A quiet way to understand what you feel.

Where it comes from

The shape borrows openly from practices that work. The four steps echo RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) — with one change: the last step reaches outward, into a small act, rather than ending in self-soothing. The feeling wheel is Plutchik-inspired; the needs and the “when… I feel… because I need…” sentence come from Nonviolent Communication. It grew out of the book The Dance of Love and Light by Cory Harasha.

It leans on well-studied ideas — naming a feeling to soften it, allowing before analyzing, self-compassion before problem-solving, and small committed action — but it is a self-guided practice, not a clinical treatment.

Who made this

Peace Muse is made by Cory Harasha, who wrote The Dance of Love and Light, the book this practice grew out of.

Not a clinician, and this is not clinical treatment. What’s on offer instead is sourcing: every claim below, and every claim in the four essays, links to the study behind it, with the effect size stated and the thin evidence marked as thin. If something here reads as overstated, that’s a bug — please say so.

What the research says

Every design choice below is checkable. Where the evidence is thin or the effect is small, it says so — you shouldn’t have to take a wellness app at its word.

• Naming a feeling precisely takes some heat out of it — even though it doesn’t feel like it’s working.

  Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia & Crockett (2011), Emotion 11(3): labeling reduced self-reported distress about as well as reappraisal and distraction — but participants predicted it wouldn’t help. That’s why the Look step tells you so.

• Asking “why” from a step back is reflection. Asking it from inside the memory is rumination.

  Kross, Ayduk & Mischel (2005), Psychological Science 16(9): a self-distanced “why” let people process an anger memory without reigniting it, and the benefit still showed up a week later (Kross & Ayduk, 2008, 2011). The “watch it from across the room” instruction is doing real work.

• Self-compassion actually settles the body, in a way that simply cheering up does not.

  Kirschner et al. (2019), Clinical Psychological Science 7(3), N=135: brief self-compassion exercises lowered heart rate and skin conductance and raised heart rate variability — a pattern a positive-excitement control didn’t produce. Some people find self-directed warmth uncomfortable, so there’s a second door at that step.

• A plan in “if X, then I will Y” form is far more likely to happen than a resolution.d ≈ 0.65

  Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006), meta-analysis of 94 tests, >8,000 people. A later meta-analysis of 642 tests (Sheeran, Listrom & Gollwitzer, 2024) found bigger effects when the plan used the if-then form and was rehearsed at least once — which is why the last step asks you to read it back.

• In a single-session tool, the action plan is the part that carries the effect.small

  Schleider et al. (2025), a 2³ factorial dismantling study (N=889): of psychoeducation, testimonials, and action planning, only the plan reduced depressive symptoms at 2 and 8 weeks (d = −0.18, −0.12). Preprint, not yet peer-reviewed — treat it as a direction, not a fact. Trial registration: NCT06322849.

• How something ends shapes how it’s remembered — and whether you come back.

  Redelmeier, Katz & Kahneman (2003), randomized trial, N=682: a gentler final minute made a genuinely unpleasant procedure be remembered as less painful, and patients returned for screening at a higher rate. So this practice ends on the warmest step, and asks nothing of you afterward.

• Single sessions do a modest amount of good, reliably.g ≈ 0.32

  Schleider & Weisz (2017), meta-analysis, n = 10,508. An umbrella review of 24 systematic reviews covering 415 trials (Schleider et al., 2025, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology) found 83% reported a positive effect on at least one outcome. Small effects — real ones.

Each claim is unpacked at length in the essay for its step — naming, allowing, asking why, and warmth and the plan.

Your privacy

Everything happens on your device. There are no accounts and no servers holding your words. The one thing kept is your most recent step — stored only in your own browser — so the practice can gently ask, next time, whether you took it. Clear your browser data and it’s gone.

For the trial, this browser also keeps a short private log of each turn you finish — which feeling and need you picked, how strong the feeling was when you started and again at the end, how long it took, whether you took either of the two side doors at the last step, and whether the plan you made happened. None of the words you write are in it, and it stays here unless you choose to copy it and send it to us.