You have never been triggered.

You have never been triggered. There's not a single day in your life when you have been triggered. 

You're probably shaking your head, but stay with me. 

Your pain has been triggered. Your wound has been triggered. A mechanism within you has been triggered.

An emotional pattern, based on shame or fear, has been triggered. Not you. And this pattern has a reaction, whether only in your body, or also through words or actions.

And sometimes, let's admit it, words are actions. 

But the risk of calling anything a pattern is that a pattern may seem to be inherent to you or another. In nature, patterns comprise. But pain-based emotional patterns are not of you. You are not comprised of them. This would be to mis-identify yourself: this is why shame has the power over the one who identifies with it.

Patterns exist IN you, like intruders to, and energetic knots in, your authenticity. Even when they seem to protect you. 

A pattern, like a mechanism, has a predictable way of playing out. You know what can trigger it. You know what contexts or circumstances make you vulnerable to feeling it. You know the lines of thinking and feelings it runs through you. You know the feeling in your body and the breath pattern it incites. You know the behaviors that come from it.

You know its nature. You know it to be like a fire that wants to feed itself, even as it collapses your perception. It highjacks or consumes your awareness. It narrows your focus. It's righteous. It's urgent. As urgent as survival instinct. 

And so, you may at times talk from the pattern. You may act from the pattern. And still, it's not you. And the moment you can name it, and see its impact within you and even on others, you create a space between you and the pattern. Not so that you can push it away, but so you can hold it within the breadth of a vaster self. 

YOU were never broken. But sometimes, we may place the healing hands of the heart on the patterns within us, so as to alchemize them to work with our authentic being, rather than contract her. 

I think every pattern conceals a gift. Every wound is only one side of a coin. If you name one side, the other becomes accessible to you, eventually, sooner or later. And truthfully that coin is more like a sphere than a coin, no part of it irrelevant to the whole. This is why we are so often drawn to what activates those patterns, so we may trace them back to unravel what's true.

When we sit in intimacy with ourselves or with another, it's so valuable to recognize when a pattern is expressing itself. As a facilitator and human, I feel we do great harm when we mistake the pattern for who we are. When we mistake the mechanism for who we are. And it's the same when we misidentify others this way. 

To be able to speak aloud about the pattern, with all the vulnerability it takes, first requires the trust we will not be mistaken for the pattern, but seen as the one who is witnessing it. The one who is naming the pattern, because she can see it as something operating with her, something that throws her being out of balance. This is a moment of irrevocable grace. This is already alchemy.

And by the way, the responses that come from authenticity, no matter how fierce they may even be, are not the same as contractive patterns. They hold a different energy signature. Often, they are the breaking of a pattern. So often when we are bold, it's because we've broken through a prior threshold of feeling safe in our skin.

Next time a trigger occurs, I invite you to acknowledge that it's not you who are triggered, but a mechanism active within you. Next time in a moment of clarity, when you are brave enough to speak of pain, rather than from it, may you be held in the loving witness of one who sees the you who is willing to see. May you also be her for yourself. 

The you who holds this courage to allow and embrace and include all that has been brought to your awareness. May you honor that moment as irrevocable grace.

This was my morning musing over coffee in the swinging hammock chair this morning, to the spring bird voices of Guatemala. As I sit and wonder who will be the next woman to join our last Sacred Expression circle this summer from July 11th-19th, 2026 on Lake Atitlan. Is she you?

Wherever we go with the circle, we will gather in the wholeness of witness.

All my love,

Aimee