Disasters can be our greatest teachers.
Less than two months have passed since the LA fires, and for everyone I know whom the fires have touched, life has been permanently altered. This past week, I gathered with four of my dearest friends to connect now that the dust has settled. Two lost their homes, two, including me, had to move out of the now-uninhabitable houses and neighborhood, and one home still stands. We reflected on the spiritual lessons the fires are teaching us, and each of us has come to different insights. It’s fascinating how one disaster can carry unique teachings for each person
The intersection of Temescal and Pacific Coast Highway, just down the road from our former house
Disasters can be our greatest teachers. This newsletter shares 12 lessons I’ve learned from the fire that I hope can help others find meaning and growth in hard times.
For nearly 2 decades, I have been nursing a desire to move closer and closer to living as integrated with nature as possible. This journey began when I was 17, when I first went backpacking and discovered that spending weeks in nature—free from technology and most common material comforts, carrying everything I needed on my back—was pure happiness. In my 20s, I spent months trekking and leading trips through remote back country, sleeping under the stars, utterly content. Deep down, I knew that humanity’s disconnection from the Earth—our concrete-suffocated landscapes, our information overload, our nature-starved cities, our 93% indoor existence—is the true root of our healthcare crisis. Globally, we are disconnected from the very thing that gives us life that we poison, suffocate, and exploit the Earth with endless construction, synthetic toxins, and extraction without remorse.
And it will be the end of us. As someone in the “healthcare” field, I’ve realized my real job is not about medicine—it’s about fostering a re-connection between humans and nature.
Me backpacking in Wind River Wilderness, Wyoming in 2022
So when I saw the flames racing down the hills toward my house on January 7th, pushed by 70 mph Santa Ana winds, I grabbed a few precious things, said a final goodbye to my home and my belongings, and drove away. About an hour later, while still in the car, I called my best friend and told her, somewhat to my own surprise, that in some ways it would almost be a relief to have all my things burn. Without any choice, I could start fresh.
Like most Westerners, I was born into a consumerist world, where even at a young age, you begin accumulating your “monuments of stuff” that you then haul from apartment to apartment, house to house, city to city, for ever. At 37, I’ve carried my possessions through 17 different homes across D.C., Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Half Moon Bay, New York City, Portland, Bend, and Los Angeles. The high-achievement life is fundamentally untethered from the Earth; our connection to a place is simply a means to an end, but not a responsibility by any means. To climb the ladder, you move from city to city for the “best” education, the “best” internship, the “best” job. In this world, material and intellectual achievement reign supreme, no matter the cost to the Earth. Heart-centered living, spiritual development, and cultivation or responsibility for the land? Afterthoughts.
I have always known, on some level, that this way of life is a lie—a trap. It seems that people with the most possessions are frequently discontent. But fully breaking out of the matrix is challenging. As I watched the flames of the Palisades fire approach our home, I wondered if this was my launching pad to a radically simpler life, an odd push to fulfilling my heart’s longing: to live in tune with the cycles of the land. If we lost our things, I wouldn’t replace them haphazardly. It would have to be a fresh, intentional start.
And then, to our shock, our house didn’t burn.
Nearly everything around it was reduced to ash, yet our home stood. We watched the Cal-Fire maps, saw the destruction inch closer and closer circumferentially around our street, and yet, somehow, threading the needle, it never reached us.
The hike just above our house that I took hundreds of times.
Rethinking Rebuilding
A fire is an odd opportunity to go back to the drawing board of life. After the fires, as I sat with my journal, one question kept emerging: What if instead of rushing to rebuild, we fully reoriented.
So many millennials I know deeply desire to live closer to the land, detach from tech addiction, grow food, and build intentional communities. And yet, despite being the most resourced and “advanced” civilization in human history, the idea of creating sustainable, community-based living still feels far “too complicated.” The entire financial and cultural system is designed to make isolated, disconnected, hyper-mobile living the default—vastly simpler than re-imagining what’s possible. Most modern cultures worship quarterly profits; there is no meaningful political will to incentivize sustainable living, which has been wrongly conflated with lack of personal freedom.
Since we had to move after the fires, it feels as if the universe decided for me that I must confront every single thing I own —sorting through 37 years of accumulated junk and cherished mementos, making deliberate choices about what to keep and what to let go. The process is painful, not just emotionally but also environmentally. Hauling it all around for the rest of my life has an environmental cost, but so does sending it to a landfill. There’s no perfect solution for the Earth, only the resolve to move forward with greater awareness and a commitment to change.
For me, the work I feel called to do next in this lifetime is helping people grasp that reconnecting meaningfully with nature is not optional—it’s essential for survival. It’s also about helping political and business leaders see that the healthcare crisis is just a branch of the environmental crisis. I suspect universe has made me go through this painful process of sifting because real transformation demands it. If we are to change our lives —and healing requires nothing less— we must all be willing to go through this reckoning. And how can I understand if I haven’t lived it myself.
The pain of sifting
Something about my relationship with my material items “broke” in the whiplash of the fire. At first, I accepted the loss, feeling both sadness and a strange relief. Then, we realized our belongings were still there, but perhaps toxic due to fire-related chemicals. We read articles constantly about the health risks of our remaining items, with NPR suggesting you should simply get rid of furniture due to cancer risk if your house was close to the fire, while others minimized the risk. But since I had already accepted the loss when I thought the house would 100% burn, I now felt much more detachment to the things that miraculously remained.
Do we donate things that don’t smell like smoke? Are they safe? A glass table that can be cleaned might be fine, but what about a porous couch? Our beloved art doesn’t smell, but could it still leach toxins into a future home? Should we put everything in a landfill, even furniture that seems fine but may carry invisible hazards? The uncertainty was exhausting. In the end, we ended up discarding about 90% of our things, and I don’t plan to replace most of them.
Realizations about “stuff” from the fires
Here’s what I want to take with me from the fires for the rest of my life.
1. Authentic relationships and overcoming trauma are an antidote to stuff.
As I parted with my things, I realized a big reason I had kept so much —a garage and closets full— was for “proof” of my identity and accomplishments; they were both my personal monument and museum. The thousands of pages of meticulously color-coded study guides from all-nighters in college, medical school, and residency. The awards. The trophies. The embroidered white coats and scrubs with “Dr Casey Means” that I’ll never use again. My captain’s jackets from high school varsity sports.
But now, having met my husband and having a handful of people who I know love me unconditionally through ups and downs, I feel comfortable letting go of these “evidence” pieces. My husband loves me and my brain without needing to see my 40-page vector calculus study guides. His total acceptance made me realize I no longer needed physical validation of “stuff.”
Tip: A helpful tool for parting with special momentos was to simply take a picture of it before discarding or recycling. This way you have a memory, but don’t have to haul the thing around.
Additionally, some of the childhood wounds I worked through in therapy and with plant medicine revolved around a past need to prove my loveability through achievement and impact, a common theme for many. In healing those wounds through hard work and re-integration of past experiences, the need for proof of impact has lessened.
2. Who I am today is the real proof of the work that came before.
The person I am now is the sum of all that effort—the rest of the iceberg lying beneath the visible tip. What truly matters is how I show up now, today: the conversations I start, the ideas I share, the kindness and peace I bring into a room. That is the real proof of my past, and ultimately comes down to my present self, which I must continue to cultivate every day. If I’m not my best self in the present to others, myself, and Earth, it doesn’t really matter what I’ve “accomplished” or been in the past.
3. I don’t need to prove to my kids how much of a badass I was.
As I prepare for motherhood, I see that much of what I’ve saved is about a desire to give my future kids a window into who I was. But leaning on philosophy, I realize it’s not my job to prove anything about my past. They will simply see who I am. The future is theirs. My role is to love and guide them.
Khalil Gibran captures this beautifully in On Children
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
I choose to believe that everything my children need to know about me, they will know through my actions, my words, and my love. And if they ever want to walk down memory lane, I have plenty of photos and stories to share.
4. Create “peak art,” then discard the bricks that built it.
Something shifted in me with the publication of Good Energy. That book is the culmination of 30 years of life experience and healing: losing my mother suddenly, deep depression and chronic pain in residency, tens of thousands of hours and sleepless nights in medical training and then quitting, hundreds of books and articles read, thousands of pages of journal entries. I gave the book my everything in aiming to distill my life into something useful. It represents me as authentically as any art I could create.So fundamentally, my life is embedded in the book. And therefore, I no longer feel as much a need to keep the bricks that built the building.The pearl here is that perhaps instead of saving endless boxes of mementos of our past, we should focus on creating peak art that embodies the growth it took to get there.
Next steps: Living with intention
1. Be obsessively intentional about what enters my home.
During these past 2 months we have been pushed to confront every single thing we own, to sift through it, to make choices, and to deeply feel the weight of what I’ve accumulated in nearly 4 decades. Even something as small as a nail file (which I “needed” yesterday for a chipped nail) presents a dilemma: should I buy a new one that is wrapped in plastic packaging, or just use the cuticle clipper I already have which isn’t the perfect tool but can do the job?
When I had a mild headache the other day, I instinctively searched for a bottle of curcumin, but I didn’t have any. In a click, I could have a plastic bottle delivered to my door. But do I really need it? Could I use whole turmeric from Whole Foods instead? These endless micro-decisions about balancing sustainability, convenience, and necessity are exhausting, but they matter. (Spoiler: I DID end up buying the nail file, and I’m disappointed in myself about it!). The convenience and having the “right” product for every task at our fingertips doesn’t seem to be making us happier or healthier as a society, but it is a dopamine hit. My goal is to reduce Amazon shipments by at least 50% this year by always asking myself if I have another tool that could do the job, if I really need it, or if I could get it at a thrift store.
Tip: My husband was a huge help in being an objective opinion on what of mine to part with. Find an accountability buddy without an emotional connection to your things to help you do “spring cleaning” and say goodbye with things you know need to go but that are tough to part with.
2. No more PR boxes and free stuff
Ever since my book came out, many brands have wanted to send me many things. This was fun for a minute, but quickly feels exhausting and leads to so many boxes and so much waste. I’m not accepting any more “free” stuff unless I see a greater purpose for it. It’s astonishing how much “free” stuff is thrust on us each week: reusable shopping bags, T-shirts, pens, key chains, goody bags, samples. None of this is actually free; it creates cognitive load, takes up space, and will end up in a landfill.
Bea Johnson, the author of Zero Waste Home, asks us to start to identify as a compulsive refuser, rather than the compulsive acceptors of “stuff” that many of us have been trained to be. This mindset shift of being a “compulsive refuser” has been a game changer for me because I’ve started to get a dopamine hit from saying “no.”
3. Commit to a smaller home with more outdoor space.
I never again want to be confined by indoor living, being part of the statistic that the average American spends 93% of their time indoors or in a car. Our next home will be intentionally smaller, with mixed-use spaces that encourage us to be outside as much as possible. Why not have a makeshift outdoor kitchen in the yard that allows me to spend those hours each day in the glorious sunshine? There’s no rule that says you can’t!
Cooking gourmet meals outside in the back country is one of my all time favorite things! Why not structure my next kitchen to be outdoors in the yard?
4. Break the cycle of equating gifts with love.
The way we express affection and care through physical gifts has become excessive and is a key aspect of internalized consumerism. Instead, I want to shift towards giving (and receiving) landfill-avoiding gifts, like experiences, classes, help, handwritten notes, vintage and secondhand finds, or homemade organic perishables.
5. Communicate with my loved ones that the greatest gift anyone can give me is adding to the things that will end up in a landfill.
Gift giving is many people’s love language, and this is so, so beautiful. I treasure so many of the gifts my family and friends have given me. However, I’m committed to not letting my life and home fill up with stuff again, and am going to start communicating to loved ones (perhaps by sending them this newsletter! that I’d like to put a moratorium on physical, non-perishable, non-compostable gifts, and that an act of love for me would be to refrain for giving me “things.” A home-cooked organic meal, a non-toxic beeswax candle, an hour of home organization help, a handwritten letter, a neck massage, a weekend trip, or hands-on gardening lessons would be the greatest gifts I could want in my life right now! Our consumerist culture has made non-physical gifts seem a little like a “cop-out” or “less-than,” and this must change.
5. Reduce clothing.
These past two months of displacement have shown me that I need FAR fewer clothes than I thought. I don’t need a big closet full of options—I need a small, well-chosen wardrobe that actually serves my life. We’ve been living out a of suitcase the last two months and have had plenty of clothes.
6. Read Zero Waste Home Again
Zero Waste Home had a huge impact on me last year, and I need to revisit it. See my newsletter here where I summarized it. The author creates only a pint-sized jar of trash for her entire home per year. It’s proof that it’s possible to live sustainably with radical intentionality.
8. Continue to write and speak from the heart.
I can’t change the world overnight, but I can change my own behavior—and share my journey. That’s what I can control.
What in the newsletter resonates with you?
With good energy, Dr. Casey
