Each kiddo arrives with a working compass that can read warmer toward what is theirs and cooler away from it. The whole task is to figure out the pull and keep moving toward the warmth.

Remember the game of hot and cold you played as a kid?

That is the best explanation for how this works. When you move toward something that connects with your Sorce Field, the pull grows warmer, and when you drift away from it, the pull cools. Follow the warmth far enough, and eventually it completes you.

A child already plays this game without being taught. They know the activity that lights them up and the one that drains them by lunch. They know the friend who leaves them full and the one who leaves them tired. The compass is standing there, working, from the very beginning. The task is to keep it, because the world will spend years teaching them to ignore the reading and follow the outside instead.

The pull is real information, and it lands in the body. Warmer feels like energy rising, like time disappearing, like wanting a little more. Cooler feels like the energy draining out, like the clock slowing down, like going through the motions. These are the same yes and no a child can feel for hunger, pointed now at the direction of a whole life. A child who can feel warmer and cooler can navigate by something no one else can see.

Here is the move that makes it work: you follow warmth by turning toward it and letting the pull grow, the way a magnet draws rather than the way a hand grabs. You take one step toward the warm thing, and the warmth answers by growing. Step again, and it grows again. That compounding is what it means for a thing to complete you. It arrives because you kept moving toward it, drawn in rather than chased down.

The warmth has a name in this work. It is the glow, a felt aliveness and energy that rises in a person the moment they follow what is genuinely theirs. It is measurable enough that researchers track it as vitality, and it is the surest sign a child is standing inside their own field. Teach them to steer toward it, and you have handed them a direction that will hold for a lifetime.

The Activity: Warmer or Cooler

About 5-minutes each night for a week, then a longer look together at the end.

You need a small notebook and one honest question asked at the same time each day.

Teach the two readings.

Remind them of the game. Warmer means the pull grows, more energy, more alive, time slipping away. Cooler means the pull fades, heavier, watching the clock. Tell them both readings are true and both are useful.

Track one week.

Each night, ask two questions. What was the warmest moment today, and what was the coolest. One line for each, in their words. Keep it quick and light.

Read the warm column.

At the end of the week, read only the warm moments together and look for the thread. The kind of thing that keeps warming them is pointing straight at their field. Circle the thread.

Take one step toward it.

Pick the warm thread and take a single small step further into it this week. One step, and then watch whether the pull grows. This is how you follow the compass on purpose.

Meet the cool with curiosity.

Look at the cool moments plainly, with interest rather than judgment. Some cool things still have to be done, and that is part of a full life. The gift is knowing the difference, so a child spends their years moving toward warmth by choice.

A child who learns to feel warmer and cooler carries a compass that stays theirs through any room, any trend, or any crowd. They will still do the cool and necessary things, and underneath all of it they will steer, year after year, toward the warmth that is actually theirs. That warmth is the glow, and following it is the whole art of living inside your own field.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

References

Richard M. Ryan and Christina Frederick. On Energy, Personality, and Health: Subjective Vitality as a Dynamic Reflection of Well-Being. Journal of Personality, 1997.

Barnaby D. Dunn et al. Listening to Your Heart: How Interoception Shapes Emotion Experience and Intuitive Decision Making. Psychological Science, 2010.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row, 1990.

Start with the eye, because it holds the whole thing in miniature. Light lands on the back of the eye upside down and reversed, and the brain turns it over so the world arrives to you already corrected. The correction is so fast and so good that you spend your whole life, absolutely certain, that you are looking straight at the world.

We built the rest of life the same way, on a correction we stopped noticing.

Over a few centuries, a small number of decisions taught our largest systems to run against Earth. We make money by stripping topsoil that takes centuries to form. Medicine often treats the body as a machine to override rather than information to read. Insurance still prices a climate that has already passed its turning point. Six of the nine systems that keep the planet livable have been pushed past their safe limit, and we call the result normal.

That is the inversion: a whole civilization running the reverse and upside down… an intentional trick so we have to live at higher states of consciousness.

Read the Inversion Series

Here’s What I Want Our Kids to Know

A child arrives fully awake, conscious, and alive in their body. You don’t need to teach them to do this; you just need to unteach yourself to stop correcting them and let them believe they already know.

We were told to be different and then we forgot. Don’t repeat this mistake. It is 30-years of a waste of an opportunity to know.

You don’t need to remember if you already know.

Babies and children know when they are hungry, when a thing is a clear “yes I want that” or a clear “no I don’t want that,” when something is interesting, when energy feels wrong. Here are just a few that we need to STOP teaching:

• The grade over the curiosity.

• The approval over their inner truth.

• More over less.

• The performance over the body.

Each swap looks reasonable-ish, and actually it all doesn’t sound like a big deal… why not get good grades? Why not have people like you? But when you stack these over 18 years, they produce an adult who chases the flipped picture, calls it success, and cannot work out why they feel anxious and tired and ‘have no idea who they are or how they ended up… well, here.’

The same pattern shows up in every single number inside of our system and it is killing us: lights out, no one is home.

Loneliness is now widespread enough that the surgeon general has called it an epidemic. Suicide among young people sits near the highest level this country has ever recorded. These numbers point to something specific. A great many people are succeeding at the reversed and upside-down inversion of life, running as fast as they can in the wrong direction, away from themselves.

The good news is simple, and it is the whole reason to teach this early. This is a very large correction all happening at once, and it is actually possible for YOU to understand and to be part of the change you want to see. It begins with every single parent, who starts with themselves and then teaches their children in an embodied and spirited way. To teach our youth the way home is through their own selves and their inner truth.

Actually, the second you start, you can’t unsee it, and neither can they. Every single decision they make will make it IMPOSSIBLE not to be playing these dimensional games.

Your Only Task: Keep one child in their highest state of consciousness. They are already there; you only need to keep them there.

And if you couple it with empowering their ability to think for themselves, and lean into their Inner Growth, they will be unstoppable.

Teach them to pause and ask one honest question: is this actually true for me, or is it just the version I am being tricked with?

Sponsor My Work

The Activity: The Two Scoreboards

About 35-minutes at the table, with one sheet of paper split down the middle.

You need paper, a pen, and a willingness to be honest about your own scoreboard too (I know that’s hard for us).

Name the world’s scoreboard.

On the left, write what the world seems to want your child to chase. Ask them about it and ask them to support you. What do they feel stressed by? The grade, the trophy, the most followers, being the best, being liked by everyone, having the most. Keep it quick, and let them name their own.

Name the real signal.

On the right, write what is actually happening when they feel most alive and most themselves. Rested. Curious about something. Honest. Next to someone they love. Moving their body. Making a thing. Believe whatever they tell you.

Find the flip.

Read both sides and find one point where the two disagree. Maybe the world says win the game, and their body says the best day was the one where nobody kept score. Maybe the world says collect the likes, and their body felt worse afterward, not better. That gap is the inversion, and once a child sees one, they see them everywhere.

Put them in the true order.

Number the real signal first, and let the world’s side come after, in service to it. You keep the grade. You just know which one leads. A good grade that grows out of real curiosity is a gift. A good grade chased for approval quietly costs them.

Choose one true-order move.

Pick one small choice this week where they put the real signal first. Read the book they actually want before the assigned one. Say the honest no. Rest before they have earned it. One move, and then talk together about how it felt.

A child who plays this a few times stops taking the world’s scoreboard as the only one in the room. They keep their own, underneath, where it belongs. They will still play the outside games, and play them well, while keeping the one signal that tells them who they are and what is actually true.

That is the whole inheritance of embodied legacy. A child who can feel into the Inversion and understand how to correct it, and put it first, in a world that spends every day insisting the flip, will win. They will actually understand how to win the actual game of life and will always be in their power.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: A perspective on culture and attention, not medical or psychological advice. If you or a child are struggling, please reach out to a qualified professional. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Gabor Maté. The Myth of Normal. Avery, 2022.

Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf

CDC, National Center for Health Statistics. Suicide and Homicide Death Rates Among Youth and Young Adults Ages 10 to 24. Data Brief 471, 2023. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db471.htm

Katherine Richardson et al. Earth Beyond Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries. Science Advances, 2023. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Columbia Climate School. Why Soil Matters. 2012.

Somewhere around age 7 a child starts to build a fixed idea of who they are. I am the smart one. I am the shy one. I am bad at math. I am the funny one, the sporty one, the one who does not cry. These stories feel like discoveries, like the child is simply noticing the truth about themselves, and they are actually closer to a costume that was worn so long it started to feel like skin.

This is the ego doing its job, and the ego’s job is to protect the story.

Actually most of the time those stories were given to us by our parents who want us to find our identity and get on with it. We are rushed to choose because it means that then we are on a path to somewhere. We are starting our contribution to society in some form.

So, naturally in that event, once a child decides they are bad at math, the ego will defend that identity against all evidence, because to the ego, being consistent feels safer than being free. The kid will avoid math, dismiss their own good grade as “a lucky win,” and quietly arrange their life around this idea they learned at 7. We all do this. Most adults are still loyally defending an identity their child handed them decades ago.

That’s why so many ‘healers’ are focused on healing the inner child. I will be honest about my opinion on this topic. If someone wants you to heal your inner child, run far and run fast. It’s a marketing ploy to get you to live inside the Inversion and they want to perform ‘cosmic surgery’ on you to get you to remove those limiting beliefs.

There is another way and it is far less painful. Just let go… let go of anything you have ever believed and surrender to the possibility that everything you thought you know is just to hold you back from your truest work. And its time to evolve into it.

The gift you can give is to teach a child, early, that identity is something you hold rather than something you are. You are allowed to put one story down and pick up a truer one whenever you grow past it. Actually, that’s the job. Don’t stand still, GROW up. GROW forward. A child who learns this does not get trapped; they stay able to change, which in a fast world is close to a superpower.

You are not the smart one or the shy one. You are every dimensional aspect of all energy of all time. You have all the truth, all the power and all the love. There are no limits to what you can do. You are god.

Now, here is the part that makes parents nervous, and I want to make sure you open the aperture wide to this concept: We all do this, but children can’t hide it and they naturally become slightly different people in different rooms. Louder with friends, gentler with grandma, careful around strangers, wild in the backyard.

The instinct is to worry that this is fakeness, that a real person should be exactly the same everywhere. That instinct is wrong. This is the chameleon which is a skill. A chameleon changes color to fit the branch and tries it on for size. But they have their ‘green’ setting and they can stays completely a chameleon the whole time. The art is to flex on the surface while staying rooted underneath.

The trap, and it is a real trap, is the chameleon who forgets which one is actually them. The child who changes so completely in every room that they lose the thread of who they are when nobody is watching. So the practice has two halves, and they only work together. One half is the freedom to adapt, to read a room and meet it. The other half is a rooted core, a small set of things that stay true no matter whose branch you are standing on. Flex the surface, hold the root. A child who can do both is at home anywhere and lost nowhere.

This is also where it ties back to the Inversion and to belonging to yourself. A person with no rooted core is the easiest person in the world to shape, because they will become whatever the loudest room wants. A person with a rooted core can walk into any room, adapt with grace, and walk back out still themselves. That is the whole difference between a chameleon and a mirror. A mirror only shows the room back to itself. A chameleon is always still there underneath, watching, choosing.

Sponsor My Work

The Activity: You in Three Rooms

About 35-minutes at the table, with paper and a little honesty.

You need three sheets of paper, or one page split into three, and a real willingness to talk about yourselves without judging.

1. Name three rooms. Pick three real settings your child moves through. With our family. With your best friends. With people you just met. Write one at the top of each section.

2. Describe yourself in each. Go through them one at a time and ask, who are you in this room. Louder or quieter. Sillier or more careful. What do you talk about, how do you stand, what do you let people see. Write it down in their words. Do your own, out loud, alongside them, because they need to see that you do this too and that it is normal and human.

3. Find the root. Now read all three together and ask the real question. What is the same in all three. What stays you no matter which room you are in. Maybe it is that you are kind, or that you are honest, or that you love a particular thing fiercely, or that you will not laugh at someone who is down. Whatever stays constant across all three rooms, circle it. That is the root. That is the part that does not change color. Tell them: this is the one you protect. Everything else is allowed to flex.

4. Spot the difference between flexing and disappearing. Close with one honest check. Is there any room where you stop being yourself completely, where you go quiet about something that really matters to you, or pretend to be someone you are not just to be liked. There is no shame in the answer. Naming it is how a child learns the line between adapting, which is healthy, and vanishing, which costs them. The goal is a kid who can read any room and still feel the root holding.

A child who does this a few times stops being afraid of being different in different places, and also stops being at the mercy of it. They learn that they get to choose their colors on the surface and keep their center underneath, and that both of those are theirs. They are not stuck as the one description they got handed, and they are not so loose that they blow away in whatever wind is strongest.

Bonus Activity

My two best friends in Guatemala and I started talking about Chameleon’s at the beginning of the year. We were working through the vantage point of our 4-children who are all the same ages going through the same things and how we also were in the blending experience of life and not understanding our own individuation, our gifts and falling short of being able to know the difference between the Inversion and the Green side of who we are.

I created this activity for all of us and I think it was tremendously beneficial for the work I am doing with my kids.

Activity Sheet & Teachers Guide

The balance the whole world is failing at right now: the rigid people who cannot bend and the empty people who cannot hold a shape. You are raising the third kind with The Roam Learning Lab:

Flexible, and rooted—at home anywhere, and lost nowhere.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: A reflective exercise about identity, not a clinical tool. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Carol S. Dweck. Mindset. Random House, 2006.

Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol S. Dweck. Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention. Child Development, 2007.

Kennon M. Sheldon, Richard M. Ryan, Laird J. Rawsthorne, and Barbara Ilardi. Trait Self and True Self: Cross-Role Variation in the Big-Five Personality Traits and Its Relations With Psychological Authenticity and Subjective Well-Being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1997.

Watch a 13-month-old learn to climb stairs, and you will see how humans are actually built to learn. They climb the same 4 steps 40x in a row, laughing and thrilled that they figured it out. They keep going until their body truly owns it. Then one day the stairs are simply boring, no longer new, and they are off to the next impossible thing.

That is the real shape of learning, and somewhere around kindergarten we replace the integrated and somatic learning experience with a linear inversion, where you meet a thing you need to learn exactly once, get tested on it, and are told you either get it or you do not.

The test is the real problem here. You are expected to ‘record’ a state of linear information and regurgitate it in a performance.

You forget it after the test. Immediately.

And if you don’t do well, you think you have failed. Actually, the real failure is that you are missing the steps of embodying the experience of the teaching. You actually can’t leap over it. You have to learn it through felt experience. This is Richard Alpert’s theory, not mine, but our beloved Ram Dass could take a test and do great on it, and was a Dr. of Psychology and had no actual understanding of his performative regurgitation. Our teachers are the same. They can study a book and learn the material, but they don’t know it from a lived or felt experience and until they do, many important and key parts of the learning are missing out of their teaching.

Read the Compliment for Adults

The truth is that you never learn anything once. You learn it in layers, and each pass goes deeper, and the same lesson at 5 and 15 and 40 is genuinely a different lesson because you are a different person standing in front of it and that’s important too. A rep is more than repetition. It is a return at a higher level, where you add weight and climb to the next one.

This is the skill I want to hand to all children, because it outlasts every single subject.

A child who knows how to think and then climb to the next level can teach themselves anything, forever. It’s sets them up for the success of life. Learn how to think, first. For yourself.

The engine of it is one small habit, coming home to yourself between the reps and asking the one question that keeps learning alive: what do I actually need to know about this that I will need again? What do I actually believe about it? What are elements of it that I could explore that would help me understand the lesson? How does it manifest across various subjects and across lived parts of my life? How does it help me?

The point of learning is to keep arriving back at your inner growth, looking deeper, and asking what is missing now.

Most kids, and most adults, never ask what is missing. Actually, it is an uncomfortable question, because asking it means stepping out of belonging and starting to question society.

A child who learns to pause and ask what they are actually missing becomes the author of their own education, and that single move changes everything downstream.

So let me give you the practical version, because this is also how you use the screen on purpose instead of letting it use your kid. There is a way to learn from a video that turns watching into work, and I call it thinking with the video. You do not watch it. You work it. You watch a short piece three times, and each pass you ask a sharper question, and somewhere in the third pass the child stops consuming and starts thinking, which is the whole game.

And when your child falls hard for volcanoes or Mandarin or how an engine works, you take it off the screen and out into the world. A live tutor on Preply for the thread that needs a human and a pace of its own. A course on Udemy to own and return to whenever the thread comes back around. And the Simsbury library, free, in person, holding more than either, where a child can follow a question down a shelf and read for six months until they discover it. And then they get to explore and expand it. Use the screen for the specific teacher or the specific course. Let the library carry the in-person expression. Keep the child coming home to ask what is next.

Help Me Homeschool My Kids & Subscribe

The Activity: Watch It Three Times

About 45-minutes at the table, with one short video, ten minutes or less.

You need a screen, a notebook, and one video on something your child already loves. Shorter is better. A clip about octopuses, a how-things-are-made short, a two-minute history of something. Pick together.

First pass, just watch.

No notebook, no pausing. Tell them the only job is to enjoy it and notice what grabs them. At the end, ask one question: what was the most interesting thing in there? Write down their answer in their words.

Second pass, how does it work.

Now you pause. Every time something happens that they cannot fully explain, stop the video and let them try to say how it works in their own words. They will be wrong sometimes, and that is the good part. Write down two things they figured out and one thing they still cannot explain.

Third pass, what am I still missing.

Watch the one section that held the thing they could not explain. This time the question is sharper: what would I need to learn to understand this fully? Maybe it is a word, a number, a whole field they did not know existed. Write that down. That sentence is the next rep, and they found it themselves.

Come home.

Close the notebook and ask the real question, the one this whole series is built on. Out of everything we just watched, what do you most want to go deeper on? Whatever they say is the thread. Tomorrow, or next weekend, you go find it, on the screen if it is a course, at the library if it is a shelf, with a live teacher if it needs a person.

That is the entire method, and it works on a four-year-old with a video about ladybugs and on a fourteen-year-old with a lecture on orbital mechanics. The level changes. The move stays exactly the same. Watch, work it, find what is missing, come home, choose the next rep.

A child raised on reps stays calm in front of hard things, because they have felt a hundred times how understanding arrives in layers rather than in a flash. They know the first pass is supposed to be foggy. They know the fog is the beginning, the opening move rather than a verdict on how smart they are. And they know that the most powerful question in any room is the quiet one they ask themselves: what do I still need to know?

Hand a child a way to think, and you have handed them the keys to every locked door they will ever stand in front of.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: Not to be used as educational policy advice. Opinions only. The Preply and Udemy links, when used, are personal referral links and may earn a commission at no cost to you. The Simsbury Public Library is free. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Sean H. K. Kang. Spaced Repetition Promotes Efficient and Effective Learning: Policy Implications for Instruction. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2016.

Michelene T. H. Chi and Ruth Wylie. The ICAP Framework: Linking Cognitive Engagement to Active Learning Outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 2014.

Elizabeth L. Bjork and Robert A. Bjork. Making Things Hard on Yourself, but in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning. Worth Publishers, 2011.

Simsbury Public Library

Preply and Udemy.

Most of us were taught exactly one thing about money: that you work for it. And that’s your only job in life.

You do a job, you get paid, you spend it, and then you do the job again. That is the whole story for most people, and it is the reason most people run in place their entire lives, working harder every year for a number that barely moves.

There is a second half to the story, and almost nobody learns it as a kid.

The second half is ownership.

When you own a piece of something that grows, a basket of companies, a share of the market, it grows while you are working and while you are sleeping, and the growth piles on top of itself, and the longer it runs, the faster it climbs. That is the inversion. The system is built so that the people who own come out ahead and the people who only work stay put, and we are trained from a young age to believe this is simply how things are.

I want my kids to know both halves of the puzzle. Even if I don’t always agree with the market, it is so essential to me that they understand their options. And I want that not because I want them to count their money, but actually for the opposite reason.

I want them to understand the machine early enough that they never have to be afraid of it, so they can spend their real attention on the things that are actually worth their life: following their purpose.

The market is not really that hard to understand, but the hard part is teaching a child that owning beats earning, and getting them to embrace it instead of that next Pokémon card.

Here at The Roam Learning Lab I teach money at three speeds.

#1 Earning; it runs on Greenlight.

It is a debit card and an app for kids, that I can manage.

You set the chores, the kids check them off, and the money reward is automatically distributed to pre-determined buckets.

The part I love is that every dollar they get sorts itself into three buckets they can actually see:

1. Current Spend: With rules on it. So I can set up allocated dollars and % for different buckets. Like

2. Save

3. Give, so the lesson is built right into the screen, making it easy to manage and creating a gamified experience. Actually, I can set it up and then adjust it anytime, so it makes it great.
   
   For example: If they receive $25 a week for doing their chores, I can say 50% goes to long term savings, 25% goes towards current spend and you can use it on games and cards and then 20% is going into short term savings for your next big purchase (and together we map out a timeline and a strategy for that next big thing) and then we put 5% into giving. This cycle offers them the dimensionality of purchase types.

Then when we start to map out the strategy together of what they want to buy, they can see how quickly the money leaves their account when they spend frivolously.

Get Started with Greenlight

#2 Owning; it runs on Acorns.

It buys a diversified basket of companies and holds it for the long haul, and the dividends quietly reinvest, compounding in the background. I think of this like weeding. Compound interest. Even if you put $5 in a week, it helps.

You open an Acorns Early account in the child’s name, you set a small amount to go in every week, and you let the family add to it on birthdays instead of more plastic that breaks by August.

I sent out QR codes at the beginning of each birthday. Then I match it in the kids Greenlight account for spending, so it gives them their splits. This is the speed that actually wins the inversion, and it is the one almost no child is ever shown.

Get Started with Acorns

#3 Trading; it runs on Bloom.

It is built for teens, with you approving every move, and it lets an older kid buy and sell real shares of companies they care about, starting at a single dollar. Bloom teaches the fast, twitchy, exciting version of the market, the buying and the selling and the watching, and it lets them practice with pretend money first, before one real dollar is ever on the line.

I think of this one as the flight simulator. It is where they learn how the market actually moves without betting the house to find out.

Get Started with Bloom

Here is the thing to say out loud to your kid: Like the turtle, the slow pile is where the money is genuinely made.

The fast pile is thrilling, teaches you how the game works, and is also where most grown adults quietly lose because they confuse motion with progress.

1. Earning is the floor.

2. Owning slow is how you win the inversion.

3. Trading fast is how you learn the board.

A child who can feel the difference between those three already understands something most adults spent decades missing.

You do not need any of the apps to teach this. You need a bowl of beans.

The Activity: The Doubling Game

About forty minutes, at the kitchen table, nothing to download.

You need a bowl of dried beans, two jars or bowls, and a piece of paper. Label one jar EARN and the other OWN.

1. Start with the EARN jar, because it is the one they already know. Every time your child does a small task you name, clearing a plate, naming a state, telling you a joke, they earn one bean. Run it for several rounds and let the beans pile up nicely. Then stop giving tasks. Point out, gently, that the second the work stopped, the jar stopped. That is a wage, and that is most of working life.

2. Now the OWN jar. Put five beans in it to start. At the end of every round, you are the market, and you add one bean for every five already sitting in the jar, whether or not your child lifted a finger that round. Run the same number of rounds you ran for EARN.

3. Watch what happens, and let your child watch it too. The OWN jar starts slow and frankly looks boring, and then somewhere around the fifth or sixth round it pulls ahead, and then it keeps pulling, because it is growing on top of what it already has. Mark on the paper the exact round where OWN passes EARN. That moment is the whole lesson, made of beans.

4. Ask one question, and then stop talking and let it land. Which jar do you want to be filling when you are my age?

The slow jar feels like nothing right up until it feels like everything, and the only ingredient it needs is time, which happens to be the one thing your child has more of than anyone else in the room.

When you are ready to take it off the table and into the real version, Greenlight runs the earning, Acorns runs the owning, and Bloom runs the trading. The links are below, and a quick honest word before you click. All three charge a small monthly fee, which on a tiny balance is a large percentage, so start slow and steady and let the years be the story. And remember that the beans on your counter already taught the whole thing for free.

Get signed up with all three platforms:

Greenlight Acorns Bloom

A child who learns the three speeds grows up standing on the ownership side of a system that was built to keep them earning. That is the legacy here. It is the seeing itself, the one piece of the machine that nobody handed you, passed to them early enough that it changes the shape of their whole life.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Sponsor My Work

Disclaimer: Not to be used as financial advice. Opinions only. The Greenlight, Acorns, and Bloom links are personal referral links and may earn a commission at no cost to you. substack.com/@rachebrand

Keep Reading

While society teaches us to think of progress as a straight line, the only work worth teaching our children is the kind with no end in sight. It is an infinite expression of growth across a whole life. It is compound interest. You can show it through money, through saving and compounding interest, or you can show it another way, the way of nature.

Here is the thing most of us do not want to believe but need to hear: There is no world where man wins against nature. We can try to tame it for a season, but it will always win.

And weeding is the easiest example I can give.

Each week or so, you spend an hour on your knees pulling the same green intruders out of the same bed, and you feel that good clean stretch of bare soil when you are done, and then you walk out a week later and they are back, smug, like you never lifted a finger. The first instinct is to feel like you failed. Actually, you did the opposite. You learned the single most important thing the garden has to teach, which is that everything alive needs tending, and tending is a rhythm, and a rhythm has no finish line. It just keeps going around and around and around.

Now some people break this cycle by removing the garden, planting more grass or paving over it. But the beauty is that beneath that transition, the mycelial network is just getting stronger, and it will come up in other places. You cannot tame nature. Entropy is one of the most important lessons you can hand your children, and yourself.

There is an old line about enlightenment, that before it you chop wood and carry water, and after it you chop wood and carry water again. And it is forever. Infinite. The work stays the same. The only thing that changes in this process is you. The more you do it, the more your mind shifts along with it. Pulling weeds is like that. The weeds themselves do not really matter. The act of doing it is what matters. A child who pulls them every week is quietly learning that life is maintained rather than conquered, and that is the whole point of life.

Teach a child to tend something that is living, and you have taught them how to arrive as a whole human in this world.

Here is where it turns dimensional, which is the whole reason we teach this way.

A child who has let plants go neglected, and seen how fast that turns into a mess that takes days to set right, will understand every other foundation you teach them. For example: why you water a friendship and always give it love, why you come back to the thing you love before it overgrows. The garden teaches the law once, physically, as a foundation, and then it will travel everywhere on its own.

I would add one more layer when they are ready. Plant some things that actually belong where you live. Native plants feed native bugs, and native bugs feed native birds, and most people have no idea that a single oak can feed hundreds of kinds of caterpillar, or that one pair of chickadees needs thousands of those caterpillars to raise a single nest of young. The tidy lawn we were all sold is, ecologically, a desert. A messy native corner is a city. When a child learns that the bugs are the foundation and not the enemy, they begin to see the yard as a living system they belong to, rather than a thing to control. They will love bugs. They will worship bugs for what the bugs give them. That shift, from controlling nature to belonging to it, is most of the work of the next hundred years, and you can plant it in a four-year-old in an afternoon.

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The Activity: One Bed, One Hour

About 40-minutes outside, or 15-minutes at a windowsill if you have no yard.

You need a patch of ground with weeds in it, a small trowel, and gloves if you like them. If you have no garden, a single pot of soil works, or skip down to the avocado.

Pick one bed.

Pick one small bed, or one container, and make it the only thing you touch today. Resist the pull to fix the whole yard. The lesson lives in finishing one small square completely.

Weed it together.

Weed it together, slowly, and talk the whole time. Show your child how to get the whole root. Pull only the leafy top and the weed is back in days. Pull the root and it is gone for the season. That one detail is the entire teaching, so say it plainly and let them feel the difference in their fingers.

Sit back and tell the truth.

When the bed is clean, sit back and look at it for a full minute. Let the satisfaction land. Then tell them the truth, that it will be back, that you will both return next week, and that this return is the whole point of having a garden, and of having a life.

Make a standing date.

Same bed, same time, next week. The magic lives in the return.

No yard? Sprout an avocado.

No outdoor space, or a rainy day? Sprout an avocado instead. Wash a pit, poke three or four toothpicks around its middle, and balance it broad end down in a glass so the bottom inch sits in water. Set it on the sill, change the water often, and wait. Roots come in a few weeks, a stem after that. It is the same lesson at a slower speed, that living things answer to steady attention and to almost nothing else. If you want the long version of patience, prune a young fruit tree together and then wait the three years it takes to show you what the cut was for.

The child who learns to tend grows up knowing, in their body, that the good life is built by return, not by rescue. That is a quiet kind of power, and almost nobody hands it to a kid on purpose. You can.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: Not to be used as medical or agricultural advice. Opinions only. Keep children away from any plant or berry you cannot identify, and skip homemade plant sprays around small hands. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Douglas W. Tallamy. Nature’s Best Hope. Timber Press, 2019.

Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Desirée L. Narango, Douglas W. Tallamy, and Peter P. Marra. Nonnative Plants Reduce Population Growth of an Insectivorous Bird. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809259115

Douglas W. Tallamy and Kimberley J. Shropshire. Ranking Lepidopteran Use of Native Versus Introduced Plants. Conservation Biology, 2009. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19627321/

Winning the inversion is simple, and almost nobody does it. Winning the whole game of life is hard, and it is the only game we are here to play.

So when you think you are winning one game, you are actually playing the wrong one, pointed in the wrong direction and upside down from the game you should be playing.

Let me tell you the secret of the simple game first, the inversion game, because it is genuinely basic, and once a child sees it they cannot unsee it.

The money inversion is easy as pie, and it solves a lot of 3D problems.

Here is how you go about it:

Own slowly, start young, keep your costs low, let time do the compounding, and stay the course (do not panic when it falls, because it will). It asks for patience in a world built to make you twitchy, and it is simple to understand. A child who learns those few moves has, in financial terms, basically figured out the puzzle. The simple game has a known answer, and you can solve it early, so the rest of your life is spent outside the inversion.

And if you want to get them started early, set up Greenlight for a kids’ chores account, and Acorns for long-term ETF investing.

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Here is the part that took me much longer to understand.

You can solve the money puzzle completely and still end up isolated, anxious, estranged from everyone, and unsure why you bothered. The big game, the actual game of a human life, does not have a clean answer, because it is played on many boards at once, and a move that wins on one board can lose badly on another. That is what multidimensional means. You are never playing just one game. You are playing your health, your money, your marriage, your friendships, your character, and your place in the world, all at the same time, with the same twenty-four hours, and they trade against each other constantly.

A child who only learns to win one board grows into an adult who is rich on paper and lost everywhere else.

So the skill I want a child to build is bigger than winning a game. It is how to see all the boards at once and play them together, which is a completely different and much rarer ability. And the cleanest way I have found to teach it is through circles.

Picture your child at the center of a set of rings, like a target drawn around them. The first ring is them, their own body and mind. The next ring out is the family. Past that, their close friends. Past that, their wider community, the town, the team, the people they see but do not know well. And the widest ring is the whole world, everyone and everything they will never meet but still affect. Every choice a person makes lands in one or more of these rings, and the great mistake, the one our whole culture makes, is to win the inner rings by quietly draining the outer ones. To get rich while wrecking the community. To win the argument while losing the friend. To feed yourself while starving the world your kids have to live in.

The other thing a child needs to know is that almost every important game in life is played more than once with the same people. This changes everything. If you only meet someone once, cheating them might pay. But you live in a small world of the same faces, year after year, the same family, the same town, the same handful of friends, and in a game you play over and over with the same people, the winning move turns out to be almost embarrassingly wholesome. Be clear. Be kind first. If someone wrongs you, respond honestly, and then forgive quickly and get back to cooperating. People who play that way, over a whole life, win the only score that counts. People who grab in every round end up alone, which is the lowest score there is.

This is the real answer to the hard game, and it is honest. It is to play every ring at once, to take care of the inner rings without hollowing out the outer ones, and to treat the people you keep meeting as people you will meet again. That is what it actually means to win.

The Activity: Map the Circles

About 40-minutes at the table, with one big piece of paper.

You need a large sheet, a pen, and a few real decisions to play with.

Draw the rings.

Put your child’s name in the middle of the page. Draw five rings around it and label them, from the inside out: Me, Family, Friends, Community, World. Let them decorate it. It is theirs.

Place some choices.

Name a few ordinary decisions and figure out together which rings each one touches. Staying up too late hits Me and tomorrow’s Family. Sharing the last snack hits Me and Friends. Dropping litter hits Community and World. Practicing an instrument hits Me now and Me later. The goal is for them to feel that almost nothing touches only one ring.

Find a move that wins more than one ring.

Now the good part. Hunt together for choices that are good for several rings at once. Helping a younger kid feels good to Me, helps the Friend, strengthens the Community. Those multi-ring wins are the whole secret of the big game, and once a child starts looking for them they find them everywhere. Circle three.

Play the repeat game.

End with a quick round of the same-people idea. Ask, if you were only ever going to see someone one time, how might people be tempted to treat them. Now ask, but you actually see the same people again and again for your whole life, so what is the smartest way to treat them. Let them arrive at it themselves. Be kind, be honest, forgive, keep playing. They will get there, because kids already know this in their bones before the world talks them out of it.

If you want a supplemental experience, try out forest bathing:

A child who can see the circles does not have to choose between taking care of themselves and taking care of the world, because they learn to look for the moves that serve both, and there are far more of those than anyone admits. They grow up able to win the simple games without losing the hard one. They become the rare adult who is doing well and is also someone you would actually want to live next door to.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: A teaching simplification of ideas from game theory, not a technical treatment. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Robert Axelrod. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 1984.

Robert Axelrod and W. D. Hamilton. The Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 1981.

Martin A. Nowak. Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 2006.

When a child acts out, the world hands you a label fast. Defiant. Hyper. Difficult. Lazy. Too much. We reach for a diagnosis because it feels like understanding what is wrong, and a label feels like an answer. Actually, what is happening is that curiosity ends with a single word. Once you have named a child with a disorder, you stop asking why, and the why is the only thing that was ever going to help.

Here is the reframe that changes how you parent, and it is pretty basic: Behavior is communication.

Before a child can read their own interoception, and often long after they have the words, the body says it first. The meltdown, the stalling, the wall of no, the kid who suddenly cannot sit still, all of it is information traveling toward you. The work is to read the signal instead of just silencing it.

Think of behavior as the smoke, not the fire. You can spend years getting very good at clearing smoke, and the house keeps filling back up, because nobody went looking for what was actually burning. A child who melts down at the same time every afternoon is telling you something about hunger, or tiredness, or the transition out of school, or a sensory load that built all day with no way out. A child who goes silent and shrugs is often overwhelmed past the point of words, or speaking to you in a language your kind of brain does not compute. You and your child see the world from completely different vantage points, and your realities are not the same. If you want to dig into this work with support, I recommend The Wonder Children and Dr. Therese Rowley’s work.

Stop fixing the behavior and start seeking the root cause. When you get there, go one layer deeper. Really dig.

The behavior still matters, and the limits still matter, and you hold them with love. The behavior is the doorway, not the room. When you walk through it, you usually find something ordinary and fixable on the other side: a need for food, for sleep, for movement, for predictability, for a feeling of control over one small thing, for a way to be understood. The behavior was the only tool the child had to point at it.

I want to be careful and clear here, because this is the place people go sideways. Reading the signal belongs right next to professional help, and next to medication when it is needed. Some children’s nervous systems genuinely need medical support, and when they do, that support can give a child back their day, their friendships, and their sense of themselves. Reading the signal does not replace your pediatrician or a good evaluation. It makes them more precise. A parent who can describe exactly when, where, and after what a behavior shows up walks into that office with gold, and any professional and any treatment will work better with that information in hand. The lens and the medicine are on the same team. Use both.

What you are really teaching, underneath all of it, is that your child is readable, that they make sense, that even their hardest moments are signals from a self that is trying to get a need met. A child who grows up believing they make sense, rather than feeling labeled and managed, learns to read their own signals too. And that is the long game. You will not always be in the room. The goal is a person who, at thirty, in a bad week, can stop and ask themselves what is actually going on under the behavior, instead of deciding they are simply broken.

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The Activity: Become a Behavior Detective

About 20-minutes to set up, then a few short notes across the week.

You need a single sheet of paper and one recurring behavior that has been frustrating everyone. Pick one, not the whole child, just one behavior.

Make three columns.

Draw three columns on the page and label them BEFORE, BEHAVIOR, and AFTER. This is the oldest trick in the book, and it works because the answer almost always hides in the BEFORE column, the part everyone skips.

Log for a week.

For the next several days, each time the behavior happens, write one quick line in each column. What was going on in the ten minutes before. What exactly the child did. What happened right after. Keep it short. You are collecting clues, not writing an essay.

Read only the BEFORE column.

At the end of the week, sit down without your child and read only the BEFORE column. Look for the pattern. Is it always before lunch. Always at a transition. Always after screen time ends. Always when two demands stack at once. The repeating thing in that column is your real suspect, and it is usually not what you assumed on day one.

Change one upstream thing and watch.

Move the snack earlier. Give a five-minute warning before transitions. Add a burst of movement before the hard part of the day. Then keep your sheet going and see if the smoke clears. If it does not, you now have a precise, written record to bring to your doctor, which is exactly what they wish every parent walked in with.

Older kids can run this on themselves, and it is even more powerful when they do. Let a ten-year-old track their own afternoons and find their own pattern. The day a child discovers that their feelings have causes they can actually see is the day they stop being at the mercy of them.

The point is to believe a child makes sense, and to go looking for the why with the same patience you would want someone to bring to you on your worst day. Most kids have never had a single adult do that for them. You can be the one who does.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: This is not medical, psychological, or diagnostic advice, and it is not a substitute for professional care. If you have concerns about your child’s behavior, development, or wellbeing, please speak with your pediatrician or a qualified clinician. Never start or stop any medication except in partnership with a prescribing professional. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Mona Delahooke. Beyond Behaviors. PESI Publishing, 2019.

Ross W. Greene. The Explosive Child. Harper, multiple editions.

Gabor Maté. The Myth of Normal. Avery, 2022.

Indiana Resource Center for Autism, Indiana University Bloomington. Observing Behavior Using A-B-C Data.

Sahib S. Khalsa et al. Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2018.

Here is a piece of biology that takes most people a minute to absorb: You have never once seen reality directly.

Not today, not ever.

Light hits the back of your eyes upside down, the signal travels into the dark, wet, quiet of your skull, and your brain builds a full-color moving picture out of it and hands that picture to you so smoothly that you spend your whole life convinced you are looking straight at the world.

But here is the thing: You are looking at a model. A very good model, built by a very fast guesser, constructed in real time, but a model all the same.

This sounds like a party trick until you sit with what it means.

The brain does not have time to process every detail coming in, so it predicts. It fills in. It guesses what should be there based on everything it has seen before, and most of the time it guesses close enough, and you never notice the guessing at all. You only catch it in the moments it slips, which is exactly why optical illusions feel like magic. They are not tricking your eyes. They are catching your brain in the act of making things up.

I teach this to my kids early, and not as a fun fact. I teach it because it is the root of one of the most important abilities a human can have, which is the ability to hold your own perception a little loosely. A child who knows, in their bones, that what they see is a construction will grow into an adult who can consider that they might be wrong, that the other person might be seeing something real that they are missing, that the obvious answer is sometimes the brain filling in a blank with the easiest guess.

That is the beginning of wisdom, and it starts with an illusion.

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A child who knows their eyes can be fooled grows into an adult who can change their mind on a dime, agile and quick-witted, able to see multidimensionally, or what we call holographically.

How our eyes see connects straight to the inversion. The whole reason a distorted system can feel normal is that perception adapts to whatever it sees most. Show a brain the same flipped picture for long enough and the brain decides the flip is reality. It believes this in the same way a religion is drilled into it.

On the other hand, a child who has felt their own perception bend and adjust has a defense against this that almost no one is given. They learn to ask the question that protects them for life: is this actually true, or is this just what I have been shown so many times that it stopped looking strange?

Let me be careful not to freak you out, since this is a really big shift. Some things are solidly real. There are realities we need to understand to keep ourselves safe. For example:

• The stove is hot.

• The ground is solid or liquid, depending on whether you are on dirt or in the ocean.

• The air moves around us and can be cold or hot, depending on the season.

• Water moves over our skin, and heat burns it.

Outside of these fundamental elements, it is hard to point to shared realities, because perception differs from person to person. How I see could be a completely different arrangement from what you are seeing.

It also means your brain is working on overdrive. The picture in your head is always a step removed from the thing itself. The training is to notice that gap and to treat it as the thing worth your attention. There are layers and dimensions in play, subtle bodies and energy centers beneath the surface.

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The Activity: Catch Your Brain Lying

About forty minutes at the table, with a few simple demonstrations.

You need a pen, a piece of paper, and your own two hands. Everything here is free, and most of it lives in your own eyes.

Find your blind spot.

On a piece of paper, draw a dot on the left and a small X on the right, a few inches apart. Have your child close their left eye, hold the paper at arm’s length, stare at the dot with their right eye, and slowly bring the paper closer. At a certain distance the X vanishes completely, then reappears. Let them gasp. Then explain: there is a literal hole in the back of each eye where the nerve leaves, and your brain paints over it with whatever is nearby, so you never notice the hole is there. Your brain has been hiding a missing piece of the world from you your whole life.

Stare and watch it fade.

Have them stare at a single fixed point on a blank wall without moving their eyes at all for thirty seconds. Things at the edges begin to gray out and fade. The brain ignores anything that holds perfectly still, because it is built to notice change, not sameness. This is also, quietly, a lesson about paying attention to what you have stopped seeing.

The afterimage.

Stare hard at a bright-colored shape for thirty seconds, then look at a white wall. The shape floats back in the opposite color. Their own eyes are now showing them something that is not in the room at all. Ask them where that image is. It is not on the wall. It is inside them.

Talk about it.

Close with the real question. If your eyes can hide a hole, fade a wall, and invent a color, how sure should we be that we are seeing everything exactly right? And what might another person be seeing that we are not? Let them sit in that. You are leaving them curious, and a little humble, about the gap between the world and the picture.

A child who plays these games a few times stops believing that seeing is the same as knowing. They start to understand that two people can look at the very same thing and honestly see something different, and that both are telling the truth, two brains doing their best with two different sets of guesses. That single insight will save them from more conflict, more arrogance, and more manipulation than almost anything else you can teach.

For their whole life, the world will try to show them one picture so many times that it stops looking strange. You are giving them the one thing that keeps that from working. You are teaching them that the picture is always a guess, and that they are allowed to look again.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: Simplified for a general audience and not intended as a neuroscience text. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Anil Seth. Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber, 2021.

Beau Lotto. Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently. Hachette, 2017.

Andy Clark. Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

V. S. Ramachandran and R. L. Gregory. Perceptual Filling In of Artificially Induced Scotomas in Human Vision. Nature, 1991. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2023631/

George M. Stratton. Vision Without Inversion of the Retinal Image. Psychological Review, 1897. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1926-02876-001

We train our kids to scan outward from the moment they can walk. We say these statements without realizing their impact: Is the teacher happy with you? Did you do a good job? Did you make a friend? Did you get it right? Mommy is so happy with you when you do a good job.

Now this is what the kid is thinking on the inside: Are the other kids laughing with me or at me? What does my mother’s face ask me to do? How can I be exactly like everyone else so everyone likes me? What happens if my teacher isn’t happy with me? There are rules and I need to follow them or no one will like me.

This scanning is a real skill, and they will need it, but it is also so unbelievably exhausting.

The trouble is that we train the scanning so hard and so early that a lot of children lose the other channel entirely, the one that points inward. This is the most important one, the one that tells them what they actually feel, want, and need. They grow up fluent in everyone else’s needs and strangers to themselves.

And this is what we define as a “good kid”: someone who totally abandons themselves for the group.

What’s actually happening? Abandonment of self. Belief in everyone’s reality but their own.

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The Recommendation: Teach your kid to listen inward.

Listening inward is the act of interoception. Hunger before it becomes a headache. Tiredness before it becomes a meltdown. The flutter of nervousness and what that actually means to the body. The feeling of warmth when something is easy and feels good. This is the tight “no” in the chest when something is off, and the open “yes” in the belly when something is right. These are real signals, as real as sight and sound, and a child can be taught to feel them clearly, or taught, mostly by accident, to ignore them until they start to break down.

What looks like a behavior problem in the US is an interoception problem. The children aren’t allowed to listen to themselves, and so every meltdown and breakdown is the body exploding from the agony of not being able to do what they believe they need to for themselves.

A child who can feel on their own carries their own permission.

This is why it is scary for the “system” to have a child who actually listens to themselves. When we allow inner listening, we begin to break down the control and governance we have held on to for so long. There are eight billion realities across the world, eight billion souls with eight billion ideas. And we feel we need a single reality. It is not possible. Each of these souls has their own code, field, and reality, and operates from it at all times. And because we all flip our sight, it’s harder for us to believe ourselves.

This matters more than almost anything else, and here is why.

A person who cannot feel their own signals has to outsource the most important questions of their life. They spend their time questioning themselves instead of moving forward, which creates a lot of running around and a mentality that fosters a false sense of safety. The way it works: “Actually, I am not sure. Am I hungry? Am I tired? Or maybe I don’t feel safe. Is this person good for me? Maybe I actually don’t want this?”

And then you ask a friend to talk it through, make a collective decision together, and feel like you belong. When all of it gets answered by other people, or by the clock, or by consensus, whatever everyone else is doing, it creates an endless energy output until there is nothing left on the inside of that person. They are wiped out.

A counterbalance to this is a person who is fully alive, in their power, and filled with vitality. They can feel their own signals, and those signals carry the answers. They belong to themselves, and they know what they need to live in sovereignty. This child will be successful at anything they do, and it is the success of a leader, not that of a machine kept complacent within the system. This is a child who will be a leader, in their power and their vitality from very young.

A child who belongs to themselves is remarkably hard to manipulate. The whole job of society is to talk you out of your own power and your gut intuition.

What you are going to teach your child is simple:

1. Notice the feeling.

2. Name it.

3. Remove anything you believe about it.

4. Trust what you feel.

5. Make a decision.

All day long, a child is pulled outward, by school, by screens, by friends, by the thousand small demands of being a person in the world. Belonging to yourself is the habit of coming back, briefly and often, to check in with the one source of information no one else can access: how am I, actually, right now? Let me remember what I actually believe. A child who learns to come home to that question keeps a center that the world cannot take, no matter how loud it gets out there. All the safety in the world, all the love, all the truth can only ever come from being yourself in yourself.

This is the most important thing you need to teach your child: Listen to yourself. Then decide what feels right.

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The Activity: The Two-Minute Check-In PLUS the Body’s Yes & No

About 30-minutes the first time, then 2-minutes a day after that, forever.

You need nothing but a quiet spot and a willingness to be a little quiet yourselves, which is the actual hard part.

The check-in.

Sit together, close your eyes if that feels okay, and take three slow breaths. Then walk through the body out loud, slowly. How do your feet feel? Your belly. Your chest. Your shoulders. Your face. Do not fix anything, do not judge anything, just notice and name it. Tight, warm, buzzy, heavy, light, fine. Let your child report whatever they find, and believe them. There are no wrong answers, which is most of the point.

Find the yes & the no.

Now play a game. Say a few things you know are true and good for them. We are going to the park. You get to see your best friend. Each time, ask where they feel it in their body, and what it feels like. Then say a few things that are a clear small no. Time to brush teeth right now. We have to leave the party. Ask again, where is that one, what does it feel like. Most kids will start to locate a real difference: an open feeling somewhere for yes, a tight or heavy feeling somewhere for no. Help them find where their own yes and no live. Everybody’s are a little different.

Name it as a tool.

Tell them what they just found. You have a yes and a no inside you, they are always sending signals, and you are allowed to listen to them. Sometimes we brush our teeth anyway, and that is fine. What stays true is that you always get to know what your body thinks, and that information is yours.

Make it a habit.

Pick one moment a day, getting in the car, sitting down to dinner, climbing into bed, and use it as the daily two-minute check-in. How am I, actually, right now. That is the whole habit. Two minutes, every day, coming home.

Keep it light and keep it short. The goal is a child who, years from now, in a friendship that feels slightly off or a deal that looks good on paper but sits wrong in the gut, can feel that wrongness clearly and take it seriously, because they spent their childhood learning that their own signals are real and worth trusting. That single capacity will steer them away from more bad rooms, bad jobs, and bad relationships than any rule you could ever give them.

You cannot follow them into every room they will ever enter. You can give them an inner compass that comes along, and teach them, young, that it works.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Disclaimer: This is about everyday attention and self-trust, and it is not therapy or medical advice. If a child is in genuine distress, please reach out to a qualified professional. Opinions only. substack.com/@rachebrand

References

Bessel van der Kolk. The Body Keeps the Score. Viking, 2014.

Antonio Damasio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam, 1994.

Sahib S. Khalsa et al. Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2018.

Cynthia J. Price and Carole Hooven. Interoceptive Awareness Skills for Emotion Regulation: Theory and Approach of Mindful Awareness in Body-Oriented Therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 2018.

Kelly Mahler et al. Impact of an Interoception-Based Program on Emotion Regulation in Autistic Children. Occupational Therapy International, 2022.

For the last five months, Iza and Zai have been homeschooling with me three days a week while attending Two Coyotes the other days for wild learning. In January, Iza moved to full-time at-home seventh grade. They need something that does not yet exist in the public conversation about education, so we are building it… and we are doing it together with intention.

Welcome to The Roam Learning Lab.

We are into branding over here (ha, hence our last name) and the container needed a name. The kids learn in the studio, in the woods, at Whole Foods, where we run the weekly math project against the actual grocery receipt, on hikes with Two Coyotes, on calls with friends about a weird-thing-to-know question, in figure drawing with RISD, in shop projects with Kurt, and in travel with me. The container is the world. The schedule is only about curiosity and ‘roaming around’ until we feel satiated by what we have learned.

So we named it The Roam.

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What do We Mean?

The Roam is all the things that industrial schooling tells us to stop: Movement. Wandering. The freedom to follow a thread without permission. The biological default for how humans actually learn, while moving around instead of sitting in a chair. We are allowed to pick it up from a book, or glance at something at the library for an event. It is pressure-free. It is life-full.

The word holds a second echo, however. The phonetic spelling: Rome. The Academy, Plato, the Elders who taught while walking alongside their students. The lineage of inquiry that predates the factory model by two thousand years… and I think actually had some foresight into this starting. When Iza read The Allegory of the Cave in January, she was sitting inside a tradition that has always understood education as the slow turning of the head toward the light.

When someone asks the kids where they go to school, the answer is The Roam. It sounds like a place because it is one: A territory of attention. The kind of environment a biologist or anthropologist would design if anyone actually stepped back from the mess we have created in the system we call education today and gave it a clean break and started over.

What Happens Here

January’s theme was Perception of Reality. We start with Plato and end with The Giver and The Truman Show. The goal is not to be abstract. The goal is to teach Iza how to see beneath the surface of a story, how to notice the assumptions inside a narrative, how to stay curious when the answer feels too smooth. We kicked off the curiosity club and started to really learn how we could break down the rules and open our eyes.

In February, the theme was Individual and Individuation. We built life boards of goals and inspiration. Messages to our future selves. We talked about feelings and emotions. We read a lot of Carl Jung and did a lot on how the body connects back to connections with mind and how it manifests. Zai read A Wrinkle in Time, and we watched a number of movies that connected the dots to feelings. Thank you, Disney, for Inside Out and Elemental. We also learned about physics through the lens of action and what gravity feels like and then caught ourselves in a deep debate on intuition and how that actually mechanically works.

In March, we moved into the Collective, exploring how we think about community, religion, systems, and government. We reread the Bible and the Torah, and Tanaka, the Kabbalah, and the Q’uran. And we hosted Passover on the same day that we went to a Roman Catholic church to experience Easter Sunday. The kids built their own country and system of government, including a festival!

April moved into Game Theory and how the system is actually played. We went into NYC and went through the layers of how strategy plays out in the 3D world, what exists, and what is actually happening beneath the surface. We learned about the mafia, the black market, and the systems inside of the financial markets like the Nasdaq. We did a Virtual Reality experience so we could actually be placed in a Roman Amphitheater and feel what it would be like to be in the middle of a fight from the center of the ring. We walked away realizing what we selectively see based on our stage of development, age, and understanding of the world. It’s very cool.

In May, we moved onto Cannibalism and understanding both the rituals and how it plays out in modern ways through physical harm to oneself. As part of this, we read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451. They are great polarizations of the same theme on how the Machine takes over. This is interesting since their big bro Rishabh has a robot company and we are understanding how AI is starting to rapidly take over the world. Both kids are using AI for their own uses in their final project. Iza is building a story and Zai is building a game. It’s incredible to watch their output.

One note: Iza struggles with math, and Zai struggles with Reading / Writing. While they are both capable in those areas, because those are their least favorites, we have adopted new ‘tools’ and ways of learning. Iza uses Vedic Math now through a course on Udemy, and it has changed her experience. For $129 a year, I have access to 100 different math learning styles for her. And Zai has learned new ways of constructing story along with AI. It’s just practice and adjustment. Because reading isn’t his strong suit, all of his books have audio and he reads along when he listens. Sometimes he speaks out loud when he reads, and since he is an auditory learner, that really helps.

Each month gives us a frame that the kids can carry as a throughline in every subject: Language, Writing, Reading, Religion, Philosophy, Art, Math, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Health, History, Government, Geography, and Systems. We have rewritten how we think about Science and Social Studies so they each focus on their own area. Biology and Chemistry are completely different. And Math and Physics are much more connected. When we pick a single idea or theme, the most important thing is that they are all connected to an idea, so you can fully embody the information that you are learning, and you can see it carried through. It is really all learning the same basic information, so we just need them to ‘remember’ with another loop of the spiral. If you only learn it intellectually, you miss the point. So we have to feel it, do it, re-inact it, etc.

Physics lives inside a snow angel and the sheer force of a sled across packed powder and then it comes with a math equation that shows how it plays out and we can adjust different equations to see when it would break down. This same idea can be a moment in The Giver in reading that can then be a create writing assignment and then we can learn about the root language of Writing lives inside Iza’s Substack and her graphic novel Escaping the Labs. Biology lives in the garden in April. This summer, we will get Goats and Bees and do a small renovation project to learn how to paint, cut tile and create a home. It’s the living lab of life that we are Roaming about together through the world.

The structure is mixed-age, mentor-led, embodied, and cyclical. It looks like how humans learned for thousands of years before someone made it into a system that breeds ‘bots’ and homogenizes thinkers on medication.

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The Hidden Layer

There is a deeper reason this matters, and it lives in the Gene Keys. I read it 2 years ago and had no idea what to expect, but this layer opened up my eyes completely.

Gene Key 14 is called Radiating Prosperity. Its shadow is Compromise. Richard Rudd writes that schools tend to homogenize children, treating them as a single collective body that needs to be educated rather than treating each individual differently. He calls “compromise” the frequency of the whole of humanity. He says it is bred into us through society’s systems and compromise to our souls’ work becomes the expectation society tells us we need to lean into in order to live this life with others. It is an agreement to settle for less than you came here to do… and we all do it until we absolutely break through nervous system dysfunction and then heads into dis-ease. Really, a rapid unwinding that starts with anxiety and becomes so much worse if you don’t listen.

The Gift of 14 is Competence. The state where you do what you actually love, refined by practice, and prosperity arrives as a byproduct of alignment. The Siddhi is Bounteousness. The radiating field. The work so true to the person doing it that abundance moves through them without being chased and in fact magnetized. I think about this a lot because while I am an excellent athlete and did everything from individual sports to team sports, I have shared this learning with my kids on day 1. You should never chase anything. Magnetizing is the only way.

An industrial school system is the delivery mechanism for the shadow. Twelve years of compromise are practiced daily until the body forgets that another frequency was ever available. We learned this very quickly in the programming inside of Brave New World. It’s the quiet, consistent whisper of the National Anthem and the ‘get in line’ that forces the kids into homogenization.

The best language I hear from parents, “We are so busy. Always driving here and there. Dinner is on the fly. This weekend we are going to another tournament where we are staying in a hotel.”

By contrast: The Roam is the practice ground for the Gift. We are not training the kids to perform. We are training them to recognize what they feel called to do, refine it, and let competence become the engine of their life. This part of their life is testing and trying out things until it feels so good. Quitting or ‘stopping’ is encouraged if you feel that your contract is complete with that effort. We have a home-cooked meal together 3 nights a week, then work sessions 3 nights a week, either together or alone. On 1 night a week after therapy, we reward ourselves with dinner out. We have moved so far beyond ‘busy’ for the sake of busy. We are filled with adventures in our minds and can’t wait to have our time to ourselves to create. It is not school anymore, it is the blending of our whole life and human experience into one.

Let’s Roam together.

On Waking Up

Most people wake up only when their body forces them to. In modern education systems, it starts with burnout or behavioral issues, and then we put kids on medication to keep them compliant so we can keep doing the ‘expected jobs’ to keep actual progress covered up until a much bigger catalytic event starts.

What’s actually happening? Spirit is tearing the structure down because the mind refused to do it voluntarily. This is the standard arc of the high-functioning adult in this country, and it is the arc I was on until eight years ago.

Waking up is the slow recognition that the things you were told would make you safe are the things that have been making you sick. Safety can only be in yourself. I was told Boarding School, Ivy League, Intern at Goldman, Big Corporate Job with a Title, Join the Country Club, Travel, Nice Car, Big House, Neighborhood, Husband, Kids, Sports, School, and then go on repeat. The acid reflux everyone shares belongs to this track, and no one questions… actually, we all think we need to do more more more. We all think it is exactly what life is supposed to be like. The dopamine hits we manufacture by stretching a false sense of ungrounded ‘growth’ in a system with a limit, or sugar, alcohol, and drugs, sex, or explosive fights to feel something, anything.

I stopped running myself only this past year. I stood in place for the first time in forty-five years and discovered I no longer needed the catalyst. I metabolized everything quickly. I did not crave escape. I liked my routine and could not wait to return to it. That stillness is the signal. External propulsion ceases to be interesting because internal coherence generates its own movement.

The Roam offers Iza and Zai that coherence at thirteen and ten instead of forty-five.

This is the way Embodied legacy is supposed to work. Once you, as the parent, understand it, you can hand it backward and forward immediately. I handed it to my parents and to my children. In 1 year alone, the progress towards soul work has been extraordinary.

What Alignment Looks Like

Alignment is the body, the work, and the day’s rhythm running on the same frequency.

For Iza, it looks like a morning she actually slept into and enjoyed her dreams, long stretches of thinking, ideas approached from multiple angles, and given time to settle into something. She might get through 1/8 of what school would demand, but she understands 10x more. She has Mentors and Elders instead of eleven teachers. Her graphic novel as the spine.

For Zai it looks like 3D printing in the studio, building and constructing with wood, learning new project techniques with new materials and then learning coding and about emotions.

For me it looks like two hours of stillness every morning, work in the off-hours, the kids first at all costs, and my own writing moving again now that the architecture supports it instead of fighting it.

When the body agrees with the calendar, prosperity radiates. That is Gene Key 14 in its full expression. That is the elder state, practiced early.

The Invitation

The Roam is one family’s answer to a question every parent is quietly carrying: what if the system is not the baseline and we are allowed to build something that feels better?

We are. The permission is and always has been available. Most of us were trained to forget that and told that the only way we could live was by accepting a fatalistic approach to life and believing that money, material objects, and escape were our only plan and currency. This article isn’t about how to make it all work, but I will write about that shortly because there are realities of living in this ‘prescribed life,’ and unless you are actually independently wealthy, it’s very hard to make that work.

I will write about The Roam here as we go. The curriculum, the failures, the surprises, the math projects, the books, the elders, the rhythm. If you are a parent thinking about something different, or a teacher inside the system trying to keep your soul intact, or an Elder wondering how to offer what you know, I would love your company.

This is co-creation in practice.

Welcome to The Roam.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

I told the kids the theme in advance, “This month, we are digging into Consumption... What we take, what it costs us to take it, and what happens when the thing we made starts feeding on us.” Then I paused and said the word. Cannibalism. Iza said, “Finally. I have been waiting (in December, I asked her what she w…

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This lesson sits inside the May question of who eats whom. AI is the most powerful tool of your generation. The work is learning to use it while staying the author of your own thinking. We will look at what AI actually does under the hood, see one example up close in Rishabh’s company, and then study your own projects as the practice ground.

Part 1: What…

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The lesson runs in two halves. The first half is real anthropology, where the goal is to move past the shock into the meaning. The second half is the mirror, where the kids name the modern versions of the same instinct. The point is to see that consumption is one of the oldest human acts, and the form has changed more than the impulse underneath it.

Part…

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Watching Iza come alive over five weeks, meeting challenges head-on and devouring them by the end, made my heart skip a beat. There was a clarity that arrived in her that I hadn’t seen in years.

This kid is brilliant. Truly brilliant. And she has been living under a cloud for the last five years, a reality I didn’t fully understand until now.

We went through a testing phase together this month, feeling our way into what actually works. That part wasn’t surprising. What surprised me was how natural everything felt on the other side of it. I don’t get caught up in box-checking, final exams, or perfect grammar. I care about integration. I care about whether the learning is alive in her body, shaping how she thinks, questions, and creates.

Recess looked like this.

Two weeks ago, Zai joined us full-time. I hadn’t planned on that happening until September. But something in me said: we can do this.

The onboarding process with Zai has been completely different. He processes faster than I do. He’s sharper. Quicker. I’m often struggling to keep up—and struggling to give him material that actually challenges him at his age.

On Monday, I gave him algebra. He said it was hard at first. By the end of the lesson, he had figured it out, and told me he loved it.

I don’t know many ten-year-olds who think mastering algebra is a blast. Zai genuinely does. And then he announced he is going to be a famous actor and could I get him an audition? Okay kid, let’s go.

He’s also returned to photography, sparked by Javi’s influence years ago. This week he filmed the multi-room igloo he built out of a snowdrift, an absolutely epic structure, which led him to start building a 3D model of a boat. He’s now working on that alongside Iza.

When I look back at the last six weeks, the volume and depth of work feels almost unreal. We read and understood Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We studied The Giver and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. We held debates on rules, ethics, life versus death, perception vs. reality. We explored atomic structure, chemistry, attraction and repulsion, and how negative and positive ions shape relationship.

We talked about the Snow Moon—how it amplified energy, and how the snow itself calmed it.

I’ve always loved teaching. I’ve always loved being a student of life. But this is the first time I can honestly say I’ve learned far more than I expected to.

Today we began digging into universal laws: religion, society, our relationship with nature. We talked about how original systems get layered, misinterpreted, and distorted until they become industries instead of wisdom.

Did you know chewing gum originated as dental hygiene? People once chewed tree resins and herbs to support gum and tooth health. Over time, that practice turned into candy, which then created entire industries around dentistry, floss, and oral care.

This pattern is everywhere.

When you trace something back to its origin, the truth usually reveals itself, both in the word and in the outcome. Watching the kids recognize this cause-and-effect thinking has been fascinating.

I once asked someone I interviewed for a podcast whether she felt guilty creating food products that harmed people. She said, “We had to do that to figure it out. Now we can use the technology to build the future.”

I understand the logic. But I feel differently.

We’ve built an entire world around circular exchange, flow, when the flow already existed. We just monetized it. What we call “progress” is often simply an exchange between two things to create dollars. Universities, industries, markets, sports, even social structures are built around competition and value extraction.

So the question becomes: what is the real value?

Value only exists when someone recognizes it. Covets it. So what happens when you stop performing for value and focus on simply being enough?

That’s where my questions rest right now.

Feedback loops matter. I’ve been intentionally gathering them from the kids, not grades, but reflections. Signals. Their internal knowing.

This quarter is baseline work for everything that comes next.

• January was perception vs. reality.

• February is intuition; knowing before you’re told.

• March will focus on the collective and we’ll move into consciousness and game theory: how societies have gamified existence from the beginning, creating wars between worlds. The Matrix and The Hunger Games are already on deck.

At the start of this semester, I promised myself I wouldn’t dumb anything down. And I haven’t. I’ve explained things differently, yes, but I’ve been stunned by what the kids are capable of holding.

What we’re missing in a homogenized education system isn’t intelligence. It’s trust.

We built a nation on industrialization and commercialization. Factories needed linear thinkers. But when you step outside the box, the system doesn’t know what to do with you.

Robots will run the factory floor. Humans will need to learn how to think.

I’m deeply grateful to Rishabh for teaching me how to work with emerging systems rather than against them. His company, Peer Robotics, exists to amplify human capability, not replace it. That distinction matters.

Learning was never meant to be done alone. Real learning happens when you’re allowed to breathe. Once you’re taught how to think, knowledge arrives like water, air, sunlight, directly nourishing the soul.

Today is my first day alone in three weeks. The kids are back at Two Coyotes after snowstorms and closures. Sitting in this quiet, knowing they are safe, cared for, and guided by people I trust carries real weight for me.

I didn’t realize how much anxiety I carried when they were in school, always wondering what they were learning, how every minute was being filled. Now I see the truth: space is where integration happens.

Unstructured time is not absence.
It is assimilation.

A writer I deeply respect wrote today about being alone as a woman, and the necessity of unclaimed time. It echoed everything I’m feeling.

This work feels right.
And I know, without needing proof, that we’re doing something that matters.

With Love,

Rache

🤍

Some resources if you are interested:

• Curiosity Club

• Chem Lab

The questions you keep skipping over…

My friends, you are missing the good stuff!

This is the juicy and delicious stuff that really has meaning in this world.

Most of the time, we take those questions for granted as absolutes and just say, “Who knows?” These are the questions that surface every day, only to be dismissed because they feel inconvenient, strange, or a little too bizarre to even ask. Your inner thoughts would be revealed. OMG! But honestly, sometimes, they are the questions that surprise you simply because they exist.

Curiosity Club is an opportunity to give yourself permission to just ask.

Breathe into yourself, with your hand on your belly, and be present in the world, not letting any single question pass you by. In that moment, you are empowering yourself to be the master of your domain, to be in charge.

Movement matters. A 30–45 minute walk is the catalyst to get that blood flowing.
Then notice what shows up.

When the body moves, the mind loosens. Patterns soften. The nervous system settles just enough for quieter truths to surface. You’re no longer forcing insight—you’re creating the conditions for it.

Some questions to play with:

• What did I just see that I’ve passed a hundred times before?

• What do I think about regularly but never actually ask?

• What surprised me today—and why?

• What question keeps returning, even when I try to ignore it?

Just notice.

Curiosity will wait for space… so don’t try to rush yourself to ask. Just hold space and calm and then see what comes up.

Give it a try.

And if you want to go deeper, try forest bathing out. It’s magical:

Curiosity Club Question: Why is there a gap between the rock and the ice? Is the rock warm? Does the material create friction?

Your Siblings are Your First Teachers

Listen. Pay Attention to What They Want You to Know.

When my brother Michael was little, he would ask a BAZILLION questions in the day. Some of my favorite ones to recall:
Why is the sky blue?
Why is a mailbox called a mailbox?
Why do we have to do that again?

It was SOOOO annoying. And also kind of interesting. He asked questions I would never have thought about, that I just didn’t even question. And because of Michael, I learned a lot and came to understand the importance of a curious mind. That mind is what has kept me semi-awake throughout my life… even when I was medicated, I still always knew something was off.

Why does my given name need to be my name?
Why do I need to live in America?
Why do I have to be old to start a company?
Why do I have to make money?
Why can’t I buy a house at 20 and get married?
Why can’t I move to Latin America with a baby?
Why can’t I work in finance with an art degree?
Why is electricity the only option?
Why can’t I homeschool my kids?
Why do we have school in the first place?

And it became the story of my life, asking big questions and moving in a different direction. One who was not convinced that what we had was right.

Actually, I have been trying to figure out since I was 3 years old why every adult I knew was unhappy and held so much pain and suffering in their bodies and faces. Fear.

But more of that later.

Read More on The Power of Why

The Real A-ha Doesn’t Happen When You Get the Curiosity Itch Scratched

It happens when curiosity pulls you far enough that you want to explore the throughline of all things.

Iza started with a simple question about the human body: how it actually grows, not just that it does. That question didn’t stop there. It led her to animals. Then patterns. Then biology.

She learned that alligators keep growing and regularly shed layers of their skin as their bodies expand. That lobsters grow inside a rigid shell until it becomes a limitation, then shed it entirely. They enter a brief, fragile phase with a soft shell before it hardens again, one of the reasons lobsters can live close to a hundred years.

We noticed the same thing happening on our plants. When a new leaf emerges, it’s thin, soft, and extremely vulnerable. Over time, structure forms. Strength comes later.

That’s when the question shifted…. from what grows to how growth actually works.

And that led us straight into cellular biology and what cells are doing in those moments of expansion, exposure, and rebuilding.

The pattern is growth through exposure and vulnerability.

Across biology, growth doesn’t happen by adding layers on top of what’s already rigid. It happens by outgrowing an existing structure, temporarily losing protection, and then rebuilding stronger. So, actually, our growth is from becoming ready for the next stage.

• Lobsters grow by molting. Their cells divide and expand inside a rigid shell until the shell becomes a constraint. They shed it, enter a soft, exposed phase, and then rebuild a larger shell. During that window, they are highly vulnerable—but without it, growth would stop. This repeated cellular process is one reason lobsters can live exceptionally long lives.

• Alligators continuously grow and shed outer layers of skin as their tissues expand. The shedding allows regeneration and prevents constraint as the body increases in size.

• New plant leaves emerge soft, thin, and highly sensitive. The cells are rapidly dividing and elongating, with minimal structural reinforcement. Over time, cellulose thickens, cuticles form, and the leaf becomes resilient. Early vulnerability is not a flaw—it’s a prerequisite for expansion.

At the cellular level, this moment is driven by:

• Cell division (mitosis)

• Cell differentiation (cells taking on specific roles)

• Temporary reduction in structural rigidity to allow expansion

• Subsequent reinforcement (proteins, membranes, structural fibers)

The key insight:
Growth requires a temporary loss of protection.

Biology doesn’t optimize for constant safety. It optimizes for adaptation.

When systems—cells, organisms, ecosystems—become too rigid, growth stalls. When they allow controlled vulnerability, they evolve.

That’s the real a-ha: Vulnerability isn’t weakness in nature.
It’s the active phase of becoming larger, stronger, and more complex.

For me as a mom there is SO MUCH MORE to unpack from that statement, but for my beautiful 12-year old, that’s a pretty cool learning to start.

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Feel free to ask questions! Reach out.

Few examples from this month:

Curiosity Club

What Are You Curious About? (Perception & Systems)

Before we begin, name one real question you’re already asking, but you didn’t quite know the answer to?

Here are some examples from Iza to help you think about it:

• Why does Willow lick her paw and then clean her ear?

• How do tumors develop?

• Why are squirrels so annoying?

• How is the human body constantly changing shape?

There’s no wrong question. Ask away.

Movement First

Take a 30–45 minute walk.
No podcast. No agenda. Just movement.

Notice what your mind returns to when it isn’t being directed.

Here are some other prompts to always think about:

• What does the sun do to the shadows today?

• Does my face feel cold or warm?

• What does the ground feel like under my feet?

• How does the air move around my body when I move?

• What do I feel in this moment?

• What did I notice that I hadn’t noticed before?

Jot Down Some Observations

• Color of the leaves or the ground

• The way the light moved

• Time of day

• How your body felt

• What you heard from the wind, the birds, the sounds around you.

Now what Questions arose?

• How come the cold temperature made a bigger space around the rock this time with the snow?

• How come my face almost felt like it was stinging from the cold air on it?

• Why was that bird calling out in that particular pattern?

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No question is silly; reach out to me if you have anything that comes up.

Curiosity Club Prompt

Option 1: Optical Illusions

Science Lens

Optical illusions happen because vision is not a camera. The brain predicts what it expects to see and fills in the gaps using shortcuts, context, and prior experience. Most visual processing happens in the visual cortex (V1–V5), but perception is shaped just as much by memory and expectation as by the eyes themselves.

Why This Matters
Illusions show us that perception favors efficiency over accuracy. The brain chooses speed, energy conservation, and pattern recognition—even if that means distorting reality.

Key Mechanisms

• Top-down processing (expectation shaping perception)

• Lateral inhibition (contrast exaggeration)

• Depth and perspective bias

• Motion detection errors

• Contextual priming

Explore Nature

• Out in nature look at the illusions that you see around you

• What is hiding just below the surface?

• What is present in front of you?

• Flip your head upside down, what do you see?

Look up Online

• Why the Müller-Lyer illusion changes perceived line length

• Why static images can trigger motion-detecting neurons

• How color contrast alters brightness perception

Curiosity Question (choose one)
If the brain alters reality to conserve energy, how often do we mistake efficiency for truth in everyday life?

Add to Curiosity List (Required)
What’s the difference between seeing something clearly and understanding it accurately?

Curiosity Club Prompt

Option 2: Surveillance Systems

Systems Lens

Surveillance systems are networks that collect data, recognize patterns, and predict behavior. They use cameras, sensors, metadata, and machine-learning models to monitor and anticipate activity.

Why This Matters
Surveillance doesn’t just observe behavior—it changes it. When people know they’re being watched, decision-making, creativity, and risk tolerance shift.

Key Components

• Computer vision (object and facial recognition)

• Pattern recognition and anomaly detection

• Data aggregation and feedback loops

• Behavioral prediction models

• Bias amplification from training data

Explore in Nature

• Sit quietly for 20 minutes… what changes in the space around you? What new animals do you hear or see?

• Watch your cat watch the birds for 10 minutes. What is the bird doing?

• What does life look like?

Look Up Online

• How facial recognition accuracy varies by lighting and skin tone

• How constant observation impacts stress and neural load

• Where prediction fails when context is removed

Curiosity Question (choose one)
At what point does observation stop protecting a system and start controlling it?

Add to Curiosity List (Required)
How does being watched change who we become—even if no one intervenes?

Examples from our school program

Rules, Nature, and Self-Authority
January 15–20

1/15 — Signal from Nature

Question: How does nature correct imbalance?

Look for examples:

• Overgrowth and pruning

• Predator–prey dynamics

• Forest fires and regeneration

Optional creative bridge:
What in Pokémon resembles a real biological or ecological system?

Write one paragraph connecting the fictional system to a real natural pattern.

1/16 — Walking Inquiry

Prompt:
Where do rules help me? Where do they limit me?

Think about this on your hike.
Don’t solve it. Let examples surface.

Write when you get back.

A starting reflection from Iza that should inspire. We are reading The Giver:
Rules exist to reduce harm and create safety. But sometimes they do too much and then we don’t hear ourselves anymore.

1/20 — Reflection

Question:
What rules does nature follow without authority?

Nature doesn’t enforce rules, it responds to conditions.

• Gravity doesn’t punish—it acts.

• Bodies don’t moralize imbalance—they signal it.

• Ecosystems don’t argue—they recalibrate.

Close with this:
Which rules in my life are responsive—and which ones exist only because someone said so?

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It’s the first day of homeschool.

My first day as a teacher.

The kids' first day seeing me in a new role and beginning their first chapter as active, intentional beings of their own destiny.

When you make a snow angel, the velocity and arc of your arms determine the pattern formed because you’re applying force over a curved path, displacing snow through shear and compression. The outcome changes depending on the density and moisture content of the snow: light, powdery snow disperses easily, while heavier, wetter snow compacts and holds sharper edges. Snow over solid ground behaves differently than snow over ice, because the substrate stiffness beneath it affects how energy is absorbed or reflected back into the snowpack. At the microscopic level, each snowflake has a unique crystalline lattice structure, shaped by temperature and humidity during formation—no two are identical—yet together they form an organized system with predictable physical properties.

As Zai moves through the snow, walking requires repeatedly lifting and driving his legs downward, increasing frictional resistance and energy expenditure. A sled, by contrast, distributes weight across a smooth surface and reduces friction through sliding contact, allowing it to glide efficiently over the snow rather than displacing it vertically. We will use both of these technics in our physics lesson this week.

For the past four months, Iza, Zai, and I have been homeschooling together two days a week. During the day they would go to Two Coyotes for 6-hours and learn about nature and their systems, beginning with wild-learning and earning notches in their belt on survival skills. Then in the evenings I would do their school day with them. It was intense and actually pretty challenging to mimic what the school was putting together for them, because a lot of it I found irrelevant. I found myself researching better ways to do the work, or better ways to teach and define lessons and advocating for the kids differently.

We all agreed with their therapist Taylor and with the school system that it made sense to do this for real. It’s a wow and a woosh for me… so much learning over the break to get ready for this moment.

What is learning actually?
What is the importance of certain material that is required?
What role does learning place on society and chaos vs. order?
What does it mean to prepare yourself dimensionally for the world?

I really have so many questions.

But the most important element I want the kids to take away from our time together this year is how to live in a state of endless curiosity for life.

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I Didn’t Know Then What I Know Now

Today, Iza begins full-time, 7th grade. Zai will follow in September. I’m giving myself nine months to learn how to be the best teacher I can be for a child who is deeply thoughtful, intrinsically motivated, and quietly observant first. Iza is capable of doing this on her own and she wants it. Zai needs a little more of a push.

I don’t take changes like this lightly—especially when they significantly alter how my own work day is structured. I mean, as a single mom and provider I honestly must be nuts doing this, but I have to say that things seems to arrive at just the right divine timing for me. I have mapped out a plan, but not the full understanding of how it will unfold.

This decision came from many years of observing the kids in their environment and landing it as the only choice.

We moved to Connecticut because of the schools, and we pay the hefty taxes to ensure the quality of the schools remains intact. Each kid is given a $21.8k budget a year in Simsbury schools. That’s freaking incredible, like a Private Day School budget. When we fled San Francisco during the pandemic, we landed in Bend, Oregon, trying to figure out what was next. I wrote about this recently, but we used a Google Search: “safe place to live, no fires, great schools” and the results were 15-pages deep targeted by Connecticut. It was actually like a no-brainer and wild to find such a specific signal.

So we moved, and we pay the second-highest taxes in the country to have the “best public schools.”

And we landed in the right house, the right place in the woods by chance. It brought me Rishabh (and now Himanshi), it brought me Kirra and it brought us an entirely different life we never knew we would find.

The real learning that took me the last 5 years to unwind (nearly 6)—those are the results of schools that meet all the standard requirements and output the kids onto the track of life. They go to Ivy League institutions or top 10 big schools, and then land them in finance and engineering careers. They get soccer and baseball scholarships and are all-around decent citizens. It is an in-the-box kind of activity that keeps you rooted in society at the same frequency and status quo. “Unrocking the lifeboat.” Anyone who tries to do something different is looked at like they are crazy and wearing 10 different patterns and shades of color all at once while standing upside down and spinning around.

I was so sheltered when we moved here… I didn’t know enough to know different or better, and I thought only the keys to a country-club lifestyle were the pinnacle. I was NOT AWAKE. I was still very much in full belief that the most critical trajectory was getting the kids into boarding schools and then into Ivy’s and finally to begin at Goldman and work your way forward into elite society. All of this is fine as long as you are awake to the process and guiding yourself. When you set it and forget it is when things actually start unwinding.

But spirit was ready for me and implanted me in a place where I could be the bridge to both worlds… without me knowing it. When we moved here, we were sent 2.5 hours north because of a house. I reluctantly purchased it as a vacation home, assuming I would still work and be in the City most of the time, which was 3 hours away. I found Two Coyotes right away, and the kids spent summers outside learning in nature. Weekends were for creating and making in our studio. I hiked every single day, and when I went to NYC, I had less and less energy for the industry and the life I had always known. Our whole world shifted… and pretty quickly.

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The Soap Box

Here’s what I know now…

Everything I just mentioned about Ivy League Schools and Finance careers is a low-frequency activity when you think that it is the pinnacle of success. Disclaimer: If you choose this career because you know you are in the game and operating as such, you will have a different outcome physically. But choosing it as truth and success is like getting on the moving walkway of life and pushing the “on” button… at a high volume and speed. You will grind yourself into the ground, burn out, and be forced to take a break, and then do it all over again until you get out of the cycle. It works for a while until spirit comes in and forces a change.

Most people will get cancer or some autoimmune issue. Everyone is constantly in flux between chubby and skinny, and then they would go to drugs like Ozempic to lose the weight. It was this fight-or-flight mode for my entire career. Most of my colleagues were gamblers and alcoholics, running on empty until their bodies gave out. You were rewarded by pushing through the pain.

The most significant signal was learning about acid reflux, and its root cause… it’s a great body disrupter you don’t think could be anything but diet, because it seems to correlate with rich foods like steak and red wine when consumed too late at night (literally every single night of my 25-year career in food and finance). And it is an internal experience meant for each of us alone. On a somatic level, it’s a private signal that happens when something has crossed a boundary, arrived too fast, stayed too long, or wasn’t fully integrated—emotionally, relationally, or temporally. It’s basically a chief indicator of emotional dysregulation. And it happens all the time in business. Everyone complains about Acid Reflux. Why? Because we are pushing ourselves too hard. The burning is the body's way of asking for attention. Medication can lower the volume initially, but we ignore it, and then it becomes a chronic issue.

All these elements are what keep the false success train moving forward on the wheel of life, and we are in full acceptance of it.

And why? Because it makes us feel productive. Because everyone in our life said it was the right thing to do. To push through the pain showed that you were working extra hard for society.

Apparently, standing in place and breathing light into your soul is something as a “woo woo” activity; it doesn’t pay the bills.

That’s right, because bills are part of the system, and according to my parents and probably yours, we have to pay them.

I feel different now. I wake up and breathe light into my soul. I stand inside nature and am free. I sit quietly for two hours every morning, alone. My mind is free, my body is free, and my soul is filled with light and purpose.

Bills? They will get figured out. Or not. But no one can take my light or my soul from me.

What Will They Do With Their Life?

They are already doing it.

If Iza and Zai land in college at any point, I will be surprised. They are both motivated, self-starters with their desire to be founders. Zai started a business last year that he closed (Sobnaf), and Iza has been toying with a couple of projects that could really get her out in the world with an artist career path behind her in no time. They don’t feel like professors can really teach them anything they can’t learn on YouTube, and they believe that they are learning at the speed of the technology being created. They look to mentors, not teachers.

It’s next gen.

And if they decide on school programs, it will be MIT, Carnegie Mellon, or CalArts. They will go because they know society needs these credentials to appreciate their talents, not because their self-worth demands it. They will know it is the quickest path to what they want and will use it as a tool.

It is not surprising that both kids have struggled in school over the last 18 months.

First, Zai had a teacher for 4th grade who needed a break last year, and in the midst of a crazy year for our family, it was ROUGH to watch him be pummeled emotionally by a teacher who just needed her own break and was cracking wide open to her own spiritual journey. He is doing so well this year in school with his new teacher in 5th grade that we are keeping him there. And he is with his 3 best friends.

This year Iza’s needs weren’t being met in Connecticut’s traditional middle school program. She’s introspective. She needs time. She learns best when ideas are approached from multiple angles and allowed to settle. The reality of a 7:15am start (5:30am wake up call), eleven teachers, and compressed attention didn’t match how she actually learns—or who she is. I was already doing double time after school just to support integration and I think it was frustrating for the whole school to have her as a smart kid who needed a lot of extra attention and support.

So we chose more time.

Time to co-create. Time to think. Time to ask better questions.

Time to begin today as the first day of their lives. We don’t need to wait until they graduate high school to pick a direction; we need them to be curious and thoughtful and to learn the roots of real life. To learn how to think, how to be curious to solve problems that are real and meaningful, and to learn how to find answers.

Look at farmers’ kids. They are up at dawn milking and mucking out stalls. And in my experience, they are more balanced, regulated, and clear on who they are than any of us combined. They are resilient.

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It’s pretty simple. Studio on the left is where the art room is and we worked hard to organize it all. From 3D printing to sticker and painting, we will have a full figure drawing class, and then work on geometry by making objects three-dimensionally. On the right is our weekly Whole Foods shop. I love JoyDays because I know the owner, Amy. Here is an example of a deal within a deal and our math project. Also understanding why they are on sale and what is unique about the product over another. So comparison, budgeting, math, and testing will all be part of this discovery and research on the owner and understanding why they came up with this one. Maybe even a call to check in on Amy and team and see what’s been going on for JoyDays. GET CURIOUS.

New Beginnings are Fresh & Full of Surprise

This is what Embodying Legacy looks like in real life… and it was surprising to me just how excited I was this morning to stop planning and start fulfilling a dream I didn’t know I was capable of executing.

And I have paused greatly on my own external facing work over the last 4 months while I figured out how to integrate everything new into my life with client projects and homeschool, so today feels like a breath of fresh air and relief that I can now move forward with my work again.

This is really what it is all about for me: shared construction of our lives together, curiosity, and co-creation for our family legacy. It requires active thinking, an active set of tools, and our mind in motion.

I had children because I wanted to leave something meaningful behind in the world, and that requires intention as much as action. Evenings and weekends aren’t enough. We need a different rhythm that gives us more lifeforce to play with. More energy.

Today feels like my first day of school, too. I barely slept—equal parts anticipation and excitement.

This month’s theme is Perception of Reality.

We’re starting with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and later revisiting The Truman Show. The goal isn’t to be abstract or overly “spiritual,” but to help Iza learn how to see beneath the surface—how to question default narratives, notice assumptions, and stay curious when answers feel too glazing over the surface.

Enjoying learning matters more than anything. So that’s the goal of this year… learning how to learn and enjoying it.

Iza is also launching her own Substack alongside her graphic novel, Escaping the Labs. More on that soon.

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Got something to share about education and supporting this next stage of evolution for The Brand Fam? Please share in the comments so we can All Rise together.

It’s Part of My Evolution Too

Over the break, I crossed several internal thresholds—new understanding, new alignment, deeper soul work. Self-worth came up at every corner, and I focused my energy on understanding frequency and the possibilities around what I am capable of. I have to actually teach myself before I can teach the kids. This year is about putting that insight of Self-Worth into action. At home. At work. In how I show up every day for myself and for my life and my purpose. I know my purpose now, but I have to create space for it to actualize.

I went on a hike with my beautiful friend Ellen yesterday and learned something new… that is a new old learning. It is a totally unusual “a ha!” for me because the specific learning been an obsession for years (10+) that I never correlated with myself: Dopamine hits.

More on what I obsessed over later, but the punchline is this: I have been first looking into why we use quick dopamine hits to suppress our emotions, leveraging them like the Krispy Kreme Doughnut to glaze over the pain.

So, naturally, after 10 years of looking at this for society and realizing that actually I was doing the same thing, was a “OMG, how bizarre that I didn’t see it,” moment. Here we go on this new learning… the only way that I was able to make change and release myself from the shackles of society was to move, to fly, to do something crazy. The goal was to leave the safety net of security. I would ride the line on financials, or leap into new things in a moment’s notice just to see what would happen. I tested myself, my body, and my mind at every corner. And it has always worked to get me to where I am now. But it was a learning that I didn’t know I was doing… I just did it.

Something new happened over the break, and it was totally out of body. I stopped running from my life and myself, and I stood in place for the first time. Naturally, I did this effort without trying. I saw something new I didn’t expect, and it freaked me out: Stability. Stability not the way most people think of it (I think mostly financial security and consistency, rooted in one place, clarity on your life). I saw stability in myself, my abilities, my worth.

I didn’t need anything external to support me in this newfound moment in my life. I liked my routine; I couldn’t wait to get back to it. I didn’t need anything external: I metabolized alcohol immediately and didn’t even really want it, I left my glass full most of the time over the holiday, and I didn’t crave anything… partners or gifts or travel or escaping my reality. I didn’t want more of anything.

I realized during this break that jumping into the world and falling without a net gave me a dopamine release that created a catalyst to a false growth cycle… it worked until I taught myself how to do this without the catalyst. I didn’t need that self-inflicted and invented dopamine hit anymore. It was such an out-of-body experience that I was actually bored. I mean, I have always created excitement by jumping without the net. So this is such a bizarre feeling. Each time I would uncover and release the surpressed emotion, I would eventually dig myself out of the pain into the healthy, desired state of my soul reality.

Ellen helped me to see that even with my name, I had jumped around with identities all my life to push my boundaries on releasing to the next stage. The throughline is this: I have landed. It took me 45 years to come back home to myself, to integrate it and the learnings and to arrive ready to become an elder and to finally be free enough of myself to teach my children; to bring them into this next realm of their life.

This is co-creation in practice.

Wish me luck,
Rache

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