Unbecoming You

When I decided I wanted to make a podcast for Unbecoming You, the first thing I did—almost reflexively—was open my laptop and start googling how to make a podcast. I wanted to understand the mechanics of it. How people do this well. What the format is supposed to be. How long episodes should be. How you choose intro music that won’t make you cringe a year from now. How you write a trailer that sounds confident without sounding like you’re pretending to be someone else.

Once I realized that most podcasts follow a pretty similar structure, I became very focused on getting it right. I wrote a trailer. I picked music. I thought about tone and pacing and all the things you think about when you’re trying to step into a new identity. And then I brought all of it to my husband—my script, my music, my plans—before I had even recorded a single episode.

He listened patiently, smiled at me, and said, “Or… you could just press record.”

I broke out laughing. Because there I was—someone who has spent years thinking and writing about unbecoming, about loosening effort, about not gripping who we think we’re supposed to be—trying very hard to become a podcaster. The irony didn’t escape me. If anything, it felt like the most honest place to begin.

Before unbecoming had a name, my life felt like a long series of becoming. I can see it clearly now, even if I couldn’t then. I was always becoming something, often with a lot of enthusiasm and sincerity, genuinely believing that the next identity might finally be the one that brought me peace.

I became a yoga teacher. I followed my bliss. I became a therapist. I became a rock climber. A backpacker. A seeker. If there was a way of being that promised meaning or contentment, I probably tried it on. And from the outside, it might have looked like a rich and full life—and in many ways, it was—but underneath all of it was a quiet, persistent hum of existential dread.

That question that doesn’t shout, but never really goes away:
Is this really all there is?

At the time, I thought I was searching for fulfillment or alignment or purpose. In hindsight, I think I was trying to become content. I was trying to outrun that question. And when I look back now, there’s grief there—a sadness that I wasn’t more impressed by this miraculous life I was already living, that I kept assuming the next version of myself would finally make it feel like enough.

There was another pattern I couldn’t yet name, but my body already knew. I grew up fast. I learned early that being there for other people kept me close to them—or at least what I thought was connection. So I became very good at overextending myself, at reading rooms, at anticipating needs, at being useful.

Burnout didn’t arrive all at once. It built slowly, layered on top of relational strain and the constant effort of holding everything together. And the more exhausted I became, the more I tried to fix it by becoming something else. A better therapist. A calmer person. A more healed version of myself.

Eventually, my body intervened.

I developed an autoimmune disease called dermatomyositis. It’s rare, and it affects the muscles and skin. When it entered my life, it forced a question I could no longer sidestep. At the time, I was working as a yoga therapist. I had been practicing meditation for over a decade. I knew all the things you’re supposed to know about nervous system regulation and stress.

And yet my body was clearly telling a different story.

Reading about how autoimmune conditions can be linked to chronic stress and nervous system overload was disorienting. How could I know so much, practice so much, and still be so overwhelmed that my body turned on itself?

That realization didn’t feel like clarity. It felt exhausting. Defeating. Like the language I had been speaking fluently no longer worked.

That was the moment I stopped asking how to do self-work better and started wondering whether the whole framework was off. Not wrong, exactly. Just incomplete. Too focused on becoming calmer, more regulated, more healed, without really questioning who all that effort was in service of.

Unbecoming didn’t arrive as an answer. It arrived as a question.

What if the exhaustion isn’t coming from life itself, but from the constant pressure to be someone else inside it?

The Process of Unbecoming grew out of that question. The book moves through five phases, not as a rigid path, but as a way of orienting when the old maps stop working.

It begins with awareness—learning to sit still, to notice where attention goes, to see how much effort is already happening beneath the surface. It moves into shedding, where we start loosening the beliefs and identities we’ve clung to, even when they hurt, because they once kept us safe.

Alignment comes next, though it’s often misunderstood. Alignment isn’t certainty or guaranteed outcomes. It’s an internal compass, something felt rather than proven. Embodiment is where insight begins to live in the body instead of staying in the mind, and calm, groundedness, and self-trust start to emerge naturally. Integration is what happens when the work becomes quieter—when old patterns still arise, but are met with curiosity instead of judgment.

Throughout the book, there are inventories meant to take blinders off, exercises that invite experimentation rather than effort, and guided meditations that don’t ask you to quiet your mind or get anywhere. They’re invitations to meet yourself at different depths, exactly as you are.

Unbecoming You exists because this process can’t be static. Life keeps happening. There isn’t an endpoint. The work continues to unfold.

This space became a living hub for that unfolding. There are six courses that mirror and expand on the book so the process becomes interactive rather than purely conceptual. The book becomes something you don’t just read, but move through. There’s a podcast where threads are followed and effort is gently noticed. A blog where reflections can linger. And a community that’s there when you’re ready for it—not as a requirement, but as an option.

I think of Unbecoming You less as a program and more as a playground. A place to explore your inner world with seriousness and lightness at the same time. A place where depth doesn’t have to feel heavy, and play doesn’t have to feel dismissive.

When I imagine someone spending time here, I don’t imagine them becoming more polished or certain. I imagine them becoming more curious. More trusting. Less critical. More at home in their own experience.

If you’ve found your way here, I don’t think it’s random. But I also don’t think it needs an explanation.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What are you trying to become right now?

And what might happen if, just for a moment, you noticed what’s already here underneath that effort?

Unravel who you are not to discover who you are.