Perimeditate is the home of Perimeditation, a lived experience mindfulness practice set to atmospheric music inspired by some of my favorite bands, layered with binaural tones, engineered to quiet the voice between our ears and make your brain genuinely receptive to what comes next. Not hypothetical. Not theoretical. A 45 minute opportunity to turn your eye inward.

This isn’t content. It’s an act of intentional connection.

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My name is Erin.

I’ve spent most of my adult life feeding people.

As a chef, a mother, and the person people called when they wanted the meal to impress their in-laws. I co-founded a non-profit food rescue organization. I volunteered. For years, I’ve shown my love through food, no matter the cost. $250/plate or free. Everyone was fed.

But through all of that, I often forgot to feed myself.

In 2021 we lost my little sister, Katy. I built a meditation practice inside the grief because I needed somewhere to put it. I journaled. I returned to stillness over and over, even when (and especially when) I didn’t want to. Two years later, that practice was steady enough to hold me when I made the choice to give up the drink. Around the same time, the meditation studio where I’d been practicing closed its doors. Instead of finding another one, I built my own version. And then the real work began. I found out who was hiding under all that holding.

I found me. Eventually. Louder than I remembered, more opinionated, more me.

Then I fell face first into perimenopause, and my body started to gaslight itself. Quiet, stealthy, and not all in my head, no matter what the experts say.

I’m not a certified meditation teacher. What I am is someone who built this practice in the dark, out of necessity, and tested it against real things. The transparency is the credential.

Perimeditate is the culmination of all that I am discovering.

The Sessions:

Each one is +/- forty-five minutes. Binaural music to arrive, guided somatic practice in the middle, music to let it settle. No mat. No prior experience. No prerequisites. One rule: stay awake. Anything else is allowed.

Session 00: Homecoming is free. Forever. No gate.

Series 01 - Rooted in the Eye of the Storm
Session 01 - Marrow
Session 02 - Confluence
Session 03 - Pyre (coming June 21st)
Session 04
Session 05
Session 06
Session 07

I originally thought I was going to make Session 00 free, along with all of the Notes from the Field, but it left me with the ick, and I changed course and decided to make the whole damn thing free. Forever.

There are monthly and annual subscriber options. That just helps feed my “praise kink” and keeps the lights on, but it is absolutely not necessary to be a part of this.

That’s also what the “Show Some Love” buttons are for. You’ve probably spent more on supplements that didn’t work and a meditation app you opened twice. Nothing to download. Nothing to cancel. The full series, yours forever, as it’s being built.

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So keep your therapist. Keep your meds. Keep your movement. This is supplemental by design. One more tool, built for a very specific kind of quiet.

These sessions are made all by me. No affiliate links or marketing department. Recorded in my walk-in closet, aka The Meditation Station.

Please share it. Please gift it!

Transformation is more “fun” when you’re on the journey together!

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Who is this for?

The woman with more intestinal fortitude than she should need. Who is tired. Not situationally tired, but structurally tired, on a cellular level, and hasn’t stopped moving anyway.

The one whose body is changing in ways nobody prepared her for. Whose roles are shifting. Daughter, mother, partner, professional, sometimes all at the same time. Who is watching the world reshape itself around her faster than she can track.

The one who knows what internal dysregulation feels like from the inside. The racing heart. The clenched jaw. The 2am inventory of everything she can’t control. The skin that’s too tight, tingling, or on fire.

The one holding her parents in one hand and her children in the other.

The one who doomscrolls not because she’s lazy but because her nervous system has forgotten how to unwind without a screen to stare at.

Organized in ways that look like chaos from the outside.

She loves fiercely. It costs her something every time.

She is raging. With a smile on her face.

We’re all in this together!

LINER NOTES

On the music
Sonic influences: Sufjan Stevens (Come on feel the Illinoise), Radiohead (Kid A), Fleet Foxes (self-titled), and Devotchka’s song “The Winner Is”. The happy accident echo present in Session 01: Marrow has been reduced significantly. Marrow’s echo was the cave. Confluence is the mouth of it.

On the session
Session 02: Confluence runs 46 minutes. The first and last five minutes are music and binaural tones only; narration runs from minute 5 through minute 40. Headphones are required for the binaural effect to work.

On the frequencies
The binaural beat in Confluence is set at 5 Hz, low theta range, produced by a 200 Hz tone in the left ear and a 205 Hz tone in the right. Your brain perceives the difference between them as a third tone that doesn’t exist in the room. Theta (4–8 Hz) is associated with flow states, creative access, emotional processing, and the liminal space between waking and sleep. You can’t hear 5 Hz directly, but the brain will sync to it over time. This is why the first five minutes of the session are music only. The nervous system needs the on-ramp before the voice arrives.

Notes from the Field 09 - Baptism by Fuzz
When there wasn’t any holy water.
6/14/26

I have a three-inch scar under my right ribcage that I have no memory of receiving. It has been there since I was ten days old. Everything I know about how it got there I know because my parents told me. And because they thought I was dying, my mother, in the back seat of a yellow 1972 Volkswagen Bug, baptized me with fuzz she pulled off of my blanket.

That is the story as I know it, which means it is not really a story I know at all. I am the unreliable narrator of my own origin. What I have is the scar I can touch but not remember, their words, and a theology that said the fuzz was sufficient.

My mom was twenty-three years old. My dad was twenty-six. They had moved to Louisville after my dad finished his Masters in Audiology. His career taking them even further south than their alma mater in Bloomington, IN, while their families lived four or five hours north. Which is the kind of distance that feels manageable until it doesn’t. They were new to the city, and I was their first born. Eight pounds, twelve ounces. Named after one of the daughters from The Waltons. My mom did her whole labor au natural, which is a detail I hear differently now, than I did when I was younger, having tried and failed at that myself. I understand it in my body rather than just my head. She was twenty-three years old and she did it all by herself. I came out healthy. Everyone was so happy. Everyone went home.

And then I stopped thriving.

My mom was exclusively breastfeeding, and I was physically returning everything she offered. This went on for ten days. Ten days of watching a baby who weighed eight pounds lose weight she couldn’t afford to lose, getting weaker and less responsive by the hour. My dad’s whole professional life is the science of how the body receives signals. The auditory system, the pathway from the world into the brain. And he was there watching his daughter lose the ability to receive anything at all, the most basic thing a body can signal. I am still here. My grandparents, their college friends, their support system, were all four or five hours north. My parents were alone with a baby who was failing, in a city that wasn’t home yet, making decisions nobody had prepared them for.

My folks had both grown up in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. In that tradition, baptism is not a formality or a celebration. It is the entry point, a sacrament through which a person is cleansed and received into the covenant, the act that opens the door to what the scripture promises after this life. While at the time, my parents weren’t exactly churchgoers, that ideology had been woven into their fabric. My parents may not have believed this completely, but like the way you believe the things instilled in you by the people who loved you. And they were watching their ten-day-old firstborn become unresponsive in their apartment, in a city they hadn’t yet made their own, and they weren’t going to take anything to chance.

There was no church. No pastor. No holy water in the car when they headed for the hospital.

My mom reached for my blanket. She pulled off a piece of fuzz. And in the back seat of their little yellow VW Bug, she baptized me.

Show Some Love

The theology here is worth sitting with, because it isn’t simple and it isn’t sentimental. Sacramental traditions have always grappled with what happens when the proper elements are unavailable under emergency conditions. When a dying person needs last rites and there is no oil, when a baby needs baptism and there is no water. The tradition usually lands in the same place: the element matters, because the Word behind the element matters more. What makes the sacrament real is the faith and intention of the person delivering it, not the vessel it travels through. The fuzz was her substitution, standing in for water the way crackers and grape juice or bread and wine stand in for flesh and blood. The church will support a contingency plan for emergencies. My mom found it in the back seat of their little car.

A couple months later, when their fears subsided, my parents asked one of their childhood pastors if it counted. It did. So, I was never formally baptized in the church. I was baptized by my mother, with fuzz from my blanket, and symbolic or not, that is as real as it gets.

The diagnosis was pyloric stenosis. The valve between my stomach and small intestine had thickened to the point that almost nothing could pass through. My body was actively rejecting nourishment because something was wrong anatomically. An emergency surgery later, I was going to be okay. The scar and the story are the only evidence, fifty years later. It’s deep, and definitely not what the same surgery, now performed almost non-invasively, leaves behind. I’ve always known it even though I have no memory of it.

I sometimes think about what those ten days must have been like for my parents. Not for me, though I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly fun for me either. I was too new to have the ability to retain it as memory. But for them. My mom, twenty-three and postpartum, watching something go wrong with the person she had just brought into the world. My dad, twenty-six, his audiology training completely useless for this specific emergency, alone with his wife in a city they hadn’t figured out yet, watching his daughter lose ground.

And in that moment of desperation, my sweet little momma reached for my blanket.

That reach is where I return to. The theology gave her a framework, and when it confronted her in the back seat of their yellow VW Bug, she didn’t debate whether the conditions were right. She grabbed the only thing available and she used it. She performed a two-thousand-year-old sacrament with fuzz, on their way to a hospital in Louisville, because she was twenty-three years old and she was not going to let the absence of the right medium be the last word on whether her daughter was going to be okay.

I wonder whether there is a version of that story that lives on in my body. A ten-day-old nervous system is just forming. It’s taking in the world through channels that have no reference point, no experience to pull from to interpret what it perceives. What it receives, it receives pure: temperature, pressure, sound, smells, pain, pleasure. I don’t know if those ten days influenced anything about how I see or feel the world, or whether the surgery changed anything I can measure. What I know is that before my body was repaired, it received my mother’s intention, traveling through fuzz, because she found a way. I don’t know how my nervous system registered that. I suspect it is filed somewhere below language, or memory. In the infrastructure that got built before it could be reconciled.

This essay is an homage. To my twenty-three-year-old mom, who reached for the blanket. To my dad, driving their car in the dark, in a frenzy, through a city that wasn’t home. Twenty-six years old and holding on. To the two of them, alone and young and doing it anyway. Together, and for the common cause of their daughter who they already loved beyond measure.

I came from that. My scar came from that. The instilled theology bending to love in a moment that must have felt unimaginable came from that. The pastor confirming it, and all of it coming from two young people who had never been put in a position like that and doing it like champions.

It substantiates the case for and beauty of improvised grace. And it turns out I was a recipient long before I could say thank you. Thank you, Mom & Dad. I love you!

— erin

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Series 01 - Rooted in the Eye of the Storm Session 02 - Confluence

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I have a three-inch scar under my right ribcage that I have no memory of receiving. It has been there since I was ten days old. Everything I know about how it got there I know because my parents told me. And because they thought I was dying, my mother, in the back seat of a yellow 1972 Volkswagen Bug, baptized me with fuzz she pulled off of my blanket.

That is the story as I know it, which means it is not really a story I know at all. I am the unreliable narrator of my own origin. What I have is the scar I can touch but not remember, their words, and a theology that said the fuzz was sufficient.

My mom was twenty-three years old. My dad was twenty-six. They had moved to Louisville after my dad finished his Masters in Audiology. His career taking them even further south than their alma mater in Bloomington, IN, while their families lived four or five hours north. Which is the kind of distance that feels manageable until it doesn’t. They were new to the city, and I was their first born. Eight pounds, twelve ounces. Named after one of the daughters from The Waltons. My mom did her whole labor au natural, which is a detail I hear differently now, than I did when I was younger, having tried and failed at that myself. I understand it in my body rather than just my head. She was twenty-three years old and she did it all by herself. I came out healthy. Everyone was so happy. Everyone went home.

And then I stopped thriving.

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My mom was exclusively breastfeeding, and I was physically returning everything she offered. This went on for ten days. Ten days of watching a baby who weighed eight pounds lose weight she couldn’t afford to lose, getting weaker and less responsive by the hour. My dad’s whole professional life is the science of how the body receives signals. The auditory system, the pathway from the world into the brain. And he was there watching his daughter lose the ability to receive anything at all, the most basic thing a body can signal. I am still here. My grandparents, their college friends, their support system, were all four or five hours north. My parents were alone with a baby who was failing, in a city that wasn’t home yet, making decisions nobody had prepared them for.

My folks had both grown up in the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. In that tradition, baptism is not a formality or a celebration. It is the entry point, a sacrament through which a person is cleansed and received into the covenant, the act that opens the door to what the scripture promises after this life. While at the time, my parents weren’t exactly churchgoers, that ideology had been woven into their fabric. My parents may not have believed this completely, but like the way you believe the things instilled in you by the people who loved you. And they were watching their ten-day-old firstborn become unresponsive in their apartment, in a city they hadn’t yet made their own, and they weren’t going to take anything to chance.

There was no church. No pastor. No holy water in the car when they headed for the hospital.

My mom reached for my blanket. She pulled off a piece of fuzz. And in the back seat of their little yellow VW Bug, she baptized me.

Show Some Love

The theology here is worth sitting with, because it isn’t simple and it isn’t sentimental. Sacramental traditions have always grappled with what happens when the proper elements are unavailable under emergency conditions. When a dying person needs last rites and there is no oil, when a baby needs baptism and there is no water. The tradition usually lands in the same place: the element matters, because the Word behind the element matters more. What makes the sacrament real is the faith and intention of the person delivering it, not the vessel it travels through. The fuzz was her substitution, standing in for water the way crackers and grape juice or bread and wine stand in for flesh and blood. The church will support a contingency plan for emergencies. My mom found it in the back seat of their little car.

A couple months later, when their fears subsided, my parents asked one of their childhood pastors if it counted. It did. So, I was never formally baptized in the church. I was baptized by my mother, with fuzz from my blanket, and symbolic or not, that is as real as it gets.

The diagnosis was pyloric stenosis. The valve between my stomach and small intestine had thickened to the point that almost nothing could pass through. My body was actively rejecting nourishment because something was wrong anatomically. An emergency surgery later, I was going to be okay. The scar and the story are the only evidence, fifty years later. It’s deep, and definitely not what the same surgery, now performed almost non-invasively, leaves behind. I’ve always known it even though I have no memory of it.

I sometimes think about what those ten days must have been like for my parents. Not for me, though I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly fun for me either. I was too new to have the ability to retain it as memory. But for them. My mom, twenty-three and postpartum, watching something go wrong with the person she had just brought into the world. My dad, twenty-six, his audiology training completely useless for this specific emergency, alone with his wife in a city they hadn’t figured out yet, watching his daughter lose ground.

And in that moment of desperation, my sweet little momma reached for my blanket.

That reach is where I return to. The theology gave her a framework, and when it confronted her in the back seat of their yellow VW Bug, she didn’t debate whether the conditions were right. She grabbed the only thing available and she used it. She performed a two-thousand-year-old sacrament with fuzz, on their way to a hospital in Louisville, because she was twenty-three years old and she was not going to let the absence of the right medium be the last word on whether her daughter was going to be okay.

I wonder whether there is a version of that story that lives on in my body. A ten-day-old nervous system is just forming. It’s taking in the world through channels that have no reference point, no experience to pull from to interpret what it perceives. What it receives, it receives pure: temperature, pressure, sound, smells, pain, pleasure. I don’t know if those ten days influenced anything about how I see or feel the world, or whether the surgery changed anything I can measure. What I know is that before my body was repaired, it received my mother’s intention, traveling through fuzz, because she found a way. I don’t know how my nervous system registered that. I suspect it is filed somewhere below language, or memory. In the infrastructure that got built before it could be reconciled.

This essay is an homage. To my twenty-three-year-old mom, who reached for the blanket. To my dad, driving their car in the dark, in a frenzy, through a city that wasn’t home. Twenty-six years old and holding on. To the two of them, alone and young and doing it anyway. Together, and for the common cause of their daughter who they already loved beyond measure.

I came from that. My scar came from that. The instilled theology bending to love in a moment that must have felt unimaginable came from that. The pastor confirming it, and all of it coming from two young people who had never been put in a position like that and doing it like champions.

It substantiates the case for and beauty of improvised grace. And it turns out I was a recipient long before I could say thank you. Thank you, Mom & Dad. I love you!

— erin

Leave a comment

Here is some session specific info if you want to do the Perimeditation session embedded at the top of this page. Guided Mindfulness + Inspired Music + Binaural Tones + Movement = Perimeditation, practical meditation for pragmatic women.

LINER NOTES

On the music
Sonic influences: Sufjan Stevens (Come on feel the Illinoise), Radiohead (Kid A), Fleet Foxes (self titled), and Devotchka’s song “The Winner Is”. The happy accident echo present in Session 01: Marrow has been reduced significantly. Marrow’s echo was the cave. Confluence is the mouth of it.

On the session
Session 02: Confluence runs 46 minutes. The first and last five minutes are music and binaural tones only; narration runs from minute 5 through minute 40. Headphones are required for the binaural effect to work.

On the frequencies
The binaural beat in Confluence is set at 5 Hz, low theta range, produced by a 200 Hz tone in the left ear and a 205 Hz tone in the right. Your brain perceives the difference between them as a third tone that doesn’t exist in the room. Theta (4–8 Hz) is associated with flow states, creative access, emotional processing, and the liminal space between waking and sleep. You can’t hear 5 Hz directly, but the brain will sync to it over time. This is why the first five minutes of the session are music only, the nervous system needs the on-ramp before the voice arrives.

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At 16, Mr. Eggers asked who I was. At 18, Ben and Grant told me how the world saw me. It took another 30 years to reconcile the two. To realize I was most of those things on any given day, and to forgive their youthful ignorance. To understand why I’ve had such a hard time defining myself, and to finally settle into acceptance. I am all of it and none of it. My life is a collage. A patchwork tapestry of every road I’ve ever gone down, every dead end, every misunderstanding of intention or identity.

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Picture it. The year was 1992. It was the first day of junior year. I was sitting between Megan and Mandy (who we lovingly called Mrs. Roper, and who is reading this right now and laughing). Mr. Eggers: psychology teacher, tennis coach, man who hoped to crack us open before we even put our backpacks down, walked in, dropped the needle on The Who, and let Roger Daltrey ask the question none of us wanted to answer: Who are you? Who, who, who, who?

We rolled our eyes. Because of course we did. We were 16, which means we were performing with a confidence and certainty we hadn’t earned, and were protecting ourselves from exactly the kind of sincerity he was trying to hand us. He gave us a blank page. We filled it with whatever version of ourselves felt safest to commit to in ink at the time.

I don’t remember what I wrote. I remember thinking it was cheesy. I wish I’d had the emotional intelligence at the time to see the exercise with as much reverence as I do now.

Now 1994. Senior year. Biology. Someone passed me a folded piece of paper.

At the top it said: What is Erin?

What followed was a list. Exhaustive. Thoughtful even, in its cruelty. Hippy. Grunge. Druggie. Princess. Preppy. Punk. Because I moved between groups seamlessly and always had. I picked up the language and the style of whatever room I walked into without even trying. Code-switching before I knew the word for it. Masking before I knew I was doing it. Belonging everywhere, which apparently read as belonging nowhere.

At the bottom of the list, after the catalogue of everything I apparently was read “Feminazi Baby Killer”. It was the height of Rush Limbaugh’s reign of ugly. And clearly these boys decided those words, that they probably heard on their parent’s radios, would hurt the most.

I’ve thought about that note a lot over the years. Not with grief. The grief phase was quickly replaced with pity for those boys. Especially after they both got suspended. It was shocking, and hurtful, but said way more about THEM than it did about ME. But I continued to think about it with a kind of anthropological curiosity. Because the list wasn’t wrong in a lot of ways. That’s the thing. I was most of those things, at any given moment. The crime, apparently, was refusing to only be one of them. The verdict at the bottom wasn’t a description. It was a punishment for being uncategorizable.

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Thirty-two years later, the algorithm is trying to do the same thing.

I’ve been building Perimeditate inside the wellness content ecosystem, which means my feed has closed around me like a fist. Somatic this. Nervous system that. Women healing in flowy linen pants. The language gets softer and more interchangeable by the day. The suggestions get more niche-specific. And suddenly I’m in a room full of people who already agree, speaking a language that only travels six inches. A somatic mindfulness echo chamber.

The algorithm, like Ben and Grant, wants to know what I am so it knows where to file me. And like Ben and Grant, it’s not entirely wrong about the parts it can see. It’s just missing the whole picture. Which is the part that matters.

Here’s what the algorithm doesn’t know about me.

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I am a 1.0 Phish fan who has stood in enough lots over the last 30+ years to understand that presence, repetition, and surrendering to the flow are a practice in and of themselves. I am a hospitality industry lifer who got broken by the industry that built me and came out the other side with a strong meditation practice and a lot of opinions about mise en place. I am a reluctantly enthusiastic Bravo viewer who is deeply, fluently literate in the gap between what people perform and who they are. I am an alcohol-free woman in my (early) fifties who built and lost brands, buried a sister, and raised a kid who sees the world differently. And I learned, eventually, to stop apologizing for being hard to file.

The woman Perimeditate is for? She’s not necessarily stuck in the wellness algorithm. She’s in the Real Housewives group. She’s dancing in the lawn at a show. She’s in her kitchen at midnight, prepping for her clients, and wondering when she stopped being able to feel her own edges. She’s been handed a blank page before. And she rolled her eyes at it too.

Mr. Eggers wasn’t being cheesy. He was trying to get a room full of kids to stop performing and ask themselves something real before the world gave them the verdict. Most of us weren’t ready. I certainly wasn’t ready.

I might actually be ready now. Maybe. Thirty years late, which is right on time.

Who are you? Not the version that fits the algorithm. Not the one that answers the note. Not the one that’s easiest to file.

The collage. The patchwork tapestry. The fits and starts and reinventions and relapses and relaunches. Who are you?

-erin

p.s. Speaking of surrendering to the flow, Session 02 - Confluence posts on Sunday. I hope you’ll stick around!

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Oops. I did it again.
I recorded Session 01 - Marrow today, in my closet, with the echo set to maximum (accidentally) on my microphone.

I obviously didn’t notice until I played it back. And then I sat there for a minute, listening to my own voice bouncing off of itself in this cavernous way that sounded nothing like any closet I’ve ever been in. And while I appreciated the trippy aesthetic, it was not really what I was going for. So…..

I was going to re-record it tonight, after I took my son to the movies.

Narrators voice: She did not, however, re-record it.

Here is what happened instead:

Levi wanted to see Backrooms. I said yes because I say yes to movies with Levi, and because I vaguely knew it was an A24 horror film about fluorescent hallways and internet creepypasta and I figured it would be weird and fun and mostly fine.

And now, much like after my first viewing of Midsommar (another A24 cinematic delight), I can say with certainty, it was not mostly fine.

Not because it was gory, which it really isn’t. But because it was bizarrely accurate.

I want to be clear that this is my interpretation of the film, and I could be a skosh off- base. But I clocked what was happening very early. And instead of feeling scared in the way horror movies usually scare you, jump cuts, loud noises, things that go bump, I felt something quieter and more unsettling laying heavy on my chest.

I didn’t blink much. I just watched.

Because what I saw unfolding on that screen wasn’t a monster story. It was an excavation story. A man who had been holding the surface tension together for so long that when it finally cracked, it cracked all the way down. The Backrooms aren’t a place you go. They’re a place that was always there, waiting beneath the surface.

That’s not supernatural. That’s what accumulates when you’re too busy keeping the lights on to check what’s in the basement.

Backrooms is about a man named Clark, who slips through a wall in the basement of his failing furniture store and ends up in an extradimensional labyrinth he cannot seem to get out of. “The Backrooms”, full of endless fluorescent hallways, stale carpet, and the deafening drone of infrastructure that has outlived its purpose.

The horror isn’t the monsters, though there are monsters.

The horror is how Clark got there. He wasn’t doing anything dramatic. He was doing maintenance. Trying to fix the lights, he entered the impossible through a workplace problem. Reality glitched while a broken man was just trying to keep his store illuminated.

And the maze (here’s the part that got me feeling really self-aware in that theater) wasn’t waiting behind the wall.

It was waiting inside the life he’d already built.

I have felt that way. Not as a metaphor, but as a Tuesday. Too many times to count.

The life that keeps running after the meaning goes out of it. The competence that becomes its own kind of cage. The moment when you look at everything you’ve built. Everything that by most measures is fine, is good even, and realize you cannot fully inhabit it. The humanizing realization that something has been running underneath all of the chaos, scanning, compensating, keeping the lights on, while you were busy looking everywhere else.

That’s not a horror movie premise.

That’s quite literally, root depletion. Which is EXACTLY what I had just spent 33 minutes recording.

Clark slipped into the Backrooms through a faulty wall while doing maintenance.

I walked into Marrow through a faulty microphone setting in my closet.

The difference is that I knew I was going underneath. I built the door on purpose. And when I came back out, I had a recording, echo and all, of what it sounds like to press into the floor and confirm it’s still there.

So, after all that, the echo is staying put.

It’s about the only woo thing about this entire production. My microphone accidentally gave Marrow the sound of a room that exists inside a room. Which is, it turns out, exactly what the root chakra is.

I’m not going to fix that.

Some things are too coincidental to be accidental.

Backrooms is brilliant. I hope you get a chance to see it in the theater, like it deserves to be. Kane Parsons, dude. Dude! I hope this finds its way to you.

Check out the liner notes below to read what artists influenced this sessions music, and tips to get the most out of your Perimeditation session.

- erin

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LINER NOTES — SESSION 01: MARROW

Sonic influences

Damien Rice / Andrew Bird / Nick Drake

Acoustic. Spare. No drums. No resolution. Just presence and the occasional cello doing something that makes you feel it in your sternum.

Recorded at The Meditation Station - my walk-in closet with my crappy laptop, and a $50 USB mic. Mixed in Audacity. Ambient track generated in Suno. Binaural tones layered underneath.

Frequency
Delta / 1–4 Hz

Homecoming used Alpha: a doorway state, relaxed alertness. Marrow goes deeper. Delta is the most primal frequency range the nervous system knows. It’s where the body goes during deep dreamless sleep, the state associated with the most fundamental rest and restoration. For root work specifically, it made sense to go all the way down. You can’t excavate a foundation from the surface.

Headphones
Binaural tones require separate audio in each ear to work. While headphones are optional, they are highly recommended for this session. Speakers won’t deliver the frequency. Any headphones will do.

A note on the echo
Yes, it’s intentional. No, it wasn’t planned. Read the Field Note.

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The Ick

It’s only been 10 days, but every time I’ve queued up a new post, I felt a low-key yuckiness I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t doubt, and I wasn’t second-guessing my message. It was the mechanism. Substack’s default suggested paywall sitting quietly behind everything I was giving away free felt disingenuous. Technically fine. Functionally dishonest.

I launched Perimeditation Session 00- Homecoming on June 1st with a pending paid subscription tier for Series 01 – Rooted in the Eye of the Storm. I told myself it was standard and just how the platform works. Everybody does it this way.

But “everybody does it this way” is not a value system that rang true for me.

I wrestled with the wrongness until Monday night, when I found the alternative. I read a piece about Buy Me a Coffee, the tip jar model, the “if this moved you, here’s a way to say so” approach, and something in my chest just… released. Not because it solves a revenue problem. But because it’s absolutely true. It matches how I actually perceive value, and the art of the exchange, and what it means to be the kind of person who tips well when something resonates.

The paywall is gone. It was never supposed to be there to begin with.

The Contradiction I Accidentally Built In

I wrote Measured Expectations as a manifesto of sorts. I directly called out of the wellness industry’s habit of charging admission to things that should just be true. The commodification of “woo”. The gated “Pay to Pray”, “Subscribe to be Seen” model.

And then I built a subscription tier.

I didn’t catch the contradiction in my brain, which tells me something about how deep the conditioning runs, even in people who are actively calling it out, but I felt it immediately in my body. The platform suggested it. I accepted the suggestion. I moved on. But something in me didn’t like how it made me feel at all.

This was never intended to be a “product”. The logo, the branding, the structure are all just the way I put things together personally. Because I HAVE built products (some quite successfully), and I like things to look like some time and effort were spent making them aesthetically pleasing. But at their core, Perimeditate and Perimeditation are open source in the oldest sense. “Here is what helps me, I hope it helps you too.” Genuine connection doesn’t have a cover charge. You can’t buy your way into resonance, and you can’t paywall your way to it either.

Putting a price tag on this was always going to be the wrong move. It just took a week of low-grade ick to see it clearly.

The Hospitality Wiring

I once had a book concept called What the F*ck, It’s Only a Buck. The title is a nod to a line you hear on Phish lots across the country by someone hawking a water bottle, a grilled cheese, or a sticker. But the book was always about something bigger than lot culture. It was about reframing the way people think about tipping. Not as an additional cost to dine out, not as a guilt trip, but as the most honest transaction in any service exchange. You experienced something. You decided what it was worth. You said so, with cash.

That’s hospitality math. Value gets determined at the end, by the receiver. Not at the beginning, by the seller. In this scenario you don’t pay before you eat. And what you leave at the end is a direct reflection of what it meant to you.

I have been on both sides of that equation for thirty-plus years. I know what it feels like when someone brings me a plate of food, and I take a deep breath and relax for the first time that day. I also know what it feels like when someone leaves me something more than standard that says “I see what you just did there, and I appreciate it”.

I’m a really good tipper. Industry folks take care of each other like. When something is good, when I see someone who does their work in a way that isn’t just a performative “going through the motions”, I want to let them know in a meaningful way. Gratitude doesn’t pay the bills like gratuity does *wink*. So, for this to sit well in my soul, I needed to structure it in a way that gives folks that option. Not because I’m asking for it, but because you might be wired the same way I am, and genuinely LIKE rewarding those who brighten your day.

The Show Some Love button is that option. It’s there if you want it, not because it’s an expected part of the exchange.

The Shift

Here’s what changed:

Everything is free. All of it. Session 00: Homecoming is free. Series 01, Rooted in the Eye of the Storm, is free. The Notes from the Field are free. Whatever comes next will be free.

If you listen to a session and feel a subtle shift, if a Field Note captures something you didn’t have words for, there’s the Show Some Love button. Use it if you want to. Don’t if you don’t. Either way, all are welcome here.

Why This Matters

This part took longer to work out than the paywall decision did.

I’m putting my front of house apron back on. I’m picking up serving shifts at a place I respect, with food I believe in, for money that’s honest and hours that don’t hollow me out, because I don’t have the luxury of making this a full-time endeavor. My first reaction was to brace for how it would look. Fifty years old. Chef. Founder of _____. Erin f’ing Edds, back in an apron taking orders.

I had to sit with that feeling long enough to see it for what it was: someone else’s perception of MY life, living rent-free in MY head.

Here is what is actually true. I’m a really good waitress! The kind of good that comes from genuinely wanting the person in my section to leave happier than they arrived. That’s not a skill set I’m falling back on. It’s a thing I love. And somewhere in thirty-plus years of building businesses and managing dining rooms, and kitchens and carrying other people’s food, I let myself be embarrassed by it.

Nobody who knows me is going to see me walk up to their table and think, “What a shame” (fingers crossed). They’re going to see me smiling. They’re going to see me in my element. And a small, still-healing part of me needed to make peace with that before I could say it out loud.

Perimeditate is my passion project. A real one, with intention and craft and a genuine belief that it will find the people it’s meant for. But it is not going to be my income replacement. It’s not supposed to be. Keeping it free keeps it honest. And taking a job that funds my life without consuming it keeps me free to build the things that actually matter to me right now.

Alignment isn’t always a dramatic pivot. Sometimes it’s just telling the truth about what you need instead of apologizing for it.

The Close

The toll booth is gone.

If you’ve been here from the beginning (all of 10 days), thank you for graciously not pointing out the blaring contridiction. If you’re finding this for the first time, welcome! Everything mine is yours.

Something with this level of transparency and intention should not be stuck behind a paywall. I knew it when I started. I just needed to see the bigger picture in order to build the model that matched the belief.

— erin

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Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Let’s get this show on the road.

Hi Buddy! My name is Erin. Welcome to Perimeditation! Session 00 – Homecoming. I wanted to take a couple minutes before you dive in to introduce myself, and get you acclimated to what you can expect in our first session, and all future ones.

First, full disclosure. I do not have a certification in mindfulness, or prior experience leading meditation sessions. I have never been to a retreat in Bali where my true purpose was revealed to me. I’m a chef with a yoga mat and a long and storied history that very much needed grounding. After years of attempting meditation through “picture a forest” apps, and YouTube gurus, I grew tired of the mantras I was being “sold”, in the most commodified Insta-sense of the word. So I built my own personal practice, over the last 5 years. In the middle of loss and grief, self-medication turned sobriety, profound life shifts, and my inherent stubbornness that doesn’t let my circumstances dictate my trajectory. Life was harried, but quite manageable.

And then, here comes perimenopause, and it flipped the script, just when I thought I had settled into a pretty good place. Suddenly, I had a body that got very loud about being ignored, and enough already established awareness (and again, stubbornness) to figure out how to listen to it. Perimeditation was birthed out of that. Not as a curriculum or methodology with a trademark (yet). Just a practice that works for ME, handed over as-is, because I really did build this for me first, and I’m sharing it because I’m not going to hide it in a safe, like the “Eleven Herbs & Spices”. I’ve been quietly working on this particular iteration for about a year, but an abrupt professional upheaval lit the fire, and I busted out 7 essays, our opening session, social media, and this Substack in the matter of 2 weeks, because, like Ricky Bobby, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

This is not my credential-free mea culpa. I believe in, and am proud of, what I’ve created thus far. It’s painfully self-aware, but I’m a glutton like that. Much like in culinary training, you can teach the basics, you can’t teach soul. You either have it or you don’t. You can teach someone technique, structure, breathing patterns. You cannot teach someone to mean it. And sincerity is my super-power.

Perimeditation is not a substitute for therapy, medication, professional support, or the hard work of actually dealing with your life. It is not going to fix anything on its own. It is a supplemental piece of the puzzle. Think of it like an opportunity to check in with yourself.

If you’ve never meditated before, don’t sweat it. You are not behind. No prior knowledge required here, and there is no “wrong way” to do it. The only rule is that you try to stay awake.

If you’ve had a meditation practice for years and are ready to try something a little more pragmatic than woo, this might be it. Or not. Honestly, I’m just happy you’re willing to give it a shot.

Subscribe now

The Setup

A few things that actually matter when you sit down to do the thing:

Listen through headphones if you want the full binaural effect. Earbuds work fine. Over-ear works fine. If you don’t have headphones, it’ll work too, but using headphones is optimal.

Choose a space and time where you won’t be interrupted. Give the people who are home a 15-minute head’s up. That beats getting yanked out of a settled nervous system by someone asking where the good scissors are. And if finding that time and space at home is not practical, go to the park, or in emergency, listen in your car (but not while driving, please).

Find a position your body can be comfortable in for a while. Seated, lying down, back supported. On the floor, in the bath, or in bed under the covers. It all works. What doesn’t work is a position you’re white knuckling through.

Timing. Not right after a hard conversation, or at the end of the night when you’re already half gone. Mornings work well, as do mid-afternoons. The sweet spot is when you’re tired enough to slow down but awake enough to stay present.

Share Perimeditate

DIY Demystified

I had never recorded anything for publication before I made this and had never even heard of the music production programs I used before I started. And I have done my fair shar of writing. Once upon a time I was the Cultural Editor for an independent news weekly in Tacoma, WA, but that was in the 1900’s.

What I AM is a DIY’er to the n’th degree and I had the realization that something big was missing in the mindfulness/meditation landscape. I knew what I wanted it to sound like and feel like, and waiting for someone more qualified to make it to my exact specifications was not a strategy I was willing to adopt. The “wellness” space is saturated with the same “pay to pray” model, and I was sick of wading through the commercialized woo, with tiers and supplemental products, and “an aesthetic”. I wanted something practical, accessible, not buried in jargon and paywalls. Simple and stripped down, which is something I think a lot of us Gen X girls relate to and appreciate! I kinda think of this as the “zine” version of what we’ve been sold up to this point.

I’m the one who critiques meditations while I’m in them. Noting where I disconnect, where the language feels inauthentic, where I get bored, where I am calculating how much time is left. I surface from those sessions with a mental of edits instead of a settled nervous system.

Binaural audio isn’t a new discovery for me, it was a deliberate choice. I’ve used it for years and watched what it does to MY nervous system when it’s running on high. What I couldn’t find anywhere was the combination I knew was possible: binaural frequencies, music that doesn’t feel like filler, and messaging that doesn’t insult your intelligence. That trifecta didn’t seem to exist. So I made it.

The music was generated with Suno, and inspired by some of my favorite bands. The frequencies were layered and mixed in Audacity, which is free, which matters, because accessibility was always part of the point. I recorded the spoken part of the session in my walk-in closet (The Meditation Station) full of hoodies, funky dresses, old concert tees, and too many pairs of flip flops. I bought a $50 USB microphone and did a lot of takes. The closet has good acoustics. The microphone cost less than a tank of gas (well maybe not currently). None of that is me being humble. It’s the whole ethos. I’m including liner notes at the end of each session with info on what bands inspired that sessions music, and why the frequencies for the binaural tones were selected. There is nothing mysterious or inaccessible about the way I did this. Transparency is the clearest path to trust, and I’m not going to make this process precious in any way, shape or form.

Subscribe now

Now bring your whole self.

This is a “come as you are” thing. If you have a ritual, bring it. If you love your crystals, bring them. If you have a candle with a scent that means something to you, burn it. If you want to set an intention before you press play, go for it! Have something to sip on. I don’t care if it’s water, coffee, tea, a Diet Coke or a gin & tonic. All of it is welcome. Basically, anything that sets the stage for the space to feel different from the rest of your day.

My set up is a low wide soft chair I can criss-cross-applesauce and lean back in, an ottoman for my feet, a light blanket for my shoulders, my pink Beatz, a lit stick of Nag Champa, and my sticker covered Nalgene full of water.

What’s not here: a recommended product list. A supplemental guide, branded crystal set, or affiliate links at checkout. Perimeditation doesn’t require anything you don’t already own, and I’m NOT going to try to sell you the version of yourself that burns a $52 candle that I just happen to sell. Woo is ancient, personal, and valid. But woo as a marketing strategy is a different thing entirely, and we all know the difference when we see it.

Find your happy place. Get your headphones. And press play when you’re ready.

-erin perimeditate.substack.com

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Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Let’s get this show on the road.

Hi Buddy! My name is Erin. Consider this my official welcome to Perimeditation! Session 00 – Homecoming is live (find it below), and I wanted to use this time before you dive in to introduce myself, and get you acclimated to what you can expect in our first session, and all future ones.

First, full disclosure. I do not have a certification in mindfulness, or prior experience leading meditation sessions. I have never been to a retreat in Bali where my true purpose was revealed to me. I’m a chef with a yoga mat and a long and storied history that very much needed grounding. After years of attempting meditation through “picture a forest” apps, and YouTube gurus, I grew tired of the mantras I was being “sold”, in the most commodified Insta-sense of the word. So I built my own personal practice, over the last 5 years. In the middle of loss and grief, self-medication turned sobriety, profound life shifts, and my inherent stubbornness that doesn’t let my circumstances dictate my trajectory. Life was harried, but quite manageable.

And then, here comes perimenopause, and it flipped the script, just when I thought I had settled into a pretty good place. Suddenly, I had a body that got very loud about being ignored, and enough already established awareness (and again, stubbornness) to figure out how to listen to it. Perimeditation was birthed out of that. Not as a curriculum or methodology with a trademark (yet). Just a practice that works for ME, handed over as-is, because I really did build this for me first, and I’m sharing it because I’m not going to hide it in a safe, like the “Eleven Herbs & Spices”. I’ve been quietly working on this particular iteration for about a year, but an abrupt professional upheaval lit the fire, and I busted out 7 essays, our opening session, social media, and this Substack in the matter of 2 weeks, because, like Ricky Bobby, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

This is not my credential-free mea culpa. I believe in, and am proud of, what I’ve created thus far. It’s painfully self-aware, but I’m a glutton like that. Much like in culinary training, you can teach the basics, you can’t teach soul. You either have it or you don’t. You can teach someone technique, structure, breathing patterns. You cannot teach someone to mean it. And sincerity is my super-power.

Perimeditation is not a substitute for therapy, medication, professional support, or the hard work of actually dealing with your life. It is not going to fix anything on its own. It is a supplemental piece of the puzzle. Think of it like an opportunity to check in with yourself.

If you’ve never meditated before, don’t sweat it. You are not behind. No prior knowledge required here, and there is no “wrong way” to do it. The only rule is that you try to stay awake.

If you’ve had a meditation practice for years and are ready to try something a little more pragmatic than woo, this might be it. Or not. Honestly, I’m just happy you’re willing to give it a shot.

The Setup

A few things that actually matter when you sit down to do the thing:

Listen through headphones if you want the full binaural effect. Earbuds work fine. Over-ear works fine. If you don’t have headphones, it’ll work too, but using headphones is optimal.

Choose a space and time where you won’t be interrupted. Give the people who are home a 15-minute head’s up. That beats getting yanked out of a settled nervous system by someone asking where the good scissors are. And if finding that time and space at home is not practical, go to the park, or in emergency, listen in your car (but not while driving, please).

Find a position your body can be comfortable in for a while. Seated, lying down, back supported. On the floor, in the bath, or in bed under the covers. It all works. What doesn’t work is a position you’re white knuckling through.

Timing. Not right after a hard conversation, or at the end of the night when you’re already half gone. Mornings work well, as do mid-afternoons. The sweet spot is when you’re tired enough to slow down but awake enough to stay present.

DIY Demystified

I had never recorded anything for publication before I made this and had never even heard of the music production programs I used before I started. And I have done my fair shar of writing. Once upon a time I was the Cultural Editor for an independent news weekly in Tacoma, WA, but that was in the 1900’s.

What I AM is a DIY’er to the n’th degree and I had the realization that something big was missing in the mindfulness/meditation landscape. I knew what I wanted it to sound like and feel like, and waiting for someone more qualified to make it to my exact specifications was not a strategy I was willing to adopt. The “wellness” space is saturated with the same “pay to pray” model, and I was sick of wading through the commercialized woo, with tiers and supplemental products, and “an aesthetic”. I wanted something practical, accessible, not buried in jargon and paywalls. Simple and stripped down, which is something I think a lot of us Gen X girls relate to and appreciate! I think of this as the “zine” version of what we’ve been sold up to this point.

I’m the one who critiques meditations while I’m in them. Noting where I disconnect, where the language feels inauthentic, where I get bored, where I am calculating how much time is left. I surface from those sessions with a mental of edits instead of a settled nervous system.

Binaural audio isn’t a new discovery for me, it was a deliberate choice. I’ve used it for years and watched what it does to MY nervous system when it’s running on high. What I couldn’t find anywhere was the combination I knew was possible: binaural frequencies, music that doesn’t feel like filler, and messaging that doesn’t insult your intelligence. That trifecta didn’t seem to exist. So I made it.

The music was generated with Suno, and inspired by some of my favorite bands. The frequencies were layered and mixed in Audacity, which is free, which matters, because accessibility was always part of the point. I recorded the spoken part of the session in my walk-in closet (The Meditation Station) full of hoodies, funky dresses, old concert tees, and too many pairs of flip flops. I bought a $50 USB microphone and did a lot of takes. The closet has good acoustics. The microphone cost less than a tank of gas (well maybe not currently). None of that is me being humble. It’s the whole ethos. I’m including liner notes at the end of each session with info on what bands inspired that sessions music, and why the frequencies for the binaural tones were selected. There is nothing mysterious or inaccessible about the way I did this. Transparency is the clearest path to trust, and I’m not going to make this process precious in any way, shape or form.

Now bring your whole self.

This is a “come as you are” thing. If you have a ritual, bring it. If you love your crystals, bring them. If you have a candle with a scent that means something to you, burn it. If you want to set an intention before you press play, go for it! Have something to sip on. I don’t care if it’s water, coffee, tea, a Diet Coke or a gin & tonic. All of it is welcome. Basically, anything that sets the stage for the space to feel different from the rest of your day.

My set up is a low wide soft chair I can criss-cross-applesauce and lean back in, an ottoman for my feet, a light blanket for my shoulders, my pink Beatz, a lit stick of Nag Champa, and my sticker covered Nalgene full of water.

What’s not here: a recommended product list. A supplemental guide, branded crystal set, or affiliate links at checkout. Perimeditation doesn’t require anything you don’t already own, and I’m NOT going to try to sell you the version of yourself that burns a $52 candle that I just happen to sell. Woo is ancient, personal, and valid. But woo as a marketing strategy is a different thing entirely, and we all know the difference when we see it.

Everything I have done up and until this point, including the introductory session is, and will always be complimentary. I’m keeping it free so you can share it freely. The sharing is really my only ask. If I’m doing this right, the rest will follow. Next up is Series 01 – Rooted in the Eye of the Storm, as seven session (released weekly) starting June 7^th. Originally, I was going to set up a subscription for the series, but to keep myself feeling 100% great about this, it’s also going to be free, as will anything that comes next.

The session is below.

Find your happy place. Get your headphones. And press play when you’re ready.
If it does the trick, please share it with your friends who you think will get it. And if you feel inclined to show your gratitude in gratuity, that’s what the “Show Some Love” button is for. Personally, I’m a big tipper, and I want to at least give y’all the option.

-erin

Show Some Love

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Liner Notes

Sonic influences: Khruangbin, Sigur Rós, and the long ambient passages of Pink Floyd. It’s warmth without urgency, weightlessness, the patient build that does not rush you anywhere.

Built with: Original ambient bed generated in Suno, layered and balanced in Audacity, with binaural tones woven underneath.

Frequency: Alpha, 10 Hz. Alpha is the brainwave range of relaxed alertness. Calm but awake, settled but still present. I chose it for Homecoming because a first session is not about drifting off; it is about arriving. Alpha is the doorway state: the body downshifts out of high alert without checking out entirely, so you can stay with my voice and still feel the floor come up to meet you. Headphones make the binaural effect work; without them, you will still get the music, just not the full undertow.

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It’s Perimeditation Eve. I am about to let loose into the cosmos something I made completely by myself, in my walk-in closet with a fifty-dollar microphone over the period of the last two weeks. Tomorrow I am going to push a button and a thing I built slowly and for myself, over years, during some of my darkest moments, becomes a thing that exists in the world for others. For them to react, ignore, share with enthusiasm, mock, or quietly need. Your guess is as good as mine. And I’m scared shitless.

This is the part nobody tells you about. Or maybe they do and I just wasn’t listening because I was too busy being so recklessly audacious.

Here’s the inside of my head right now:

Who do you think you are? What if nobody subscribes? What if people subscribe and then unsubscribe after Session 00 because it’s ridiculous? What if people you love think it’s stupid? What if people you don’t know think it’s stupid? You sound weird on the recording. What if you built this for a version of women that doesn’t actually exist outside your own head? What if this is just another public failure? What if June 1st comes and goes and nothing happens?

What if June 1st comes and something does?

And yet, here I am, doing the damn thing anyway. This isn’t my first rodeo in the ring of putting something into the world that opens myself up for criticism. I’ve been creating things in the public eye for 18 years. It never gets easier though.

But I didn’t get this far in my life by shelving things before they launch because I’m scared. I call it “aggressive naivete”, and it has served me well thus far.

Here is what I’m sure of though. I am proud of this project. I put a ton of work into it. Years of research, trial and error, multiple apps, and nights when the binaural tones in my headphones were the only thing that allowed me to function. But I’m not that girl anymore because I have dedicated myself to a disciplined practice of showing myself grace, and not taking anything to seriously. Nothing a little self-deprecating humor can’t solve, am I right?

And speaking of The Audacity, I spent this whole last week watching the new series of the same name on AMC while I was building everything I’ve published so far. If you’ve watched it, you will appreciate that the irony was not lost on me.

To tomorrow. However it decides to show up.

-erin

More days than not, my brain is making connections. Comparables. Drawing parallels that only exist in my life and in my experiences living it. Almost like I have to know how something relates to something I already understand in order to know how I feel about it.

My shorthand for this is hypermode. It is not a clinical word you’ll find in the DSM-5. It’s just what it feels like in my noggin: the receiver wide open, the field humming, every signal in the universe arriving at the same volume.

I relate the experience best from a kitchen perspective. A culinary competition floor is hypermode’s natural habitat, the clock running, judges circulating, the attendees asking questions when I’m trying to plate my lamb chops. My mise en place is the only thing I am concerned with regarding preparedness. I bring fifty extra things in case I need them, and I am rigorously organized and intentional about every choice. I just don’t know what they are until I’m making them. I do not plan or prepare for execution the way most people do. I very rarely get the forecasted outcome from planning anyway, so I work on the fly, and I can pivot so much more effectively than the people who spent weeks rehearsing. It looks, from the outside, like I am thriving. Truth be told, I usually am. I freaking love it in the moment! The cost shows up later, after the dish has been turned in, when the receiver is still wide open and there is nothing left to point it at.

A lot of people, and in the food industry especially, retreat to escapes that don’t serve them but temporarily soothe. Closing the bar. Calling their dealer. Hooking up with the new sous chef (not me, of course). All of it while turning the charm back on the next day to do it all again. It’s the rigor, combined with unhealthy coping mechanisms that invigorate and often destroy incredibly talented chefs. You already know that, because Anthony Bourdain.

Here is what I am learning, slowly: hypermode is not free.

Days like that cost me. The receiver is open in both directions. The patterns I am catching are also catching me, and by evening my nervous system has run thousands of small currents it didn’t ask for. I call it Farmers Market Tired. Complete depletion on a cellular level. Exposure to the elements, to other people’s energy, to the physical output the task required, and the mental drain of having had to do it in the public eye. If I don’t meet it in the body, it scorches the next two days. My skin is on fire. My head is a helium balloon.

My practice gives me room to dump all the pieces out on the table, assemble the puzzle, and then put it away.

What it looks like, on days like that: I reduce almost all sensory input. Comfy light clothes, blinds closed, fan on high. No noise. No TV, no music. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a big glass of cold milk, and a couple cookies. If it’s nice enough out, I open the windows. I live next to a beautiful park and also next to the highway, and the sound of the birds intermingled with the sound of the semis is everything.

And I let a few of the connections go unwritten, which, if you have this kind of mind, you know is harder than it sounds. Not every pattern needs to be caught and made into something. Some of them are weather. Prioritize and discard.

I don’t know how to teach this. I know how to live it, badly, and then a little better each year. If you know what I mean by the receiver is on, you already have your own version of all of this. If you don’t, that’s fine too. I’m a little envious honestly.

The practice I have built, the thing I’m calling Perimeditation, and putting out for public consumption, isn’t a way to remove or fix hypermode. It’s a way to come back down through the body afterward. Or alongside. Or both. It’s like grace in a mirror.

— erin

We perceive a slice. A small one.

The human eye registers only a thin band of the electromagnetic spectrum and misses everything else. We cannot see radio waves passing through our living rooms or the infrared signature our own bodies are constantly broadcasting or the ultraviolet patterns that bees see in flowers we think we are looking at. Our ears pick up a narrow range of frequencies. Our noses are weaker than our dogs’ noses. The world we move through is the filtered output of a perception system that evolved for survival on the African savanna and has not been meaningfully upgraded since.

And yet we arrogantly walk around like we are seeing the whole picture.

I think about that a lot. Like a lot a lot. About how much of what is happening around us is simply not available to our human equipment. About how strange it is that society has built entire belief systems on the assumption that what we can sense and what is real are the whole shebang. The honest scientist and the honest mystic are in surprising agreement about this. They disagree on the mechanics. About what is in the unperceived field, how it operates, what it wants from us, whether it wants anything from us at all. They agree on the principles. Something is there. We are picking up a fraction of it. Our perception is not the limit of what exists.

So what is in the part we cannot perceive?

* * *

I have a friend who talks to angels. Not metaphorically. Literally. She gets information she could not have known any other way, and she traces it back to a source she calls by name. People around her get the wisdom and insight they need. Doors open in her presence. She gets vibes about a person and the feeling turns out to be precisely right. If you ask her how, she shrugs and gestures upward.

I have another friend with guides. She talks about them the way other people talk about their favorite group chat. Her crew, who while not always available, are usually right when they show up. She is the most grounded person I know. She runs her life with rigor. The guides are part of how she does that.

I have spent my whole life trying to find the precise expression for what these women are describing and finding most of the available vocabularies inadequate. The religion-only version flattens it. The science-only framing flattens it differently. The pop-spiritual version turns it into product. None of it sits right.

What I have come around to is this: my friends have tapped into something expansive. They are perceiving more bandwidth than most of us are tuned to receive. Whatever they are picking up is there. They have, for whatever reason, developed receivers that pick up signals the rest of us miss. Like a person who can hear higher frequencies, or see in the dark, or notice the smell of rain coming an hour before it arrives. They are not just intuitive or know how to read a room. They are reporting from a wider slice of the reality we are all already in.

I have recognized the presence of that gift in others even when I did not feel like I was being personally addressed. I do not need a friend to tell me the field is wider than the visible. I have my own evidence.

* * *

My little sister, Katy, has been gone five years now.

She still shows up. Not on a schedule. Not in big dramatic ways. Just in the small impossible ways that are the actual texture of being met by someone who is no longer accessible through the previously available channels.

Three months ago I was driving home from work on the fifth anniversary of losing her. I was bummed, but had spent the day putting it on the backburner. Each year I try to visit the Meditation Woods at First Friends Quaker Church where we held her first memorial, and planned to swing by on my route. I needed to turn off NPR and put on some music to put me in the proper headspace. But I didn’t necessarily want something that was going to tug at my heart. Suddenly, my mood shifted. I wanted 90’s angry girl rock. That was the entire request. Something loud, female, brazen.

I was going to put on Hole. Or The Breeders. Or Liz Phair. Or PJ Harvey.

I picked up my phone to stream something I could sing really loud to. I was opening the app to search when Veruca Salt popped into my head. Not as a thought I worked through. As a substitution at the level before the search. I pulled up their album American Thighs. I had not thought about that album in years. The shift was quiet enough that it didn’t even register. I put on Veruca Salt and started driving. Singing at the top of my lungs to songs I hadn’t heard in years. All Hail Me, Spiderman ‘79, Seether. I cracked myself up because I still remembered most of the words.

As I was pulling into the parking lot at the church Track 6, Wolf, came on. And I started to cry. Big cry. The kind of full-bodied grief I have lost access to for a long time. Not because I had healed away from it, but because the version of me that had been doing the last several years of my life had had to put it somewhere not easily accessible. The song was the trigger. “Angels can be so deceiving when they love you well.” The line landed in a vocabulary my waking mind rarely has access to and unlocked everything that had been waiting underneath. I started the song over, said out loud “Hi, Katy!”, and just cried.

I KNEW it came from her, but I didn’t piece it all together until several days later. American Thighs was released in September ‘94, the fall I left for college. The next summer it was ours. It is the soundtrack of the summer we became friends. The summer we stopped being only sisters and became also people to each other. The album is the sound of the year I started loving her completely, and not just as a birthright.

I did not pick American Thighs because of that correlation. I didn’t even have Veruca Salt in mind until it was there. Something completed my thought for me, before the search happened. The thought that came in, and that I didn’t connect the dots on until later, was the album she lived inside with me when we were young women together. And a song about “This is a time for believing, in fairy tales. One in which you were brought back to me” came on, on the anniversary of her death, and met me with jazz hands!

She did that. I am as sure of that as I am of anything.

I do not have an inkling of what she is doing now or where she is doing it from. I do not need one. My whole body knew it had been met by her. It knew her so completely while she was there in that moment that it has not had to learn to recognize her since. It already knows.

She is an everyday angel in my life. She is also, I suspect, one of the senders. The distinction between the one who shows up and the one who is moving through whoever is showing up gets blurry once you let yourself believe the field is real. I am not in a hurry to resolve the blur.

* * *

So what are angels? Or guides? Or spirits? Or whatever name a given tradition uses for the unseen-but-felt?

I do not have a complete answer. I have a working one.

I believe they are intelligences that operate in the part of the field we cannot directly perceive, that they intersect with our lives in ways our limited equipment registers as coincidence or intuition or grace. I think the body knows them better than the mind does, because the body is not nearly as committed to the fiction that what we can perceive with our “five senses” is all there is. I think every culture that has ever existed has noticed them, named them differently, and built rituals around the noticing. I do not think every framing is equally accurate, but I do think the underlying fact, we are not alone in this, is something humans have been clocking for as long as we have been humans.

And I think they show up. Not on demand. Not on a schedule. Not always in ways we recognize while they are happening. But they show up, and the body knows.

* * *

It’s not usually as profound, or obvious. Or without the participation of the everyday angels we find in human form too.

Very recently I was wrestling with something that was doing a number on me, and a person I had met months ago, briefly, and had known for only eight days before our paths separated reached out to me out of the blue to check in, without knowing that she held the missing piece to complete a really tough puzzle, and she offered me exactly what I’d been searching for. Not eight months. Not eight years. Eight days. Long enough to recognize me in a hallway, not long enough to owe me anything. And yet she showed up and what she may not have thought mattered as much as it did changed everything. Thanks, girl.

It’s the woman I barely know, crossing a room to give me a hug before I’ve said a word. Because she sees me and is drawn to the brief connection. She probably couldn’t say why she did. She does the thing, briefly, and we are both better for it.

It’s the friend I haven’t talked to in weeks, texting out of the blue just because I just had a feeling. The feeling is accurate. The friend cannot explain why she reached out. I just had a feeling. That is the whole explanation.

These things tend to happen when I am outwardly showing my best self. When the “Everything is great” Erin is on display, but underneath it’s loud, messy and lonely.

These are not the kind of coincidences I am stacking into a pile to prove a point. These are the texture of my life. They happen often enough that I have stopped being surprised by them. They happen often enough that I have started to organize my understanding of reality around them rather than around the assumption that they are anomalies.

What I am proposing is the simpler hypothesis. These events are not the anomaly. The framework that treats them as anomalies is the anomaly. If you let yourself accept that we perceive but a slice and that more is happening in the field than our equipment picks up, then the everyday angel is not a disruption of the natural order. It is the natural order briefly becoming legible to a body that happened to be paying attention.

* * *

The somatic frame and the metaphysical frame are pointing at the same thing.

The body knows when it has been met. There is a particular relaxation that occurs in the chest and shoulders when grace arrives unsummoned, and it is different from the relaxation that follows a planned-for kindness. The body recognizes the difference. The body has been noticing the difference all along. The mind is the slow one in this exchange. The mind needs explanations. The body does not.

When my friend talks to her angels, her body is doing something. Something is being received. The receiver is real because the receiving is real: observable, repeatable, useful. When my other friend consults her guides, her body is doing something. Something is being received. When a stranger crosses a room to hug me, my body is doing something. Something is being received.

The fact that we cannot fit any of this neatly inside the equipment we currently understand does not mean it is not happening. It means our equipment is what it is. A radio without an FM antenna is not refuting the existence of FM stations. It is just a radio with a particular tuning. We are radios with a particular tuning. The FM is still broadcasting.

* * *

Who are the everyday angels?

They are the ones who show up before they were sent for. The friend who calls without knowing why. The colleague who stays late without being asked. The stranger who makes eye contact at the precise moment you seeking connection. The woman in the parking lot who tells you your taillight is out. The acquaintance who reaches across an eight-day acquaintanceship and hands you something you desperately needed. The hug delivered without explanation.

They are also, and this is the part I am more interested in, whatever is moving them.

Because something is. A signal is going through the field. An intelligence is doing the dispatching. Whether you want to call that God or the universe or the guides or the angels or the collective unconscious or the morphic resonance or however you acknowledge it, the something is real. The receiving is real. The bodies that get met know it is real, regardless of what name we put on the sender.

When you are met like this, let yourself notice. Recognize it for what it is. Let the body register the pattern. Let the relaxation in the chest happen when grace arrives unsummoned. Let that be the practice for today.

And if you have ever been the unbidden shower-up in someone else’s life, if you have ever crossed a room you were not sent across, called a friend on a feeling you could not explain, handed a stranger something they needed without being asked, you are someone’s everyday angel. You may not know it. You do not have to. The signal moved through you. The job got done. The body on the receiving end registered the meeting.

* * *

There is one more thing the practice asks of me, and it is the thing I find hardest to write about because it sounds the most like the kind of spiritual modeling I have spent years trying to avoid sounding like.

Thank you.

Just that. Not directed at anyone in particular. Not aimed at a deity I can name or a sender I can identify. Just thank you. To the field. To whatever is moving through it. To the friends who pick up signal I do not. To the strangers who cross rooms. To my sister, who has not stopped surprising me. To my own body, which has been a more reliable receiver than my mind has given it credit for. To whatever is doing the dispatching. To the universe, if that is what we are calling it today. To the unseen, the unnamed, the unaccounted-for. Thank you.

I do not need a recipient on the other end of the gratitude. The gratitude is not a transaction. It is a posture. It is what the body wants to do when it notices it has been met. The thank you is the natural conclusion of the receiving. It is also, somatically, a thing you can practice on its own, turning toward whatever-is, in your day, and offering the silent or spoken thank you without needing a forwarding address.

Try it sometime. The body will tell you whether it works. Mine has been telling me, for a while now, that it does.

That is a big part of what the rest of the Perimeditate practice is for. Noticing. Receiving. Saying thank you to no one in particular. Letting the field stay wider than the mind would have allowed.

Our first guided session, Session 00 – Homecoming, is being posted Monday. These Notes From the Field essays are meant to provide some context, and help you understand my mentality and methodology. I’ll tell ya, it’s not a linear journey. I hope you will revisit the essays and the sessions when you need them and will share Perimeditate with your Everyday Angels too.

— erin

* * *

“Angels can be so deceiving, when they love you well.”

— Veruca Salt, Wolf (American Thighs, 1994)

Something changed significantly in my professional life recently. A twenty-year plan that was supposed to culminate in a gold watch retirement changed shape in the span of a weekend. A chapter I thought would carry me through the last iteration of my career turned out to be much shorter than I’d anticipated. It happens.

The weeks leading up had brought a dramatic shift in my workload. New landscape, extended hours, ever moving expectations, with anticipated supports lagging behind the changes. I am not elaborating beyond that, or cataloging these conditions as complaints. But I am not burying them either, because it matters somatically. A nervous system that has been running at high output for an extended stretch is already operating outside of baseline by the time anything else happens. The body does what it does in those circumstances. Rise up. Show up. Meet each day (and the day after that) with whatever is required. That adds an extra layer of intensity. And intensity has a metabolism that can catch up with you.

Then it was over. Suddenly. Without the ability to brace for impact. The why is not important to name. Those details belong to other people as much as they belong to me. What I want to talk about is what my body did next. That is the part most people leave out of the story.

In eight days, while absorbing the shock, I breathed life into a little project I had backburnered last year. I rapidly drafted essays. I designed a logo and brand identity. I sequenced a launch. I set up the socials. I made coffee. I kept showing up to my laptop. I wrote our first meditation session. I developed the music and mixed the tracks. I launched a Substack.

If you have been watching this unfold in real time, and a lot of you have, kindly, what it probably looks like on the surface is competence. Like what a productive woman does when she hits her creative stride. Like watching the universe open a door. Or, what it looks like if you’ve known me for a while is “Oh shit! Here she goes again!”.

Some of that is true. And.

What is also true is that a dysregulated nervous system, when it cannot tolerate what is surfacing, will find something to hide inside.

For some people, that something is alcohol. For some, it is food. Or it is shopping or scrolling or sex or another person’s life. For me (this time around anyway), in this season, with the tools I have built, that something turned out to be making the damn thing. My body said I cannot sit with this. My hands said we will be over here building. And a project that had been waiting in me for years was birthed inside the panic.

I am not telling you this to undercut what has brought us to this point. The work is real. The practice is real. Perimeditate would have existed eventually, whether or not things unfolded the way they did. But the version of Perimeditate that is in front of you right now: the launch, the velocity, the volume, would not be here without what went down. There was something my body had to do with all the stuff it wasn’t ready to feel yet. And what it did was get down to business.

The wellness version of this story is one door closes and the universe opens. That sentence is not wrong. It is also not the whole truth. A closer version of the truth is that one door closed, and rather than sit and stare at it, I found a way to sprint into the opening door before the closing could land in my body.

That is what dysregulation can look like in a woman who has been doing the work. It does not look like falling apart. It looks like building. It looks like a perfectly competent, generative, even admirable response to a ridiculously hard week. From the inside, it feels like surviving. From the outside, it looks like she’s figuring it all out.

But she doesn’t have it all figured out. She has just learned, over decades, that hands moving and mind firing keep the body from feeling what it is still too hard to internalize fully.

Here is the part the somatic frame insists on.

The dysregulation and the work are not opposites. They are happening in the same body simultaneously. I am not building Perimeditate in spite of what shifted. I am also not building it because of what changed. I am building adjacent to all of it. The unsettled and the work inhabit the same space.

What this practice asks me to do is eventually let my body catch up with what my hands and mind have outrun. That is its whole job. My hands and my mind will run, because that is what they do, and they are excellent at it. But my body needs me to come back. My body keeps the appointment, whether or not I show up.

But not quite yet. I am not asking myself to come back yet. I am asking myself to keep building and to notice, in real time, that I am building partly to avoid feeling something. I am asking myself to write this piece, on day six of a launch, rather than pretend I do not know what is happening underneath.

The acknowledgment is the first thing. And sometimes, it’s all you’ve got for a while. The body is patient. The body will be there.

* * *

I have been thinking a lot about geodes this week.

I grew up camping and canoeing with my family. Fossil-hunting. The kind of family that came home with rocks in our pockets. My dad taught us what geodes were. That the outside of a geode is unremarkable. A plain rock. You could walk past it on a riverbank and not look twice. The inside is crystal. The two facts of the geode are simultaneous. The rock does not become a crystal. It has been a crystal the entire time, hidden inside the plain.

I had not thought much about geodes since my sister and I took the kids creek stomping more than a few summers ago. Geodes came back to me this week, in the middle of everything, and I have not been able to put them down since.

From the outside this week looks like a launch. From the inside, it is a woman in the middle of a chapter she did not see coming, meeting the not-seeing by making something she had been waiting her whole life to make. Both are happening. The plain rock and the crystal. The same week, the same body, the same minutes. The metaphor surfaced when I needed it because my body had been working on it without me.

I do not know how the crystal got inside the rock. I do not know how a professional wound gives birth to a passion project. I do not have an answer for you about how to make this happen in your own life or whether it should. I am smack dab in the middle of it. As we speak. I am not through it yet.

What I can say is this: my body knew what was happening before I did. And sometimes the hardest work is to not stop the building. Sometimes the work is to let yourself build while quietly, in the same body, beginning to make room for what is actually going on. The two can happen in parallel, like they are for me, right now.

If you are reading this and recognizing yourself; if you have ever responded to hard things with a project, a makeover, a move across the country, or a sudden generative burst that surprised you, you are not bad at coping. You are just using the tools you’ve had at your disposal until now. And that’s ok! We’ll tap on that geode together.

That is what this entire practice is for.

-erin

p.s. Session 00 - Homecoming launches Monday. My microphone was just delivered, the session is written, and my walk-in closet, aka “Meditation Station” is set. I’m ready, if I could just get past the procrastination paralysis <3

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I read this Bridgette Hamstead’s piece at NeuroJustice™ Monday night. Her case for “puttering” as one of the most underrated neurodivergent productivity strategies nobody is talking about. Read her. She is right about what is happening, and she names the cognitive piece beautifully.

I have always called the same thing fussing. Same territory, different doorway. She goes in through the brain, I go in through the body. My word has more affection in it (to me), and I am keeping mine.

Fussing is what I do when I get home from a day that has been too much. I do not sit down. I do not put my feet up. I do not pour a beverage and announce that I am going to relax. I walk in the door and I begin moving things one inch to the left.

I wipe down a counter that is already clean. I flip the laundry. I unload the dishwasher even though it can wait. I might vacuum a single area of the rug, or dust the one shelf that has been annoying me, or refold the towels before putting them in the linen closet. None of it is urgent. Most of it is reorganizing the “organized”. It would not look productive on a list. It would not photograph well (see photo for evidence of that). If you watched me for forty-five minutes, working in a spiral with my backpack, and sometimes even sunglasses, still on you would conclude that nothing of consequence was happening.

Something of consequence is happening.

* * *

For most of my adult life, fussing was my secret coping strategy and I did not know it was a coping strategy. I just knew that on the days I could not skip it, I was a worse version of myself. The 35-minute commute home from a long day used to turn me inside out. By the time I got in the door, my nervous system was a hot wire. If anyone tried to talk to me before the fussing ran its course, it was seldom productive

For a while I was irritated that my husband did not jump up and help me when I started cleaning. There I was, visibly working, and he was sitting on the couch like a normal person, and I was building a small resentment about it the way one builds a small fire, patiently, with kindling.

It took me longer than I want to admit to understand that he could not have helped me even if he tried. The fussing was not about the apartment. The fussing was for me. It was a thing my body needed to do in order to come back from wherever the day had taken me. If he had stood up and started wiping counters alongside me, I would have appreciated the effort, but the ritual was not asking for assistance. The ritual was asking for time.

Once I understood that, the resentment dissolved. He gets to do what he needs to do to come down from his day. I get to do what I need to do to come down from mine. Sometimes those things look like the same activity. Often they do not.

* * *

Here is the thing I did not know until I started building Perimeditate: fussing is somatic.

It is a body-led ritual that completes a stress arc the day has left unfinished. It is small, repetitive, sensory work: touch, motion, the satisfaction of a thing put in its right place, at just the right angle. It engages the parts of my nervous system that responds to predictable physical action and lets the parts that have been on high alert finally exhale. It is, on the scale of human technologies for self-regulation, ancient and free and available to almost anyone.

The wellness industry would not sell you fussing. There is no app for it. There is no “streak” or “badge”. The before-and-after photo would just be your apartment looking almost exactly the same. The Instagram caption would have to be “I moved the coasters an inch and feel slightly less feral, see you tomorrow.”

But this is what the somatic frame actually looks like in real life. Not a candle. Not a cushion. Not a perfect breath. Just a woman who needs to put the kitchen towels in the order she likes before she can be a person again.

I did not learn this from a book. I did not learn it from a teacher. I learned it from my own body, which figured out, without my permission, what it needed to do to come back to itself. I just had to stop interpreting it as a chore I was doing wrong and start interpreting it as a practice I was doing right.

That reframe is the whole game, by the way. Most of you already have a fussing. You may call it something else. The walk you take after work. The dishes you do before you can sit down. The slow drive home with one specific song on repeat. The fifteen minutes of garden-tending that nothing depended on. The puttering, if you want to call it that.

The somatic invitation is small: notice what you already do, and stop apologizing for it.

That is a practice that has been in practice the whole time.

— erin

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I have tried, periodically over the last twenty-odd years, to become that friend who meditates. Every time the goal fell apart for some variation of the same reason: the meditation everyone was selling asked me to leave my body, and I have spent enough years actively trying to do that (metaphorically, of course).

The apps want me to picture a beach. The gurus ask me to “observe my thoughts like clouds.” The wellness folks push me to manifest. The optimization people want me to track my heart rate variability and buy their co-branded supplements. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, a soft voice was supposed to instruct me to clear my mind. And the rest of my body? The part actually carrying the weight of the world? Was it supposed to just politely wait its turn?

The products I found in the already over-crowded landscape never really worked for me. Some provided some much-needed naps, and if that counts for anything. But I would close the app and feel like I had just failed a test designed by people who had never been in my body. And then I wouldn’t think about the app again until the recurring charge hit my credit card.

It took me a long time to understand that I am not bad at meditation. It was the model I was being sold that was bad for me. And I’m guessing they just don’t do the trick for a lot of you either.

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What is being sold

Most of what is currently being marketed as “meditation” or “mindfulness” inherited its shape from two places: a flattened, decontextualized version of Buddhist practice, and a productivity industry that wanted a calmer worker. The result is a posture-first, mind-first, optimization-coded practice. Lay down. Close your eyes. Notice your breath. When the mind wanders, gently bring it back. Repeat until you are a better person, a calmer parent, a more focused employee.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the underlying techniques. The problem is what the techniques assume. The designers assume that the mind is the project, and the body is the cushion you sit on while you do the work. They assume you arrive at the practice neutral. They perceive the wandering mind as an obstacle, rather than a message from a nervous system that has been trying, sometimes for years, to get you to pick up the phone.

For someone navigating perimenopause, a career pivot, a marriage that is reshaping, or a loss that has not finished taking its toll, that model is, at best, a mismatch. At worst, it is one more place to perform stillness over a body that is not still and has very good reasons not to be.

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What I actually needed

What I needed, it turned out, was a practice that started in the body and let the mind come along when it was ready.

I didn’t learn this from an app or practitioner. I learned it in the kitchen, where you can’t cook well without tracking all of your senses in real time. Without trusting that your nose knows when something is on the edge of burning, or that your tongue knows that a tiny pinch of salt will perfect the soup. I learned it in recovery, where I had to face the fact that our bodies keep a meticulous record of everything our minds try to outrun. I learned it in grief, which does not respond to “let it go” and does respond, slowly, to being acknowledged by the body. I learned it on long drives with the music turned up, the same song on repeat, with the lyrics delivering me back to myself. I learned it in the quiet, persistent realization, earned in a thousand small ways, that my body is not the obstacle. My body is the doorway.

Somatic mindfulness, the actual tradition, not the wellness aesthetic, starts from that premise. It does not ask you to empty your mind. It asks you to notice what is happening in your body, with curiosity, at a pace your nervous system can metabolize. It treats sensation as information. It treats the discharge of held tension: a trembling, a yawn, a sigh, a sudden urge to move, as completion, not interruption. It works with the autonomic nervous system instead of demanding it comply.

It is slower than the apps. It is less Instagrammable. It will not give you a “streak”. The streak is a productivity metric quietly smuggled into a body practice, borrowed from language apps and habit trackers, dressed in wellness language, and pointed at the part of you most susceptible to the suggestion that you are not doing enough. Your body does not need you to show up at the same time every day for thirty consecutive days. It needs you to show up when you can, with what you have, and stay long enough to listen. Sometimes that means daily. Sometimes that means twice a week with a long pause to metabolize what surfaces. The body keeps a different kind of time.

What it will do, in my experience, and in the experience of a lot of women I trust, is actually begin to change something.

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Why I am building Perimeditate this way

Perimeditate is a home for somatic mindfulness meditation, what I am calling Perimeditation. Body-led, slow, working with the nervous system rather than overriding it. There are no instructions to empty your mind. There is no ultimate goal of achieving calm. There are no implications that if you do it correctly, you will become a more complete version of yourself.

The free essays, Notes from the Field, are the ongoing pulse of the work. Session 00: Homecoming is the door into the practice itself. The first guided series, Series 01 - Rooted in the Eye of the Storm is comprised of seven sessions, hitting each of the seven energy centers or chakras, and are released each Sunday. More specific series and session themes will come in time.

What all of it offers, the essays, the sessions, the series, is the same invitation: to come back into the body you have been living in this whole time. The one carrying the perimenopausal flush and the work week and the people you love and the people you’ve lost and the version of yourself you are quietly becoming.

I am building it for anyone moving through change, named or unnamed, who has suspected that the currently available brands of meditation being sold are not quite their thing. I weave in philosophy, science, theology, spirituality, history, anatomy, and my own dry brand of humor.

The sessions are built over music inspired by some of my favorite bands and layered with binaural tones which help our minds achieve a more receptive and relaxed state.

If any of this resonates, you are already where we start. Session 00: Homecoming, and all of the other sessions are 100% free by design. Wellness shouldn’t be stuck behind a paywall.

-erin

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Memorial Day, 2026

This is not my grief to share.

I want to say that first, because the day is heavy with people who deserve to be at the center of it, and I am not one of them. I have never lost anyone to war. I have lived a life made possible, in part, by people who did, and I have spent most of that life envisioning war as conceptual, as existing in a reality outside of my own.

So this is for you instead.

For the women who went. The ones who carried a rifle. The ones who carried a medic’s kit. The ones who flew the helicopter, drove the convoy, ran the comms tent, held the dying soldier’s hand in a room nobody back home would ever see. The ones who came back and the ones who didn’t. The ones whose names are on the wall and the ones whose names are not on any wall because the work was classified or the war was unnamed or the country had decided, by the time you got home, to think about something else.

And for the wives. And the husbands. And the partners. For the ones who held a household together across a deployment, across two, across six. For the ones who folded a flag at twenty-three. For the ones who are still folding laundry sixty years later in silence, staring at the empty chair across from them. For the ones whose grief was public for a week and then private for the rest of their lives.

For the children of those unions, who I thought about more than I expected to when I sat down to write this. The ones who grew up around a parent’s absence or a parent’s return or a parent’s grief and learned early that some kinds of love come with a weight that does not lift.

I know there are people who hold their convictions about war the way I hold mine, and who still love someone who serves. I know there are women who marched against a war and packed a duffel bag for a husband going to fight it in the same week. I know there are mothers who raised their children to be careful with violence and watched them enlist anyway, and loved them anyway, and lost them anyway. I do not know how you metabolize that. I do not think there is a clean way. I think you carry the contradiction the rest of your life, and the carrying is itself a kind of service that almost no one names.

The country has a vocabulary for the soldier and almost no vocabulary for the rest of it. We say thank you for your service to the one in uniform. We do not say it to the woman who answered the door when the chaplain came. We do not say it to the children who learned to live around a missing parent. We do not say it to the body that carried the dread for fourteen months and then carried the news for the rest of its life.

I want to say it now, even though I am a stranger, and even though I will go on with my Monday after I write this. Thank you. I see, dimly and from outside, that you did something most of us were spared from doing. I see that the doing did not end when the war ended. I see that the country uses your loss for parades and forgets it on every other day of the year, and that you keep holding it anyway, because what else is there to do with a person you loved.

For the women in combat: thank you for going into rooms most of us would not have gone into, and for going in as women, in a system that was not built for you, and for staying anyway.

For the spouses: thank you for the daily, invisible, unglamorous work of keeping life intact when half of it was somewhere else. Thank you for the meals served at tables with someone missing. Thank you for the nights you did not sleep. Thank you for the years afterward.

For everyone reading this who has lost someone to war: I am sorry. I do not have anything more useful to say than that. I hope the day holds you gently. I hope someone makes you the kind of coffee you like. I hope the silence in your house, if there is silence, feels less like absence today and more like company.

The rest of us owe you a slower kind of attention than the country has historically been willing to give. I do not know how to fix that. I can offer this much: today, in this small corner of the internet, I am thinking about you. I am thinking about you in the body, your body, and the bodies of the ones you loved. Because that is where the cost has lived all along.

- erin

p.s. If this resonated with you in the same way it does with me, share it with a friend who it DOES pertain to. They need us the other 364 days of the year