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Blog
Thoughts on identity, integration, and building a life that actually fits.

Awakening
Reflections on the moments that crack everything open. Posts in this category explore spiritual awakening, belief collapse, and what happens when you can no longer live the way you have been living.


The Idea of God Isn't God
Watch video version on my Youtube Channel. There's a difference between believing in an idea of God and actually experiencing God. Most of us live in the first one without knowing it. Take every human being's experience, every generation that's ever existed, add it all together, and it still wouldn't come close to touching the vastness of what God is. Every concept, every religion, every idea we've built around God is a finger pointing at something none of it can fully hold.

Zachary Leal
18 hours ago1 min read


My Therapist Told Me My Biggest Coping Mechanism Was Performance. She Was Right.
Watch the video version at my Youtube Channel. I was sitting in therapy when my therapist said something that stopped me cold. She told me my biggest coping mechanism — the one I had never noticed, the one I had never even considered a coping mechanism — was performance. Not alcohol. Not avoidance. Not anger. Performance. Doing. Staying busy. Checking things off a list so I could feel like I was in control. And she was right. Why Am I Always Busy But Still Anxious? If you hav

Zachary Leal
Jun 263 min read


I Created My Own Suffering Without Knowing It. Here's How.
Watch a video version at my Youtube Channel. For years I thought the answer was somewhere ahead of me. I spent the first part of my journey dominated by the past. Shame, guilt, regret, and a constant loop of things I wished I had done differently. My anxiety lived there. I was almost entirely in what had already happened, feeling like a victim to it, feeling powerless over myself. Then I started to heal. I learned to look at myself with less judgment. I started accepting who

Zachary Leal
May 154 min read


The In-Between Is Not the Enemy. It Might Be Where You Find God.
What if the stillness you've been avoiding — the uncomfortable, uncertain, full-of-mystery stillness — is actually where you connect to something real? I've been sitting with that question a lot lately.

Zachary Leal
Apr 173 min read
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