In the fall of 2018, I found myself in a place many of us know well. That disorienting space where you can no longer distinguish fact from fiction, where you are spinning in uncertainty and unable to discern where the truth lives. I was wishing, as I often do in moments like that, that I could pick up the phone and call my Mom. She passed away in 2003, so I did the next best thing and called my best friend to ask for help.

Over lunch, we talked through the whole tangled mess, and even she was stumped. Then she suggested something I never would have sought out on my own: a session with a woman named Carissa Schumacher, a Brown University-trained neuroscientist turned intuitive who has spent fifteen years working with CEOs, scientists, and creatives, and whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Marie Claire. She is also the author of The Freedom Transmissions: A Pathway to Peace.

I went in with zero preparation and an open mind. What followed was one of the most disorienting and clarifying experiences, and it sent me down a path I am happy to still be wandering down today.

She joked at the start of our call that sixty seconds with her has been described as worth ten thousand hours of therapy. I laughed. Then the hour began, and I stopped laughing. Not because it was painful, but because her words were so precise. Decades of patterns became visible. She pinpointed the exact years where I experienced voids, the year my Mom passed, the year I had to have surgery if I wanted to have a second child and the moment I had just found myself in.

I didn’t have a word for what I had been experiencing before that call. But Carissa gave me the framework.

I was in a void.

We have been conditioned to fear the void. To see it as emptiness or as evidence that something has gone terribly wrong.

Sometimes the void announces itself dramatically. A diagnosis that reorders everything in your world. The death of a parent. A marriage that ends. A child who is struggling in ways you cannot fix. A financial collapse that dismantles the security you spent years building. A betrayal so complete it makes you question your own perception of reality. Or the moment when you realize you perhaps “drank the kool aid”. It is the loss of a pet so beloved that the grief leaves you genuinely helpless for days.

But just as often, the void can arrive quietly. It is the strange emptiness after a child leaves for college or outgrowing people you love and not knowing what to do with that knowledge. It is the in-between moments when you might be waiting for results, waiting for a decision, waiting for something to finally begin or end. It is hitting a milestone birthday and feeling slightly unmoored.

Whatever form it takes, the void has one thing in common across all its expressions: it is the place where the life you knew, or the self you understood yourself to be, no longer holds its shape.

And that, as terrifying as it feels, is precisely where you are given the choice to find your way back to peace.

The problem is that when we are faced with a void, most of us rush to fill it. With distraction, with busyness, with the comfort of controlling whatever small thing it is that we can still control.

But what if the void is not a problem to be solved but merely the best invitation you can receive to evolve?

In The Freedom Transmissions, Carissa channels a teaching that the void is not darkness to be escaped. It is a birthing point. A space of limitless possibility, not unlike the womb itself: a darkness where creation begins.

I want to be careful here, because surrender is one of those words that can feel passive, or defeatist, or even vaguely religious in a way that puts people off. Surrendering to the void is one of the most courageous choices a person can make. It means deciding to stop fighting what is already happening. It means trusting that the unraveling has a purpose, even when you cannot yet see what it is. It means sitting in the uncertainty long enough to let something real emerge, rather than searching for the nearest exit.

Last year, like so many women, I was called back after a routine mammogram for an ultrasound, and while this was not my first rodeo, I was determined to respond differently this time. I had been reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, and his teaching that most human suffering comes not from what is actually happening but from our resistance to it was the exact reminder I needed when that call came in. In the past I would have spiraled, called in favors to expedite the appointment to have an answer sooner, and spent those days bargaining with a future that had not even been written yet. This time I stayed in the present moment instead. I found the ordinary goodness in each of those days and resisted the pull toward what might be coming, because in that present moment there was only the now. And in that now, I was fine. The appointment came and went, a cyst was drained and the relief that followed said what I already knew. I had not needed to spend those days in fear.

There is a moment inside every void, a pause between what has just collapsed and what has not yet taken shape. Most of us rush through it. We are so conditioned to fix, to decide, to move forward, that we treat that pause as a problem rather than a portal into what's possible. As my friend Laurie said, what if we approached the void like the Haunted House at Disneyland, with curiosity and openness, not fear?

On a call with Carissa in 2024, she spoke about what she called the space to process. The space to feel. The space to allow something true to surface before we act. We live, she said, in an ionized, charged world that is constantly pulling our attention outward, filling every silence with noise and every pause with another item on the to-do list. And in doing so, we never give ourselves the one thing that growth actually requires. Space.

She also spoke about the part of each of us that loves unconditionally, that sees through the lens of unity rather than separation. It exists within every person, she said, but it becomes buried under years of sediment. Fear. Conditioning. Grief. The habits we developed just to survive. The void, uncomfortable as it is, is actually an invitation to clear away what has accumulated and find what was always there underneath.

What I find most remarkable about Carissa's work is that she does not just name what is happening to us. She maps it out specifically. Over years of working with people in the depths of their own unraveling, she identified seven distinct passages that mark the journey through a void. Not stages to rush through, but thresholds to recognize. Knowing which one you are standing in can bring real relief, because it means you are not lost. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. The framework is simple enough.

The first is the Holy Fire, the entry point. The phone call that changes everything, the morning you receive a rejection you never saw coming. Covid, a death, a realization. Something that shakes you loose before anything new can take root.

The second is the Holy Water, the process by which your eyes open to what Carissa describes as the beautiful lies: the stories you have been telling yourself, the control you believed you had. The truth that emerges is not always pretty, but it is real, and reality is always the better place to build from.

The third is Coagulation, where you start to feel who you are again. With it comes a strange new intolerance, almost an allergic reaction to anything no longer in alignment with who you actually are. It is the intuition, arriving in the body before the mind has caught up.

The fourth is Ionization, the point where, as Carissa describes it, you come back online. You may find unusual clarity in your dreams, or feel drawn to people, books or ideas that would not have registered before. It can be as small as a “slow down” sign on the side of the road that suddenly feels aimed directly at you, or a song that feels so much bigger than just a song. For me it is RUFUS DU SOL’s Innerbloom. Something is waking up.

The fifth is Fermentation, where the invisible work becomes visible. Like dough that needs time in the dark before it rises, this is the stage where nothing looks like it's happening right up until it does. New people arrive, seemingly out of nowhere. New structures take shape. An opportunity surfaces that you didn't go looking for, because it was already fermenting quietly while you were busy just surviving the earlier stages.

The sixth is Distillation, where it all consolidates. Like butter slowly clarified over heat, where the milk solids separate and rise to the surface, and what's skimmed away leaves only the purest fat behind, this is where everything nonessential finally separates out. The changes you have been making begin to clarify. What remains is more essentially you than anything that came before, because everything that wasn't you has already been skimmed away.

And the seventh is Crystallization, where the happy home is. Not a destination so much as a state, a settled, sense of a calm, confident, clear self forged by everything that preceded it. The crystal is hard because it has been under pressure. It catches the light because it has been refined.

It is no wonder that Carissa’s next book due out in September is called The Alchemy Transmissions: Fire to open you, water to show you the truth, the body to bring you home to yourself, energy to wake you, time to transform you, heat to refine you, and pressure to make you whole. It is not seven separate ordeals. It is one long alchemy, and you are the element being changed.

What strikes me most about this framework is what it asks of us in the earliest stages which is where most of us are when we first feel the need to reach out for help. We want someone to tell us it will be over soon. Carissa does not do that. Instead, she offers something more useful: the assurance that what feels like falling apart is actually the beginning of being remade. The map does not shorten the journey. But it means you can walk it without being consumed by the fear that you are going the wrong way.

There will be many shifts as you move through your life. That is not a warning but an invitation to explore who you are at your core, including all the knowledge and gifts that have been waiting beneath the sediment of everything you have carried. The void does not take things away, it returns you to yourself.

Having first learned about voids in 2019, I was a little more equipped when we lost our French Bulldog Chili. The grief was real, and this time I made a point not to rush past it. I had enough experience, and enough reminders, to hold both things at once: the sadness, and the knowing that something is always being rewoven, even when you cannot see it yet.

While I had lost both my parents, grief does not rank itself by size, and losing Chili hit harder than I expected. Grief is so often the doorway into the void and it deserves its own space beyond what I can offer here. But my wise friend Marisa wrote a beautiful piece about Grief as the “Marry Poppins bag of emotion”. If you are sitting with loss right now, I’d start there. All of it asks the same question: will we rise to what is being asked, or will we falter under the weight of it all?

Chili had been teaching me that lesson for years. He had a seizure disorder, and watching him move through those moments with no resistance and no fear showed me something about responding to what you cannot control. So on the morning he passed, I tried to honor what he had taught me. I took the day off and I grieved without rushing past it. I emailed Carissa, who reminded me that animals are our greatest teachers in unconditional love, and she pointed me to a passage in The Freedom Transmissions: "There is nothing quite like grief or loss to remind you what matters most: Love. Thus, often a loss can be just what is needed to restore simplicity and balance to your life. Perhaps not in the way you want, but in the way you need."

Again… the void does not take things away. It changes the form of things. And love, I am certain, does not disappear. It just finds a new shape. In our case, it arrived in the form of two French Bulldog puppies who wove an entirely new story into our lives exactly one month after we lost Chili.

You see, there is a larger intelligence at work that our minds simply cannot access or control. The soul sees a bigger picture. And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is stop pushing, create space, and trust that what belongs to us will arrive.

Before you move on with your day, I want to offer you something you may not have thought to give yourself: a moment of recognition.

If you have been through a void, or if you recognize yourself in one right now, that is not something to be ashamed of. It is something to be honored. Those who have moved through voids tend to be the grown-ups in the room, not because life was easier for them, but because it wasn't. They have been handed the gift nobody envies: the opportunity to grow. To face the truth. To break through complacency, take accountability, and ask for help when they need it.

And if you happen to be in the thick of it right now, daily rituals can help. Put down the distractions and find community, nature, creative expression, stillness and simply learn how to listen to yourself again. Honor the messiness without being swallowed by it. Feel it. Listen to it. And when you are ready, let it go. You are more protected than you know.

Here are a couple questions to sit with, you don't need to answer them now and you don't need to answer them at all. But if something stirs, listen.

Where in your life are you fighting what might be trying to unravel?

Are you more afraid of the void: of uncertainty, of losing control, of failure, of shame, or of the light: of truth, self worth, deservingness, or of what you might have to change if you really saw things more clearly?

The void is not your enemy. It is the place where the shape of things changes, and where, if you can bear to stay long enough, you find that everything you actually needed was already waiting there.

The teachings in this newsletter are drawn from sessions with Carissa Schumacher, and from her book The Freedom Transmissions: A Pathway to Peace, distilled here in the hope that they reach people who might not otherwise find them. I pay for my own sessions with her, the same as anyone else would, and I share her work with her blessing simply because it has changed how I move through my own voids. You can explore more of Carissa's offerings at thespirittransmissions.com.