By the time we met, we were both traumatized, carrying more pain than we could digest, caught in snarls of our own coping mechanisms.

We don’t usually reach for diagnostic labels, but they sure can help paint a picture. Some labels that described us at the time include: anxiety disorder, manic depression, complex PTSD, autism spectrum traits, paranoid schizophrenia, anorexia, hypertonia, fibromyalgia, arthritis, alcoholism, and chronic migraines — just to name a few.

It wasn’t pretty. And responding to it wasn’t linear.

The beginning of our relationship was a beautiful and complex dance that we will expand upon in upcoming videos. For now, the important thing to know is this:

We made a pact — to create and maintain mutual relational safety.

Now, anyone who’s tried to build safety in a relationship knows: it’s not as simple as making a promise. We came with different boundaries, different wounds, different needs. We were separated by a full generation of cultural context. We had every reason not to work.

Here’s what made it possible for us: we both knew, deep in our bones, that we needed to build a new way.

We spent the first year of our relationship mapping our shared values — not just naming them, but embodying them, practicing them, and weaving them into the ground beneath us.

And from there, something sacred began to grow: a stock of relational trust.

Whenever a dissonance arose, we worked through it. We kept going — sometimes slowly, sometimes fiercely — until we landed on a shared perspective. Sometimes that meant agreement. Sometimes it meant a mutual clarity about where we differed. But always, we decided together how to move forward.

When contrasting needs came up, we referenced our shared values. When old patterns flared, we held each other accountable — not to perfection, but to alignment.

Both of us committed, and recommitted during every dissonance resolution, to releasing the parts of our individuated selves that weren’t in resonance with our highest values.

And little by little, something shifted:
The more we re-patterned our perceptions, our interpretations, and our behaviors around shared values, the more energy we had.
The less we relied on willpower, stimulation, or escapism …
The more we felt alive.

We no longer needed hype music to get through a workout.
We no longer needed adrenaline to get through the day.
We no longer needed consumer pleasure to feel momentarily whole.

We were no longer running on the fossil fuels of stress and anticipation. We were running on the clean energy of connection, stability, and satisfaction.

Over time, we realized something wild:
We weren’t two separate people working in parallel.
We were one interdependent energy system.

When one of us stumbled, both of us felt it.
When we moved together, we moved with more momentum than we’d ever had alone.

As we anchored into shared practices — from sleep to food to movement and muscle building to dissonance resolution — our healing accelerated.
Symptoms we once thought were permanent began to resolve.
Conditions like anorexia, arthritis, and hypertonia began to re-pattern through the coherence of our shared lifestyle.
Experiences like mania, anxiety, cPTSD, and even paranoid schizophrenia began to integrate and dissolve.

The peace of Reunion, 2024.

And over time, something astonishing happened:
We reached what we call dissonance zero.
No dissonances left in the queue.
No more stories stuck in our subconscious.
A distinct yet shared perspective on everything.

Just clarity. Just Reunion.

And with that Reunion came something neither of us had ever felt before: An energetic surplus.
Our relationship — and our way of living — was giving back more energy than it took.

So we did what we had always intended to do: We created The Experience of We.

Because if this kind of healing and energy return is possible for us…
what might it make possible for families?
For communities?
For ecosystems?

What if the same connection that heals trauma also heals consumption? What if living in resonance is the most ecological choice we can make?

On our journey to Reunion, every time we asked ourselves why our traumas had happened — why anyone’s traumas had happened — we found the incoherent, entropic world systems.

Why were the systems incoherent?
Because of a collective crisis of meaning.

And underneath that?
A foundational relational pathology — fragmented, invisible, seemingly everywhere.

We believe that restoring the coherence and integrity of our relationships — with ourselves, with each other, and with the Earth — is the path to restoring coherence at every scale.

From the very beginning, Naomi told Matthew:
I have a calling, a plan, and a boundary.
We must devote ourselves to healing the world — and we have to begin by healing ourselves.

Matthew left his job, his marriage, and his old life behind.
He followed Naomi — not blindly, but in reverence for the clarity she embodied, recognizing the way it harmonized with his own sense of what was most important.

And together, we transformed.
Now, we want to share that transformation with you.