The Two-Star Review That Didn't Wreck My Week

Someone left a two-star review on my book, Mediumship Is Easy, this week, and for about ten minutes I felt the exact thing you'd expect, that hot, sinking, oh-no-they-hated-it feeling that lands somewhere between your chest and your stomach. A few years ago that feeling would have been the opening scene of a multi-day spiral. I would have stared at those stars for hours, built an entire narrative about my own inadequacy out of two stars on my computer screen from a stranger, and probably avoided opening my laptop for the rest of the week out of some vague sense of dread.

This time it played out differently, and I want to walk through why, because the difference wasn't willpower and it wasn't positive thinking. It was nervous system regulation, the exact thing my systems are built on.

But instead, I let myself feel the sting of it. I didn't push it down or immediately reach for a reframe like "not everyone will love it" before I'd actually let the disappointment land. I sat with being sad and a little stung for a bit, because that reaction was real and it deserved a minute of actual acknowledgment instead of a bypass from me. That part matters as much as anything else here. Suppressing the feeling doesn't process it, it just delays it and usually makes it bigger later.

But a minute of feeling something and three days of spiraling are two completely different events, and the thing that kept it at a minute instead of three days was using the same regulation work I teach.

I used my own methods of vagal tone, breath, working with the light fields of the body, getting my body out of the activated state before my mind had a chance to run off with a story about what the review meant about me as a writer, as a medium, as a person who poured a genuine amount of herself into a book.

Once my body settled, the thought loop that would have kept the spiral going simply didn't have anywhere to attach. The emotion moved through instead of getting stuck, which is the entire premise I've built this work around, so getting to actually live it in real time, on a random Tuesday, over something as small and as personal as someone's opinion of my book, felt like proof of concept in the most inconvenient possible way.

Here's the part I think is actually the most important thing to take from this. When people come to my work, they usually come to it wanting one thing, a clearer intuitive signal, a more reliable connection, less static between them and what they're trying to sense or channel. That's real, and it's a big part of what this method does.

But what happened this week wasn't a psychic moment at all, it was an ordinary, painful, very human moment, the kind everyone runs into, and the same regulation that clears the static around your intuitive signal is what let me come back to baseline in minutes instead of days. This method was never just about expanding what you can sense. It's about a nervous system that can actually recover, from a two-star review, from a hard conversation, from any moment that would otherwise take up residence in your body for far longer than it needs to. The intuitive gains in my protocol get most of the attention, but the regulation underneath them is doing quiet work in every other part of your life too, including the parts that have nothing to do with being psychic at all.

What I keep coming back to is this. The old version of me needed the review to be wrong, or needed everyone to love the book, in order to feel okay. The version of me that got to have this experience this week didn't need either of those things. I could let someone dislike my work, feel the very real sting of that for a moment, and then continue with my day without the feeling needing to prove anything or resolve into a story about my worth. That's what regulation actually buys you. Not immunity from disappointment, just a much shorter runway back to yourself, in this and in everything else.

If you've ever had a version of this happen, a comment, a review, a piece of feedback that used to be able to take your whole week hostage, that's exactly the pattern this work is built to shift. Not by teaching you to care less, but by teaching your body how to come back to baseline fast enough that the caring doesn't turn into days you don't get back.

Here is the protocol, not only changing my clients psychic lives, but also their very real, and very deep personal lives: The Unblocked Intuitive™.

Learn more about the mind-body-psychic connection in my book, Your Body is the Channel.

Xoxo Melinda