About

Hello! My name is Emma, and I write about self-liberation.

There are two kinds of personal growth:

1. The kind that shapes you into what society expects and rewards—more productive, more attractive, more acceptable, more “successful” by standards like money, fame, or climbing whatever ladder matters to you.
2. The kind that makes you genuinely happy, free, and connected to your soul—which often means rejecting social conditioning and becoming your own autonomous self.

I do the second kind. And I call it self-liberation, just so nobody is confused as to the goal.

What I teach comes from a combination of my training in Hakomi and NVC (more on that below), and 20 years of doing my own healing work using whatever I could find or figure out that was helpful. I spent many years unravelling my personal history, patterns, wounding, and learning what I need to thrive as an autistic/ADHD person in an overwhelming world.

I write about everything from state shifting and spiritual self-delusion to self-validation and healing from childhood trauma, including attachment and complex PTSD.

I consider myself a personal growth educator or inner-work artist—I learn methods, use them, and then transmit what I find useful to others.

If you want to follow along with my process, I write about that over on my Substack Sparkly Dark.

Joy Ninja is the distillation of my process—the “here’s exactly how to get free” instruction manual.

I have completed professional trainings in Hakomi (a mindfulness-based therapy method), attachment styles, trauma, life coaching, group dynamics, and I studied and helped teach Nonviolent Communication (NVC) for several years, including in prison (although I’m not a certified trainer). I have also informally studied and used parts work, which has been popularized by Internal Family Systems.

Spirituality

I live my life by following what Robert Johnson called the “slender threads”—following an invisible path of intuition, growth, exploration, and discovery. This is central to who I am and how I approach life and healing.

I have been following my own spiritual path for about 20 years that mostly consists of direct inner awareness of Spirit (mysticism). I’ve gotten value out of various teachings including Wicca, Buddhism, New Thought, Evolutionary Astrology, A Course in Miracles, the Akashic Records, and Neville Goddard. I have read a lot of NDE accounts (near-death experiences) and past life and between-life regression accounts.

I am studying astrology in-depth and have a separate website about that at AstroLiberation.

My approach to spirituality is not about belief —it’s about utility. Any framework that creates more internal freedom, compassion, connection, and love is a good thing as far as I am concerned.

I do generally believe that we have immortal souls that plan our lifetimes before we are incarnated, to have certain experiences. On the soul level, we are whole and complete, even if we don’t feel that way on a human level. Accessing this idea of the soul has helped me immensely to transcend the conditioned trauma identities I developed as a child. (This is not a substitute for doing painful emotional work).

My personal life

I live in Oregon, which is on the West coast of the US. I grew up in Southern Oregon, on a farm in the woods.

I’m a mostly-retired web designer and developer. (Meaning I only work on my own projects, not for clients).

My neurodivergent brain is constantly making connections between ideas, especially ones that don’t seem related to most people. I seek novelty, which can look like “shiny object syndrome”, but it’s a deep need for me to absorb novel stimuli and make sense of them. The result is that I have a broad and eclectic history of minor and major obsessions with different philosophies, systems, frameworks, hobbies, etc.

Sometimes I post random stuff that interests me on my ideation blog.

In 2014, I married someone who was in prison, and was a prison wife for 7 years. It was an overwhelming, painful, and transformative experience that shattered my understanding of “America” by exposing me to the most dysfunctional and trauma-inducing institution we have. After he got out and our marriage fell apart, I had to finally face my fearful-avoidant attachment wounding.

I have always been sensitive to suffering, especially feelings of alienation and loneliness and disconnection. I am drawn to the shadows within the mind and within the world. I know I can’t “save” the world, as it has to evolve and grow at its own pace, just like individual humans do. But I do care, and want to contribute to more happiness and healing where I can.

Why the name Joy Ninja?

To me, joy ninja means spiritual warrior. That might sound like a contradiction, but I see it as a practice of discipline or mental training to see through illusion.

Healing and integration are the opposite of fighting, but our minds put up a hell of a fight to convince us that threats are real and to employ defenses.

Being a joy ninja means developing the discipline to recognize truth when we see it. It means having the willingness to let go of illusions (especially the ones that feel precious and vital to our survival), and to continually seek freedom.

Thanks for reading!

If you want to know anything else, you can contact me, or find me on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram.