by Mika Gainer

In my special note to you in my journal, I include in the list of namesakes that I am a Khaeos Priestess. I am that because I learned to radicalize chaos as a spiritual technology.

From growing awareness as a child, I noticed how my presence generated chaotic responses in the world around me—reactions that felt disproportionate, confusing, sometimes hostile. The world had expectations for this chaos, narratives about who I was underneath.

And for a time, I fought internal battles with those narratives. Not because I believed them, but because I wanted to placate the outer chaos projected onto me as a means of survival to experience my dreams.

The ways of walking the lines required quiet perseverance without reward. They showed up as energy veils around my experiences with work, success, opportunity, worth, and belonging. They shaped how I moved in the world and pressured me for compliance. I could see them clearly, but it also dismembered my hope.

Journaling has always been my space for mental and emotional processing. Apparently, I wrote what are called pain journals - only getting out of my head negative things that bothered me so that I could gain relief and clarity. I wrote primarily about my interactions with people in relation to commonplace advice. The contradictions, disappointments, rejections, and hurts led to self-directed affirmations and remedies. I now see how it was an accessible healing dialogue with my true self. 

Writing helped me see the reality of different situations to determine how I would respond. Each situation challenged my spirit of authenticity as I was prompted to play a character role in someone else’s story of my life. More was needed in my journaling practice.

And so I began creative redesigning.

I gathered practices that helped me connect inner reality to outer experience: yogic philosophy for understanding consciousness and the nature of self, herbalism for remembering my kinship with the earth, black eco-feminism for grounding spirituality in justice and interdependence, and the liminal space of khaeos for unpretzeling disruption to create new possibilities.

Khaeos is my subtle reality. This form of khaeos stems from the Greek for creating from the void. Instead of trying to avoid conflict or code-switch to conform, I learned radical acceptance and fearlessly iterated the experiences of my life. The result is sustaining peace of mind, not bypassing, and compassion for myself and the projected turmoil that exists every day.

When I detached myself from the outer noise and instead focused on embodying my spiritual wholeness, I became fortified. The chaos didn't disappear, but the driving undercurrents were revealed. They are quiet shadow whispers, not necessarily the foremost known source of troubles. I became a priestess of khaeos—someone who knows how to navigate disruption, whether it be interpersonal conflict, life transitions, or unrealized life goals, and use it as a catalyst for deeper alignment with truth.

At the heart of my coaching strategies is an aspect of exploring khaeos to experience a Wild Sacred Resurgence: the untamed reclaiming of your essential nature, honoring the sacred reality of who you actually are in the world, and living into the fullness of your spiritual wholeness in all aspects of life. 

Anyone can do this work of reconnecting inner truth with outer experience, redesigning inherited beliefs, and learning to disentangle chaos instead of being consumed by it. You are more capable of problem-solving for harmony and sorrowless joy.

Because when you live from your true spiritual wholeness, unpretzeling chaos is just a breath away.