Solving for X

My father is a math magician.

Growing up, he was either in his office, on his bike, at the school, or coaching my brothers' sports. When I'd wander into his office, I'd see pieces of scratch paper scattered across the desk, covered in drawings, letters, and formulas. For most of my childhood, I had no idea what any of it meant. But there was always this invisible draw to it. A fascination with something I had no real relation to. Once I was old enough to ask, I learned one concrete thing about my father's work. He is a topologist.

Not someone who makes maps. That's topography. Topology is something else entirely, an abstract branch of geometry. In plain terms, it's the study of what stays true about a shape even when you stretch it, twist it, or bend it out of its original form.

He put the "arcwise" in the topological theorem... "Every arcwise connected, non-separating plane continuum has a fixed point property." ahh...yes, we ALL drop off there for a minute...but the long and the short of it is that he's a pretty big deal in topological circles...Pun intended!

The theorem my father has spent much of his career on is called the fixed point theorem, and it's part of a specific, still unsolved question in his field: does every shape that doesn't separate the flat surface it sits on always have a fixed point? Here's the plain version. Picture a piece of paper. Now crumple it up into a ball and drop it back down inside the outline of where it used to lie flat. No matter how you crumpled it, there is at least one point on that paper sitting directly above the exact spot it started from. You can twist it, fold it, wrinkle it into something unrecognizable, but no matter what one point never moves.

That's the fixed point. The moment my dad explained it to me, I understood it well enough to hold onto, though not yet well enough to see how it could be applied in our lived experience. So I kept it in my pocket, the one concrete thing I could offer whenever someone asked what my father studied.

For most of my life, I made no connection between my father's work and my own. After all, being the daughter of a math magician doesn't make you good at math. I struggled with it and was quite frankly embarrassed by my remedial reality. Numbers never spoke to me the way I thought they spoke to him, and for years that gap made me feel like I wasn't cut from the same cloth, like his genius was his and had nothing to do with me.

I was forty-four years old when it finally clicked. At the time I was deep in the early work of building the Eco-Verse®: developing a video game concept to teach people about energy, practicing Jean Houston's methods for revising our past, studying Joe Dispenza's work on manifestation, figuring out who my audience would be and who might partner with me. 2022 turned out to be an unusually prolific year for visualizing what is now coming into the world. I was writing in my journal one day, on what I thought was a complete side track, when it hit me. Holy moly. My father's life's work, the fixed point theorem he has spent decades circling, is the mathematical version of an old saying I'd carried around without ever really hearing it. "No matter where you go, there you are."

People have been circling this idea for centuries, back to a fifteenth-century devotional text called The Imitation of Christ, and much more recently to Jon Kabat-Zinn's 1994 book on mindfulness, which shares its title with the saying. The phrase itself isn't new. What's new is finally recognizing it sitting inside my father's math, inside his life's work, the whole time.

He'd been proving it on paper since before I was born. I just hadn't been able to connect the dots yet. Here's what makes that even more interesting to me: the problem itself is still unsolved, after an entire career spent circling it, and to me, that's the most exciting part of it. When I shared my excitement about the realization with him, he told me what he loves most about mathematics is that there's always more to figure out. There is no such thing as a concrete finish line.

This is the whole point. Every contribution he made moved the larger theorem forward, with no complete destination in sight, and that was what kept him going. It already meant something, every single day he sat down to it. That's the shift that changes things. Once you stop needing the finish line to make the work matter, you stop treating your own life as something you're supposed to eventually solve and be done with.

The fixed point is the part of you that never moves. It's not your job title, your relationship status, your bank balance, or how many people are paying attention to you this week. Those things fold and crumple constantly. The fixed point is underneath all of it, the same point it's always been, whether you can feel it right now or not.

But here's what nobody tells you about the fixed point. Knowing it exists doesn't automatically mean you can find it. You can spend years, decades even, completely disconnected from your own fixed point, getting pulled around by every algorithm, opinion, trend, and piece of outside noise that crosses your path. That was me for a long time. Present in my life, but not exactly living from the center of it. Modifying, adapting, and compressing myself to fit the space I was in, rather than living from my spirit, my true, fixed point.

So, finding your fixed point is the first half of this. The second half is what you do once you're standing on it. That's where my own formula comes in, the one I've been building for years, long before I understood it shared a shape with my father's work.

This is where energetic awareness comes in. Your energy, the frequency you're actually living in on any given day, is what tells you whether you're standing on your fixed point or somewhere off in the folds of that crumpled paper. Distraction distorts it. Fear distorts it. So does everyone else's opinion of what you should be doing with your life. Awareness is simply the practice of checking in: am I in alignment right now, or have I drifted into one of the creases? You cannot answer that question if you are not paying attention to your own energy in the first place.

Agency is what happens once you have an answer. When you know where you actually stand, you stop being a passenger inside your own experience. You get to reach into the formula and shape its inputs on purpose: what you let yourself imagine, how much feeling you attach to it, whether you can actually release your grip on the outcome, and what you do with your body and your time once you have. That is not the same as controlling everything that happens to you. It is deciding what you are contributing to what happens to you.

I didn't invent the idea that emotion and imagination shape experience. People have been drawn to this for centuries. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau wrote about it in the 1840s. Phineas Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy built entire practices around it a few decades later. Wallace Wattles and William Walker Atkinson turned it into something closer to a system at the turn of the century. Neville Goddard sharpened it into visualize, feel, release, and act. Wayne Dyer and Joe Dispenza carried it forward into language people could actually use in their own lives. I'm not claiming to have thought of something new. I'm offering my own translation, the way it finally made sense to me, and one that may give others a new way of approaching it.

So here's the evolution of these concepts in mathematical form. What my father opened up for me is that life itself is a formula, one with many different ways to influence the outcome.

Sd[(Vi + (Em)²)R + Aa] = X

Sd comes first for a reason. It stands for suspended disbelief, the necessary first step, because nothing else in this formula can do its work if you've already decided none of it is possible. You don't have to believe it completely. You just have to stop letting disbelief close the door before you've looked inside.

Once that door is open, Vi is the visualization, the picture you hold of what you want to experience. Em is elevated emotion, squared, because the stronger that emotion runs, the more powerful its impact. (Anyone who's studied physics will recognize the nod to E = mc². That's intentional. Energy and mass convert into each other. So do emotion and imagination.)

Then there's R, release, the letting go that almost nobody talks about because it feels like giving up right when you want to hold on tightest. Joe Dispenza describes this part as allowing the universe to tickle you with delight, which sounds like a strange way to put it until you've actually felt it happen.

Last is Aa, aligned action. The two letters aren't styled the same way by accident. The capital A carries the weight of alignment, because action pointed in the wrong direction just burns energy without moving you anywhere. The lowercase a is doing its own quiet work too. Even a small action can have a magnificent impact, so it doesn't need to announce itself to count.

Put all of it together and you get X: a lived experience.

None of this is a magic trick, words strung together and hoping. It's closer to chemistry: combine the right elements the right way and you get a reaction. Skip one and nothing happens. What I've noticed, in my own life and in watching other people try this, is that experience tends to take a particular shape when belief, imagination, emotion, letting go, and action are all pointed the same direction instead of working against each other. Most of us have some of these dialed in and at least one quietly missing. Plenty of people can picture what they want and feel it fully but never actually suspend the disbelief underneath it, so the whole thing stays theoretical. Others do all of that and then can't release the grip, so nothing new has room to land. Or they skip straight to action without any of the rest behind it, so the action feels hollow and exhausting. What changes the outcome isn't finding some missing magic ingredient. It's being honest with yourself about which of these you're actually doing, and which one you've been quietly skipping.

Here's why I think this matters more right now than it did even a few years ago. We are living in a moment where a huge amount of thinking can be outsourced. Ask a question, get an answer. Ask for a plan, get a plan. That's not a bad thing. Some of it is genuinely useful. My book, Agency: Reclaiming Your Power Through Energetic Awareness, exists partly because of it. But there's a piece no tool can do for you, no matter how good it gets. It can't tell you what to solve for.

Discernment, knowing what question is actually yours to ask, is not something you can prompt your way into. If you don't know what your X is, you'll keep handing that decision to whatever is loudest around you: an algorithm, someone else's opinion, a culture that profits from your distraction. That's the same thing that pulled me away from my own fixed point for forty years. It just has better technology behind it now.

My father is still working on aspects of his fixed point theorem at eighty-four. He has contributed to it in ways recognized as historically significant across the international topological community, and the core problem still isn't solved, and may not be in his lifetime or mine. To me, that doesn't read as failure. It reads like a life spent paying full attention to one true thing, which might be the entire assignment.

Solving for X isn't a single equation you complete and set down. It's a practice. You find the fixed point. You lose it. You find it again. You run the formula, badly at first, then a little less badly, then well enough that it starts to feel less like math and more like how you actually move through your days.

Here's the coolest part of this whole correlation. My father was never a genius with numbers, not really. He's a genius at imagining, at working inside the world of mathematics with his imagination doing the heavy lifting. That is the cloth I have realized I have been cut from all along.

So here's the question I'd leave you with, the one that started all of this for me and the one I still come back to. No matter where you go, there you are. Do you know where that is?