A few people have sent me this clip and it makes me mad.

For one, because it’s a man standing in front of a room telling people to go after menopausal women as a market because there’s “free money” there. A man who has zero personal experience of what it means to live in a woman’s body, much less a body going through the upheaval of perimenopause.

And because I know exactly where a lot of this will go: dieting advice, belly-fat promises, anti-aging fixes, ways to make women look younger and take up less space. Much of it won’t work, because the perimenopausal body does not respond the way a male body does, or even the way a 25-year-old female body does. Biohacking often backfires, adding stress and weight and inflammation instead of reducing it.

And also: fuck this guy. Seriously.

Menopausal women are not just a “market.” We have so much more to offer than our purchasing power.

I believe Gen X and elder millennial women hitting perimenopause at this exact moment in history may be part of what turns this sinking ship around.

We are not a market.

We are a fucking maelstrom.

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

This guy might be a perfectly nice guy. I just have a real problem with predatory marketing bros, and I’ve had my fair share of bad experiences with them. (One of them in particular - I’ll share that story another time)

Of course I understand that people are in business to make money. There’s nothing wrong with being paid for something that genuinely helps people. But there’s a difference between offering real support in exchange for money and identifying women’s insecurities as an opportunity to profit. That’s where, for me, the line gets crossed.

Here is a related excerpt from my book, The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming Their Fuck…

“The natural rhythms of our female biology are often the first place we're taught to outsource our authority. We hand over our period pain to doctors, our birth control choices to pharmaceutical companies, our fertility to IVF clinics, our pregnancies to institutions, our birth choices to hospital regulations, and our mothering to conflicting online advice.

“We're conditioned to override our intuition in favor of expertise, to doubt our sensations, to defer to outside answers. Opting for a Western medical doctor versus a midlife Instagram influencer has the same energy if we are overriding our own intuition and bodily awareness.

“When we’re trained early to give our power away, it can be incredibly challenging to take it back. I've supported women in disrupting that pattern of outsourcing their bodily autonomy when it comes to their fertility. Perimenopause is another perfect opportunity to reclaim our body’s wisdom—to explore all the options, gather real information, and then choose what actually feels aligned for our unique bodies, lives, and values.

“It's not an accident that we've become so disconnected from our bodies. Whatever you choose to call it—the patriarchy, capitalism, consumerism, religious indoctrination, colonialism—it's all functioning exactly as it was designed to: to profit off our disconnection, our confusion, our unmet needs, and our insecurity. By the time we arrive at the Empress phase, our body may be screaming at us for attention. Begging us to start listening internally.”

If you’re craving midlife connection, community, and support, but want to understand your body rather than fight it, I’d love for you to join me in the Midlife Mystery Circle.

It’s free, and it’s for women who want to have honest conversations about this season of life without being sold another version of how they should fix themselves.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

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Of course, as soon as I felt the first rumblings, I brought myself back to therapy. I tried to understand the feeling with the sole purpose of making it go away.

I loved my life. Of course I did. I had built it for myself, so lovingly. So why was it starting to feel like a cage? Why did I want to bust out at the seams?

I was having dreams about clothes that were too tight. Ceilings that were too low.

I found ways to channel all of it. I poured it into my work and created the Fertile Mama Method. I poured it into sisterhood and did some deep healing there. I danced. I worked with plant medicine.

For three years, I dove deep into myself and into those feelings of destruction.

Sometimes it felt like I was dying. And now I can see that parts of me were. They needed to.

But maybe more importantly, parts of me were coming alive.

Ultimately, I did blow up my life. Or at least the life I had been living.

The destruction was brutally painful. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The grief was enormous. The guilt I felt for destabilizing my kids’ lives was horrific.

But it cleared a path for me to walk forward into the life I’m living now. A life that feels like mine. A version of me who feels more like me.

Midlife can hit like that.

I’m not saying anyone should end a marriage or do anything drastic. Not yet, anyway.

But I am saying that the purpose of all those feelings, (and holy moly, there are feelings: chaos, despair, disgust, dread, boredom, longing) is not to make them go away.

They are asking to be seen. To be looked at. To be taken seriously.

The version of you who is stirring wants to be deeply known. Deeply seen. Deeply loved.

Midlife is a reckoning. Who else is here for it?

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Between the woman we’ve been and the woman we are becoming, there is a liminal space.

When we enter that space in midlife, we often start fighting it.

Society tells us this is when we should resist. Start biohacking and injecting and protein-maxxing, or whatever it is we’re supposed to do to stay in control.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things.

But what happens when we allow ourselves to simmer in the liminal space for a while?

I’m 47 now. Still smack in the middle of it all. Still navigating shifting hormones, changing skin, and teenage kids who will soon go to college.

The figuring it out feels like part of the process.

And doing it together, with each other, is where the magic happens.

I’d love for you to join me in the Midlife Mystery Circle. It’s free, and for women who want to have honest conversations about this season of life.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

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Midlife grief.

I thought I’d miss my younger body – my perky boobs, my smooth neck, my supple skin.

But I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of the grief of time past. I didn’t expect the grief of never having my little babies climbing all over me, their sweet sweaty faces. Of the version of me who was a bit naive and innocent, just figuring it out, trying to do it all perfectly. The version of me who was somehow bold and brave and terrified all at once. Who ran full steam ahead.

Did I savor enough? Did I love on those kiddos enough? Did I feel everything there was to feel? Did I miss anything?

And that woman? That version of me who I’d been so so hard on?

Now that I could see her from this vantage point, I could see… My god, she was amazing.

I grieved not knowing.

Why didn’t I know?

Our grief in this season isn’t wasted. And it doesn’t mean we’re getting it wrong.

Autumn, the season of midlife, is the season of grief. Of letting go. Of acknowledging what was, so we can move into what’s next.

The autumn trees release their leaves because the season is complete.

For me, grief itself was the threshold.

I needed to let myself fully grieve the past — the things I’d gotten wrong, the lessons I’d learned, every joy, every heartbreak, every disappointment and every delight—to see that none of it was wasted.

It was like the distillate of it all had become a part of me. She—that amazing woman I was far too hard on—would always be a part of me. But that version of her was gone. Her season had ended.

Giving myself the space to grieve the past is what let me recognize the preciousness of it all. To love that woman I was.

It’s what gave me the freedom to stop looking backwards, clinging to her. I could finally turn around and be where I am now. And really see and appreciate this version of me.

Yes, my boobs are deflated. My thighs are jiggly. The laugh lines are there. And also, my God. I am amazing.

Midlife can absolutely be about hormones and peptides and supplements and learning how to support these changing bodies. But it’s also an invitation to ask different questions.

Have you given yourself room to grieve what is no longer, so you can be where you are now? Have you grieved the woman you were to make room for the woman you’ve become?

I’d love for you to join me in the Midlife Mystery Circle. It’s free, and it’s a place for women who want to have honest conversations about this season of life.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

If you’ve been reading this and thinking, yes... me too, I’d love to invite you into a different conversation.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve been learning as I’ve entered this season myself. Yes, we’ll talk about hormones and hot flashes. But we’ll also talk about grief, identity, Chinese Medicine, the changing body, the changing heart, and what I believe is one of the most profound and holy transitions in a woman’s life.

If you’re in this season or if you can feel it approaching, or you’re past it and wish you’d experienced it differently, I’d love for you to join me.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

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I never met Carolyn, but somehow she still helped me know myself better than I might otherwise have.

I found her book, Existential Kink, on the bookshelf of a place I’d gone to sit with Ahayuasca. I left that retreat having decided that Ahayuasca was not my medicine, but also having found exactly what I’d been looking for.

This was about 6 years ago, and ... who knows? Maybe I would have come to what I came to via Existential Kink in time. But I kind of doubt it. I was still so attached to “being good” and “getting it right” and “not fucking up.” This shifted some gears for me. It made me get curious about my shame, curious about all the parts of myself I’d been stuffing away, and helped me fall deeply in love with them.

Despite it seeming obvious, “having as evidence of wanting” was kind of a mind-fuck. I couldn’t unsee it... all the places I’d been playing the role of the victim in my own life. All of the ways I was accepting, and so choosing, the things I felt most frustrated with. All the ways I was participating in my own extraction, and then feeling perpetually pissy about it. And so attached to my delicious pissiness.

Existential Kink was a course correct -- and it made me grow the fuck up. Accept that only I could be responsible for myself, my life, my joy, my pleasure, my delight. And only I could be responsible for my anger, my shame, my fear.

Less than 2 years later, I’d ended my 20 year marriage...

In a lot of ways, I know my life might have felt “easier” if I’d stayed.

But this life feels like mine. I get to feel like me in it. Silly and kinky and sometimes broody but mostly wild and free, the softest and strongest I’ve ever been, and delighted by my delicious life and this profoundly beautiful world.

I’m going back to have a reread. Shadow Hunting. Rest in Peace, Carolyn. Thank you for sharing yourself and your magick.

If you haven’t yet read Existential Kink, I highly recommend it. Rarely have I called a book life changing.

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve been learning as I’ve entered this season myself. Yes, we’ll talk about hormones and hot flashes. But we’ll also talk about grief, identity, Chinese Medicine, the changing body, the changing heart, and what I believe is one of the most profound and holy transitions in a woman’s life.

If you’re in this season or if you can feel it approaching, or you’re past it and wish you’d experienced it differently, I’d love for you to join me.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

Leave a comment

Hanging on to warm nights and long, lazy days.

Summer is still here, in full swing… but I know it’s coming to an end.

Soon.

Sooner than I’m ready.

The kids go back to school in three weeks. The days are getting shorter.

I can feel summer fading.

This is the first year I’ve recognized how similar it feels to the way I entered midlife.

I tried to ignore the inevitability of it.

I did my best to hang on to my personal summer years (in the name of health, obvi).

I did all the mitochondrial repair supplements and infradian intermittent fasting and facial gua sha...

Just.Hold.On.To.Summer.A.Little.Longer.

But autumn arrives, no matter how hard we fight it.

Full bloom begins to wilt.
(Sisters, it usually begins with the neck.😕)

But I’d spent too many years fighting my body already. I wasn’t interested in doing that for another twenty years. That couldn’t be right.

I started to ask myself, instead, what it would feel like to just stop running? To face midlife head-on?

Of course, I’ll always care about health and vitality. But in the same way I came to understand that fertility wasn’t a problem to fix, I knew in my bones that midlife wasn’t a problem to fix either.

Maybe it was an experience to enter.

Midlife isn’t decline.

It’s descent.

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

If you’ve been reading this and thinking, yes... me too, I’d love to invite you into a different conversation.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing what I’ve been learning as I’ve entered this season myself. Yes, we’ll talk about hormones and hot flashes. But we’ll also talk about grief, identity, Chinese Medicine, the changing body, the changing heart, and what I believe is one of the most profound and holy transitions in a woman’s life.

If you’re in this season or if you can feel it approaching, or you’re past it and wish you’d experienced it differently, I’d love for you to join me.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

Leave a comment

Midlife puberty.

It’s catchy, and in some ways, I get it. There’s an enormous amount of hormonal change, with somewhat similar symptoms. But the comparison has never quite fit for me.

One of the things I love most about Chinese Medicine is that it isn’t just interested in how much energy we have. It’s also interested in the direction that energy is moving.

In spring, everything grows. Everything wants to push through the soil and reach out toward the sun. Girls in puberty want to taste everything, try everything, kiss someone, leave the nest, discover who they are. The energy naturally moves outward because that’s what spring energy does.

Autumn energy is also moving and changing.

But unlike spring, the direction isn’t up and out.

It’s in. It’s down.

The autumn tree isn’t interested in growing another hundred leaves. It begins pulling nourishment back toward its roots, letting go of what it no longer needs.

By midlife, we’ve already spent decades tasting what the world has to offer. Maybe we’ve fallen in love, had our hearts broken, built careers, raised children, chased dreams, tried on identities that fit and identities that didn’t. Stayed too long. Given too much. Tried too hard.

At midlife, we can feel the direction of our energy beginning to change.

After enough years of living, our bullshit meter is off the charts. Even if we don’t admit it to ourselves right away, we know what doesn’t work for us anymore.

The question is no longer just “What else is out there for me to taste?”

The question starts to sound more like, “What do I want now? What is actually worth my energy? What gets to be nourishing and delicious?”

What do I do, now, with this hard-earned wisdom?

If these are the questions you’re asking too, I’d love to have you join me in the free Midlife Mystery Circle, where we begin the conversation.

The FREE Midlife Mystery Circle

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

Leave a comment

One of the leading theories is that women evolved to live beyond our reproductive years because we helped tend to the next generations.

Maybe that’s partially true.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve translated that into one very specific role. We hear “elder woman” and immediately imagine grandmother, caretaker. As if our greatest contribution post-reproductive years is still found in tending to the family.

Isn’t it interesting that even this story ends with women taking care of everyone else?

It looks a little like trad-grannying to me.

Hanging back. Tending to the grandkids.

Sure, I love the idea of sharing wisdom and calm with younger generations. I love the image of women who have lived enough life to bring perspective, steadiness, and strength to those coming behind them.

But it’s still a little too docile for me.

I believe women in midlife and beyond care for the collective differently, and it doesn’t necessarily look or feel maternal.

What if helping the next generation isn’t primarily about raising grandchildren? What if it’s about reshaping the culture they’re inheriting?

What I’ve been noticing in myself and in the women around me is that women in midlife become more Yang energized than ever before. Our ratio of estrogen to testosterone changes. It’s obviously more complex than that, but I believe our changing physiology is reflecting something profound.

What I’ve come to is that women in midlife are taking our fuck back.

What that looks like will be different for every woman. For some it may be leaving a marriage. For someone else it may be starting a business, making art, changing careers, finally speaking up, saying no without apologizing.

For many, it’s about finally becoming the subject of our own desire, rather than trying to be the object of anyone else’s.

I can understand why this has always been pretty terrifying to the systems that rely on women doubting ourselves and fearing our own neck skin. Why we’ve been cast in the role of witch, bitch, difficult or even just “nasty.”

It feels pretty clear why we’re still being encouraged to believe that our greatest value after our reproductive years is found in serving everyone around us.

We’re much harder to manipulate when we know and love ourselves. When we’ve reclaimed our fuck.

I’ve been deep in the discovery of this phase, of midlife, and there’s so much more I’m excited to share with you.

We’ll be exploring this (and much more) in the FREE Midlife Mystery Circle.

The Deets

Date: Thursday, September 10, 2026

Time: 10 AM MST

Location: Live on Zoom

Join the Free Midlife Mystery Circle

Thank you for reading.

What’s unfolding for me now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress, The Autumn Phase of a Woman’s Life.

The Empress Phase: The Sacred Act of Midlife Women Reclaiming their Fuck

Leave a comment

This is the very last chapter of my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last. Thank you for reading… it’s been such a treat to share with you.

When I returned home from Mexico, I deleted the dating apps and ended the casual connections I’d been maintaining. They were just no longer appealing.

I could see clearly that the men I’d been relating to had been reflections of my own unintegrated masculine, parts of me that were still looking outward for response, direction, validation. Once I turned toward my animus and began to integrate him, those connections lost their charge. The small flurry of excitement that came from being wanted, flirted with, chosen, no longer held much interest. It no longer met my deeper desires.

Within two months of consciously honoring my animus, I sat down to write this book.

As with all acts of creation, something had shifted internally. Yin had been nourished, and Yang could now innervate it, allowing something new to take shape. What had been gestating was ready to be born.

At first, it was just going to be a book about fertility. And at its most basic level, it is. It’s about life force. About aliveness. About what happens when Yin and Yang meet in true relationship, when the elements are allowed to move freely through the body, unblocked and honored.

For a long time, I believed that magic lived somewhere outside of me. In polarity. In sex. In relationship. In another person’s ability to see me, hold me, meet me. And while I’ve had moments of that kind of magic, experiences that cracked me open and revealed what was possible, I came to understand that those experiences were not created by another.

They arose from me. They arose from seeing myself, holding myself, meeting myself.

Feeling the truth of that shifted the way I moved through intimacy.
The way I understood love.
The way I gave.

It was familiar to me, in love, to give. To sense another's wounds and pour myself out into them.

But I no longer want love that depends on my disappearance. I don’t want to be needed in a way that requires me to stay hidden from my own vulnerability. I don’t want to give from a place that leaves me unseen, outside of my own desire.

The fullness of me includes wanting. It includes need. It includes tenderness. It includes the longing to be met as a woman alive in her own body.

I used to imagine my path as linear. That there was a destination, an arrival point where I could finally say, I made it. Here I am. It all worked out.

I tried to write this chapter in that way — searching for an ending, a conclusion that would tie everything together, where the meaning in it all would finally be revealed.

But now I see that there will be no ending. My path has always been a spiral. I have been circling the same truths, the same lessons, and like all living things, deepening by returning. Unraveling and reweaving. Coming home again and again, each time with more awareness about who I am and how I want to live. Each time, more fully me.

Just as an acorn contains the oak tree, we carry our wholeness from the very beginning. At the moment of our birth, we already contain the entirety of our possibility. Constantly unfolding.

Like the Spira mirabilis, the sacred spiral, we are living miracles. Always in motion. And we are always, at each moment, already a masterpiece.

There has never been a destination.

Only this moment, again and again,
and the magic of being fully alive.

Thank you for reading.
Thank you for walking this path with me, for letting these words meet you wherever you are.

What’s unfolding now lives in the space between Mother and Crone.
I’m calling her The Empress. Stay tuned for more on

The Empress Phase: Finding The Sacred Yes of Your Midlife Initiation

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

The next year or so after ending my marriage felt like wandering in the desert. Like I had left the village and could still turn around and see it behind me, but it was getting farther away, and I couldn’t yet see what lay ahead. I knew, though, that whatever was coming would be a life of my making. That I would meet it as me. This version of me, who knows what she wants and needs, and knows what feels like love and what doesn’t.

I dated casually for a while, mostly for fun. I wanted to create stability for my kids, so I wasn’t looking for a new life partner. I mostly dated men in open relationships. I can see now that I was only somewhat available, and so I was finding men who were only somewhat available too.

About a year and a half after I ended my marriage, I went on a trip with my Alchemical teachers, the first they had hosted since Covid. It was held at Playa Viva, a beautiful eco-resort in Petatlán, Mexico. We stayed in treehouses overlooking the ocean, practiced yoga every morning, and ate food grown and raised right on the land.

It was a small group. Besides Benjamin, there was just one other man there. I had met him once before, five years earlier, at a retreat in Santa Fe. I barely remembered him, and I know I hadn’t felt anything about him one way or another.

This time was different.

Despite the fact that he was there with his very sweet, very young, very adorable girlfriend, I developed a crush. A big one.

I recognized the familiar pull immediately. The longing. The way someone unavailable becomes bright and shiny and suddenly holds an outsized amount of psychic real estate. I knew what it was. Another animus projection.

At first, I was annoyed with myself. I had done so much work around my animus. I thought we were in a good place. I had hoped that the next person I felt drawn to would actually be available.

But I also knew the drill. I knew that whatever I was fantasizing about had far less to do with him than with me. Yes, he was very handsome. A nice guy. But that was all I knew about him. So whatever qualities I was projecting onto him were pointing me back toward something inside myself that wanted my attention.

What I imagined wasn’t very specific. I imagined depth. Presence. Intensity. Passion. Mostly, I wanted to feel his energy and feel mine meeting it. I wanted mutual attention. Energy exchange. Aliveness.

As I sat with the longing, something became clear.

Over the past few years, I had done a lot of work extricating the immature, distorted masculine from my system. I had leaned into my animus as a source of safety and support. I had allowed him to adore me, protect me, believe in me, stand with me.

But I hadn’t really turned toward him.

I had let the Masculine love my Feminine. I had received his care. But I hadn’t integrated the healthy Masculine as myself. I hadn’t acknowledged him beyond noticing that he was no longer harsh or punitive. I had been learning to receive, and suddenly I realized that it was time to return the energy.

I decided to write down the qualities I could feel and appreciate in my inner masculine.

My animus is:

Magnetic and attractive, and aware of the responsibility of his sexuality. Initiatory. He sees what needs to be done and takes the next right step. Loving, kind, and deeply protective. In relationship with his own emotional body. Attentive to health — emotional, physical, and spiritual. Able to laugh easily and find joy in life. Willing to stretch and grow without force. Clear in communication. Grounded in integrity.

As I wrote, I felt a wave of gratitude move through me. What I would call devotional gratitude. These qualities had been showing up in my life for years. They had been shaping my choices, my boundaries, my capacity to care for myself. And somehow, I had never paused to really see them.

My relationship with my animus had remained somewhat unconscious. Healthier, kinder, but still one-sided. He was showing up for my Feminine again and again, and it had never occurred to me to thank him.

I decided to begin a gratitude practice. Whenever I noticed myself acting from the care or protection of my animus, I would pause and acknowledge him. I would let myself feel appreciation and consciously return the energy.

I added one more line to my list:

He is open and receptive to my love. He receives my love. He wants my love and says yes to love.

Our outer world reflects our inner world. If sacred exchange was what I wanted in relationship, I knew it had to begin inside myself.

Dr. Kelly Brogan calls this “self-husbanding.” I don’t love the term, but I understand what she’s pointing to. I think of it as inviting in my animus. Relating to myself with protection, discernment, and devotion.

Self-mothering had been an important part of my healing. That love is nurturing, soft, and forgiving. Relating to my animus feels different. It has a more disciplined quality. Not punitive, but benevolent. Devoted to my long-term well-being.

Without my animus, my care could easily become indulgent. Comfort without direction. Feeling without movement. If I were only leaning into Mama love, I might want to lounge around all day, eating ice cream and feeling all the feelings, all the time. That would work for a time. But my animus knows that yin needs direction, or it will waste itself.

For me, this looks like getting myself to the gym because I know my body feels better when I move. Putting myself to bed at 9:30 because sleep is medicine. Cleaning my space because I feel more creative and alive when my environment is clear. Having hard conversations because relationships only feel good to me when I can be real.

Once I knew that I had myself, I had my own back, and that I could rely on my animus for safety and direction, a new question emerged. How could I show up in devotional love for him?

When I felt into it, the answer was simple.

Appreciation.
Acknowledgment.
Awareness of how good it feels to be protected, supported, and met.

The Feminine had gotten out of the shadow of the immature masculine and had let the Mature Masculine shine his light on her. She’d been dancing in and thriving in that light.

Now she could finally turn around and see the sun. To acknowledge how good it felt to receive his warmth and light.

And then keep dancing.

Upcoming: Chapter 35: Alive

But now I see that there will be no ending. My path has always been a spiral. I have been circling the same truths, the same lessons, and like all living things, deepening by returning. Unraveling and reweaving. Coming home again and again, each time with more awareness about who I am and how I want to live. Each time, more fully me.

Have you ever realized that what you were longing for “out there” was asking to be integrated within you first?

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

I began to pay close attention to the energy in my breasts, and I noticed that when I thought of Dean, or had to interact with him, I’d feel a tightening, sometimes even shooting pain, in my breast tissue. At first, I simply let myself be aware of it. I breathed into the sensation, almost trying to gently unravel the tension from the inside.

I felt like my body was asking for something specific. After a few months, I decided to hold a cord-cutting ceremony for myself.

When we had first separated, I asked Dean if he’d be open to having a divorce ceremony with me. I imagined something akin to a commencement, a ritual to mark the ending of our relationship. A space to share what we loved most, what we would miss, what we wished we’d done differently. To acknowledge the significance of what we had shared, and then to release each other with love.

Dean wasn’t open to the idea, so it never happened.

About three months after moving out, nine months after ending the marriage, I decided to have the ceremony myself.

Karina Maria was getting married in her mother land of Colombia, and I decided to arrive a few days early. I rented a small, one-room cabin in the mountains outside of Cali.

When I arrived, a wild storm was moving through the area. Lightning, thunder, torrential rain. The cabin sat several miles outside of town, reached by a long, winding drive up a bumpy dirt road. By the time I arrived, the electricity had been knocked out by the storm. It was dark, quiet, and isolated.

It felt like as good a time as any to begin.

I had brought candles, music, and, the pièce de résistance, five grams of mushrooms.

While I’d experimented with mushrooms a few times in college, it wasn’t until I moved to Colorado and became friends with therapists working in the psychedelic space that I began relating to them more intentionally. For the past few years, I’d have about two sessions a year. My experiences had always been profound, pointing directly to blocks in my body, around wounding, abundance, love.

I have deep respect for their medicine. I trust that they show me what I need to see and feel.

That night, I set the intention to feel everything there was to feel, so that I could let Dean go.

As I dropped in and turned my awareness toward my body, I felt pain immediately. A deep ache everywhere. I couldn’t get comfortable. My low back was excruciating. No position brought relief.

As I breathed into it, I began to sense that Dean lived in me. We’d been together for twenty years. The essence of him was woven into my body, into my cells. I couldn’t simply extract him.

But I became aware that the version of him I was holding wasn’t neutral. It was the him I felt pain for. His depletion. His anxiety. His unhappiness. That version of him was living in me, taking up space in every cell.

And that I couldn’t make him better, couldn’t make him happy, couldn’t make him okay — the guilt of that was diminishing me, my health, my vitality.

I sobbed for hours. It felt like my whole body was breaking open. Like childbirth.

I felt all the places where his pain lived in my body.
The pain of hurting him.
The pain of not being able to make him happy.
The pain of my love not being enough.
The pain of having had to fight for the love I needed.
The pain of wanting someone to fight for me.
The pain of not getting it right.
The pain of failing him, myself, my marriage, my children.

I wept and wailed, letting it all move through me. The physical agony braided together with heartbreak and grief and a pain that felt all-consuming.

But as the pain began to unravel, a new awareness emerged.

I realized that the most loving thing I could do for both of us was to hold an image of Dean as whole and healed. Not as someone I needed to fix or save, but as the man I had always believed he could be. Even if he never chose that for himself, I could choose which version of him I carried inside me.

I imagined him standing in front of me, filled with golden light. Embodied. Peaceful. Enlivened by life. I held that image there for a long time, sobbing at its beauty. Wishing this version of him into being. Shiny and bright and full of his own vitality.

I decided that whenever I thought of Dean, this was the version I would see. This was the Dean I would relate to. The Dean who lived in my heart and in my cells.

This Dean didn’t tug on my tits, on my guilt, on my feelings of not being enough or doing enough or giving enough because this Dean was full. He, without me giving anything of myself, was enough, had enough. He was love.

I imagined cutting all of the cords that were draining my vitality into him. And I saw him releasing them too, because he didn’t need my life force anymore. He could stand on his own.

I’d spent the previous few years trying to get him to see. To just see just how much I’d been doing for him. Just how much I had been giving to him. How much love and life I had poured into him.

But I could suddenly see that his inability to feel my love had far more to do with his capacity to receive than with the reality of me. It was like feeding someone who couldn’t absorb nutrients. No matter how much you offer, they remain undernourished.

I knew then that even if he never recognized what I had given, I would be okay. I’d spent probably my whole life trying to prove that I was enough. Giving more than I had to give to try to prove it. When I let him go, I also let go of my need for that validation to ever come from anyone other than myself.

When I woke up the next morning, I was bleeding.

It felt like my body releasing everything I had worked through the night before. I wrote Dean a twenty-page letter. Though it was a goodbye, it also felt like the purest love letter I had ever written.

I had released him. And in doing so, I had released myself.

“Grief opens a doorway to the sacred. It forces us to slow down, to feel deeply, and to confront the reality that love and loss are inseparable. In this space, we come to understand the true weight of our connections and the beauty that exists even in our sorrow.”

Dr. Sherry Walling, Touching Two Worlds

Upcoming: Chapter 34: Devotion

Over the past few years, I had done a lot of work extricating the immature, distorted masculine from my system. I had leaned into my animus as a source of safety and support. I had allowed him to adore me, protect me, believe in me, stand with me.

But I hadn’t really turned toward him.

Have you ever felt like you were holding someone else’s pain as your own?

Have you ever made yourself smaller, to “protect” someone from the fullness of you?

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” – and find that there is no death.”

-Eckhart Tolle

Leaving my marriage, my twenty-year relationship, my entire adult life was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It felt like four deaths: the death of the me that lived in “Us,” the death of the Dean that lived in “Us,” the death of our couple, and the death of our family as I knew it, the family our kids would be losing. And a massive part of the grief was the realization that love wasn’t enough.

I expected the grief to be hard. But I wasn’t prepared for the brutality of it. I had no idea how often grief would feel like it was consuming me whole.

I wondered, a million times, if I could have just accepted my life. If I could have tried harder to be satisfied. If I could have loved better. Loved different. Loved harder. If I could have needed less.

But then my body made something unmistakably clear. There would be no going back.

Two months after I ended the marriage, I had a mammogram that showed atypical cells in my left breast. The left breast, energetically, has more to do with the energy of Mother, while the right has more to do with the energy of Lover. I had been longing to be Lover, but in my marriage, I couldn’t seem to escape a relational dynamic that required me to mother. I felt a deep knowing that all of my unexpressed longing lived in that breast, all of my desire to break free from the narrow role I had lived in that life. Everything that I couldn’t say and couldn’t be because it was “too much” or “not nurturing” was being held in that breast, stagnating, festering.

I felt a deep certainty in my body that if I stayed in the marriage, the cells would have progressed, and I would have had to cut off my Mother breast because I had not been able to extricate myself from that dynamic. Ending my marriage was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I knew I had to do it so that the fullest expression of me could finally live.

While I trusted my decision, and also trusted that I could clear the cells*, I feared that I was wrong. That I would have to face cancer alone. That I would have to face the rest of my life alone. I had nightly crying sessions about how existentially alone each of us is in this world. I told myself that even if we have friends and loved ones, this kind of thing, the brutal things, we have to face alone. We die alone.

It sounds dark, but it just felt like truth. This was something I had to face alone. I couldn’t go find another man to help me get through it. I knew my friends were there for me, but this part I had to do on my own. I needed to face myself. I needed to let die all of the parts of me that no longer felt like me, the parts that wouldn’t walk me into the next chapters of my life. I needed to surrender.

Some nights, the terror felt overwhelming. I hadn’t been single since I was twenty-one. Would I be able to “do life” alone? And then there were the atypical cells. It was too much to process with my logical mind. The fear was too much to hold.

So I made a practice of imagining myself in the ocean, letting myself be rocked by the great mama sea. I imagined my cells dissolving into her, being washed away, absorbed into her vastness, replaced with crystal-clear drops of water.

Even though I couldn’t feel like the full version of myself in my marriage, I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t have gone crawling back if not for my breast health. The grief was often overwhelming. Even though it hadn’t been enough, Dean had been my person for twenty years. For him to simply not be there anymore was brutal.

I missed the big things, the little things, all of it. We had a whole life together, and suddenly it was just gone. Sometimes I’d remember the feel of him, and the pain of his absence was crushing.

But I saw the atypical cells as a warning. This is the path you were on. If I had stayed on that path, I believed the cells would have progressed.

The cells were in my milk ducts, which felt like a direct expression of how much of myself I had been giving in that relationship. I was giving more than I had to give. I was depleting my own stores.

Whenever the pain of grief felt like too much to bear, I returned to what I believed at my core: that everything I wasn’t able to express in that dynamic would have found a way to express itself through my body. That staying would have made me sick.1

Upcoming: Chapter 33: Cutting the Cords

I began to pay close attention to the energy in my breasts, and I noticed that when I thought of Dean, or had to interact with him, I’d feel a tightening, sometimes even shooting pain, in my breast tissue. At first, I simply let myself be aware of it. I breathed into the sensation, almost trying to gently unravel the tension from the inside.

I felt like my body was asking for something specific. After a few months, I decided to hold a cord-cutting ceremony for myself.

Is there a way that your body has set a boundary that you weren’t able to set yourself? Has your body said no when you’ve said yes?

I’d love to hear what resonated.

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

This is a journal entry I wrote in the days after I made the internal decision to leave my marriage. It is unedited and written before grief had fully arrived.

Journal Entry — 7/14/22

It feels like I’m able to do it now. Or, more accurately, it feels like I have to do it, because I can feel it as somehow in service to something bigger than me.

It’s hard to explain that without feeling kind of egoic, like “I have a purpose here so I get to do what I want.” It doesn’t feel like that. It feels more like there’s energy that wants to be explored, and if I don’t, it just gets stuck and builds and creates toxicity.

There’s a fine line between selfishness and hedonism and … I don’t really know how to name this feeling yet.

It feels like devotion, actually.

Trusting that my exploration will somehow serve the people I love and care about, but maybe even beyond that. It feels like there’s an energy that wants to be created so that it can exist on a planet that needs it. And I feel willing to devote myself to that, to make sacrifices for that, and even destroy the things that get in the way of that exploration.

I mean, I have been. With tons of guilt and shame and all the things, but I’m starting to feel an ownership in that too, and even a responsibility to tear down all the structures that don’t support that.

For now, I’m honoring the selfishness.

I’m honoring the destructiveness.

It’s the pain that gets me, though. Feeling responsible for someone else’s pain. It’s crushing. It’s brutal. That is what has kept me here far longer than I should have stayed. But I’ve been unhooking from that. Slowly.

I am saying “no” to meeting someone in their disempowerment. There’s a difference between seeing and loving someone in their pain, and being willing to hold it for them, do the work for them, so as not to feel responsible for their pain. Remaining less than I need to be so that they don’t experience their pain.

Saying no, for the first time, feels like creating a blueprint.

Saying no, without guilt or shame in it.

Just no.

With love and lots of respect, but no. It feels honoring to both of us. It’s like, this is the path I’m devoted to. Meet me here. But I’m not leaving this path.

But it’s hard, because I know that he can’t meet me here. And that’s okay. I can love him and let him go. And yes, I know that he will judge me and maybe hate me and probably see all the ways I’ve failed him. My goal is to love him even as he’s judging me, love him even as he’s hating me.

I’ve been using this time to unhook from all the places I get hooked in, trying to prove what I’m not, that I’m “good,” and focus instead on just feeling who I am. Knowing that even as he sees me otherwise, as selfish or destructive, I can own that everything I’m doing is in service of love and growth.

Upcoming: Chapter 32: Grief

Leaving my marriage felt like four deaths at once. And the most devastating part was realizing that love, on its own, was not enough.

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

The summer of ‘22, I had a business event on a beautiful private island in Croatia. I met new people, paddle-boarded, danced to live music each night, took classes, and journaled during the day. I thought a lot about my life—my marriage, my relationship, the version of me that existed before wifehood and motherhood.

I hadn’t traveled solo since studying abroad in Australia during my junior year of college, and I knew before the trip even began that it would be a turning point: there would be a before and an after. I still hoped the “after” might somehow include non-monogamy, but I also knew the “before” was a life that no longer fit.

After the event, I continued on alone, moving through a series of towns and countries, mostly watching the landscape roll by from ferries and buses. The beauty was breathtaking, but more than that, I felt anchored in myself. My intention for the trip was to experience myself as my own home base, even in far-away places.

I thought often of my grandmother, Nana—how bitter and resentful she had become toward my grandfather, how much of life I imagined she might have wanted to experience. I invited her spirit to travel with me, to guide and protect me. I felt her rooting for me—to be brave, to explore, to live—and believed that in some small way, her presence could heal the part of her that hadn’t gotten to live enough or taste enough joy.

Thinking about Nana’s resentment toward my grandfather, and my mother’s toward my dad, I realized how easy it would be to stay angry at Dean—to keep blaming him for the ways I felt unfulfilled. There’s a dark comfort in victimhood; it lets us stay safe in what’s familiar.

But the more accountable I became for my life, the more that story felt like a betrayal of who I was becoming. Maybe I had accepted that dynamic a decade ago, when I loved myself less. But the more I fell in love with myself, the more I recognized that staying in victimhood or resentment no longer felt like the kind of love I wanted for myself.

I also knew this path was hurting Dean. But I sensed that the version of me who stayed angry and unfulfilled would hurt him more in the long run. Even if it was less threatening to the status quo, it would have been a more subtle kind of aggression.

I didn’t really know though. Maybe these were just the things I was telling myself so that I could do what I wanted. Maybe it’s safer to feel trapped in a life you agreed to, in the comfort of known pain, than to risk the unknown. But I wasn’t willing to do it. I wasn’t willing to feel caged in a life of my own making. Out there, traveling, adventuring, exploring… it felt clear to me that the only aligned option was to take the risk. To be willing to explore the unknown. To trust.

Traveling alone, showing up in new places, not knowing a soul, not speaking the language, became proof of how much I trusted myself. Each ferry and border crossing reminded me that I could navigate life. When I show up fully, life meets me.

I could feel something I had been cultivating for years: the understanding that real safety comes from within. Of course I needed trust and safety in any relationship… but I had to learn to source it first from within myself. On that trip, I felt just how much I had come to trust myself.

I remembered how much I love to know: people, places, textures, flavors. How alive I feel in the presence of something new. That sense of expansion was something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

I was grateful for the stability of my home life and for the sweetness of the ordinary. But being out there reminded me that expansion is part of my nature too. That I am meant to grow, stretch, and keep discovering what’s possible.

By the time I met up with my family in Athens, I felt more at home in myself than I ever had. Traveling alone had reminded me that I could trust my own rhythm, that I could move through the world guided by instinct.

Upcoming: Chapter 30: Reconnecting

Almost as soon as I saw him, I could feel myself begin to close. A tightening in my body, a pulling inward of my awareness. I tried not to make a story about it, to just notice. But as the days went on, the friction grew, and I could feel how quickly I had gone from open and expanded to completely shut down inside myself.

If something in you recognized itself here, I’d love to hear what stirred.

As always, thank you for reading.

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

In the months that followed, the questions that had begun to stir in me about love and freedom grew louder. If love wasn’t about possession or safety, what was it about? Could intimacy be something wider, more fluid—something that didn’t need to be contained within a single relationship? Those questions led me, almost inevitably, toward the idea of non-monogamy.

I now know that I wanted to explore non-monogamy for all the wrong reasons. I was at my wit’s end. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life without the kind of intimacy I was longing for. I felt like I was stagnating in my marriage. The alternative, in my mind, was divorce. But I didn’t want divorce. I loved my husband and the life we’d built. I just felt like I was suffocating inside it.

Even though we’d talked about non-monogamy before, it had always been theoretical. This time, I was serious. He wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I think he knew it was the only way to keep me, so he agreed to explore it. Looking back, I know that non-monogamy doesn’t work unless both partners aren’t a full-bodied yes. And knowing what I know now—that I would eventually leave the marriage without us even opening it—I can now see that ending it sooner may have been kinder.

Still, I’m grateful for those months of reading, reflecting, and talking. They opened my mind and softened my ideas of what love and marriage are supposed to look like. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I could be honest about what I was desiring.

It was fascinating to learn about the history of marriage—how so many of our cultural “norms” come from religious frameworks most of us have long since stopped questioning. It helped me understand that what I wanted wasn’t another person so much as a new way to relate: intimacy and connection that were sustained by mutual desire, not obligation. I didn’t want the structure of marriage itself to be the thing that was sustaining our relationship. I wanted intention, aliveness, curiosity.

Yes, we had built a life together, but I didn’t actually feel like it was one in which either of us was really thriving. I often felt like we were just going through the motions of life together, to get through another day.

When I read about the “relationship escalator”—the assumed path of dating, marriage, children, often followed by quiet resignation—I recognized myself on it. I began to see how often the status of a relationship becomes the thing that keeps people together, rather than fulfillment or even genuine connection.

It occurred to me that I’d never realized there was an option other than monogamy. Love had always felt like a choice between one person or another. It never occurred to me that honesty itself—about desire, attraction, longing—could be part of the relationship, rather than a threat to it.

But what if there were no escalator?
No destination?
No end goal?

What if love could exist as something living and responsive—something that required us to keep choosing each other, not because we had promised to, but because we wanted to? It was so simple and basic, even, but somehow… new.

I admit that I was idealistic about it all. But exploring polyamory made me look directly at the places where jealousy, not-enoughness, and rivalry lived inside me—and where they had been shaping my understanding of love.

The exploration of polyamory, for me, wasn’t ultimately about wanting multiple partners. It was about wanting more truth. It made me confront the roots of jealousy, scarcity, and comparison. It exposed how deeply I’d been conditioned to view other women as rivals, and love as a limited resource.

For most of my life, I’d been jealous. I’d always believed that another woman would inevitably be prettier, funnier, cooler, smarter—more. My jealousy had less to do with anyone else and more to do with not knowing what was truly valuable about me. But I also saw how this conditioning was collective: womanhood under patriarchy had never been built on sisterhood.

I never trusted other women. I only knew myself in comparison to other women, so had to look for all the ways one of us was better. It was me or her. Her or me. Other women had been my mirrors of competition, potential threats rather than sisters.

As I began sitting in women’s circles, that started to shift. When I let myself be witnessed by other women—raw, grieving, joyful—I began to see the beauty and strength that live in vulnerability. I saw how our radiance, together, doesn’t compete. It amplifies.

In circle, I could feel another woman’s strength in her vulnerability, her bravery in her expression of fear, her beauty in her joy. If another woman could be powerful and magnetic, it didn’t take anything from me—it added to the field.

In her reflection, I could love another woman as my sister. And in that love, I could see and love more of myself. I didn’t need to be perfect or have it all together. I’d always felt that if I showed my vulnerability to women, I’d be torn down for it. But in these circles, showing my vulnerability allowed them to hold me up—and it allowed me to see how much of my strength actually lived in my capacity to be seen and loved.

I began to recognize that another woman’s success didn’t mean my failure; another woman’s beauty might just be different from mine. Reflected in these women’s eyes, I began to know myself. I began to feel what was beautiful about me, what was special, what was unique—not just worthy of love, but love itself. I began to experience myself as love—my exact, unique frequency of it—and to trust that that frequency would magnetize what was meant for me.

I thought of how love expands with children. When my second son was born, my love for my first didn’t lessen—it grew. My capacity stretched. I wondered why we’ve been taught that romantic love should be any different.

Even though non-monogamy wasn’t ultimately meant for us, it shifted something profound in me. It asked me to expand my definition of love, to let go of ownership and control and open to truth and reciprocity.

Ending my marriage never had to do with love fading. I still love my ex-husband with all of my being. Letting him go, I believe, is what let me love him without the condition of my needs being met. Finally, I could see him and love him and not need him to be anything other than who he is. I actually believe that ending our marriage was one of my greatest acts of love.

I’ve come to believe that relationships don’t have to last forever to be wildly successful. Their value isn’t measured in longevity, but in how deeply they grow us. Our marriage had already done its sacred work. It brought me to the edge of myself.

I had been desperately trying to avoid ending my marriage because, at least a part of me believed that its ending would signify failure. And I knew that my marriage was not a failure. There was no part of me that ever felt I’d married the “wrong guy.” I married the right guy, the perfect guy, for the woman I was at the time that I’d married him.

We had two amazing children, and I’d never have wanted a different father for them. We’d moved across the country together, created a new life in a new place together. We’d experienced twenty beautiful years together. And even the hard parts showed me all the places where I wanted to grow and heal.

The narrative about divorce that I’d been raised believing was that a marriage ending negates all of that—but what felt more true was that nothing could negate that. Our love, our relationship, our family, our story was a wildly successful one. Trying to hang on to it at all costs, even at the expense of both of our happiness, is what would make it a failure. But honoring it, having gratitude for it, appreciating the scope of the love story—that even if it ends, it was a massive success.

That perspective shift is what helped me loosen my grip a bit on “needing it to work.” It had already worked. It had walked me to the edge of a cliff where there was nowhere else to go but to untether myself and leap.

Upcoming: Chapter 29: Becoming My Own Anchor

There’s a dark comfort in victimhood; it lets us stay safe in what’s familiar. But the more accountable I became for my life, the more that story felt like a betrayal of who I was becoming. Maybe I had accepted that dynamic a decade ago, when I loved myself less. But the more I fell in love with myself, the more I recognized that staying in victimhood or resentment no longer felt like the kind of love I wanted for myself.

What did this bring up for you about jealousy or not-enoughness?
Where do you feel that in your body?
What shifts when you imagine being seen, valued, and loved without comparison?

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

One of the practices in our Alchemy mentorship was to write down and explore the messages from our dreams. Around that time, I began having dreams filled with softer kinds of men.

In one, I was lounging in a hammock with a man. He was soft but strong—bearish, grounded, wearing a flannel shirt. His belly was a little soft, and his arms were around me. I felt like I could melt into him. I felt held and safe, comfortable. We were laughing. Relaxed. At ease. He had a small piece of paper that said “initiate” on it, and I watched as he folded it carefully and tucked it into his front pocket.

When I woke and remembered that word—Initiate—my first impulse was to interpret it as a call to action: start something new, get back in the game. But when I felt into the dream’s tone, the slow, languid ease of it all, and remembered that he had put the paper away, I realized the message was the opposite. It was to wait. To hold off. To let myself rest.

I believe that truth, or universal wisdom, is always available to us, because we are a part of that truth. We are not separate from it. Often, our conscious mind blocks it—what feels true may not make logical sense or may conflict with what we think we should do. But dreams bypass that filter. They slip messages from the unconscious into consciousness, using symbols our waking mind would never allow. Elephants on roller skates, the circus of our inner world—dreams let imagination stretch reality just enough for deeper knowing to reach us, if we choose to listen.

I chose to listen.

The man in my dream felt like a new version of the Masculine—gentler, relaxed, playful. If he was my animus, my inner masculine, he had evolved. I began exploring how I felt in relationship with this new version of him.

We were lounging in a hammock. We were relaxed. There was nothing to do. In fact, the message was specifically not to do. Not “initiate.” Not yet. He didn’t throw the paper away; he put it in his pocket, as if for later.

This first conscious image of my animus was learning, just as I was, to trust the value of the Feminine. He was holding my softness. He was beginning to understand that Yin qualities were not weakness, but wisdom. He was willing to slow down, to pay attention to what she needed in order to … just exist. He was willing to just be with the Feminine, show her that he was there, that he had her back. He showed me that I could stop trying so hard, stop doing so much, and simply be. He was protective of my exploration of the Feminine in myself.

For that first year of consciously relating to my animus, this was the image I returned to. Whenever I felt the urge to be hard on myself—to push, to perform, to earn my worth—I would call in this dream animus. That he had me. I would feel him behind me, his arms around me, reminding me that I could relax. When I was critical of my body, I’d remember his soft belly and cuddly feel and let myself soften too.

Yes, I knew this was “all in my head.” But I trusted the process. I trusted that this inner marriage between my animus and me was essential to the work I came here to do.

In real life, I had no idea what was next. I’d sold the Apothecary, opened a small private practice in Boulder, and knew growth there would be slow. But I felt in my bones that this Feminine exploration was leading somewhere. I already sensed that what was missing from fertility work was Yin, and that to teach it, I needed to live it—embody it. Up until then, my life had been almost entirely devoid of Yin: trust, surrender, receptivity. These were foreign to me. But my dream animus was showing me that he was with me in this, supporting me in just being.

“Just being” went against everything in my nature. I’d been a straight-A student, worked through high school and college, graduated cum laude, went straight to grad school, opened my practice as soon as I could, opened the Apothecary when I was 5 months pregnant.

To not do was massively uncomfortable. It hit every insecurity about worth and value. Who was I if I wasn’t being productive? Because it had become conscious, whenever my old, hard-driving animus kicked up and told me to do more, I’d envision hammock-guy and tell business suit to fuck off.

Reading about the Feminine seemed to grant me permission to allow—to rest in Yin, to linger in Water, even for more than one season. To gestate. To make a practice of deepening into each element and season, noticing my cyclical nature: Metal when I was bleeding, Water in my follicular phase, Wood when ovulating, Fire in my luteal phase.

We’d moved to the mountains by then, and I could actually feel the seasons passing. The thinning of the air in fall, the letting go of leaves, the nostalgia that accompanied it. The stillness of winter, the slowness. The quickening of spring—the buds, the daffodils pushing through frozen ground. And then the heat of summer, the dryness, the early-season spark that softened into languid ease by mid-summer.

I began to feel myself cycling not only with the moon, but with the Earth herself. And I started to believe that maybe this was the most important thing any of us could do: to slow down, to pay attention. To live attuned to the rhythms that sustain all life.

I didn’t know it yet, but all that resting and softening and being with Yin was quietly preparing the soil. The stillness had done its work. Beneath the surface, something was beginning to stir.

Upcoming: Chapter 26: BDE

While I was fantasizing about getting fucked, I could recognize that what I was wanting from another, what I was projecting onto my fantasy about another, was actually what I wanted for myself, IN myself. I could recognize that this energy was wanting me to … well… penetrate, to exert my will out in the world. To fuck the shit out of some shit. It was time to get up out of the hammock and get shit done.

Do you have a sense of your own inner masculine? Is he gentle with and supportive of you? Is he hard on you? How do you feel about letting yourself rest?

I’d love to hear what this stirred in you!

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These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

While I’d spent nearly a decade learning about and feeling into and exploring the art of receiving, from myself and my animus and from nature and from spirit—receiving from another still felt like the most terrifying thing imaginable. In love and even friendship to some extent, I could love and love and give and give, but the idea of receiving made my throat tighten and my chest clench and my body ache.

It was a different kind of surrender than letting my body relax into the earth and letting myself be held. Feeling safe with another person enough to surrender to receive, somehow, felt even more terrifying than death. I knew that it wasn’t logical or rational, but the fear lived in my cells.

And yet I knew that this was the next step in my soul’s journey: to fully receive. From a man, specifically. To feel safe enough to drop all of my guards, and just BE… in my Yin Feminine. And receive. That possibility didn’t feel remotely available in my marriage, so for years I tried everything else I thought might bring me to the same place.

I had loads of therapy, danced at women’s circles, sat with Ayahuasca and psilocybin, begged Spirit to let me meet this part of my work alone.

I had lain on the Earth, letting her hold me as I rooted into her, drawing her sustenance into mine. I had communed with the river, letting her carry me, honoring her ferocity and her flow. Around fire with sisters, I had spoken truth into the flames and been witnessed in my vulnerability and strength. These were all powerful medicines, essential and holy.

But I knew there was more. Even more. I kept arriving at a threshold I couldn’t cross, a closed door for which I had no key. The Feminine asks for trust, and despite my resistance, I began to see that if I didn’t follow this call, my spirit would wither. When I imagined turning away, my energy collapsed. I felt heavy, stagnant— like aliveness stopped moving through me.

I tried for a time, to ignore the call. To turn away from the door. I’d get cranky or irritable or depressed. I gained weight. Didn’t feel like getting out of bed. I felt listless. Life felt pointless.

All of the logical parts of me longed to shut it down, to stay with the life I knew—the one I had built for twenty years. But something deeper wouldn’t let up. It kept calling me back, towards the door. I think I knew, even then, that to open it would have to mean the end of my marriage. A woman who could hold and contain the energy that pulsed behind that door would not be someone who could stay in a relationship where she couldn’t express all of herself.

She was not someone who couldn’t want more.

When I felt into the stirring energy, it actually scared me, because it felt so big. So powerful. So dynamic. It felt like aliveness and love and magic and ecstasy. Even just a taste of it activated some of that energy in me, and I just couldn’t feel where in my life there was any room for it.

When I tried to turn back toward my familiar world, the same question that had haunted me years before returned: Is this all there is?

Only now, I knew that it wasn’t. I knew there was more. I had felt all of that elemental energy moving in me and around me, and by now, I trusted the importance of it too much to just be willing to turn away. I felt it, like that clarion call of resonance. This was my path, calling me forward, despite my feeling the impossibility of it all. I could no longer pretend I didn’t know.

I had tried for years to engage that alchemical dynamic within my marriage, but I finally had to accept that it wasn’t something I could force. It wasn’t happening there.

I wasn’t ready to give up on my marriage, but I could no longer pretend it was enough. I stopped pretending I was happy while frustration quietly smoldered inside me. I was no longer able to play the helpless victim of an unfulfilled life.

It was time to step into full ownership of my experience—to recognize that I was orchestrating my life from the inside out.

Upcoming: Chapter 25: The Man of My Dreams

This first conscious image of my animus was learning, just as I was, to trust the value of the Feminine. He was holding my softness. He was beginning to understand that Yin qualities were not weakness, but wisdom. He was willing to slow down, to pay attention to what she needed in order to … just exist. He was willing to just be with the Feminine, show her that he was there, that he had her back. He showed me that I could stop trying so hard, stop doing so much, and simply be. He was protective of my exploration of the Feminine.

Is there a part of you that knows that there’s “more” available to you, but you don’t know how to access it?
I’d love to know if/ how this resonated.

Leave a comment

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

It occurred to me that this struggle was tapping into some of my deepest wounding — my oldest story of victimhood. I kept telling myself that if he really loved me, he would want to be the best version of himself for me. That he would see what I was longing for and choose to be that man.

I was fighting and begging for it, but beneath the fighting, on an even more primal level, was an old belief that I didn’t actually deserve that kind of love. If I truly believed I deserved it, it wouldn’t have been something I was still trying to wrestle into existence after all those years.

Instead, I could see what wasn’t available and, from a clearer sense of my own worth, I could finally make another decision.

Who I believed Dean could be if he were willing to do his work and grow with me … that guy was perfect for me. But I had to accept that what I was desiring was a version of him he didn’t want for himself.

I had been fighting and pushing and begging for him to be that guy. And for over a decade, in one way or another, he’d been saying the same thing:

“No.”

I just hadn’t wanted to hear it.

I had been focusing on and fighting against his unwellness because actually accepting it as something that might never change forced me to feel the next truth: that it wasn’t enough for me. He … not future version, but this version… was actually not enough for me. The pain of that reality hit me like a ton of bricks.

I began to see that the part of me still fighting for love was my little one—the child who had needed her mother to become well for her. She had spent years demanding to be seen, to be made important enough for someone else to heal for.

But for the past several years, I had been tending to her. When I felt lonely or unseen, I was the one who reached for her, nurtured her, offering presence and validation.

By not denying my own needs, by no longer directing anger at others for not meeting them but instead meeting them myself, the part of me that was used to not being met grew less frantic. My needs were being me, at least in part by me.

The version of me who had been fighting was the one who didn’t really believe she would ever be met. Once she was, the compulsion to keep fighting for what was clearly unavailable from Dean began to ease.

I had been equating his availability with my deservedness. Once I could meet some of my own needs, I began to recognize how deserving I truly was of having them met—regardless of anyone else’s capacity. As Big Me became enough for Little Me, Little Me’s need to fight dissipated.

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