Hi! I’m Nicoletta.

Since 1999, I’ve been researching methods of remembering our mental flexibility and remedies for (existential-type) heartbreak. My educational background is in philosophy of mind, religious studies, effective and symbolic communication, yogic arts, and creative literature. The first things my friends (and the occasional opponent) will describe me as is extremely open, questioning or independently curious, sweet without any strategy, and wind-like or with a tendency to float up. I’m just discovering what I’m best suited to do with that, and I’m excited to share what I’m catching onto with you.

A few years ago, my experiments brought me to a workflow design job in the population health studies and preventative care systems wing of a large health care technology company.

While I was there, my job was to tweak the software that tweaks how doctors tweak their patients’ lifestyles.

Sometimes I was improving the prompts that nudged them to encourage more exercise, social connection, or intentional eating. Sometimes I was refining how the system would select and present who the highest-priority patients were to schedule open heart surgeries for.

Every once in a while, I had a conversation that was meaningful to me, or a project that I thought might dig into something important and ripple out.

But for the most part, I felt like I was adding layers to something I actually wanted to peel back. I was interested in the space before or outside of patient-hood. And at some point, it was time to leave.

It didn’t feel easy to find my way out. I was getting headaches all the time. My muscles were getting weak. I didn’t like how I was eating, thinking, moving. I couldn’t explain what I was doing with clarity and pride, and I couldn’t hide how much that mattered to me.

But I also spent a lot of time in that uniquely peaceful, grounded, and observational state of depression where hitting the bottom becomes quiet, spacious, and comforting. And I loved many small things.

I looked at my rabbits like tiny gods. I pushed my furniture around. I enjoyed sleeping outside and taking long walks. I read book after book during my long plane rides. And I studied what I was interested in, however I felt like it.

I sat in the spaciousness of having basic needs and securities met during that time, and having easy answers available to me for people’s most common personal questions.

And I slowly, secretly practiced giving space and energy to my dream life. Then I learned how to quit something with full faith and confidence. The trick of choosing mystery!

And after mixing together all the self-healing and self-knowing lessons I had gathered through my relief-driven experiments in trauma repair, religious patchwork, and access to peacefulness, the whole world seemed more like it was just as much of an oyster for me as it is for everybody else, and I acknowledged that I’m the oyster, too. And I want to be eaten by things I want to feed!

I started to believe that that’s really an option.

I think that when you don’t tap out of a miserable ritual for just long enough, all kinds of dark parts bubble up for attention and healing, and that is a sacred opportunity. You may learn how to give yourself new permissions, or playfully take a few away. The lows may be emergencies, and exorcisms, and teachers, all at the same time. If you’re interested in enlisting a confidante for a similar self-scrubbing and reassembly process, I’m excited for you and I’d love to hear what’s on your mind!

Books I Like Remembering Lately

  • Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas

  • The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo

  • Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Tiqqun

  • Be Water, My Friend, Shannon Lee

  • Dreaming of You, Melissa Lozada Oliva

  • No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July

  • Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva

  • Creative Visualization, Shakti Gawain

  • The Vegetarian, Han Kang

  • Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson

  • Skinny Legs and All, Tom Robbins

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey

  • Blasphemy, Sherman Alexie

  • Philosophy of Mind, Ian Ravenscoft

  • Still Life with Woodpecker, Tom Robbins

  • Ishmael, Daniel Quinn

  • Boleros for the Disenchanted, José Rivera

  • The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle

  • Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss

  • Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics, Lara Glenum + Arielle Greenberg

  • The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

  • Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters

  • Human Design, Jenna Zoe

  • Authors of the Impossible, Jeffrey J. Kripal

  • Lucy 72, Ronaldo V. Wilson

  • Feng Shui and Charlotte Nightingale, Pam Ferderbar

Peacefulness is the gateway through which abundance is received.

— Richard “Blackhawk” Kapusta