Come in Friends!

A Welcome Note from My Nervous System to Yours

I don’t write to be seen.
I don’t write to go viral.
I write because I have been watching.
Because I’ve been listening.
I write to tell the truth, especially the ones that sit in the body long before they’re ready for words. I write because there are things we’ve lived that we weren’t allowed to name in real time. I write to offer those moments a second chance at wholeness.
Because something in me, whether it’s intuition, memory, or spirit, won’t let me move on until I name what’s happening beneath the noise.

Welcome to my corner of the internet. A slower place. A warmer one. A space for truth-telling and repair, for grief that hasn’t found language yet, and for desires that feel too sacred for Instagram captions or staff meetings.

So if you’re here, reading this, you’re already invited. You’ve entered a space that doesn’t ask you to shrink, perform, or overexplain. You’re allowed to feel something here before you know how to name it.

My name is Ashley Johnson. I’m a mother, a facilitator, a polyamorous Black queer woman, a training director in public education and racial justice, and the founder of Flower Effect a practice space I’ve curated for healing, conflict transformation, and cultural work that isn’t interested in performance.

But beyond my titles, I am a Projector in Human Design. Which means:

• I am here to guide, not to grind.

• I see what others often miss—but only when invited to share.

• I thrive on rest, precision, intimacy, and completion.

In all of these roles, I carry one assignment: to tell the truth in service of freedom.
Not just mine. Yours too. Our children’s. The communities we claim. The lineages we inherit. The relationships we choose, and the ones we are still learning to release with love.

This is not a newsletter that will flood your inbox.
It is a space for slow-burning insight, felt truth, and pattern recognition.

This isn’t a productivity blog.
It isn’t a self-help newsletter.
It’s a place where I let the truth breathe, where the body speaks before the mind interrupts, where feelings are allowed to arrive in their own time.

Here’s what you can expect from me:

What you’ll find here

What I write will often come from the after.
After the rupture. After the silence. After the clarity that couldn’t land until I slowed down enough to feel it.

Some of what you’ll read includes:

🌀 Essays on conflict, repair, and emotional honesty.
I’ll write about the cost of silence, the false worship of calm, and the beauty of wholeness. You’ll find reflections on interpersonal rupture, institutional harm, and what it means to love from a place of sovereignty, not survival. What does it mean to love someone and still choose yourself? How do we practice community in a world that taught us to perform belonging instead of building it? I’ll also write about what happens when our values collide with our coping mechanisms, and how we navigate harm without recreating punishment.

🌱 Dispatches from my healing justice practice.
As a facilitator, I’ve supported thousands of people and hundreds of teams through the most complex parts of their work. I’ll share field notes from the organizations I support, minus the name-dropping and savior complex. Expect reflections on team culture, facilitation as spellwork, and the slow rituals of repair that aren’t flashy but keep people from breaking. I’ll share behind-the-scenes learnings about organizational trauma, somatic facilitation, and what it really takes to build a values-aligned culture.

💘 Love that doesn’t apologize: Letters from my polyamorous, queer, Black life.
Expect tender writings on dating while demisexual, loving without hierarchy, co-parenting with integrity, and building relationships rooted in consent, abundance, and magic. I am learning every day how to move from control to consent, from scarcity to abundance, from performance to presence. This is a space where I’ll talk about intimacy, dating, queerness, grief, erotic clarity, and loving more than one person without making any of them small.

🫀 Parenting as portal: A lineage, and intergenerational reimagining.
Being a parent has changed everything. I’m raising my child with my whole chest and my softest hands. You’ll hear about our rituals, our ruptures, and our healing. I’m interested in what it means to co-regulate with a child, to model boundaries as love, and to parent in a way that undoes some of the harm we inherited. I’ll also write about what it means to be a caregiver in the community, not just in biology.

🔍 And reflections on identity, strategy, and spiritual survival.
Whether I’m unpacking Supreme Court decisions, internalized capitalism, or my own body’s whispers, everything I write will center curiosity over certainty and truth over trend.

What I hope you feel

I hope you feel slowed down.
I hope something inside you exhales.
I hope you feel like you are in conversation, even if we never speak directly.
And I hope you start to feel less alone in the questions that have no quick fix—just truth, movement, breath, and time.

This space isn’t built for constant output. I will write when the time is right.
I will write when I feel the clarity in my body, not the pressure in my inbox.
I trust that the people meant to be here will find me. And I trust you’ll know when a piece is written for you.

Thank you for being here.
Thank you for making space for slow truth, for sacred pause, for what lives underneath the performance.
I don’t take it lightly.

If any of that sounds like something your nervous system has been craving, you’re invited. You are deeply, warmly invited.

This is a place for us to complete the story together.

With care,
Ashley