To Taste the Thunder: Risk, Ruin, and the Subconscious Hunger to Feel

“If you ever want your soul to dance in the clouds, you will at some point have to juggle lightning and taste the thunder.”

— Christopher Poindexter

“You are here to risk your heart… You are here to be swallowed up.”

— Louise Erdrich

There are truths the nervous system knows before the conscious mind catches up.

One of them is this: joy will never come without risk.

To want beauty, to want connection, to want to live in full color—you are also agreeing, quietly, to hold the voltage that comes with it. The sharpness. The ache. The hunger… and yes, the loss.

You may not say it out loud, but some part of your system has always known:

To dance in the clouds, you will have to juggle lightning.

And taste the thunder.

And that can feel scary to a subconscious mind built on keeping you safe.

The Body Knows What It’s Risking

The subconscious mind—this tender architect of habit and safety—is always trying to protect you.

It builds invisible contracts:

• “If I stay quiet, I won’t be rejected.”

• “If I don’t want too much, I won’t be disappointed.”

• “If I numb now, maybe I won’t shatter later.”

These are not irrational.

They are intelligent.

They’re how we survive long enough to consider healing.

But eventually, a deeper intelligence surfaces.

A louder ache.

You realize that surviving isn’t the same as living.

You realize that safety without soul becomes a form of starvation.

The subconscious—devoted, precise—doesn’t argue.

It waits for your permission to revise the script.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love.

You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

The Price of Aliveness

The quotes above aren’t just poetic. They’re maps.

“You will have to juggle lightning…”

This is not metaphor for suffering.

It’s truth: aliveness comes with current.

To feel joy fully, you have to stop protecting yourself from all the other things that live near joy—grief, awe, heartbreak, vulnerability, and surrender.

“You are here to risk your heart… to be swallowed up.”

It’s not a flaw to break open.

It’s a rite.

What breaks you also shows you what you were built to hold.

Sweetness, Wasted, and Tasted

Louise Erdrich writes of sitting by an apple tree after loss, listening to apples fall and waste their sweetness.

She doesn’t say:

“Protect yourself from ever tasting one.”

She says:

“Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

This is the subconscious shift.

From avoiding pain at all costs …to … letting me love while I can.

From let me not be broken… to… let me be present when I am.

The sweetness is not preserved in safety.

It’s preserved in its presence.

A Hypnotic Truth: You Already Know How to Feel

In my work as a coach and hypnotherapist, I don’t install false confidence or program toxic positivity into your subconscious.

I listen for what the subconscious already knows.

Often, clients are afraid to feel anything that isn’t immediately palpable, or think they’ve forgotten.

They say, “My feelings always betray me, or I’m stuck..”

But when we slow down—when we let the subconscious show us the shape of longing or protection—we find it:

A warmth behind the heart.

A pressure in the throat.

A flicker in the gut.

A song they didn’t know they were still humming.

The body always remembers what the mind edits out.

We don’t learn to feel.

We unlearn the barricades.

What Happens When You Say Yes to the Risk?

Not all at once. Not recklessly.

But consciously.

What happens when you say:

I am willing to taste the thunder, in exchange for the sky?

Often, it’s subtle. You begin to:

• Let love land without rehearsing its loss.

• Feel grief fully, and still choose beauty.

• Tell the subconscious: I am safe enough to feel this now.

• Let the sweetness come, even if it won’t stay.

Final Thought

This is not a call to suffer.

It’s a call to live.

To taste.

To risk.

To let yourself be swallowed up—not by pain, but by life.

Your subconscious will resist. That’s okay.

Just let it know: I’m not leaving you behind.

I’m bringing you with me—into the thunder, into the sweetness, into the stormlight.

An Additional Reflection

Ask yourself gently:

What sweetness have I refused because I was afraid of losing it?

Where am I still holding lightning, instead of letting it move through me?

What is my body asking to feel, right now—not perfectly, just honestly?

Sit. Listen. Taste what you can.