Hey all you lovely folks! As it is obvious, life got super busy after returning to Canada. I’ve been reestablishing love for a few months and am finally planting some roots. Though my season demands a shift of priorities. I WILL have this community kickoff again in the future as you’ve all been a major blessing during my time abroad and refining my thinking, new book and enriching one another as well. What a privilege it’s been to bring you guys together here! Please feel free to follow/add me wherever @remmystourac in the meantime. I hope to publish ‘Emotions as Magic’ by end of the year, so a sincere gratitude for those who commented and followed my process of building this emotional intelligence resource🙌🙌 When time and opportunity permits, I will return with more pizzazz and personable ways to connect (vid group chats, etc). I hope you’ve all been well, thriving, and can’t wait to reconnect on the flipside of this new season. God bless, love y’all!

Promises as Temporal Magic A promise reaches forward in time and binds your future self. Nothing physical changes in the moment of a promise, yet reality reorganizes around it. Expectations form. Trust routes itself. Behaviour adjusts. A promise is more of an anchor than it is a statement. You are telling the future, “You may count on this version of me.” Promises Create Continuity of Self Without promises, the self fractures across moments. Promises stitch time together. They state: - I will remain intelligible to myself. - My actions will not contradict my words. - My future self will honor my present values. This is why broken promises feel disorienting. They collapse continuity. The Weight of a Promise A promise carries mass. Every promise occupies mental, emotional, and moral bandwidth. Too many promises create drag. Unexamined promises create guilt. A promise unkept does not vanish. It becomes a ghost. Ghost-promises haunt motivation, confidence, and self-trust. Promises as Trust Engines Trust is not built through grand gestures. It is built through small promises kept. Each kept promise: - Lowers friction in relationships. - Reduces the need for vigilance. - Frees attention. - Stabilizes emotional weather. Trust is stored promise-keeping. Internal vs External Promises External promises bind you to others. Internal promises bind you to yourself. Internal promises are more dangerous. Breaking a promise to another risks reputation. Breaking a promise to yourself erodes identity. This is why self-betrayal feels heavier than disappointment. Corruption of the Promise System Promises corrupt when: - Used to control rather than commit. - Made to soothe discomfort instead of express intent. - Offered without capacity. - Repeatedly broken without repair. Corrupted promises train others not to trust you. More critically, they train you not to trust yourself. Purification Through Repair A broken promise can be purified. Repair requires:

(Definitely the hardest section to write. So much nuance to bring in to one cohesive place to build on. Any feedback would help it be all that it can be!) Forgiveness: The Magic of Unbinding Every emotional harm creates two motions: 1. The offender’s unresolved process. 2. The injured person’s interrupted motion. Most people are taught to aim forgiveness at the first. That is the mistake. Forgiveness does nothing to complete the offender’s motion. It completes yours. What Forgiveness Is Not Forgiveness is not: - Saying what happened was acceptable. - Releasing accountability. - Restoring access. - Reconciliation. - Forgetting. - Premature peace. Those are social actions. Forgiveness is an internal spell. When forgiveness is confused with morality, it backfires. It freezes anger. It bypasses grief. It weaponizes gratitude. And the body refuses to comply. What Forgiveness Actually Does Forgiveness performs one precise function: *It returns agency to the correct owner.* When harm occurs, the nervous system does something dangerous but understandable: It keeps the offender inside so it can finish the correction later. What manifests when anger and grief try to complete without access to authenticity is: Replays. Arguments. Imagined confrontations. Endless ‘if only’s.’ Forgiveness says: “I release myself and us from reliving this sorrow.” That’s it. That’s the spell. That being said, the ultimate emphasis to clean that loop of revisiting betrayals is to live by the standard that: *The only genuine apology is a change of behaviour.* (This rule changed the standard of my whole adult experience.) The Law of Motion Applied to Forgiveness Harm interrupts motion in this order: - Anger wants correction. - Grief wants continuity. - Shame threatens dignity. - Hope strains to endure. Forgiveness does not skip these. It comes after they have been honoured. If forgiveness is attempted before: - Boundaries are set. - Loss is acknowledged. - Dignity is restored. - The system rejects it.

(I'm soooooooooooo JAZZED to get to this stage of the book! Each section will get surgical with different tools of the human experience. Hopefully this magical expression can deepen how you choose to play with reality! :)) Humour is not a feeling. It is a reframing engine. Where fear braces and anger sharpens, humour tilts the world sideways just enough that gravity forgets its job. Nothing is erased. Everything is reweighed. Humour’s magic is not denial. It is full-facing reality while refusing to lose playfulness with the moment. The Spell It Casts Humour interrupts inevitability. Pain may suggest: This means something terrible. Humour replies: Maybe… but not only that. That “not only” is the crack where freedom leaks in. Humour doesn’t fight reality. It re-contextualizes it mid-stride, like changing dance partners without stopping the music. Why Humour Is So Potent Most emotional systems operate by intensifying meaning. Humour does the opposite. It loosens meaning without dissolving it. This is why: - Tyrants fear jokes. - Trauma survivors develop dark humour. - Laughter can coexist with grief without disrespecting it. Humour proves to you that this moment does not own you exclusively. That sentence alone is spell-work. Humour Mid-Flight Humour cannot be held. The moment you clutch it, it dies. It only works while moving, which is why: - Explaining a joke kills it. - Forced humour feels hollow. - Timing matters more than cleverness. Humour is a kinetic art. It requires trust in the moment and a willingness to look slightly foolish. That vulnerability is the price of admission. Misunderstandings About Humour - “Humour means I’m not taking this seriously.” No, humour means you are refusing to let seriousness become tyranny. - “Humour avoids pain.” No, humour often walks through pain with a lantern, not around it. - “Humour makes light of suffering.” No, it makes space around suffering so it can breathe. Why Humour Restores Agency

It’s felt like teleporting to an alternate world where so much is the same, but entirely different at the same time! Friends went from single to married, not even pregnant to being parents, shifting careers, entirely new goals and ambitions… same amazing people, dramatically different eras. We slowly inch forward day by day which doesn’t feel so big in small plays, but what is basically 1-2% (based off a 80-100yr life) of a lifetime away, so.much.happens! While mentioning, YOU guys and this all happened in that time. None of this was even an idea less than a year ago. Now some of you are front-row players of my life and many of you have impacted me in big and small ways in simple interactions. Endlessly grateful for those who’ve found ProSpirit and those who dip in every now and then with your wonderful insights!🤘🥳 Now… I return to new home, roommate situation, new job, new (likely) school for therapy, and renewed sense of possibility in this familiar land. It all happens so fast🥲 tryna catch it before the next thing swoops me away! What plot twists have unfolded in your life this last year? PS: Emotions as Magic will not only be a book, but I am developing it as an app to plug-and-play life scenarios! It will help decode our emotional experiences specifically and give action steps to renew our agency amidst life’s chaos!🤯 you heard it here first! I will share the prototype to get your guy’s feedback soon enough:) let me know if that interests you and I’ll reach out personally when I share it so you don’t miss it grow from the ground up:) —- First 3 vids/photo of the family farm in Alberta! Last 4 of the drive home to Kelowna and paddleboard back on my home lake.