What is this Deepening: Sophie Marsh x Yasmin Suteja

Welcome back to a walk-turned-reverie on sobriety, sensation, rupture, and what it means to rebuild from a place of deep presence.

Together, Yas and I spoke of the parts of ourselves that no longer fit, the joy that feels suspicious when it arrives unannounced, and the subtle, radical power of refusing to numb. We circled around grief, transcendence, and the emotional muscles we’re still learning to stretch—especially in a world that rewards disconnection.

This is a conversation about coming home to yourself when home no longer looks how it used to. About the liminal magic of thresholds, and how, if we choose to stay with what aches, something else might bloom.

SOPHIE:

Pain is something we need to spend time with. I think there's a lot of discourse and indoctrination that encourages us to attempt to transcend pain. 

YASMIN:

That’s what modern medicine is really: numbing pain. Finding the root cause of something is a lot harder than just numbing the symptoms.

SOPHIE:

When you surround yourself with people who choose to be numb, you will find it very hard to be held in your vulnerability. If you want to live a life where you're allowed to be vulnerable, you need to surround yourself with people who are willing to be vulnerable. People who are constantly numbing don't have the muscles—the emotional muscles—to even know what you're talking about when you speak into your emotions. It's actually psychologically unsafe for them to try and empathise with you when they've committed to numbness.

That's something I really had to learn the hard way the past year, realising how we share so much of ourselves with other people, whether we even consent to or not. I'd surrounded myself with people who were hardened, who didn't have time or space for their emotional worlds. As a result, the muscles that I had used my whole life, that had been my strength, they began to kind of make me the other. They began to make me, you know, kind of this anomaly that started to feel alien even to myself.

YASMIN:

On the topic of being sober—I honestly never think about it that much because I don't know what the alternate is. I've never been able to embody the feeling of what it's like to not be sober. When you talk about numbing, I don't know what that is. I don't know how to numb things.

SOPHIE:

One of the biggest thresholds I've crossed in the past few years is my sobriety. Six months—this is the longest I've been sober since I was 15. Every single day I can feel the synapses in my brain connecting. New serotonin, joy, euphoria, experiences where I'll be laughing uncontrollably, and then I'll have this wave of panic: "This is out of control. You must be going insane because you've never felt this much joy."

Then I have to sit with that and let it pass, and it's like, "Oh wait, I'm not broken. I can just have a good time, and it's free, and it belongs to me." It's wild that there's any sort of lack of safety in that feeling. My whole identity was built around struggle and drama—this catapulting, ricocheting from high to low, this cycle where I could be the victim and the rescuer, the nightmare and the dream.

YASMIN:

Always the victim, never the perpetrator. I caught up with my childhood friend in Greece, and she said, "I have made a discerning decision to no longer play the victim in my life." She was talking about dating, and it was helping her reframe the way some of these things were mirrors to her—how she was inviting these particular energies.

When you reframe that, it becomes less "all men suck" and more "what am I inviting into my life? What am I allowing?" It's rewiring your brain and your interactions with people. It's easy to see yourself as a victim, but I don't think that gets you anywhere.

 

On Shame and Healing

SOPHIE:

A lot of my trauma—I was in proximity to what I can now define as black swan events in my life. At the time, I felt uniquely victimised. I didn't realise the extent to which other women had experienced what I had gone through.

A huge part of reframing the whole narrative was speaking publicly about my trauma and being a safe space for other women—opening up that void for other women with similar stories to rush into and be in congregation. There's something really holy about being able to gather around pain, like funerals, and lift that barbell of shame off your neck.

Shame doesn't belong to the individual. Shame is a collective construct. It's really hard for one person to alleviate themselves from shame. Guilt is a very personal experience, but shame often involves the acknowledgment of multiple people in order for it to move.

To rid yourself of shame requires deep connection to the wisdom of other people, to love of other people, and to an inherent sense of self that has deeper meaning than perpetuating an old cycle.

 

On Defining Thresholds

YASMIN:

So thresholds—would you say they are dichotomies, polar opposites? We've kind of come to the conclusion that thresholds are one and the same thing, existing next to each other, with a barrier between.

SOPHIE:

I would say the threshold is as wide and as wavering as you will it to be. The threshold is created by the diametric opposition, but the threshold itself is whatever you will it to be. Thresholds ultimately present us with a choice, and that choice is as expansive as you can conceive it to be.

Thresholds is really about being able to commit to experiencing the wholeness of something.

YASMIN:

Once you've passed through a threshold, is there any way to go back to the version of yourself that you were before?

SOPHIE:

I don't believe so. The way I see my spiritual evolution is like a tree trunk. When you cut a tree in half, you have these rings that represent its lifespan. They all orbit the same central point, but they get further and further away from the thing in the middle. That distance represents wisdom.

I don't think we ever lose our core, but my relationship with myself and the people around me will always orbit around the same core tenets. I'll just get wiser and more complete in my understanding. With that distance also comes new thresholds—to question, to perceive, to connect, to invite, to share.

 

On Identity and Reconstruction

YASMIN:

Going back to physics—when you put a glass of milk in the microwave, the water molecules vibrate, and when you take it out, it's a different thing on the level of atoms.

There's this philosophical question about ship reconstruction. They find a wreckage and try to put it back together for a museum. Some parts are original, some are missing, some are recreations. You see this in Greece at the Parthenon—some parts are legitimately the real thing that have been standing for hundreds of years, some are recreations so similar you can't tell the difference.

The question is: if you apply that to a human, you've got parts of your old self, parts of your new self, parts that are missing. When you put that thing back together, is it ever the thing it was in the beginning?

SOPHIE:

It's never not the thing it was in the beginning. I firmly believe I cannot be reproduced. You can't be reproduced. I try day to day to reproduce successes of previous days or years—it's literally impossible. But I've also tried to run away from myself, throw myself into the dumpster fire and hope something entirely new will be born. I know that's a fallacy too.

We are always with ourselves. Regardless of where we go and who we go with, our self will always be there.

YASMIN:

With dementia patients, the person is physically the same, exists in the same environment, but they're not the same. Part of the process of being human is consistently changing. I wonder if that one core thing that's immovable is the soul.

SOPHIE:

I have a loved one with dementia. There are things he cannot remember—immediate things like what day it is, what he had for breakfast. But there are parts of himself I'd never heard him talk about before until recent years. There's this renegotiation of our insides that happens regardless of what stage of life we're at. Things become less important in favour of other things.

On Connection and Transcendence

YASMIN:

I was thinking about déjà vu. If there's anything that confirms to me that we've been reincarnated, it's déjà vu. How can you explain that feeling? The fact that there's a word for it in every language—we've all felt it.

I think we are our physical selves right now, but we're also the culmination of a whole other plane of existence that we can't conceive of. Maybe that's why people are attracted to drugs and alcohol—that's the closest we'll ever get to accessing that part beyond the invisible.

SOPHIE:

I've had psychedelic experiences where I can—this will sound absurd—but I know what everyone around me is thinking and feeling, just by existing next to them. The tendrils of my sensitivity are so far open that I'm receiving information and my body is ordering it autonomously.

I know people think it's funny that I'll genuinely hug trees and lie in the garden for three hours, but I can feel a sense of oneness and information that my body needs to calm down in those spaces.

YASMIN:

When you're a kid and people ask what superpower you'd want, most say the ability to read minds. Then everyone debates whether that would be good or bad, and you end up with "I don't want to know, actually."

We're in an age where tech is desperately trying to be that superpower we talked about as kids, and it's getting pretty close. But more than ever, we're collectively trying to understand what it means to be human—if that's actually a precious thing that can't be recreated.

 

On Chaos and Mystery

SOPHIE:

Our mind can be isolated. It likes to isolate things, put them into categories: "This is this, this is where this lives." That's very Apollonian—everything has a place, a time, a purpose, a form, a function.

It's the Dionysian energy we struggle with that more accurately represents my soul and body's journey. I've experienced incomplete information, mystery, unpredictability, being out of control. Making peace with those things is what I'm learning to do. That inherently grounds my human experience in a deeper sense of beauty, of accessible fulfillment.

It's not about removing the chaos or the oppositional forces. It's about embracing them and asking, "What is this deepening?"

 

On Contentment and Purpose

YASMIN:

Coming back to the conversation we had with the boys last night—I've heard this from pretty much every single man I've spoken to. This idea that men, particularly straight men, must exist in a state of being dissatisfied to some degree. For most of them, that means rejecting love and intimacy to continue pursuing betterment.

Their fear: "The happiest I've ever been in a relationship was when my fitness was down, my businesses were doing badly, but I was so content." This idea that contentment and happiness are oppositional to betterment. But I reject that wholeheartedly.

There's this idea that unless you're broken, you won't be desired, you won't desire being fixed, you won't desire getting better.

SOPHIE:

The difference between what they were saying and how I feel is about where the ruptures exist. I don't need to manufacture ruptures. They're going to arrive anyway, in all areas of my life. If I can welcome them, I will never stop getting better.

I don't need to isolate or try to control any one part of my life anymore. I'm wanting to be more okay with the presence and arrival of ruptures in whatever form, and I can trust my ability to repair the ones that need repairing.

YASMIN:

My brother and I, on our trip to Greece—I've always operated from a space where I have high standards for myself and have associated a lot of my self-worth with what people think of me, with achievements, with external validation. Anyone chasing a creative career wants validation from external factors.

The whole time my brother was sick, he was fixated on this idea that he hadn't done enough, wasn't successful enough. He didn't have enough of a legacy to leave behind. It's very relatable: "I haven't done enough to be happy yet. I can't possibly be content because I haven't done enough."

We're driving off-road to this secluded beach where nobody is, and he says, "I think I'm happy." He's like, "Maybe I don't need to work so hard. Maybe it doesn't matter if I have a six pack or a million dollars. Maybe this is the whole point."

It's sweet seeing that revelation, because we're all struggling with that. The boys last night were orchestrating some degree of pain in their lives at all times, in fear that contentment will lead to lack of productivity, and therefore lack of purpose, and therefore death.

 

On Being in Service

SOPHIE:

There's a real sense of purpose that many people have not met—being in service to others in an intentional way for a period of time. There's something primal and deeply spiritual about creating a space where you are the container and other people are sitting in your held energy, having this levity for a moment where they can collect bits of themselves, put bits of themselves down, renegotiate themselves in your holding.

That's something I hope to achieve through my art, regardless of whether I'm facilitating in person or digitally—creating a space for people to sit in and feel alive in, feel safe in all their aliveness. Where they can go, "Oh, I see myself. I see how I'm part of the collective, and I can also value my own experience more deeply."

YASMIN:

That's a beautiful way to end this.