“The Braid Framework emerged when I
stopped trying to become someone else
and started listening to the rhythm
of who I already was.”
-Shannon Wooten
The Story Behind The Braid Framework
I didn’t plan to build a framework. I just needed a way to keep living that didn’t cost me myself.
After years of shape-shifting to avoid punishment, perform worth, or maintain peace, I lost connection to what was mine. I wasn’t living. I was managing. And the cost was clarity, presence, and self-trust.
What emerged was a relationship with resonance, with rhythm, and with what’s real: resonance, rhythm, and the truth I could live from instead of perform for. Not a new version of me.
The Braid Framework (TBF) arose from the mess of silence, overstimulation, breakdowns, and breakthroughs. It wasn’t designed in a vacuum. It came from recognizing that every emotion, every reaction, every insight has its own rhythm. Not always logical, but always intelligent. Always trying to communicate something real.
TBF is a way of relating to life, through the rhythm that’s already within you. Not through the roles you perform. It centers 5 root elements—Presence, Values, Emotional Regulation, Perspective, and Romance—not as steps, but as mirrors. They reflect how your energy moves, how your truth speaks, and how your choices begin to align with what’s actually real.
TBF helps you recognize what aligns and what doesn’t, so you can respond, not just react.
Live, not perform.
Root in what’s true instead of reflexively reaching for what’s expected.
TBF helps you see what aligns and what doesn’t, so you can respond instead of react.
Live instead of perform.
Root in what’s true instead of defaulting to what’s expected.
This work is about filling out what’s already true. Not about becoming someone new. It’s inhabiting who you wholly are. Honoring what’s always been yours. Living from rhythm, not rigidity.
The Braid Guides >>
What Braiding Taught Me
The Braid is a metaphor for living in rhythm with what’s real and choosing from resonance instead of reaction.
It’s not about removing tension. It’s about relating to it. Holding contradiction, energy, and emotion in relationship—not perfection. Not chaos. A living rhythm you learn to trust.
The Braid is your throughline. It’s the internal rhythm of congruence. What stays steady when life gets loud. It’s your values, your clarity, and your capacity coming together to guide how you move.
The Braid taught me that life isn’t about removing tension. It’s about staying with it. Letting it speak. Letting it shift. Letting it soften and surge without losing yourself. It’s not about fixing the dissonance. It’s about relating to it with care.
The Braid represents three living truths:
→ What’s already within you
→ What’s impacting you, moving through or around you
→ What you consciously choose to carry forward
It’s not about an endless performance of holding it all together or staying perfectly braided. It’s about having a rhythm to return to—so when life unravels, you don’t abandon yourself. You stay with it. With honesty. With care. With presence. You greet the resistance with relationship instead of abandonment, rejection, dissolve—instead of more resistance.
TBF is about honoring how you’ve already been braided by experience, intuition, culture, and choice. Not from pressure. Not from perfection. Not from endlessly aiming to hold everything together. But from a rhythm that’s always been yours to live by.
The Braid Framework didn’t give me a new identity. It gave me rhythm. Something I could return to as I evolved. Not to perform alignment, but to practice it. To live, decide, and relate from what’s honest, current, and clear. Now, I offer it to you. Not as a fix or formula, but as a rhythm of relating to what’s real. Relating to eachother. Relating to the real mystery, in us, between us, and all around.
Truth begins where performance ends, when you romance the rhythm of what’s real.
The Braid Guides >>
