2024 was the most high-output, public, loud year of my life. My book Good Energy came out on May 14th, 2024, became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and sold over a million copies in a year. I’d been on over 75 podcasts, including three of the top 10—Huberman in May, Tucker Carlson in August, and Rogan in October—with tens of millions of downloads; my episode with Tucker was the most shared podcast episode in America in 2024. The Make America Healthy Again movement had picked up my book as a key text, and root-cause health was suddenly moving into the center of a political movement—something I had never remotely anticipated when I wrote the book.

A couple of months into pregnancy, my phone rang while I was sitting on my deck, asking me to serve as Surgeon General of the United States. I ultimately agreed as a way to help bring about systems changes in healthcare that could positively affect hundreds of millions of people, possibly the whole world.

Through the nomination—where, by cosmic humor, my Senate hearing coincided with the exact day I gave birth—I learned what it means to surrender to energy outside my control: to let a massive amount of energy move through me without being destroyed by it.

By surrender, I mean relinquishing the ego’s inner resistance and compulsive need to control and react, so that action can arise from greater clarity, acceptance, integrity, and love. I do not mean resignation, passivity, or disingenuous agreement. 

I hope these lessons from a colliding presidential nomination and birth might help some of us navigate life and complex cultural times when circumstances can make us feel powerless.

Months before the nomination, on September 21st, 2024—just days before my Joe Rogan interview—I was wandering around the Healdsburg farmers market when I noticed a piece of paper on the ground. I picked it up and turned it over. It simply said: “Be brilliant, then be quiet.” No other text.

Every aspect of my professional world was cut off in one moment. No more newsletter. No social media. No podcasts. No talking to the media. No more sharing about my book. Nothing.

These nomination processes can proceed for weeks or months. In my case, it became a full year, so the silence had the opportunity to be totally immersive.

When you enter the political orbit, you enter a washing machine of controversy. You are turned into a caricature of yourself. Your life is scrutinized. Huge numbers of people are critical of you; others are incredibly complimentary. It is all of it, coming at you at once. And as a nominee, you cannot reply, with the rationale being that it could create more controversy and liability. 

I brushed most of the criticisms, disparagements, and falsities off. But of course, I felt reactive at times. “I can’t believe this is being said about me!” “This is abjectly false.” I watched as slander from outlets like the New York Times permeated into social media vitriol, while fully fictional rhetoric from social media was printed in the New York Times, in a weird, political cyclone.

Parts of me wanted to correct the record, defend, and explain. But the rules came from the top: the White House. I was to take it on the chin and recognize that this was part of the “game” that most in the political orbit experience. 

The gift in having to stand witness, without reaction, to an onslaught of controversy and false or misleading claims targeted at me was profound. Reactivity is something I have worked on my whole life. I’ve read the books, done the practices, and thought about it for years. I’ve gotten better, but I have always wanted—and needed—to get stronger.

And it became a strange blessing: an opportunity to go inward, be quiet, be deeply present for my pregnancy, and think about what was happening in our country, our health ecosystem, and our birth culture. For one of the most sustained periods of my life, I had to come to terms with my sense of self, not only absent public validation, but in the face of monumental negativity.

The Buddhists have a teaching that captures how I had to think about those months: the two arrows. The first arrow is what happens to you—the facts of the event. The second arrow is the suffering you create on top of it: the rumination, resentment, and story. The first arrow is rarely optional, but the second arrow is.

A vicious headline is a first arrow. Reading it forty times—imagining every stranger who believed it—and drafting the rebuttal you will never send—those are second arrows. And you are the one shooting them. If you read every comment and attach to praise or criticism, you will get clobbered. Let go or be dragged, as they say.

I couldn’t react publicly because of the nomination rules, but more importantly, I had to tend to my private reactions and emotions because of the life inside me. It’s one thing for me to stew in anger; it’s another to indulge in indignation when it drenches my baby in stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine.

One of my dreams for many years was to have a home birth—a “physiologic birth,” as in touch with the natural, animal, hormonal flow of birth as possible. To be clear, I am in awe of what hospitals can do in true emergencies. I absolutely would have been grateful to use those services had I needed them. I was low risk, my midwife was a seasoned, licensed provider with a strong relationship with the hospital, and for the right patient population with the right practitioner, home birth is very safe.

A goal was to avoid the “cascade of interventions” that is common in hospital births and can harm mother and baby and lead to unnecessary C-sections. But my reasons went beyond the physiological. They were personal and spiritual. I craved an experience so intense that it would require me to access layers of strength, resilience, and agency I had not had to harness before. I wanted my baby’s entry into the world to be as calm and grounded as possible.

To show up with the resilience I craved, I had to face fears and limiting beliefs. I had to examine where I derived my confidence, strength, courage, and love. I had to cut the cord with any sense of victimization, which I knew would hinder a safe and swift birth. I also had to be willing to vulnerably receive loving support from my birth team while in the transcendental state of birth consciousness.

You must do this in a culture that can be diminishing, exploitative, and unaccommodating to mothers, mothering, and children, and still feel proud of the act of creating the future.

What became clear in pregnancy was that the nomination was a crucial piece of my preparation. Being placed under that microscope—having my life scrutinized, being praised and pilloried by strangers, and being unable to respond—was a precious gift from God in helping me show up for birth. With major newspapers and influential voices distorting my life’s work, motivations, integrity, family, and “credibility,” I had the rare opportunity to go deeper into honoring and validating myself and trusting God’s plan, based on truth that only I needed to know.

I got to ask myself:

Ultimately, I had to stand on my own two feet, ready to do something extremely intense.

Birth, at its essence, is a massive amount of energy moving through your body. The work of labor, from what I’ve come to understand, is not to try to control that energy. It is to surrender to it—to let it move through you in order to open. Fighting it, clenching against it, and letting fear take over can slow labor and dilation. The body requires something completely different and totally unintuitive: trust, safety, breath, surrender.

In the nomination, it was the same. Massive energy was coming at me: headlines, scrutiny, praise, criticism, projection, distortion, the intensity of a divided culture, and a manipulative media. The lesson was identical. In birth, if you clench against the contractions and pain, you suffer more. In life, if you attach to the comments, praise, criticism, or distortion, you suffer more. Control in both scenarios is not only ineffective, but counterproductive.

David Hawkins’ work, particularly his influential book Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior, had helped prepare me to understand this distinction. He wrote about force as the energy of fear, control, resistance, and coercion, while true power arises from integrity, alignment, surrender, and truth—which does not need to attack or endlessly defend itself because it can stand on its own. We want to be powerful, not forceful.

Both experiences asked me to choose who I am in this world: a Creator, or a victim. To create, energy must flow freely. Birth and the nomination taught me I needed to let go of anything that blocked that flow.

So there I was: contractions beginning just hours before I was supposed to sit before the Senate. Two of the great initiations of my year arrived at the same moment, both demanding that I let go—of my need to control my reputation and my need to control my contractions. There was also a third initiation in 2025—my Los Angeles neighborhood burning down in the second week of the year—which further contributed to all these learnings. 

Just hours before I gave birth, I whispered to my midwife that my unmedicated birth—the most physically intense experience of my life—was the second hardest thing I’d done that week.

Aspects of the nomination—witnessing the cultural division and pain, experiencing the collective’s projections, my frustration that the Senate knowingly scheduled my hearing for two days after my due date, and the expectation that I pretzel my pure message about health through a political lens—all felt harder. Somehow, surrendering to all of that made birth seem easier.

My son was born at home, into quiet, into darkness, into my own hands, with my husband cradling both of us. It was the best moment of my life.

A new version of me was born too, where my focus and desired impact have become more resolute. My nomination was not confirmed by the Senate, but my sense of purpose in helping bring about a healthier world—and focusing my energy on the intersection of human health, environmental health, and spirituality—has only strengthened.

With my baby here, it feels imperative that I direct every iota of my impact toward a more peaceful, life-respecting world where humans are inspired to honor their unique place in the web of life and protect the miraculous system of interdependence on which our existence depends.

Equanimity encompasses deep, unflappable grounding and peace. It encompasses civility, dignity, and integrity. It is the capacity to witness your life and the world with peaceful detachment—not the cold detachment of not caring, but the grounded detachment of being fully aware and not being toppled.

So many spiritual traditions teach that attachment is the root of suffering, and that the ability to step back and observe your life with equanimity is part of how we spiritually transcend.

Alongside equanimity is stewardship: the responsible caretaking of things temporarily entrusted to us. That includes my body, which is simply matter that is currently “Casey”—atoms that will soon cycle back into the wider universe. It includes the earth that sustains all of us. And it includes the child in my home, whose soul journey I have been entrusted to support.

Our culture doesn’t inspire us to be stewards, and we are shown few models of how to be equanimous. We are nudged and manipulated to be extractors, consumers, defenders, vigilant, and angry. But we can see flashes of it here and there, and, as I lifted a new soul out of the water and into my arms, it became even clearer that cultivating equanimity and stewardship in myself—and possibly inspiring more of it in the world—would be the greatest work I could do. I have absolutely none of this mastered, not even close; I am so far from being a true equanimous steward. But it is the journey I am on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I don’t think my year was as unusual as it looks. I think it was a concentrated dose of what many of us are living through now, every day.

Anyone observing social media or the mainstream news is standing in a storm of energy being thrust back and forth. There is so much fighting, negativity, and projection. Many people feel hopeless about where we are as a culture. We live in a reactive world where people feel justified in their anger—where some even feel justified in violence—because the problems seem so big and trust is so low.

Chronic anger and obsessive control are health annihilators. They are anti-nature; biochemical states opposed to healing. A life organized around too much anger or control is a life organized against your own body. Unfortunately, hijacking our amygdalas and inciting outrage and fear is the business model of many of our largest industries.

We want a life where the idea of stuffing images, content, food, drugs, or anything else into our bodies that does not honor this miraculous journey becomes unfathomable. The goal is to make willpower easier by living from a place where healthy “habits” feel naturally aligned, and where our overwhelming awe for life inspires us to pursue meaningful work that fulfills us and supports the well-being of ourselves, our communities, and our world.

Many of us will experience a first arrow sometime soon: the comment, the conversation, the headline, the frustration—whatever it is. But the second arrow, the suffering we layer on top, is optional.

Steve Jobs said in his Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005:

We cannot really plan our future, but, if we look back at our past, we can see a pattern of waypoints that created who we are. I needed the level of the White House to help me learn a lesson on letting go. I needed twelve months of silence and one night of labor to get me more clear on how I want to live. I’m hoping that, by writing this, you can borrow the lesson, too. 

With gratitude,

Casey