🤺 From Worrier to Warrior: The Medicine of Doing

⏰ When the Loop Becomes the Enemy

There’s a particular kind of despair that doesn’t come from a big tragedy. It comes from doing the same thing every day.

Same job. Same bolognese. Same playlist. Same chair. Same thoughts.

A slow grind of sameness that leaves your nervous system brittle and your soul numb.

I used to think I was just burnt out. Figured if I could quit this one job, or sleep more, or take a long weekend off, I’d feel better. But it wasn’t tiredness. It was something deeper.

My brain wasn’t imbalanced.

It was under-stimulated. Over-scheduled. Spiritually anaemic.

Eventually I realised I wasn’t living—I was bracing for impact.

Waking up in armour. Navigating the day like a hostile environment. Waiting for something to go wrong because it always did, didn’t it?

Repetition is a double edged sword. It can be medicine or it can be a curse.

Done consciously, it becomes ritual.

Done mindlessly, it becomes a loop.

The loops—when they get tight enough—start to feel like cages.

I’ve written before about identity traps and brain rewiring (see here). That post was about novelty, neuroplasticity, and trying new things to shake yourself awake. This one goes deeper. This one’s about what happens after the realisation. After the loop snaps. When you stop spiralling internally and start moving your body toward something different.

This one is about doing.

About movement as medicine.

About worry as an ancient habit that can only be broken by something physical, local, and real.

🧬 Worry as Inherited Survival Strategy

Worry felt like love.

Like care.

Like control in an out-of-control world.

I didn’t recognise it as a problem at first—because in my family, worry was a form of responsibility. It was how you showed you were paying attention. That you were being good. That you cared.

Hypervigilance wasn’t labelled as a trauma response. It was just being “realistic”. Or “prepared”. Or “pragmatic”.

I come from a lineage of worriers. People who terrorise their nervous systems by watching the news before bed and call it being informed. People who expected any good thing to go wrong because they sometimes had in the past. That energy gets passed down. Not through blood, but through dinner table comments. Through silence. Through the anxious grumbles beneath casual interactions.

When I went back home recently, I noticed it more clearly than I ever had before. The way certain family members speak in permanent worst-case-scenario mode. How quickly joy gets tempered with “don’t get your hopes up” or “let’s not jinx it”. For most of my life I couldn’t see that frequency—I was tuned to it. I was taught to always expect the other shoe to drop, never tuned into the possibility of something going right.

Now, something has changed within me. When I hear those same phrases, my body recoils. Like it knows I don’t live there anymore. It’s not even defiance—it’s incompatibility. My system won’t absorb it.

That shift didn’t come just from intellectual reframing. It came from somatic work. From understanding, through lived experience, that nervous systems can be trained—but they’re usually trained by other people before we even know what’s happening.

Chapter 1 of this series dives into that in more detail—how fear loops get hardwired by the amygdala, how our brains are still running predator-alert systems in a world of inboxes and family group chats.

Even if your current life looks “safe”, your body might still be bracing. Still rehearsing old scripts. Still scanning for exits in rooms that aren’t dangerous.

For me, not worrying felt reckless.

Like I was tempting fate.

Like if I didn’t imagine the worst, I wouldn’t be ready when it arrived.

But that’s the lie. Worry doesn’t prepare you. It just exhausts you before anything’s even happened.

🧨 The Moment I Realised I Was Just Bracing for Impact

I wasn’t living.

I was preparing for something bad to happen.

Looking back, I was stuck in what I now understand as functional freeze.

Not quite fight, not full collapse—just permanent vigilance. Performing life while quietly waiting for it to implode.

I thought I was just being responsible. Careful. “Emotionally pragmatic.”

But I’d overclocked my nervous system so far beyond baseline that rest felt suspicious. Joy felt naive. Even neutral moments got flooded with contingency planning.

There was a dream I had around this time that changed my perspective completely.

In the dream, I split in two. My physical body was about to get on a carnival ride—a janky, slingshot metal monster I didn’t trust—but my consciousness couldn’t cope. My sister was pleading with me to go on the ride with her. My consciousness stayed on the ground, watching from a distance, while my body went on without me.

I made my body go alone

Because I didn’t want to feel what it was about to feel.

In the dream, my body survived.

When it came back, we embraced. I returned to myself. Whole again.

I woke up shaken, but clear that this wasn’t a dream I could ignore.

That dream was showing me just how far I’d split from myself. How often I was forcing my body to endure something my spirit had emotionally checked out from. A lifetime of pushing through, powering on, numbing the signal.

That morning I booked a psychologist.

I only ended up doing a few sessions, but it was enough to send me on a trajectory that changed my internal world for the better. Enough to name what I’d been doing. Enough to start unfreezing.

Fires of Alchemy came a few years later—but that dream was the start.

That was the moment I realised my worry wasn’t protective.

It was paralysing.

Worry without action just loops.

Action without awareness just burns you out.

To actually shift, I had to start doing something different. Something my nervous system could recognise as safe. Not just intellectually safe—but physically safe.

Pay attention to your dreams.

If you’re that disconnected like I was, your body might have to wait until you’re asleep to speak to you.

🛡️ Worrier vs Warrior: Energetic Archetypes

At some point, I realised my nervous system wasn’t wired for inner peace—I had to practice it routinely.

Not in a monastery kind of way. In the way you retrain a muscle after injury.

Slowly. Repetitively. Until your body believes it’s allowed to feel it as a default state.

I started noticing two distinct energies in me.

One was the Worrier.

Always scanning. Always ready. Hyper-alert under the guise of being “prepared”.

The other was the Warrior.

Not violent. Not dominant. Just steady. Clear. Capable of holding intensity without letting it hijack the whole system.

The Worrier kept me alive when I was younger.

But it also kept me small. Exhausted. Looping.

The Warrior doesn’t waste energy trying to predict every outcome.

It just stays present enough to meet whatever actually arrives.

Here’s the distinction:

⚠️ Worrier	⚔️ Warrior
Reacts from fear	Responds with presence
Braces for impact	Trains for possibility
Tries to control everything	Trusts self to handle anything
Never rests	Chooses rest as sacred strategy

The biggest shift came when I started thanking my fear instead of fighting it.

It sounds counterintuitive, but it changes your relationship to the things that make us uncomfortable.

Try this as a ritual or journal prompt:

“Thank you, fear. I know you’re trying to help. But I don’t need you in charge anymore.”

You don’t have to exorcise the Worrier.

Just stop letting it drive.

Let it sit in the passenger seat, if it must.

But choose your Warrior hands for the wheel.

Eventually, the worrier will feel safe to lean the seat back and put their headphones on. 🎧

🌀 The Spiral Path: From Reflection to Doing

I used to live stuck inside loops.

Tight, closed circuits of thinking.

Rehashing the same insight, the same memory, the same decision I thought I needed to make—over and over—without actually moving.

Reflection became a trap.

An endless deconstruction of who I was, what I felt, what it meant.

At some point, it stopped being healing. It became another form of avoidance.

There’s a difference between a loop and a spiral.

Loops circle the same point, afraid to leave it.

Spirals expand. They return—but from a different angle. They let you revisit without re-enacting.

They gift you repeated moments where you can allow yourself to choose differently this time.

That’s what Fires of Alchemy became for me. Not a brand. Not a blog.

A lived-in spiral. A nervous system experiment disguised as a creative project. A way to test whether doing something real—publicly, imperfectly—could pull me out of mental paralysis and into some kind of momentum.

Each post, each video, each seed planted or word written—it wasn’t about content. It was about entering a state of mental and physical coherence.

Could I align what I believed in with what I did? Could I take fear, shape it into function, and eventually find fulfilment through that process?

Turns out: yes. But only by spiralling.

Only by letting the lessons return—without demanding they look the same.

Doing became my spiritual practice.

Not as performance, but as anchoring.

Something physical. Traceable. Repeatable.

Not just thoughts about healing—but acts in service to it.

When my inner world started spiralling out of reflection and into movement, something in my system began to soften.

Not because I figured everything out.

But because I finally stopped rehearsing mentally and started participating physically.

✂️ Cutting the Thread: The Medicine of Doing

The antidote to despair isn’t detachment.

It’s self devotion.

Not the manic, hustle kind. Not grand gestures or saving the world with a silver bullet.

The quiet kind. The earthy kind. The kind that happens with your hands.

For a while, I was drowning in existential grief.

Too many headlines, not enough hope. I couldn’t scroll past another post about biodiversity collapse or coral bleaching without feeling like I was carrying it on top of my shoulders. It started to feel like nothing I did would ever be enough. That we’d left it too late. That care had turned into paralysis.

Solastalgia—the grief of watching the places you love decay.

Anxiety is the nervous system’s attempt to prepare for a future it can’t predict.

It’s not irrational. It’s relational. It means you care.

But caring with no outlet corrodes the body.

The medicine, at least for me, wasn’t to turn away.

It was to do something small.

Local. Physical. Repeatable.

Sometimes that looked like picking up rubbish on my walk.

Sometimes it was re-growing spring onions from kitchen scraps, not because it would change the world, but because it helped me feel human.

I started talking to the magpies near my house. They remembered me.

That felt like enough, some days.

Sometimes the most radical prescription is dirt under your nails.

Doing something with your body tells your nervous system it’s not helpless.

It creates micro-moments of agency.

It cuts the thread of overthinking and sews something else in its place—something your hands can hold.

There’s a spiritual coherence that happens when you align care with action.

Not in a performative way. Just in a “this matches my values” way.

So if your anxiety feels existential, try going smaller.

Pick up a spade.

Whistle with a local bird.

The Earth doesn’t need you to be a saviour.

Just being present is enough.

🪡 Upthreads: The First Thread I Pulled Free

It wasn’t just a business idea.

It was a soulful salve.

Another form of nervous system repair.

Upthreads began in the middle of a global collapse.

During lockdowns, during the mindless monotony, during the kind of existential grief that seeps in when your days all blur together.

My sister and I started it because we couldn’t just sit back anymore. We were burnt out. Creatively frustrated. Grieving the state of the planet. Drowning in overconsumption.

So we did the only thing we could think of: we manifested something real.

Something tangible. Something circular. Something hopeful.

We started sourcing secondhand clothes. Ironing, mending, relisting.

It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t very scalable.

But it was real, we were doing something instead of just talking about it.

From the very first sale, we decided to give part of the profits away—to people and projects we believed in.

Even when we weren’t paying ourselves.

Even when the orders slowed down.

We donated monthly to SEED Mob, Two Good Co., Orange Sky.

We shared receipts. Wrote impact statements. Stayed accountable.

Upthreads wasn’t perfect.

But it was sincere.

It was the first time I’d taken all the things I cared about—social justice, sustainability, creativity, circularity—and put them into motion. It taught me what action feels like in the body. What integrity feels like in the nervous system. What it means to show up when no one is watching. To take the first steps without knowing how it will end.

Fires of Alchemy grew out of that same energy.

Same soul, different outfit.

In the next post, I’ll share more of the behind-the-scenes at upthreads as we celebrate our 5 year anniversary.

What we built, what we got right, what we got wrong, and where we want to take it next.

For now, just know this:

You don’t have to have a five-year plan.

Sometimes you just need to start pulling the thread that’s been itching under your skin.

The one that says: do something real.

🌳 Earth Angels & The World Tree

If we don’t act out our beliefs, they die in us.

That’s where Earth Angels began.

Not as a strategy. Not as a campaign. Just a quiet call inside me that said:

Make it real.

Let the values live in your hands. Let them plant something. Let them pick something up.

Earth Angels is a collective experiment in grounded rebellion.

No money. No crypto. No saviour complex.

Just ordinary people doing small things that matter, together.

Cleanups. Ethical banking switches. Forest planting. Compost piles. Guerrilla gardening.

Acts of hope disguised as missions.

It lives inside The World Tree—our digital home for regenerative action.

A place where you can see the impact. Leave a comment. Add your own photo. Be part of something humble and real.

One of our major missions is the plan to plant a native microforest using the Miyawaki method. Tiny space. Big intention. Local roots. Deep time. It’s not just about trees. It’s about coherence. Showing that the ideas in this book are living, breathing, growing in soil.

If you read my solarpunk manifesto you’ll know this isn’t a pivot—it’s an evolution. A natural spiral from nervous system repair to planetary repair. From personal alchemy to collective action.

Not everything needs to scale.

This is how I pray now.

This is what regenerative activism looks like in my world.

Spiritual, yes. But not floating in abstract.

Grounded, into the Earth that birthed us.

⚖️ Integration: Action with Awareness

Worry without action leads to paralysis.

Action without awareness leads to burnout.

Warrior energy lives in the middle.

If you’ve been frozen in place—looping, waiting, overthinking—you’re not alone.

Fear can be convincing. Perfectionism even more so. It’ll tell you that you can’t move until you’ve figured it all out. That you need to be more healed, more prepared, more worthy.

That voice isn’t wisdom. It’s a distraction.

You don’t need to be finished to begin.

You don’t need to feel fearless to move.

You just need to act from a place that’s aligned, not performative.

This is where the spiral matters.

You’re not circling aimlessly—you’re revisiting with more presence.

Each turn brings more context, more clarity, more capacity.

Fires of Alchemy isn’t a book or a brand. It’s a live transmission.

A map for returning to the body. A reminder that meaning isn’t something you wait for—it’s something you create by doing the thing.

So take the next step, even if it’s small.

Move toward the version of you that’s already in motion.

Let your body feel it. Let your nervous system register that it’s safe to engage.

You don’t have to fix everything.

Just participate.

Let your action lead.

The insights will flow naturally.

✍️ Journal Prompts: From Loop to Spiral

• Where in your life have you mistaken worry for love?
  

• What fears were passed down to you that no longer belong in your body?
  

• What’s one thing you’ve been waiting to start until you “feel ready”? What would happen if you started anyway?
  

• What does peace feel like—not as a concept, but as a sensation?
  

• What would “one small act of medicine” look like this week?
  

• What loop are you ready to spiral out of?

• 🌾 Ritual: The Seed & The Sword

  1. Write down one fear you inherited but no longer wish to carry. Be honest with yourself.

  2. On a second scrap, write one action, value, or cause you care deeply about. Something that feels like truth in your body.

  3. Find some soil. A pot. A garden bed. An overgrown patch near the bins. Doesn’t matter.

  4. Plant a seed—or a veggie scrap like spring onion, garlic, or a sprouted potato.

  5. As you press it into the earth, speak this aloud:
     
     “I trade worry for action. Fear for service. I plant this in hope.”

  6. Water it. Watch it. Let it grow as a quiet anchor for your nervous system.
     You don’t need to be perfect to be grounded.