Category: The Alchemy of Becoming
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Ceci n’est pas une école
If I had my way (and I probably never will in this regard), I wouldn’t burn books—knowledge is sacred. But I would take every piece of bureaucratic, gatekeeping, money-making crap from the College Board industrial complex, pile it in the center of an empty field, and surround it with sage. I would light the sage,…
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The Posterior Lie
I vacillated on the publish button. This is the story of the 17-year-old kid holed up in the dark, the 5-year-old in the hospital, and the Red Thread that ties them together. A journey through the ‘Posterior Lie’ of trauma to find the gold hidden in the mud.
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The Crack in Everything: How Trauma Made Me a Teacher
Tonight is my 30th High School Reunion. I thought about going. I’m not. While I feel less animosity than I did for the 10th or the 20th, the invite—and the social media blitz from the class Instagram account—opened a trauma wound that hadn’t fully healed. It was a May weekend in 1994. The Rangers had…
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Unmasking The Exile: Internal Family Systems & The Self
40+ years of surrendering in advance. 40+ years of self-deprecation as self-defense. 40+ years of believing what they tell me so that they’ll like me. 40+ years of wearing a mask that never let me fully breathe.
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The Training Ground
I never felt like I belonged in that town. Leaving it is one of my personal triumphs. But it still lives in my head… The bullying, the classism, the snobbery, the racism… It all formed me, for better or for worse. It gave me a conviction. Make no mistake, there were and still are good…
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Chapter Two
What is a year? 365 days, 52 weeks, 12 months, a spiral journey around a star around a black hole around infinity?
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Teaching: Empowerment, Not Indoctrination
If I start demanding you see the world my way, I’m no better than a fascist. It is important to me that I teach you how to follow paths of logic. It is important to me that you know how to make your own paths when the well-worn ones are outdated.
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We are here to make a better world
We’re often told that self-love is selfish, a frivolous indulgence. But what if society has it wrong? This post dives into the secret that looking inward isn’t about ego, but about unleashing an omnidirectional love that overflows, transforming not just ourselves, but the world around us. Discover the hidden truth about our human nature and…
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Surfing The Phoenix
Ego rides the crest, surfing the Phoenix wave Westward with the sun.
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![How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write A [_______]](https://strohmeister.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Project-20250610080126-1.png)
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write A [_______]
A silver lining to the thunderclouds of apocalyptic transformation is that their rains have a particular propensity to fertilize the fields of creation — a soil tilled and turned by the tectonic turbulence of an empathic existence.