This weekend (Feb, 2025), a private Infinity Container was created in our ceremonial yurt space — a container built around attunement and secure attachment, and what it means to actually be met. I wrote this in reflection of some things that came up for me as the space holder, and wanted to share it.
The Octopus & The Whale: A Journey of Attunement
The octopus tentacles — the ones that reach out to control, to manipulate. The ones that grasp at others without trust or regard… they say, "you're doing this wrong, I have to fix it." They can tangle us in confusion, codependence, judgement, distancing us — even from ourselves. And sometimes, we feel them grabbing at us from the outside, urging us to fit in, to comply, to be something we are not. Urging us to lose our boundaries and values, tangling us in the weeds of other people's emotions and truths that don't match our own.
Yet, if we look closer from an integrated state — with compassion — we see these tentacles as protectors trying to organize chaos. Most of the time, they are born from missing moments of attunement — the felt sense of being truly seen and met. We all have tentacles. We lose ourselves in the tentacles. But there is another way.
Enter the Whale
The whale says: meet this place with heart. Not bravado, but an integrated, brave heart. When we receive enough attunement — especially in early life (the first seven years) and in key moments of growth — we develop an inner trust. This trust helps us navigate chaos without suctioning to the tentacles. It tells us: if I let go, I will be found. I will find an environment of resonance, of whale energies. I will not be lost. It is brave to trust this process. When we are given enough moments of intuitive attunement with a caregiver, our nervous systems have more fortification and resiliency to trust more easily.
Attunement and Secure Attachment: Why It Matters
If you are a space-holder, a doctor, a parent, a caregiver, a ceremonialist, a practitioner, a teacher — you have a rare and profound opportunity: to practice attunement.
Attunement says: I feel you, and I feel you as separate and valuable from myself. It says: I notice your body language, your energy, your voice, your behaviors — and I respond with loving presence. Attunement is an integrative practice. It is valuing all parts involved in the frequencies present and feeling their essence without judgement or an anxious need to create change. Attunement is the greatest predictor of attachment style later in life — whether we develop secure, avoidant, anxious, or disorganized attachment, the categories John Bowlby's attachment theory first mapped.
All of us had moments where we were met with deep presence. Some of us more than others. All of us had moments where we were in the company of another, but not their presence — where we were scared inside, and no one noticed. Or maybe it was noticed, but avoided.
Personal Reflections on Attunement
My mother must have given me rich moments of attunement. And yet, I also know she was likely sick with leukemia for much of our time together. It took me much time to remember and practice a sense of true security. After she died in 1989, I would retreat behind the forsythia bushes to dissociate — not into a void, but into something alive. The dirt held me. The tiny yellow flowers on sturdy branches stood in community around me. Nature attuned to me when human presence could not. My sister attuned to me, but she was young herself and still needing care. And then I met Nana Joysee, and I learned what it felt like to receive attunement — to really be given space to find myself. I also learned how to attune with quantum and access the infinite.
Attunement Is a Practice
In safe medicine ceremony, our neurochemical armor relaxes and we find more availability to open to attunement — trusting enough to let emotions and thoughts rise to the surface, so pain points that created the armor can surface and release. This weekend I felt myself deeply in the energetic work I learned from JoySee. I was simultaneously with her teachings, with my client, and playing in a robust Infinity Container. May we all practice this kind of connecting. May we all meet one another with presence. A lightness is achieved when this kind of resonance creates release and room for expansion.
This is also, at its root, why psychedelic integration work leans so heavily on relationship — attunement and secure attachment aren't side effects of the container, they're the mechanism.
Flag on the tier update above: I rewrote the two-option paragraph into three (Free / Practice / Practitioner) based on your note, but I'm not certain which specific features belong to which tier — I dropped "weekly 1:1 mentorship" since I didn't know whether that's a Practice or Practitioner perk, rather than guess and misplace it. If 1:1 mentorship exists on one of these tiers, tell me which and I'll add it back in the right place.
Opportunities to Practice
If you, or someone you know, are a helper, a supporter, a parent, a creator, and/or a practitioner, then most likely you — or they — need integration support too. Attunement and secure attachment aren't things we're supposed to have figured out alone. Join our growing community of beautiful souls. We are an integration platform focused on supporting the supporters, to mitigate burnout, isolation, stuckness, and overwhelm, and to proliferate inspiration, creation, and the opening of possibility into actuality.
We currently have three options: a free membership open to all, with access to our monthly community integration calls and community feed space (Community Calls occur the first Saturday of each month, 10am–11:30am PST); a Practice membership, with access to a library of integration teachings and practices, weekly process-focused sessions, and a network of incredible humans doing this work alongside you; and a Practitioner membership, for those bringing this work to their own clients and communities, with everything in Practice plus the professional layer — frameworks you can apply directly in your own practice, and a community of peers doing their own work alongside their client work. Not sure which fits? Find your membership here.