2025 Wasn’t a Glow-Up Year — It Was a Strip-Back Year: Welcome to PRIAS

If Everything Felt Like It Was Falling Apart, You Were Probably in PRIAS

There’s a narrative floating around that 2025 was meant to be some kind of radiant “new earth” glow-up. A year of manifesting, ease, abundance, and alignment if you just think positively enough.

I’m not seeing that.

What I saw — in myself, in my clients, and in the broader collective — is something much more uncomfortable, much more honest, and ultimately much more transformative.

I’m calling it PRIAS:Purging. Releasing. Inspired Action. Surrender.

And no — it’s not pretty.

Purging: When the Body Brings Up What the Mind Avoided

Purging is usually where people panic and think something has gone wrong.

Old emotions resurface. Trauma memories stir. Grief you thought you’d “dealt with” shows up again. Your body feels heavy, tired, inflamed, wired, or flat.

This isn’t regression.It’s your nervous system doing what it couldn’t do before.

What many spiritual spaces don’t talk about is the pain body — the stored emotional residue of what we had to suppress to survive. When safety increases (or illusion drops), that material comes up to be felt, metabolised, and integrated.

This phase lowers your tolerance for bullshit. Including your own.

You can’t bypass it. You can’t affirm it away. And trying to stay “high vibe” through purging only delays the process and increases the suffering.

Releasing: When What No Longer Fits Starts Falling Away

Purging is internal.Releasing is external.

This is where jobs, relationships, identities, habits, addictions, coping strategies, and belief systems start to feel intolerable.

Things you once justified suddenly feel dishonest.Dynamics you normalised start to feel constricting.Loops you’ve been stuck in for years become impossible to ignore.

This part can feel brutal — especially for trauma survivors who learned that attachment equals safety.

But here’s the truth:If something requires you to abandon yourself to keep it, it’s already expired.

Releasing isn’t something you force.It’s something you stop preventing.

Inspired Action: When Intuition Gets Louder Than Fear

Once enough has been cleared, something else starts happening.

A quiet nudge. An idea that won’t leave you alone. A sense that you’re meant to move, even without a full plan.

This isn’t hustle. It isn’t ego. And it isn’t about proving anything.

Inspired action comes from alignment — not anxiety.

For some people it looks like starting a podcast, writing a book, leaving a profession, sharing their story, creating something that feels terrifying and necessary at the same time.

The catch?Inspired action usually asks you to move before you feel ready.

Ignoring it tends to lead to stagnation, irritability, depression, or that restless sense of “something’s off.”

Surrender: The Part Everyone Wants to Skip

This is the step I personally find the hardest.

Surrender doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means letting go of how the outcome should look.

Letting go of timelines.Letting go of validation.Letting go of needing certainty before you move.

For those of us with trauma histories, surrender can feel unsafe — because control once kept us alive.

But true surrender isn’t collapse.It’s trust rebuilt at a nervous system level.

It’s continuing to show up without gripping the steering wheel so tightly that you miss where life is actually trying to take you.

PRIAS Isn’t Linear — It’s Cyclical

This isn’t a neat, one-time process.

You don’t “complete” PRIAS and ascend into permanent peace.

You cycle through it — again and again — at deeper levels, with more honesty, less illusion, and (hopefully) more self-compassion.

Growth isn’t a straight line.It’s a spiral.

Each turn asks you to shed another layer of who you thought you had to be to survive.

A Note on Spiritual Teachers & Discernment

Some frameworks around surrender, letting go, and the pain body have been articulated by figures like Eckhart Tolle and David R. Hawkins.

Their work can be supportive — when approached critically and grounded in lived reality.

No teacher replaces your discernment.No framework should override your nervous system.And nothing spiritual should require you to tolerate harm.

Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. Always stay grounded.

If This Year Felt Like Everything Fell Apart…

You’re probably not broken.

You’re likely went through a recalibration.

PRIAS doesn’t arrive to destroy you.It arrives to dismantle what was built around wounds that no longer need to run your life.

Be gentle. Be honest. And don’t rush yourself through a process that’s trying to return you to yourself.

If you’re in it — you’re not alone.And you’re not doing it wrong.

You’re just becoming more real.