settle so I can actually do my work without feeling like the world is vibrating apart. I don’t do it at 5:00 AM because I’m not that person. I usually do it mid-morning, after the first cup of coffee has actually hit my system and the initial flurry of emails is handled.
The First 10 Minutes: The Uncomfortable Quiet
I set a timer for ten minutes. I sit on a cushion that has a faint ink stain on it. I don’t try to clear my mind—that’s a myth that used to make me feel so frustrated. Instead, I just sit there and let the static play out. If I’m thinking about my overdue invoices, I just acknowledge it: ‘Okay, we’re thinking about money again.’ If I’m thinking about the weird dream I had about a giant owl, I acknowledge that too.
If you’re feeling that weird buzz in your head that comes with this territory, you might recognize it as one of the mindfulness challenges we all face. The first ten minutes of my practice is just sitting with that noise. Not trying to change it. Just being the person who hears it. It’s often boring. Sometimes it’s irritating. But it’s real. I’m just observing the internal weather without trying to stop the rain.
The Middle 15 Minutes: The Ink on the Page
This is the part that actually saves me. I grab my journal—not a fancy one with gold-edged pages, just a plain sketchbook. I write for fifteen minutes. It’s not ‘manifesting’ and it’s not ‘gratitude journaling’ in the way you see in magazines. It’s a brain dump. It’s a way to get the internal pressure onto the paper so it isn’t pressing against my ribs.
I write about the weird synchronicities, sure. Like how three different people mentioned the same obscure 1970s Polish poster artist to me in one week. But I also write about how my back hurts from sitting at my drafting table or how the rain in Portland has been particularly grey lately. Writing it down makes it manageable. It turns the ‘spiritual’ into the ‘practical.’ It’s about taking the abstract buzz and turning it into concrete sentences.
The Final 10 Minutes: The Transition
The last ten minutes are the most important, and the part I used to skip. I don’t sit. I move. I might stretch, or just walk around my studio and touch things. I’ll run my hand over the texture of my watercolor paper. I’ll look at the way the light is hitting the moss on the tree outside my window. I might even just wash a few dishes or organize my pens by color.
The goal here is to bridge the gap between ‘meditation land’ and ‘real life.’ I spent a year trying to live entirely in ‘meditation land’ and I nearly lost my business because I forgot how to actually be a person who meets deadlines. These ten minutes are about saying: ‘Okay, I’ve listened to the noise, I’ve emptied the brain, now I am here. In this room. With these tasks.’ It’s a somatic grounding that reminds me I have a physical body that exists in 2026, not just a consciousness floating in the ether.
What Didn’t Work (and the Awkward Truths)
I think it’s important to talk about the stuff that felt like a total waste of time, at least for me. A few weeks ago, in early May, I went to a sound bath that cost around forty dollars. I spent the entire forty-five minutes wondering if I’d left my space heater on and feeling a growing headache from the vibrations of the singing bowls. Everyone else looked so serene, and I just felt... annoyed. I felt like I was failing at being spiritual because I wasn’t ‘vibrating’ with the bowls.
I’ve also tried those intense breathwork sessions where you end up crying and shaking on a yoga mat. And look, for some people, that’s clearly transformative. For me? It just felt like I was inducing a panic attack on purpose. I realized that my awakening didn’t need more intensity—it needed more gentleness. It needed more grounding. I didn’t need to blow the roof off my house; I needed to make sure the foundation was solid. I stopped looking for the ‘spiritual high’ and started looking for the ‘spiritual middle ground.’
There was this moment about three weeks ago, on a particularly rainy Tuesday. I was doing my 35-minute reset, and I just felt... silly. I was sitting there, listening to my own breath, and I thought, ‘I am a 29-year-old woman sitting on a stained cushion in a drafty studio. Is this actually doing anything?’ And that doubt is okay. In fact, I think the doubt is part of the practice. Spirituality isn’t about having 100% certainty; it’s about showing up even when you feel like a bit of an idiot. Even when I was exploring deeper tools, like when is moon reading accurate was a question I spent way too much time obsessing over, the most helpful part was always the reminder to just pay attention to my own cycles, not the search for a magic answer.
Why ‘Good Enough’ is the Goal
The biggest shift for me wasn’t finding a ‘perfect’ practice. It was realizing that ‘good enough’ is actually the goal. Some days, my 10 minutes of sitting is just me worrying about whether I should get a new office chair. Some days, my 15 minutes of journaling is just a list of errands I need to run. That’s fine. The practice isn’t about achieving a state of perpetual enlightenment. It’s about building a container for whatever is happening.
Since I started this 35-minute routine, the ‘volume’ doesn’t bother me as much. The static is still there—it’s always there now—but I have a place to put it. I’m not ‘that person’ who needs a three-hour ritual and a specific set of incense to function. I’m just an illustrator who takes about half an hour every morning to make sure she’s actually inside her own body before she starts drawing. It helps me stay centered enough to recognize common third eye opening symptoms for creatives without letting them derail my entire workday.
It’s not flashy. It’s not something I’d post a filtered photo of. But it works. It keeps me grounded in a world that often feels like it’s spinning too fast. And if I miss a day? I don’t beat myself up. I just wait for the rain to start tapping on the skylight the next morning and I try again. That’s the most spiritual thing I’ve learned so far: the world keeps turning, and we just have to keep showing up for it, one messy, unpolished morning at a time.