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Return to Wonder Author • Speaker • Coach | Off-grid. Still listening.
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Todd is a MindValley certified coach & hypnotherapist dedicated to helping you elevate your life.

I said no three times.Someone I’d never met paid five thousand dollars to send me to an immersion in California because ...
05/17/2026

I said no three times.

Someone I’d never met paid five thousand dollars to send me to an immersion in California because they felt during meditation that I was supposed to be there.

I still said no.

Then my ex and I got into another fight, I jumped in my Tacoma at midnight, and drove twelve hours through the desert to California like that was a completely reasonable thing to do.

It wasn’t. But it changed everything.

Turns out you can spend years being impressively articulate about your damage and still be completely run by it. The nervous system doesn’t care how self-aware you are. It changes through experience. Through finally getting to finish reactions it never got to finish the first time.

What’s strange is humans have been building experiences like this forever. Sweat lodges. Grief rituals. Mystery schools. Brutal initiations. Strange little containers designed to push people hard enough that the nervous system finally stops running the same unfinished reactions over and over again.

Jung stumbled into the same thing. Modern neuroscience finally mapped part of the mechanism in 2012.

New essay up on Substack. Read for free.

toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
Link in bio.

Once a year, on the exact same day as the Kentucky Derby, 3,000 people show up in a town of 250 where absolutely nothing...
05/05/2026

Once a year, on the exact same day as the Kentucky Derby, 3,000 people show up in a town of 250 where absolutely nothing about the day makes sense.

Cerrillos, New Mexico.

Population: a few stubborn humans, some ravens, and an unknowable number of opinions about water rights.

The occasion? The annual Cerrillos B***o Race.

People come from across the country with their b***os loaded up in vintage mining gear. Pickaxes. Gold pans. Shovels. Because the rules apparently require you to look like it’s 1887 and about to strike it rich in the Ortiz Mountains.

The race starts up by the old hanging tree, because of course it does, and drops down dusty roads into the arroyo, through the general indifference of the desert. Winding through old mining trails like someone designed a sporting event after reading half a paragraph of history and deciding, yeah, that makes sense.

They come in from all over, b***os in tow, and the rule is simple: you run with them. Which turns the whole thing into less of a race and more of a negotiation.

Meanwhile, 3,000 people line the streets like this is the Super Bowl of poor decision-making.

No one really knows why this many people showed up. For a town that tries to keep itself a secret, there’s no real marketing for this. Definitely no influencer push. Just some collective agreement that this is important.

And it kind of is.

Because where else do you get: a b***o dressed like a taco. I cannot explain this. I will not try. A Buddhist b***o mural. Or a rusted 1960s Chevy van turned into some sort of folk-art b***o shrine, complete with an oil painting of b***o Jesus and the b***o apostles at the last supper. I guess that makes Judas the ass.

Things in the high desert don’t always make sense. Neither do I. We get along fine.

***oRace

Went to a sound bath in Tulum because my friend promised snacks after. Walked out recalibrated by someone playing a sala...
05/03/2026

Went to a sound bath in Tulum because my friend promised snacks after. Walked out recalibrated by someone playing a salad bowl.

It took me a while to figure out what actually happened.

New essay
toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
link in bio

Unforgiveness doesn’t punish them. It keeps you tied to it.You stay loyal to the wound long after it’s done with you. An...
04/19/2026

Unforgiveness doesn’t punish them. It keeps you tied to it.

You stay loyal to the wound long after it’s done with you. And the longer you carry it, the more of your life it takes up.

Forgiveness isn’t absolution. It isn’t weakness. It isn’t saying what happened was okay. It’s the decision to stop letting a moment that’s already over keep running your present.

Three words came through on Easter morning.

I forgive you.

And somewhere in the middle of receiving them I realized I’d been extending grace to everyone around me for years while being absolutely merciless with myself.

This week’s essay is about what forgiveness does to the body, what it costs, and why the hardest three words most of us ever say may not be to someone else.

They’re alone. To ourselvses.

toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
Link in bio.

A stranger gave me gas on NM 14. A few weeks later I bought him a beer.
Didn’t feel like returning anything. Felt like s...
04/12/2026

A stranger gave me gas on NM 14.

A few weeks later I bought him a beer.

Didn’t feel like returning anything. Felt like stepping into something that was already moving.

Wrote about it.

Before the stained glass. Before the institutions. Before the political Jesus, the judgmental Jesus, and the one people ...
04/05/2026

Before the stained glass. Before the institutions. Before the political Jesus, the judgmental Jesus, and the one people use to win arguments.

There was just a man moving through a brutal occupied world, stopping for people everyone else had already written off.

And every time he did, it cost him something.

New essay. Read for free.
https://toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com/p/love-made-flesh
Link in bio.

EasterSunday

I sat under a juniper this morning with a cup of coffee and a burrito still wrapped in foil.
Nothing dramatic happened. ...
03/29/2026

I sat under a juniper this morning with a cup of coffee and a burrito still wrapped in foil.

Nothing dramatic happened. That’s kind of the point.

The wind moved through before it touched me. You hear it first out here. Low in the trees, then across the ground, then it hits your skin like it was always on the way.

I didn’t come out here to have a moment. I came out here because it’s where I go. Same spot. Same tree. Coffee going cold while I stare at dirt like it might explain something.

Somewhere in that, everything goes quiet.

This is when I pray.

I pray differently now than I did when I was a pastor.

Back then it was words. Asking. Interceding. Trying to say it right, mean it right, aim it somewhere and hope it landed.

Out here it doesn’t work like that.

It’s less about what I say and more about whether I’ve gotten quiet enough to be in it. Like there’s already something moving through all of this and I either line up with it or I don’t.

And when it does, I’m not sending a prayer anywhere.

I’m inside it.

Part of it.

The same way the wind is part of what it’s moving through.

That’s as close as I can get to explaining it.

I wrote about that here
toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
Link in bio

There’s a pattern across ancient traditions built around waking up at 3am. Egyptians. Desert monks. Kabbalists. Muhammad...
03/22/2026

There’s a pattern across ancient traditions built around waking up at 3am. Egyptians. Desert monks. Kabbalists. Muhammad. Yogic tradition. Aboriginal Australians. All of them. Independently. Same hour.  All of them about something profound that was taking place in that moment.
 
 
I wake up at 3am thinking about a demonic Russian cat with a tommy gun, David Byrne losing his arms, and a bumper sticker about a car in an arroyo. By the next afternoon those three things had solved a design problem I’d been stuck on for weeks. It eventually won an architecture award.
 
And I think about weird New Mexican town names.  Like Pie town.
 
Is this neuroscience? Is this a deeper spirituality calling? Or is indigestion mixed with and assault of juniper pollen?
 
I wrote about it here.
toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
link in bio

Santuario de ChimayóA couple hours north of here there’s a little chapel in Chimaó where people have been showing up for...
03/15/2026

Santuario de Chimayó

A couple hours north of here there’s a little chapel in Chimaó where people have been showing up for centuries hoping the dirt knows something the doctors don’t.

There’s a room filled with crutches left behind by people who say they walked in needing them and walked out without them.

There’s another room where people scoop a little dirt into jars and take it home.

Some say it heals them.

Nobody really knows why.

New essay: Something Like Healing

toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com
Link in bio.


 
 
 


I can derail a real moment with a joke faster than most people can order a beer.All it takes is one self-deprecating lin...
03/08/2026

I can derail a real moment with a joke faster than most people can order a beer.

All it takes is one self-deprecating line at exactly the wrong moment.
Everyone laughs and nobody has to admit what they were actually feeling.

I was good at that. Still am. Five seconds and the moment is gone.
That reflex didn’t come out of nowhere. Somewhere along the way a younger version of me learned that staying in the heat of a real moment wasn’t safe.

So he picked up a few tricks.

Charm. Humor. Be the easy one. The guy everyone likes having around.

It works.

The only problem is the person running that move isn’t a grown man. It’s a kid who learned a long time ago how to break the tension before things got uncomfortable.

Learning to stay is still new territory for me.

Stay when it gets quiet.
Stay when someone asks a real question.
Stay when there’s nothing to hide behind.

Every once in a while I catch myself right before the joke comes out.
Instead of grabbing it, I just sit there and let the moment be awkward.

For most of my life I thought the joke was personality.

It wasn’t.

It was a way out.

Full essay is on Substack today.
toddjosephfieldnotes.substack.com

Link in bio
Read it, its free.





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