What was happening
It was a sunny Monday morning in Bali. I had just finished an hour of Kriya with Brandi, jumped into the pool, and was lying in a hot bath preparing for the day.
What was striking was that I actually felt eager to work. I wanted to get in front of my computer and work on Natasha’s systems and my own.
That eagerness was occurring alongside an experiment I hadn’t necessarily set out to conduct: lately, I had been doing a lot of my work from bed.
On the surface, that seemed like a small logistical detail. But working from bed had started exposing an entire architecture of beliefs about adulthood, work, responsibility, and what a legitimate day is supposed to look like.
What I was experiencing
I had been noticing genuine discomfort about working from bed, even though I was getting the same amount of work done, sometimes more.
The discomfort wasn’t coming from evidence that the arrangement wasn’t working. It seemed to come from what working from bed represented to me.
Lazy. Childish. Not grown up.
Somewhere inside me was a model of adulthood that said I was supposed to wake up, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, make the bed, and begin the day properly. Once the day started, I was supposed to be “on.”
Work came first. Lunch was an allowed break. Then came more work. Relaxation belonged at the end of the day, after I had fulfilled my responsibilities.
I realized I had lived inside this structure for so long that I hadn’t really recognized it as a structure.
It just felt like reality.
I could suddenly see how this had shaped my mornings. I had craved slow mornings for years, but when I gave myself one, I couldn’t actually enjoy it. Anxiety would appear and start pushing:
“Let’s go, girl. Get your shit together. What are you wasting time for?”
By 11 a.m., there would already be an internal accusation:
You don’t get to start your day at 11 o’clock.
The strange thing was that nobody was currently imposing this schedule on me.
It was happening inside me.
What I was thinking about
The question underneath all of this became much larger than whether it is acceptable to work from bed.
I was beginning to wonder how much of my life had been organized around an inherited idea of how a person, particularly a responsible adult, is supposed to function.
I know that I am smart. I know that I am responsible.
I know that I get things done.
So why should the physical location from which I do the work determine whether it counts?
And why should taking a long morning to meditate, move, swim, bathe, or make myself feel present and safe in my body be treated as delaying the “real” part of the day, especially if those things are precisely what allow me to access my intuition and creativity?
I was beginning to see a different possibility.
Maybe I don’t have to organize myself around a predetermined sequence.
Maybe I can move from my laptop in bed to my whiteboard, clean the kitchen, jump in the pool, meditate in the sun, return to creative work, and let the day take shape through what is actually available in me.
That sounds simple when written down. Inside my life, it felt radical.
What was becoming clear
One of the clearest realizations was that I wasn’t becoming less productive as I loosened the rules.
I had evidence that I was still doing the work.
What was changing was how much force I was using to make myself do it.
I was also becoming aware of transitions in a new way. I could notice when my energy for one kind of task was draining and when energy for something else was becoming available. I could distinguish, or at least begin learning to distinguish, creative energy from computer-work energy, movement from stillness, concentration from depletion.
Rather than staying locked into one mode because this is what I’m doing now, I could practice moving.
There was something deeply freeing about that.
A phrase that emerged in the conversation was responsive structure.
That feels important because I am not necessarily discovering that I don’t need structure. I may be discovering that structure can support responsiveness rather than override it.
The structure itself could potentially become:
check in → notice → choose → engage → notice → transition
rather than:
wake → prepare → work → break → work → finish → earn rest
I don’t know yet whether that is how I function best.
But it feels worth investigating.
The tension
There is an important tension here between freedom and avoidance.
I don’t want to replace one absolute rule, I must work according to a conventional schedule, with another, I must always follow whatever I feel like doing.
Those could both become forms of rigidity.
The question is how to tell the difference between a nervous system genuinely asking for a transition and a part of me avoiding something difficult.
How do I distinguish intuition from impulse?
Regulation from avoidance?
Responsibility from obligation?
Structure from control?
Pleasure from irresponsibility?
This doesn’t feel like something I can solve intellectually.
I need evidence.
The inquiry emerging
Several questions opened from this moment:
What becomes available to me when I stop organizing my life around how I think an adult is supposed to function?
What beliefs about work, responsibility, pleasure, and worth did I inherit rather than consciously choose?
What does my natural rhythm actually look like when I don’t interfere with it?
Can satisfaction itself be useful information?
What kinds of structure help my autistic nervous system without becoming another cage?
Can I create scaffolding around agency rather than predetermined behavior?
And perhaps the largest question:
What does Jess actually do when Jess is allowed to be Jess?
The tarot reading
I used those questions for a six-card tarot reading from the bath.
I pulled:
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- Temperance (XIV) for what becomes available when I stop organizing my life around how an adult is supposed to function.
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- Nine of Cups for the inherited belief about work, responsibility, or worth that I am ready to question.
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- Justice (XI) for what my natural rhythm wants me to understand about how I create.
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- Judgement (XX) for the kind of structure that could support rather than control me.
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- The Devil (XV) for what wants to emerge if responsiveness rather than obligation leads.
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- The World (XXI) for the evidence that could show me this new way of living is working.
Five of the six cards were Major Arcana, all upright.
Before I had even pulled them, I found myself smiling while reading the questions. Something in me recognized the inquiry immediately.
I said, “This is it.”
I could feel that this wasn’t merely about productivity. Control and confinement have been enormous themes in my life. I described the experience as though there had been something subconsciously “owning and ruling me” for a very long time.
And I had the sense that if I could “turn the key in this lock,” something powerful that had been dormant or trapped might become available.
The cards gave me a symbolic language for investigating that possibility.
Temperance suggested movement between states rather than maintaining one state rigidly. Justice brought me back to evidence: don’t romanticize this experiment, but don’t condemn it because it violates inherited rules either. Observe what actually happens.
Judgement raised the possibility of structures I can rise out of rather than structures that imprison me.
The Devil was particularly striking after I had just described feeling trapped by an internalized authority. One interpretation that resonated was not simply bondage, but the possibility of reclaiming desire, appetite, instinct, pleasure, embodiment, and parts of myself that had been treated as inappropriate or irresponsible.
And The World offered another possible metric for whether this experiment is working: not merely productivity, but integration.
Does my life begin to feel less divided into work Jess, creative Jess, spiritual Jess, autistic Jess, professional Jess, resting Jess, responsible Jess, embodied Jess?
Can the same person increasingly inhabit all of them?
What I was moving toward or away from
I was moving away from the assumption that responsibility requires overriding myself.
I was moving away from treating discomfort as proof that I am doing something correctly and comfort as evidence that I am being lazy.
I was moving toward observing my actual functioning.
Toward slower mornings when they are what I need.
Toward transitions.
Toward allowing different forms of work and movement to coexist within the same day.
Toward creating structures based on what helps me function rather than what makes my life resemble somebody else’s idea of adulthood.
Most importantly, I was moving toward authorship.
Not no structure.
My structure.
Why this moment may matter
I don’t yet know whether this becomes a lasting way of organizing my life.
What feels worth preserving is how significant the realization felt before I had evidence of where it would lead.
This Monday morning, working from bed stopped looking like an insignificant personal habit and became evidence of a much larger question about how much of my life I have organized around internalized rules.
I felt possibility in recognizing that.
There was a sense that something I had experienced as fixed might actually be editable.
The experiment wasn’t yet, I have discovered the correct way for me to live.
It was much closer to:
What happens if I stop assuming the rules are true and start watching myself?
Evidence captured
The concrete evidence from this moment included:
→ The original Monday morning voice/text reflection after Kriya, swimming, and while taking a bath.
→ My observation that I had recently been doing substantial work from bed without a reduction in output.
→ The six-question tarot inquiry.
→ The six-card spread: Temperance, Nine of Cups, Justice, Judgement, The Devil, and The World.
→ My immediate reaction before pulling the cards:
smiling and recognizing, “This is it.”
→ My description of the underlying experience as feeling controlled, trapped, or ruled by something subconscious.
→ The emerging idea of documenting my naturally occurring rhythm rather than immediately designing a new ideal schedule.
Open threads
The next thing to observe is not whether I can invent a better productivity system.
It is what actually happens when I stop imposing one.
What time do I naturally begin?
Where do I want to work?
How long do I stay with something?
What causes me to transition?
Which transitions restore energy?
When am I regulating, and when am I avoiding?
What gets completed?
What happens to the quality of my work?
What happens to my creativity?
What happens in my body?
And perhaps most interestingly: what parts of me begin appearing when I no longer require myself to become “ready for the day” before I am allowed to inhabit it?