Chaos Is Not the Problem. It’s the Answer.  

When my life was falling apart, I was doing two deep meditations a day, trying to interrupt the experience I was having and gain some nugget of insight that would release me from its grip. I used to ask the same question over and over again.

Where is this coming from?

I thought I was asking to be shown a memory. An event. Some specific trauma I could locate in my past and say, there. That’s it. That’s the source. Fix that and everything else will fall into place.

Growing up with a mentally ill parent, that seemed reasonable. There was no shortage of moments I could point to. The manipulation.  The lies.  Walking on eggshells. Being the emotional support child when I was still a child myself. I assumed the answer would be buried somewhere back there.

But that’s not what happened.

When I asked that question and actually tuned into my body, what came up wasn’t a clean answer. It wasn’t a scene or a memory or an image I could work with.

What came up were stories. Loud ones.

If I can’t work, I’m worthless.

If I’m not productive, I’m nobody.

If I fail, I’ll be abandoned.

I’ll starve.

I’ll end up living in my car.

Or worse, a trailer.

Might as well be dead.

That was the noise.

For a long time, I thought those thoughts were the problem. Like my mind was broken. Like intuition had turned against me. Like something had gone wrong in my wiring.

What I didn’t understand yet was that those thoughts weren’t random. They were translations. They were the language my nervous system had learned to use to answer my questions about what I was feeling and why. I didn’t recognize it at first because it was so intense to experience in my body.

Here’s the part that took me a long time to see.

My trauma wasn’t a single event.

My life was the event.

Growing up as my mother’s emotional support child meant I never got to find out who I was. I learned who I needed to be instead. I learned which emotions were allowed and which ones were dangerous. I learned that love came with responsibility and that my sovereignty was negotiable.

So when my life later collapsed and all those emotions showed up, guilt, anger, shame, terror, it wasn’t because I was failing to heal. It was because those emotions are what arise when someone has been living against themselves for a very long time.

Those feelings are not a sign you’re broken.

They are a sign your sovereignty was violated.

Most people hit that wall and stop. They retreat. They numb out. They cling to relationships, identities, spiritual ideas, anything that promises relief. And that makes sense. Those emotions hurt.

I didn’t stop because I had nothing left to lose.

So instead of trying to escape what I was feeling, I let it shape me.

I kept asking the question, but I stopped asking it the way I used to.

I wasn’t asking anymore for an explanation.

I was asking for honesty.

When we ask a real question, the answer doesn’t arrive as words. It arrives as experience.

How else could it?

We are nonphysical beings navigating a physical world. We navigate by sensation. Smell. Sound. Emotion. Nervous system response and story.

Your nervous system is both the one asking the question and the one receiving and translating the answer through your story system.

So when people say, I don’t trust my intuition or I don’t believe in intuition, what they’re usually describing is a misinterpretation of the information they’re receiving. Their body is giving them answers as sensation and signal, and their mind is translating those signals in the only language it was ever taught. Story.

The practice isn’t to attack the noise.

The practice is to witness the story that tries to explain the noise.

When I was searching for a trauma that could explain the suffering I was feeling, the answer I got wasn’t a memory or an image or some neat moment I could point to. The answer was complete overwhelm. Chaos. Just too much, all at once.

At first I thought that meant I was failing. Like I couldn’t access the right layer yet. Like I was blocked or doing it wrong.

But over time I realized something.

That chaos was the answer.

There was no single origin point to uncover because my life had been the environment. The answer my body gave me was the experience of living inside that environment without a self, without sovereignty, without a stable place to stand.

My body wasn’t showing me an event.

It was showing me a system.

As I stayed with it instead of trying to escape it, patterns started to emerge. Themes inside the chaos. The same stories repeating. Not just in me, but in other people too. Stories about worth. About usefulness. About abandonment. About needing permission to exist. Behavior driven by story and emotion instead of choice.

My body had been telling me the truth the whole time. I just didn’t know how to listen yet.

The terrible emotions I felt weren’t coming from something happening now. They were coming from a lifetime of living inside stories that required me to abandon myself in order to survive.

Once I saw that, the noise made sense.

It wasn’t madness.

It was accumulated emotional misdirection.

This is where most spiritual systems fail people.

They tell you to replace the story with a better one. A higher one. A more loving one. Forgive your aggressors. Don’t get me started on that. The idea that victims must forgive the people who harmed them is an inversion of truth and a failure of respect. It’s not healing. It’s an attitude produced by a system that behaves exactly like an abuser.

But choosing a better story is still choosing a story.

And once you choose a side, once you occupy a position, the system renders the experience that goes with it.

Not choosing is what dismantles the spiritual ego.

Not choosing leaves you in the Between.

That’s not a blank space. It’s a clear one.

A nonjudgmental space where pain can exist without becoming identity. Where old stories can surface without being believed. Where the nervous system can finally exhale because it is no longer being overridden or explained away.

So instead of asking, what’s wrong with me, try asking something else.

What stories do I need to let go of?

Show me the lies I still believe.

That question has teeth. I don’t recommend it lightly.

Because the universe always answers. Not in sentences. Not in concepts. In experience.

With practice, you get better at listening. You learn to feel the emotion, notice the story that arises, and not step into belief about it.

You don’t need to fix it.

You don’t need to transcend it.

You just need to stop mistaking the translation for the signal.

That’s where clarity lives.