Sheila Franzen, The Spiritual Geek

There is a children's game where one kid gets blindfolded, spun around, and has to find their way.

That is what uncertainty feels like from the inside.

The spinning. The reaching out. The not knowing which direction is forward.

And you are still being asked to choose.

In my newest piece in the Conscious Sovereignty series, I write about what it actually means to stay grounded when the world feels unstable. Not the concept. The practice. What I do when I can't see the way forward, and what the research tells us about how our inner state affects the world around us.

It's called Choosing in the Dark, and I think it might be exactly what's needed right now.

Link in the comments.

You are not your reaction.
I know that can be hard to believe in the middle of the storm. When the energy is rising and your body is responding and it feels like there is no way to stop it.
But somewhere in the middle of all of that, there is a part of you watching. Aware. Present. That part is your consciousness. And it is never the reaction.
The new article in the Conscious Sovereignty series is live on Substack. It's about what lives underneath the reaction, and what becomes possible when you find it.

The world is loud. Relentlessly loud.
And most of us have adapted to it so completely that we don't even realize what it's costing us anymore.
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to live from the inside out in the middle of all of this noise. Not by checking out. Not by pretending it isn't there. But by knowing where you end and the world begins.
That's what Conscious Sovereignty is. And it's what I'm exploring in my new series on Substack.
The first article is up. I'd love for you to read it and tell me what resonates.
[Link in first comment]

The world is loud. Relentlessly loud.
And somewhere in all that noise, you stopped hearing yourself.
What if the most radical thing you could do right now was simply come home to yourself?
That’s what conscious sovereignty is.
And that’s what we’re going to explore together.
More coming soon.

The moment before the moment.

It is the most advanced skill we have explored in The Rewiring Files. And let me be honest with you. This one is tricky. It doesn’t happen just because you want it to or decide that it should. It takes practice. Practice. And more practice.

Yet it starts somewhere. And that somewhere is exactly where you are right now.
Think before you speak. You have heard that phrase. The moment before the moment is the same thing. Only it is pause before you react. And when you actually catch yourself before the reaction fires, it feels like an a-ha moment. A sudden arrival into presence.

Even if you only catch yourself once a week, that is one more time than you were doing it before.

Set small goals. Practice daily. Just start small.

This is the final article in The Rewiring Files. Five articles exploring the hidden patterns that run our lives and what it actually takes to begin changing them from the inside out. Read the full article at the link in the comments below.

Sometimes stories like these have me sobbing. The will and strength of a soul to simply ‘believe.’ I’m in awe.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=979682874616725&set=a.186962720555415&type=3&mibextid=wwXIfr

She was buried alive under ten feet of snow in total darkness for five days with no food, no water, no light—and when rescuers found her, she asked if she could go skiing again.
March 31, 1982. Alpine Meadows ski resort, Lake Tahoe, California.
For four straight days, a massive storm system had dumped eight feet of heavy, wet spring snow on the Sierra Nevada. The kind of snow that packs down under its own weight. The kind that creates catastrophic avalanche conditions.
Alpine Meadows had closed. The avalanche danger was too extreme. Most employees had gone home.
Anna Conrad, 22 years old, a UC Davis biology student working as a lift operator, had already left for the day. But she'd forgotten her ski pants in her employee locker on the second floor of the Summit Terminal building.
She and her boyfriend Frank Yeatman drove back to retrieve them.
At 3:45 PM, an employee named Jake Smith looked up and saw the mountain moving.
He screamed into the radio: "Avalanche!"
The slide was traveling over 100 miles per hour—a wall of snow and debris the size of a freight train, unstoppable, devastating.
It buried the parking lot under ten to twenty feet of snow.
It demolished the three-story Summit Terminal building, reducing it to rubble.
It killed seven people.
Anna Conrad and Frank Yeatman were inside the building when it imploded.
Frank was killed instantly.
Anna was thrown under a bench as the building collapsed around her. Lockers toppled over, falling against the bench instead of crushing her. They created a tiny hollow space—an air pocket barely large enough to keep her breathing.
The space was two feet wide, three feet high, five feet long.
Total darkness. Complete silence. Buried under an unknown depth of snow and building debris.
When Anna regained consciousness—probably the next day—she had no idea where she was or what had happened.
"It was pitch black. I had no recollection of what I was doing, where I had been. I was cold, obviously. And I had a horrible concussion."
She tried to move. She couldn't. She was completely trapped.
She was wearing two sweaters, a ski jacket, and powder pants—layering that probably saved her from dying of hypothermia in the first hours. But her feet, in cross-country ski boots and wool socks, were less protected.
For five days, Anna Conrad ate nothing.
For water, she scraped snow from the walls of her tiny prison and let it melt in her mouth.
She slept when exhaustion overtook her. She woke to the same absolute darkness.
On what she believed was the third day, she heard voices above her.
She screamed. She screamed until her voice was gone, until her throat was raw, until she had nothing left.
No one heard her.
The voices faded. The darkness returned.
She was alone again.
Outside, rescue teams worked in brutal conditions.
The main cache of rescue equipment had been destroyed in the Summit building collapse. Pole probing was impossible in the debris field, so teams dug trenches by hand and with snowplows, working systematically through the wreckage.
But heavy snowfall continued for three more days—nearly forty additional inches. The increasing avalanche danger above the search site forced rescuers to temporarily halt operations.
They couldn't risk more lives.
Inside her tiny hollow, Anna had no idea how much time was passing. Day and night were indistinguishable in absolute darkness.
She kept telling herself they would find her.
She believed in the system of search and rescue. She believed her friends were looking for her. She believed they would come.
On Monday, April 5—the fifth day after the avalanche—the weather finally subsided enough for avalanche patrols to control the surrounding slopes.
Early that afternoon, rescue teams returned to the Summit building location and resumed their search.
Avalanche rescue dogs had been brought in.
At 1:10 PM, a nine-year-old German Shepherd named Bridget, trained by her handler Roberta Huber, alerted on a spot in the debris.
Her nose had found something: a tiny air hole that had been exposed as teams dug nearby.
Rescuers followed her signal and began digging frantically.
"All I really saw was the snow falling above my head, and that's what I grabbed at, and they saw my hand reaching for the snow," Anna remembered. "They called my name, a sound that was wonderful."
Casey Jones and Lanny Johnson spotted Anna Conrad's hand emerging from the debris.
She was conscious. Talking. Alert.
She had been buried alive for 117 hours. Five days. In total darkness. With no food. No real water. No warmth.
Anna Conrad didn't even realize she'd been buried for five days. Time had lost all meaning in the darkness.
She suffered severe hypothermia, devastating frostbite, and extreme dehydration.
After five days buried, she lost part of her right leg below the knee and the toes on her left foot.
During her evacuation in the care-flight helicopter, Anna was fully conscious and listening to the pilot and nurse argue about which hospital to take her to.
"They finally asked me what I wanted. I told them I really wanted to go to Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee. It was the closest hospital to Alpine Meadows, and therefore the closest to my friends. It was my friends who found me. It was my friends I spent time thinking about while buried."
Anna spent two months in the hospital recovering.
In December 1982—just nine months after losing part of her leg—Anna Conrad went skiing again.
Bridget became the first search-and-rescue dog in North America to locate and save a living person from an avalanche.
Anna Conrad became the longest survivor of an avalanche burial in U.S. history.
Studies show that only 40% of avalanche victims survive fifteen minutes after being buried. Most people die within an hour from suffocation or trauma.
Anna survived 117 hours.
Here's the part that makes this even more remarkable:
Bridget had actually tracked Anna's scent on the third day—the same day Anna heard voices and screamed until she had no voice left.
But rescuers didn't act on it.
Everyone except Anna's parents and Bridget's handler Roberta Huber assumed she was dead. No one in U.S. history had survived an avalanche burial for that length of time. There was no urgency to dig where Bridget indicated because they thought they were looking for a body, not a survivor.
Two days later, when Bridget alerted again and they finally dug, they found Anna alive.
If they had acted on the third day, Anna might have kept her leg. But she was alive either way—and that was the miracle.
Throughout the entire ordeal, Anna said, she "always believed in the system of search and rescue."
She believed someone was coming. She believed her friends would find her. She believed she would survive.
And when she heard voices on day three and screamed until she had no voice and no one came—she kept believing anyway.
Today, Anna Conrad Allen is 64 years old.
She married. She raised two children who have graduated from college. She continues to work in the ski industry.
And she still skis—with a prosthetic limb, on the same mountains where she was buried alive for five days.
"One of my biggest goals," she said, "was never to make this incident my whole life."
She refused to let five days of darkness define decades of light.
Think about what Anna Conrad survived:
Five days in absolute darkness, trapped in a space barely large enough to breathe. No food. Almost no water. Temperatures cold enough to cause severe frostbite. A concussion. The knowledge that her boyfriend had been killed. The sound of voices calling her name that faded away without finding her.
Every rational calculation said she should be dead.
But Anna had something that statistics can't measure: belief.
She believed the system would work. She believed her friends were looking. She believed they would find her.
And on day three, when her screams went unanswered and the voices disappeared and every piece of evidence suggested she was wrong—she kept believing.
Two days later, a German Shepherd named Bridget proved she was right.
Anna Conrad's story asks something important of all of us:
What keeps you alive when survival seems impossible?
When you're trapped in darkness—literal or metaphorical—and help hasn't come and time is running out and every rational voice says to give up, what do you hold onto?
Anna didn't have food. She didn't have warmth. She didn't have light.
For 117 hours, she had only one thing: the refusal to stop believing that someone was coming.
Sometimes survival isn't about strength or skill or luck.
Sometimes it's just about refusing to let go of hope, even when the darkness says otherwise.
Anna Conrad was buried alive for five days.
She lost part of her leg, but she kept her life.
She lost her boyfriend, but she found the will to keep living.
She spent 117 hours in total darkness, but she chose to spend the decades since in the light—skiing, working, raising a family, refusing to be defined by the worst thing that ever happened to her.
Nine months after losing her leg, she was back on skis.
Forty-two years later, she's still skiing.
That's not just survival. That's choosing to live.
Rest in peace to the seven who didn't make it out, including Frank Yeatman.
Honor to Bridget the German Shepherd, who saved a life when everyone had given up hope.
And respect to Anna Conrad Allen, who proved that sometimes the difference between life and death is nothing more—and nothing less—than refusing to stop believing that someone is coming.
Even when you're buried in darkness.
Even when your screams go unanswered.
Even when 117 hours have passed and every statistic says you should be dead.
Someone is coming.
Keep believing.

Have you ever found yourself already in the middle of a reaction before you even knew it had started?

The words already out of your mouth. The tension already in your body. The familiar feeling of having been here before, again.

95% of our daily life runs on autopilot. Our patterns move so fast that we simply don’t see them. And when we catch ourselves mid-reaction the most compassionate response is simply to name it. I see you. You are not wrong. You are not broken. You are learning.

The most powerful practice of all? Slow down. When you are going 60 miles an hour everything flies by too fast. Slow down to 10 and you can actually see what is happening.

The Rewiring Files, No. 4 is live on Substack today. Link in the comments below.