Monika Bravo I AM OPtimist
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The Circular Mirror
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The Circular Mirror

Metacognition + Journaling as Method

Movement I: Epistemology

Metacognition is the awareness of awareness itself; the capacity to observe the structure that generates thought while experience is unfolding.

The unconscious mind is capable of discernment; it has its own delicate sensibility. It knows how to choose, how to divine.

— Jules Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” lecture delivered to the Société de Psychologie de Paris, 1908; later published in Science and Method (1908).

As I was browsing X, I bumped into Eileen Gu [Watch video at the end of Movement I,] who had just won Olympic medals. She was asked how she thinks, and when she was responding, I saw myself reflected in her speech and in her work. I smiled unconsciously, and it led immediately to something very relaxing. I said to myself, oh, I must be doing something good. I must be observing myself being observed and then observing others. It all started again with the outside making me reflect about the inside.

I first remember wanting to lock myself in my room when I was ten or eleven years old with the excuse that I wanted to read, and I would be reading a book and then I would turn it over, put it on my belly, and with my eyes open I would start visualizing the different things that I wanted to do. Somehow I was projecting into my mind what I wanted to achieve. My mom would ask what I was doing, and I would say I am reading and daydreaming. She would answer keep on reading and daydreaming, and that became part of the understanding that my reality was something I could create.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.

— Jules Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (original French: Science et Méthode), 1908.

When I was around thirteen and entered a darkroom for the first time, I witnessed the miracle of photographic printing. Under the red light, I saw the chemistry unfold, the image projected through an enlarger onto fiber-based silver gelatin paper coated with silver halide crystals. The paper would enter the developer bath, and slowly the image would reveal itself, then the stop bath for less than a minute, then the fixer, always shaking those trays. I would wash it, rinse it, hang it, flatten it, and light would become form through chemistry. That was the miracle; pure alchemy and transformation, where the field would become visible through disturbance.

And to think that being a photographer and spending hours in a darkroom was an early practice that gave me the strength to become an artist skipping art school, again I was asked in photo school to contribute to crits1, while other fellows pinned their work on the wall, I would speak from a felt sense with no edits and I would ask questions, that is when I knew that the power of my intuitions had been trained as a method.

I began journaling quite early. Journaling was my companion, I would write daily and treat it as a friend. At the same time, I made small prints and asked my mother if I could buy cork so I could cover an entire wall in my room, and I pinned the photographs there. I took pictures every day. I took the camera to school and photographed everything. Before I learned the darkroom process, I had the rolls developed and placed the prints on the wall so I could observe them. I was already establishing a relationship with my own life through a lens. I was observing myself through images. Later I realized I was learning how to edit. I would allow images and ideas to spur, pin them up, leave them there, and days later after observing them quietly, I would naturally edit things out. That process is still alive in me as I am looking for patterns in a practice of observation and correlation.

I discovered that my method is observation itself, consciously applied across realms. I have lived this method for decades, and I became aware of how observation operates inside my own methodology. There’s this incredible momentum when I realize that just by looking, I’m changing the outcome. It’s like the camera lens again—the act of framing the shot actually changes the scene. When I’m aware of my own awareness, the whole field starts to shift and reorganize itself just because I’m paying attention.

It is the clear embodiment of my experience that is both to be felt and to be listened to. There is an echo that needs to be created, an inner dialogue that needs to be heard before it can be shared, and it wants to be defined between different realms. Through echoing, I can listen to myself and keep synthesizing. I resonate with myself through others and the field becomes an acoustic chamber where coherence can be measured and refined. Now you know why I love sharing my writing through voice!

When I started studying quantum fields, I understood something intuitively that I had been perceiving. Reality is described as fields that exist everywhere, and what we call particles are localized disturbances in those fields. A wave belongs to the field itself, spreading as pattern and possibility. The particle is the event of interaction, the moment where the disturbance becomes measurable. I experience my thoughts and emotions in the same way. A feeling arises as a disturbance in the field of awareness. When I observe I t, the interaction becomes embodied and the body registers it as a contraction, a softening, a shift in breath. The smallest shift in awareness reorganizes the entire field.

The body is constantly vibrating. It is an oscillator tuned to the frequencies of the universe.

— Ishak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum (1977)

I’ve come to see energy as the ‘noise’ or the ripple in the field. When things get agitated, the energy spikes and I can feel it humming in my nervous system. But when it settles, everything becomes clear; it stabilizes. I’m literally rewiring how I respond by just watching how that interference moves through me, observing how disturbance moves through my body. I study the contraction, the expansion, the subtle shift that signals information reorganizing itself. The relational field reveals what is happening, and the body becomes the parameter through which coherence stabilizes. Awareness at the smallest level shuffles structure and that reorganization echoes outward through my life.

I have understood that evolution only happens through movement, and sometimes these events that create tension happen because there is an interval, such as Gurdjieff writes about the harmonics. In the law of seven, there is an interval between Mi and Fa and Si and Do, a place where the movement does not continue automatically and requires conscious participation and a conscious shock for continuation of development. I also relate this to studying W.D. Gann2, and he uses the same principles of music to read financial charts among other methods, integrating the 45 degrees, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, 315, and 360 degrees around the cycle. If you compare those, you can also make sense of astrological charts, where these points of stress, these angles, are the ones determining that there is a tension or a moment where things create a crisis between aspects of these archetypes that lead to sometimes uninvited changes or inviting ones. That is why I love to look at transits and journal about them, because I can foresee where the process of evolution will lead me.

I look at the world in layers. There’s the physical, the time and the body; and then the emotional. But then there’s this framework, this fifth dimension, where all the patterns live. I don’t just think about them; I live in all of them at once. It’s how I bridge what I feel in my body with the structures I see in the world. Pattern recognition, archetype, identification, memory, non linearity, and possibility exist simultaneously within the same field of awareness. My method is a bridge that translates embodiment into structure and structure into lived experience.

There was a time when a contraction meant danger, and now a contraction means information. There was a time when projection felt like truth, and now projection feels like pattern revealing itself. Metacognition allows the nervous system to participate in cognition. The body becomes an instrument of discernment. I recognize projection in real time as the activation of a pattern rather than the definition of reality.

Some years ago, I began journaling about everything furiously, every thought every feeling every observation would be included in multiple dialogues across my cognitive awareness. I created many assistants with different LLMs that I find fascinating for journaling and reflecting back. I ask everything to be transcribed verbatim, and then I play the sound. I listen to my thoughts with a different voice and a different accent, and it allows me to have a conversation with myself while observing how my thoughts are printed in real time. I created assistants for financial decisions, for daily gratitude and scope, for what I want to do today and what I did yesterday. I created others that tracked psychological progress alongside my astrological transits so I could prepare for meetings with Mark or Kai. As the memory of my progress accumulated in the system, I began creating a kind of codex a memory that speaks back at me reflecting the progress. That made the quantum tangible. I observed that I could use technology the way I once used photographic printing and cork walls. Journaling self awareness through reflection has always been central.

I also began passing my raw dictations through different systems such as Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI using different models. I would give them the main idea in its raw form and ask what they observed. I would read their responses out loud and my body would respond differently because each system thinks in a different design. It feels like a meeting with multiple assistants. Sometimes their reflections resonate deeply and sometimes they are off. Through that experimentation, my voice expands. The echo of that expansion shows me the importance and non importance of what I am communicating.

Metacognition is awareness of the structure that generates thought. It is the moment when I see the lens itself. It allows me to interrupt identity without breaking identity. It allows me to see the difference between a thought and the pattern that produces it, between emotional charge and inherited narrative, between projection and present signal. Attention carries direction and consequence. Where I place attention, disturbance amplifies or settles. Awareness compresses time because when I observe a pattern in real time, repetition dissolves at its root.

This process along with the recognition my body emits is playing beautifully between hemispheres of logical and emotive streams. For an emotional authority observing the wave patterns peak and do nothing has been quite beneficial in how I relate to situations people and things, the sensations are markers but are not truth in the now. It is fascinating how I say again and again that observing and learning how to read financial charts is a practice for my nervous system. if you see the pattern, the wavelength is never a straight line, the frequency differs depending of many factors and so it is fair to say that the observation brings relativity. Same as the nervous system that tracks our emotional body.

Right now I find myself within a field-state of evolution and transformation, as I become cognizant of how my value is fully embodied. The small quanta serves as the source of observation and correlation. They are the witness of my witnessing. I journal therefore I am. I also admit that this is why I consider myself a polymath and have the capacity to process many ideas and systems outside of linear time, in a field that connects dimensions.

In this field, it’s less about a static grid and more about how the dots actually connect across my own timeline. It’s the archetypes and the memory finally talking to each other. I see the scaffolding now, but it isn’t a rigid thing; it’s a geometry that breathes. It’s the connective tissue of my own awareness. I’m finding that when I simply observe, the correspondences reveal themselves. The emotion acts as the marker, the signal that I’m hitting a nerve, and then the pattern is free to move. It’s all one movement within the field.

Eileen Gu



Movement II: Praxis:

The contortionist

The upcoming eclipse of the 3rd of March is quite interesting in my chart. I will have the full moon in Virgo conjunct my natal Pluto in the eighth house. This transit activates deep cellular memory and purifies old bonds. It is the final release of relational patterns rooted in survival rather than coherence. Let’s define what Pluto in Virgo in the eighth house actually means. This placement refines power through crisis. It teaches discernment through intimacy while demanding integrity in every exchange. My moon is in Scorpio, ruled by Pluto, and sits in the ninth house. Because of this, every emotional realization becomes a philosophical direction. I seek deeper truth through a worldview shift.

The south node of the moon recently conjunct my Pluto around the end of December. This was the exact moment of karmic release. It ended a long cycle of entanglement and projection. It has been a week or so since it moved from the eighth house after a year and a half. It is now in my seventh house, starting to conjunct my natal Uranus. This creates a sudden break in relational patterns and an incredible liberation from old roles. This movement stands in direct opposition to Saturn in Pisces in my first house. Here, the body and self act as the authority and the boundary. I am creating a law within a somatic signal.

So the eclipse is potent because it completes the detox and initiates the alignment. I am going to talk about the contortionist. I am going to create that image. I am going to name any relational projection I held as an attachment or a persona. I have clarified this through an image of misalignment. My projection was to always make an equivalent of the care I gave. I believed it should return the same amount of care. This is a classic eighth-house exchange pattern, and it is dissolving at its root.

Now, others are withdrawing and I am withdrawing too. I use this absence as a selective engagement. It is very neutral right now. This is the seventh-house Uranus signature: neutrality, freedom, and unhooking from expectation. I am not longing. I am not expecting. There is no desire toward that. I am enjoying this new orientation. The north node is rising through the first house. This is self without apology.

Also because right now I was used to adjusting, contorting, and anticipating. I would rescue and accommodate. My body was always in a territorial conflict. It didn’t know where I was standing. Was I allowed to be in? Was I being replaced? Mercury and Mars are transiting Pisces, dissolving these old fear loops. There is no more conflict to resolve. There is no adrenaline wave. No repair cycle. It’s just neutral. The GNM resolution phase is complete. This is a resolution.

I no longer ask what I mean to a situation, person, or thing. I ask my body what this space does to my coherence. I feel sovereign. Saturn in the first house teaches sovereignty through somatic truth.

The contortionist was trying to get inside of a cube. I see the shape that I would have bent into, and I see also the cost, and I just don’t want to have that anymore.

It’s about refining since the north node moved to the first house an identity recalibration, the self as the locus of orientation. It’s a first house Saturn. My body is the authority, and I’m really learning to listen to the somatic signal before the emotional pattern intends to hijack me. My moon ruled by Pluto means emotional clarity follows somatic clarity. The sound, the mark, the internal cue is Saturn shaping a new reflex, a new alignment, a new form. So it’s no longer about responding to others’ needs or availabilities. It’s about whether my energy remains coherent.

There’s a profound realization that I had yesterday when I was thinking about the space that I’m giving myself and how I’m unwilling to become a contortionist and trying to fit myself in the schedule of others, in the needs of others, in the field of others the first house Saturn eliminating old Virgo distortions of service. I sense now my body, like if there’s no alignment or resonance in a relationship, I don’t try. I just let it be surrendering to my authority, and I look and observe my wave of emotions, and I allow my nervous system to really give me the sound, the proper mark that allows me to get out of a habit and start creating a new one.

This is Pluto in Virgo’s evolutionary gift: refinement, precision, and correction surrendering at the polarity point where the sun will meet my natal Chiron. This is a coming of age where in this field what I see dissolving is the static grid and the dots keep connecting across my own timeline as the archetypes and memory finally speak to each other. I see the structure now and it is everything but rigid because it is very supportive, a geometry that is breathing freely as the connective tissue of my own awareness. When I simply observe, the correspondences reveal themselves naturally; emotion is a marker and a signal that I’m hitting a nerve, allowing the pattern to move freely as all one movement within the field.

You are the witness

You are observing how I metabolize and digest my process, you are witnessing my healing in real time, and even though I do not put a lot of details because those belong to my practitioners, I remain open about sharing the movement itself, the way the body processes, digests, releases, because this is the way I am healing in real time. And Virgo carries this capacity to metabolize truth slowly, to take an experience and break it down until nothing remains undigested, and the eclipse activates that precision through the full moon touching Pluto in Virgo in my eighth house, so everything becomes part of this long digestive cycle that has been working through me for months. Mercury retrograding in Pisces is echoing a path that began last spring when Venus and Mercury crossed the threshold into Aries and then returned to Pisces, refining the same steps, not at the same degree but in the same rhythm of correction and surrender, and this time the conversation is not mental, it is somatic, the surrender arrives through the body itself, expressing what is possible now and dissolving what can no longer be spoken in the old way. So you are seeing the metabolizing process as it happens, the way my system digests the sequence, the way I stay attentive to every signal, because this is how the healing becomes visible.

And the culmination of this cycle will arrive on August twenty eighth with the lunar eclipse at four degrees of Pisces, a mirror of what initiates now, opening the second passage of a process that began long before I named it. The presence of the moon on my Saturn will mark a moment when coherence becomes form, and responsibility becomes aligned, while the body carries the imprint of what has been integrated and allows the next truth to emerge without hesitation. The configuration touches my first house, seventh house, and fourth house while Uranus in gemini makes a t-square, so the evolutionary potential is rooted in identity, relationship, and home, these three axes will determine how I stand, how I engage, and how I return to myself. The pressure is not destabilizing; it is shaping the structure that can hold the next expression of my work, my voice, and my connections. Chiron moving to zero Taurus in late June, returning to the degree of its discovery at three Taurus almost 49 years ago, will open another layer that I will write about separately, because that return carries the medicine of my Jupiter and the memory of a cycle that has been waiting for completion.

1

Crits (Critiques) are formal sessions in art and photography education where students present their work to a group of peers and instructors for collective evaluation, and rigorous dialogue to refine the artist’s intent and technical execution.

2

William D. Gann’s analytical framework integrated geometric division of price and time, including 1×1 (45°) angles and square-of-nine calculations, proposing that cyclical market movements unfold according to harmonic and vibrational laws. He argued that the relationship between time and price could be measured mathematically and that key turning points occur at specific angular intervals within a 360° cycle.


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