This piece was originally published on my Substack on June 11, 2025. If you’d like to follow my writing there, you can find me at mineralshaman.substack.com.

I used to grip my desires so tightly I left nail marks.

Health protocols stacked up like homework. Morning routines that felt closer to boot camp than to care. A mind running constantly, calculating the next move, hunting the formula, looking for the path that would guarantee everything I wanted.

Working with thousands of people seeking wellness and abundance and peace has shown me something. Whatever we want, we are usually pushing away with the same hand we reach with. Most of us never notice we’re doing it.

Nothing held that tightly stays. Not health, not wealth, not contentment, not people. There’s a tension built into wanting, and learning to feel it is most of the work.

Call it control. Call it fear of loss. Call it dependence. What we long for tends to arrive after we’ve given up the campaign to force it.

The part of us that wants to manifest by effort finds effort easy. What’s hard is the other thing: knowing, in the body and not just the head, that life is already moving in ways the mind was never built to follow.

Most of this fixation was trained into us early. Decades of schooling and social reward for arriving at the correct answer. We get paid in gold stars for so long that certainty starts to look like the only available way to be alive.

But we’re human. Humans don’t know everything.

I watch this play out in the wellness world constantly. The grasping after health. The fixation on control. A protocol, a conviction about the right route, a sense that something must be done exactly. And the truth is that it matters far less what we do than how we do it.

Good food, sun, laughter, joy, real relationships. All necessary. But the way there almost never runs in a straight line, which is why each person ends up finding their own.

The people I see moving toward what they want are the ones who hold it lightly. Curious. Not convinced they have to walk in someone else’s footprints or absorb everything on offer.

What it comes down to is trusting your own heart. Which is to say, loving yourself.

We have to love ourselves enough to let in what we’re asking for. We have to learn to feel good for long stretches without flinching, and to stop taking direction from a mind that runs on fear and was calibrated for a world we no longer live in.

Trust something larger and let go of needing to know. Call it God. Call it the Universe. Call it the Unknown.

Be grateful for all of it. Gratitude is the actual superpower, and what it opens tends to arrive on every level at once.

This is the real work, and it doesn’t come from where we were taught to look for it. It comes from further in.

From the heart.

At the end of the road there’s only one thing to find, which is ourselves, and what we’re made of turns out to be love. The rest is the background hum of a mind telling stories.

The magic was never in the grasping.