The Effects of Butterflies

Your voice. Your creative expression. Your power. They were never too much. You were never too much. No, you were just forced exiled. And now it's time to reclaim all of it. Ayu spent years as a magazine editor quietly starving her own creativity while she fed everyone else's words. Then, she gave birth to her son, and the floodgates within her broke open. Grief, rage, joy. All of it poure...

Ashley was a junior in college, living in a dorm room, with a profound feeling of being lost, and a deeper knowing that her whole life was about to transform. She needed guidance. So her mother handed her a phone number and said, I think you should talk to this psychic my friend Susan loves. Jeannine. Eight and a half years later, Ashley is still following the thread that call started. Jeannine Ki...

What if the reason you can't look at your bank account isn't laziness — it's a wound that's been centuries in the making? Emily Ersher came to do Ashley's taxes. They ended up talking for two hours about shadow work, eagle spirit guides circling outside the window, and why the thing that makes you flinch every time wealth gets close might be the exact same thing that got women...

Chelsea had a full-body panic attack on a Chicago bus commute home. Not because something was wrong — because everything was fine. Stable job, great coworkers, paycheck, health insurance. And that's what terrified her. This was going to be the rest of her life. Ten days of PTO a year. Forever. Until she couldn't anymore. She quit the job, moved to Australia, started living like the movie c...

She closed her books for the first time in nine years. Not because she had to, but because her Higher Self was screaming that it was time . Full availability suddenly gone, just space to write and dissolve and rebuild. This is what it looks like when you Feng Shui your entire life so the next version of you has room to breathe. Kate Van Horn is a tarot reader, spiritual mentor, Feng Shui consultan...

I used to think I was broken. Not in a dramatic way — more in a quiet, maddening way. Like, why do I keep ending up here? Different year, different person, different city — same feeling. Same pattern. Same crash out. And then I heard a quote by Carl Jung that changed everything: "Until you make your unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate." That was the mo...

A Rotten Fridge, Clogged Pipes, and My Initiation into New York City I five months in near-total silence on my grandparents' home in Topeka, Kansas trusting myself and embracing the quiet nothingness of the in-between. After being sent a blaring sign from The Universe that it was time to leave Denver and move to New York City, I knew I needed to deepen my relationship to myself and nervous sys...

What if play isn't just for kids? What if it's the practice that keeps you tethered to yourself when everything falls apart? Rachael Renae spent over a decade as a civil engineer, building what looked like a stable life while her creative soul screamed to get out. Then her dad got sick. She moved home. He passed away six months later. And suddenly, she couldn't fake it anymore. So, she...

The Power of Ravishing The F*ck Out of Your Life with Giana Cerasia What if shadow work isn't about digging through your trauma—but about throwing the most exquisite dinner party for every version of yourself you've been taught to exile? Giana Cerasia has been a lot of things: a Title I teacher with 150 students a day, a prison reformer, a government lobbyist fighting for educational equit...

What does it take to completely blow up your entire life and hit the hard reset button? Well, my friend Edila has done it MULTIPLE times. A couple years ago, she sold everything she owned (literally gave her furniture away to people on her apartment floor), bought a one-way ticket to Mexico, and hasn't looked back in four years. She's traveled and worked across 15+ countries, rebuilt her b...

Someone cast a spell on Heated Rivalry. There's no other explanation. My friend KP and I are backkkk for round two of what is now our (and your) emotional support group. It's been a month since we first watched the show, and instead of subsiding, the possession and obsession has simply only gotten worse. I'm glued to my phone. My entire feed is Heated Rivalry. Anderson Cooper is talkin...

How does a low-budget show about closeted hockey players become a revolutionary moment that leads to collective mania and lowkey psychosis? My friend KP — social media wizard, editorial content strategist, and fellow queer human — and I both got completely possessed by a show called Heated Rivalry three weeks ago. It's about two professional hockey players (one gay, one bi) who've been sec...

What do you do when everything falls apart? My friend Jonathan Koe — mystical astrologer, energy worker, Pisces sun with two master's degrees, and one of my favorite people — just got laid off from his job in insurance. And instead of spiraling (okay, maybe a little bit of spiraling has been involved), we're talking about The Void. That space where you don't know what's next. Where...

What if a butterfly flapping its wings could create a tornado on the other side of the world? And what if your tiny, messy, imperfect choices could ripple out and transform your entire life? Welcome to The Effects of Butterflies — the podcast that exists so you can find the inspiration to have The Audacity™️, make decisions you know are right for you, and take leaps of faith to finally live life o...