Much of my socialization and yoga practice requires me to head north about 45 minutes to Asbury Park. I often drive through one of the little shore towns en route and have been catching glimpses of new shops, restaurants, pilates studios. Every storefront makes this little shore town even more idyllic. It is the kind of place that calls to you to stroll, stop for an adult beverage or bite to eat [both], and take your time enjoying a slow afternoon with no agenda. However, every time I would drive through, everything was closed. And every time I thought, “Someday I will come when everything is open.” Every time I thought: next time.

Last Tuesday afternoon, everything was open. I had time. And I had nothing stopping me from keeping my promise to myself.

And yet I moved through those shops feeling rushed, a bit guilty, and maybe even vaguely fraudulent for not having “work to do”, as though the afternoon were something I had stolen rather than something I had earned. The joy I had been anticipating all summer showed up smaller than expected. I noticed it. And felt something close to shame. I realized I was holding my breath, waiting for the perfect time, the perfect moment to do something my heart desired.

I had forgotten how to exhale and allow joy to find me; or rather me to find joy.

In yoga, there is a practice called pranayama. It is the regulation of breath as a pathway to regulation of the entire nervous system. The word itself comes from Sanskrit: prana meaning life force, and ayama meaning extension or control.

In pranayama, the exhale is not passive. It is the most important part of the breath.

When you extend your exhale, for example the way we do in Coming Home each week, breathing in for four counts and out for eight, you activate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, running from the brainstem through the chest and into the abdomen. The vagus nerve is the body’s primary pathway to the parasympathetic state, which is what we call ‘rest and digest’, the counterpart to fight or flight. A long, slow exhale tells your nervous system: the threat has passed. You are safe. You can release it.

You cannot take a full inhale without first completing the exhale. You need to make space first.

The breath that restores you is made possible only by the breath that releases what came before.

This is not a metaphor. This is physiology. Science. Not mysticism.

And most of us have been holding our breath, waiting to exhale, for decades.

I have spent most of my professional life building toward culminating moments. Grand reveals. Launches. The achievement that justified all the sacrifice that preceded it. I understood the pause only as a problem. It was evidence of insufficient momentum, insufficient drive, insufficient commitment to the goal or anticipation of imminent failure.

I have a small sign taped to my iMac that faces me each day as I work. It reads:

I have been learning, slowly and imperfectly, what this actually means.

Building Second Ascent has been the first time in my professional life that I have tried to move with intention rather than velocity. To be present in the work day by day rather than living perpetually in the future moment when it will all be complete. To recognize each step as its own accomplishment rather than only as a rung toward something else.

The State of Midlife 2026 report is live. The website is live. The email server went down as a result. I fixed it myself. Those are milestones worthy of acknowledgment not as a prelude to the next sprint, but as their own complete and significant things.

And so for the last two weeks of August, I have chosen to exhale.

It has proven startling to me that it is more uncomfortable than I expected.

The science of rest is something our culture has largely chosen to ignore in service of productivity. But the brain does not stop working when the body pauses. The Default Mode Network is the neural system that activates during rest, reflection, and unstructured thinking. It is responsible for some of the most important cognitive work we do. Consolidating memory. Making unexpected connections. Integrating experience into understanding. Processing emotion.

Rest is not the absence of work. It is a different kind of work. One the brain can only do when we stop demanding the other kind.

The women in the State of Midlife research named exhaustion as one of the defining experiences of this chapter. Sixty percent (60%) reported being depleted from holding everything together. But I have been thinking about the specific quality of that exhaustion. Most of us wait until we are completely empty before we allow ourselves to stop. We treat rest as a last resort rather than a practice. A reward for sufficient suffering rather than a prerequisite for sustained flourishing.

What would it mean to rest before we are depleted? We completed the breath by fully exhaling, not because we have nothing left, but because we understand that the exhale is what makes the next breath possible?

I am going to another, yet to be discovered, shore town this week. Without the guilt. Without the laptop in my car as the fix for my addiction to guilt. Without the low hum of everything I should be doing instead.

The joy has been waiting for me; it has always been there. I just needed to slow down enough to be in the same place as it. That is a ‘me’ problem.

This is what I am learning and the skills I am building into the second half of my life, as a practice of moving through all of it. It is the exhale. Then the beauty and wisdom that is found in the pause between the exhale and inhale.

Whether you are still in a corporate role, or leaving one, or building something of your own, or simply living with intention toward goals that matter, the pause is not the enemy of progress.

The pause is where you find out whether you are moving in the right direction.

Direction is more important than speed.

Many are going nowhere fast.

And some of us, finally, imperfectly, learning as we go, are choosing to go somewhere slowly.

And it is the start of the next ascent.

— Ashley

He is 10 years old. Nonverbal and autistic. And last week, on a perfect summer morning on the Jersey Shore, he gripped my neck with a strength that made it difficult to breathe and rode his first wave to shore.

I was one of three adults in the water there to help him experience the joy of surfing. There was one person pushing the board. One to manage the board itself. And me, responsible for holding onto him, or rather, being held by him, while we counted to 12. This was because numbers were the language he had that day to calm himself in this new, unfamiliar place we ventured to, together. We counted together in the water, just off the shore, waiting for the right wave to break. The ocean rose and fell around us. His hands were locked around my neck like he would never let go.

And then the wave came. The perfect wave, we had been waiting for.

And with the courage of a lion, he let go.

Garrett released his grip to ride the wave to shore, where his parents were cheering for him. When he made it, still on the board, he raised both hands above his head and erupted in a sound of pure joy, joined by the expression of pride and joy of his parents and his crew of three. It was the kind of joy that does not need language because it lives in the body before it lives anywhere else.

I stood in the water and felt something I do not have adequate words for. More connected with the universe is the closest I can get to expressing it.. Like I had been part of something that mattered in a way that is not available to me on my own, no matter how hard I work or how much I build. Perhaps I cherished this moment and felt it so deeply because I do not have children of my own. Or perhaps it is just more of the same I have come to find as part of my midlife experience; I feel everything more deeply now than I ever have. Pain and sadness, but more importantly the joy of life. It is my compass now, and when I find it, it is loud and clear.

There is a concept that appears in almost every faith or culture in some form, across human history.

In Bhakti yoga, we call it Seva. It is selfless service as a path to the divine. In Christianity, Agape is love expressed through action, given freely without expectation of return. In Islam, Khidma is service to others as an act of devotion. In Buddhism, Dana is the practice of generosity, of giving from what you have for the benefit of all beings. In Judaism, Tikkun Olam is the repair of the world through acts of justice and loving kindness.

And for those who hold no religious framework: altruism. The simple, scientifically supported truth that giving to others, with no expectation of receiving anything back, is one of the most reliable pathways to human joy that exists.

There is a beautiful book written about the time His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu spent together exploring the origins of joy; what it is and how we can find it within ourselves. It is called “The Book of Joy”. They concluded, after a week of discussion, sharing stories and ideas, in shared devotion to humanity, that joy is deeper, resilient, and accessible even amid adversity. And most notably, joy is greatly tied to expression of the acts of compassion, gratitude and generosity.

They, like every tradition that has ever tried to understand what makes a human life meaningful has arrived at the same answer.

Service.

The State of Midlife 2026 research keeps telling me that fifty-four percent of women in midlife desire reinvention. Nearly half are questioning their purpose, searching for something that career and title and salary are no longer able to fully provide.

I wonder if some of what they are looking for is exactly this.

Not a new job. Not a better morning routine. Not a different version of what they have already done.

The particular joy that arrives when you climb into ocean water on summer morning for someone else’s first wave.

Last week I launched the State of Midlife 2026 report and ended my Thursday dispatch with a question:

“When was the last time you did something for the first time?”

Last week, on the same day I launched, was an answer I was not looking for, but found me.

I am not a surfer. I get into the Jersey Shore water a handful of times each summer, reluctantly, because it is cold and I have learned to appreciate this about myself rather than apologize for it. Getting into that ocean, having never surfed, with a team of people I did not know, with a child I had never met, to help him ride a wave he was afraid of; that was a first for me.

Garrett’s first wave. My first time. We did it together.

Beyond the gift of absolute and pure joy, Garrett also taught me something about fear.

He was afraid. Genuinely, visibly, completely afraid. Afraid of the water, of the depth, of the sounds, of the movement, of everything unfamiliar and outside his control. His body told the truth about it in the way bodies do when language is not available. He did not pretend. He counted. He held on. He breathed.

And then he did it anyway.

That is not fearlessness. That is bravery. And those are not the same thing.

We live in a culture that has confused them. That presents courage as the absence of fear rather than the willingness to act in spite of it. That has turned fear itself into a product; weaponized, amplified, sold back to us as proof of our inadequacy. The scarcity mindset that whispers you are too old, too late, too far behind, too much, not enough. Or to our children, too different from the others.

This is a lie. A persistent and profitable one.

Honest fear is information. It is the body paying attention. A signal worth listening to, not a sentence worth living inside.

The goal is not to eliminate it.

The goal is to do what Garrett did.

Count. Hold on. And when the wave comes, ride it and scream with excitement..

What this experience has caused me to reflect on is that for most of my life I believed that hiding my fears protected the people I love. That being the strong one, the capable one, the one who has it handled, was a form of care. That my fears were weakness. That showing weakness would shake the people who loved me for my strength.

What I understand now, standing in that water with Garrett’s hands around my neck, is that I was wrong.

By keeping my fears to myself, I never gave the people who love me the chance to help me be brave. I never gave them what Garrett’s parents gave us that Saturday; the trust and the space to create safety for someone they loved, so their child could feel the pride and elation of conquering something he was afraid of.

For the first time.

I have come to realize I was not protecting those I love. I was isolating myself from them.

The bravest thing I have done in this season of my life is not launching the website or publishing the research or learning to code at fifty-one, though all of those required their own particular trembling courage.

It is beginning, slowly, imperfectly, with great difficulty, to let the people who love me see where I am afraid.

To let them be in the water with me. To let them count with me.

Writing and having my fears and journey witnessed is also helping me do exactly this. Thank you for reading, for subscribing, and acknowledging this in me, which is much like pushing my board as the wave comes so I can feel what it feels to ride it back to the safety of the shore.

— Ashley

I will be taking a break from Wednesday’s Coming Home Practice and Thursday’s Dispatch while I focus on getting the State of Midlife 2026 shared as widely as possible, and to give everyone’s inbox a break. Stay tuned for the reimagination of Thursday’s Dispatch to return, alongside weekly practices to return in the Fall.

If you are in New Jersey, or know a family with an autistic child, please look up POAC — Parents of Autistic Children — at poac.net. Their annual Autism Surf Day is one of the most beautiful things I have ever been part of. Volunteer if you can. Donate if you cannot. Reach out if you have a child who deserves a perfect wave.

It will change your life.

It changed mine.

Inspired by the light of the Buck Moon, we named what we had been carrying. We distinguished between what was ours to put down, what was ours to slowly unpack, and what others should be helping us carry. We sat with a prayer that illuminated what we were finally ready to see.

That was the preparation.

This is the threshold.

This weekend was August 8th. Eight eight. In numerology, the number eight is the symbol of infinity. Cycles without end, abundance, power, and return. It is not a coincidence that the most significant portal of the spiritual year opens on this date.

The Lion’s Gate Portal opens every year around August 8th when the Sun is in Leo, Sirius rises on the horizon, and the Earth, Sun, and Sirius align. This year this auspicious time lasts through August 12th, when the portal is said to ‘close’. Sirius is the brightest star in our sky and has been called the spiritual sun across ancient Egyptian, Greek, and indigenous traditions. When these three bodies align, a channel opens. Energy flows. What has been held in the invisible becomes available to the physical.

In the language of Second Ascent, this is the portal to rising.

Last week you released what was holding you back.

This week you step through.

This practice includes a prayer I wrote specifically for this moment. It is an affirmation of what you are stepping into, not a reflection on what you are leaving behind. Read it as a declaration. Mean every word.

Let’s begin.

ARRIVE Two to three minutes

Find your place. If you can be outside, feet on the earth, face toward the sky, go there. This energy is expansive and activating. Your body will feel it more fully if it has room to open.

If you are inside, stand at a window where light enters.

Stand rather than sit if you are able.

Feel your feet on the ground, rooted, solid, connected to the earth beneath you.

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four, drawing the breath all the way down to your belly.

Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of eight, emptying your belly completely. This is not the breath of settling. This is the breath of opening. You are not pressing down into rest. You are expanding into space.

Again. In for four. Out for eight.

And one more time.

Feel your chest lift. Feel your shoulders draw back. Feel the front of your heart open toward whatever is in front of you.

You are not arriving into stillness today.

You are arriving into readiness.

FEEL Five minutes

Keep your eyes soft or closed.

Last week I asked you to find where the weight was living in your body.

This week I am asking something different.

Find where the desire lives.

Not the fear. Not the doubt. The desire. The part of you that knows, underneath the conditioning, underneath the disappointments, underneath the voices that said you were too much or not enough, what your best life actually feels like.

It may live in your chest as a warmth or an ache. It may live in your belly as a flutter or a pull. It may live in your throat as something that has been waiting to be spoken aloud.

Find it. Place one hand there.

This is not a wish. This is knowing. It has always been there. It has been waiting for you to stop being afraid of it.

Breathe into it. Let it expand. Let it take up more space in your body than the fear has been taking.

You are not chasing this feeling. You are recognizing it.

It has always been yours.

LISTEN Seven to ten minutes

Stand with your feet hip-width apart, grounded and steady.

Slowly open your arms wide. Not raised above your head, not pressed against your sides. Open at the level of your heart. Palms facing forward and up. A gesture of receiving rather than reaching. You are not grasping. You are allowing.

Feel the opening in your chest. The vulnerability of it. The courage of it.

This is what it means to be available for the life that is calling you forward.

Now, read the prayer below. Aloud if you are able. Slowly. As a declaration. Let each line land in your body before you move to the next.

This prayer was written for this portal. For this moment. For you, standing at the threshold of your Second Ascent, arms open, heart open, ready to receive what has always been meant for you.

Dear Divine Sister Within Me,

I gather all the scattered pieces of my energy, my power, and my dreams back to myself. I pause, I breathe, and I choose to come home, deeply and tenderly, to my own body.

Today, I choose to treat my body not as a project to fix, but as a sacred sanctuary to honor, cherish, and adore.

Ignite the wise, radiant heart of the lion within me, not to roar at the world, but to walk with profound softness, fierce self-compassion, and unconditional grace toward my own spirit.

May I stop talking myself out of my desires. May I stop measuring my worth by how much I do, and instead rest in the deep, unshakeable truth of who I am.

I am worthy. I am deeply, inherently worthy of all that I desire.

I open my hands and my heart to receive love that is not earned, abundance that flows without struggle, and blessings that arrive simply because I am alive.

Help me trust what is leaving my life to make space for my greatest good, and help me welcome what is arriving with open arms.

Remind me that I am supported, held, and deeply loved in the sacred sisterhood of women walking this exact same path.

Thank you for the magnificent woman I am becoming: the one who chooses hope, who honors her boundaries, and who believes in her magic, even on the days the path ahead is unclear.

Thank you for never giving up on me, even in the moments I was ready to give up on myself.

Thank you for the peace that comes with trust, and the vibrant, beautiful life waiting for me in this second half.

And so it is.

When you have finished, remain standing with your arms open for one full minute.

Do not speak. Do not analyze. Simply receive.

Feel the energy of this portal. Feel the alignment of earth, sun, and star and allow yourself to be held by it the way you have held everyone else.

Then slowly draw your hands to your heart. One on top of the other. Feel your own heartbeat beneath your palms.

You have stepped through.

WRITE Ten minutes

Open your journal.

This week we are not releasing. We are not excavating. We are not looking backward.

We are writing forward.

Begin here:

My best life feels like...

Write without stopping. Write without editing. Write the feeling, not the plan. Not the how or the when or the who. The feeling of living fully in your truth; what it feels like in your body on a Tuesday morning, in a room that is yours, in a life that has been waiting for you.

Write it in present tense. Not “I will have” or “I hope to.” Write it as if it is already true. Because on some level, in the quantum field, in the energy of this portal, in the version of you that has always known her worth, it already is.

When you are finished, read it back aloud to yourself.

This is not a wish list. This is a map.

CLOSE One minute

Place both hands on your heart.

Feel your heartbeat beneath your palms.

Say aloud, or in a whisper:

I believe I am deserving of this life. I am open to receive it. I allow it.

Let each line land fully before moving to the next.

Then take one full breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Carry one word into your day.

Believe.

Not as striving. Not as forcing. As a quiet, steady, unshakeable knowing that what is meant for you is already in motion. That the releasing you did last week made space for this. That the portal is open. That you have stepped through.

Open your eyes.

You are on the other side.

A note on returning to this practice.

The Lion’s Gate Portal is most activated on August 8th, but its energy is felt in the days surrounding it. Return to this practice or to the prayer alone any day this week that calls to you. The affirmation at the close can be spoken as a daily practice, each morning before the day begins, for as long as it serves you.

If this practice resonated, share it with a woman who is standing at her own threshold.

She may not know she is ready.

Help her see that she is.

Coming Home is a weekly practice from Second Ascent, published every Wednesday as a companion to Tuesday’s essay. Practices like this — somatic, contemplative, rooted in the body and the breath — are foundational to what Second Ascent is building. This is a taste of what the Founding Circle will hold: a community of women doing this work together, with intention and care, in a space built specifically for them.

Return to this practice as many days this week as calls to you. Even two minutes of the breath and the declaration is enough. If it stays with you, stay with it.

If this landed for you today, share it with a woman who needs it. And if the Founding Circle feels like it is calling you, please reach out to me at ashley@secondascent.co.

Welcome home.

— Ashley

But, in today’s essay, I want to talk to the people who love women in midlife. The partners, the husbands and wives, the brothers and sisters, the friends, the colleagues, the men who have been reading these essays and reaching out to tell me they finally understand, a little better, the women in their lives.

This letter is for you.

Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese philosophy that finds beauty not in perfection but in imperfection. In the aged, the weathered, the worn. In the thing that has lived.

Within that tradition lives a practice called Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. When something breaks, you do not hide the repair. You do not dispose of the object. You do not disguise the crack or pretend the breaking never happened. You do not seek to put it back together such that the cracks are never to be seen. You fill them with gold. You make the fracture the most beautiful part of the object. The repaired piece is not diminished by its history. It is made more extraordinary by it.

Leonard Cohen understood this. He wrote that there is a crack in everything — “that’s how the light gets in.”

I have been thinking about this all week. About what it means for women in midlife. And about what it asks of the people who love them.

One of the most unexpected gifts of writing these essays over the last several months has been the men.

Not only women writing to me to say they feel seen, though that has been profoundly meaningful. The men. Former colleagues, old friends, brothers of women I love, husbands of women I have never met, reaching out to say that reading about this journey has helped them understand the women they love in ways they could not before. That the essays have made them better partners. Better brothers. Better friends.

A few weeks ago I received a text message from an old friend and colleague that read,

“Hey had to tell you I’m reading and following you on Substack wrt Second Ascent. It’s helping me better understand what [wife’s name] faces daily…Hoping I’ll be a better partner to her going forward.”

This is not the first note I have received from men that love women in midlife and desire to understand and support them. I want to acknowledge how genuinely hard this terrain is for men.

And I mean that with compassion, empathy and loving kindness, not frustration.

When the men who love us hear that we are struggling, something happens in them that is biological before it is personal. Men are largely wired to protect and provide. To solve. To repair. And when a woman they love is in pain; overwhelmed, or crying, or cannot quite name what is wrong, the instinct is to find the source of the problem and address it. And when they cannot find it, or when their attempts do not land the way they intended, it can arrive as a feeling that they have failed. That they are not enough. That they are somehow the cause.

This is not the case. They are not the cause. They are the witnesses.

And what women in midlife need most from the people who love them is not repair.

It is gold in the cracks.

I have spent most of my time in these letters talking about the feelings, emotions and attempting to convey deeper understanding of the journey through midlife. But in this essay, I want to take you through my lived experience last week; to ask you to walk with me with a desire to understand. Because understanding the reality of the embodied experiences commonplace to women in midlife matters more than any framework I can offer to those that love women in midlife.

Let’s start with context. I am in perimenopause. That simply means my body has symptoms common attributed to changing hormone levels, particularly declining estrogen and progesterone. But I am still menstruating and have within the last 12 months, so am not clinically considered in menopause. (Yes, the way to diagnose menopause is that you have not had a period for 12 months, Gents.)

The Saturday before last, I woke up hurting. I have been fighting a hip injury that has refused to resolve, regardless of how hard I work or how carefully I train. I woke up Saturday barely able to walk. One of the biggest challenges of perimenopause for me has been the joint pain, so this is more common than I’d like, but I was aching much more than usual.

I pushed through a workout, feeling defeated, and began my weekend chores. Laundry, meal prep, etc. And that is when things started breaking in my house. The dryer. The stove. The AC. The ordinary infrastructure of daily life, failing simultaneously, in the way it does when you are least equipped to manage it. I am single. I live alone. When things break, I am the one who figures out how to fix them, and who navigates the particular vulnerability of being a woman calling a repair person she does not know, wondering if she will be taken advantage of because she is on her own.

I could not sleep on Saturday night. I tossed, turned, was hot, my body ached. So I woke up Sunday with my engine sputtering before I even put my foot on the gas to start my day.

After a community breakfast Sunday morning, one of my neighbors made a joke, loving, well-meaning, as their jokes always are, often causing me to laugh more at myself than anyone else ever could. This one was about my being single, a topic that normally I am providing the punch line for. This one landed like a stone in still water. Not because it was said with an intent to harm, but because it hit something that was already bruised and invited shame to come down on me like a tidal wave.

I then spent an afternoon struggling with the technology I am using to build Second Ascent; Claude open, ChatGPT in one tab, Vercel and Tally in others, trying to learn to build a web app by myself at fifty-one, which is humbling on the best days and defeating on the hardest ones. Building not just a platform, but my livelihood.

Later that day I joined neighbors at a family gathering, surrounded by people I love and who love me, invited because they consider me part of their family. I am safe and welcome there. And yet I found myself, in the energy of love that filled the room, feeling profoundly and inexplicably alone.

I had been accumulating this tension in my chest and feeling of being on edge that I could not explain, and increasingly I could not ignore. So, I left their house, came home and stood at my kitchen table feeling inexplicably shaken. And suddenly, a tidal wave of emotions washed over me. A wave of panic. A tightening in my chest and shortness of breath that I can only describe as all of it arriving at once; the pain, the joke, the loneliness, the house needing repair, the feeling of being broken myself, the learning curve, the financial worry, the fear.

Everything, in the same moment, in my body.

I gasped for air. And then, I cried.

And could not stop.

The people I could reach out to were unavailable, in different time zones or dealing with their own beautiful, important, real things. I did not want to put my weight on any of them. I was swirling. Unsettled. Overwhelmed in a way I could not explain. And I didn’t know why I was feeling the way I was or how to ask for help even if I did reach them. I wasn’t prepared because it came from out of nowhere and I was seemingly incapable of self soothing, calming or controlling my swirl. I tried to escape it by hiding from my phone and my laptop, it lessened but didn’t go away by the time I finally found sleep.

Monday was new, but the same feelings quickly returned. Everything was harder than it was meant to be. I found pain and hurt in every word spoken, conversation or endeavor. I danced between wanting to cry and wanting to vomit, as the anxiety had dropped from living in my chest to living in my belly. I made it through the day; had a girls lunch, caught up with family, no one the wiser I was struggling.

Tuesday I had a call scheduled in the morning with a former colleague, who was now more like family given the years and roads traveled together. It had been on the books for over a week. He has been part of my life and seen me in the midst of my greatest struggles and greatest victories, personally and professionally. Often by my side. After asking about his work, family, and beautiful daughters, he asked how I was. I could not run, avoid or deflect. I was incapable of escaping my truth in that moment, even after years of perfecting the art of being ‘ok’.

I simply said, “You know, I’m struggling to be honest”, as tears began to roll down my cheeks.

He did not try to fix anything. He did not offer solutions. He did not remind me of my fears or the things that were not working.

He made it clear it was ok to not be ok.

He stayed. He didn’t try to escape. He sat with me, assuring me he was not going to run from my pain. He assured me his family loved and missed Auntie Ashley as well, and that I was welcome in their home any time. And then, with the particular certainty of someone who has known you long enough to have earned it and to be trusted, he told me it was all going to be okay. That he believed in me. That he had been with me on this journey, through the many peaks and valleys of life to know who I was, and he knew it with certainty. He assured me that he had seen me go through the fire and if anyone was going to be ok, it was me.

That was enough. That was everything.

And then, I was able to return home. To myself, to my body, to my heart. He held space for me and assured me simply that he believed in me.

This is what most women in midlife need from the people who love them. Not repaired. Not solutions. The unwavering presence that says: I see you. I believe in you. I am not going anywhere. The cracks do not make you less. They are where the light gets in.

And then Wednesday came. And for the first time in two months, I got my period.

It wasn’t like a switch was flipped and suddenly, everything was well in the world again. But, I now understood the origin of the tidal wave of overwhelming emotions that seemingly came from places that would normally not shake me the way they had. The panic, fear, feeling of being unsettled had lessened to a whisper, instead of a roar. I felt like myself, composed and at peace again.

Mostly.

Except for the gnomes staging an MMA bout in my womb.

This is what midlife, and perimenopause is like. Science explains it but it doesn’t make it any less harrowing of a journey. I am 51 now, and for women like me, in midlife going through perimenopause, skipping a period means we had an anovulatory cycle. Our body didn’t release an egg, leaving us with virtually zero progesterone (the hormone that calms mood and prevents fluid retention). Meanwhile, our brain bumped up signals to stimulate your ovaries, triggering a sharp spike in estrogen right before our delayed period finally arrived. This combination of unopposed high estrogen (which causes severe bloating, breast tenderness, and physical discomfort) and missing progesterone (which destabilizes serotonin and GABA receptors, driving sudden anxiety and heightened emotions) creates an intense hormonal storm right before bleeding begins.

I sat with sisters a bit older than me on our annual girls’ weekend this past Sunday, and told them about my week (while I cried uncontrollably). They assured me that was exactly their experience when my age, in the throws of perimenopause. The storm arrives without a calendar. The emotions speak in a language that even she cannot always translate in the moment. The overwhelm, the panic, the inexplicable grief, or anger. None of it was or is a weakness. Rarely was it the fault of the person with whom they feel safe to display their truth, most often their husbands and kids. Given time’s passing being the cure, in the end it is simply biology. All of it our bodies doing whatever they are going to do, on their own schedules, without asking permission or sending a memo in advance.

Men share some symptoms of perimenopause with women; persistent fatigue, increased abdominal fat and fluid retention, unexpected moodiness or irritability, and a loss of physical resilience due to natural decreases in testosterone while estrogen remains constant or fluctuates (yes men produce estrogen) around the same time; midlife. It is why an increasing number of men seek testosterone supplementation around the same time their wives begin turning down the thermostat and freezing them out of the house.

This should make understanding and giving the women they love grace for their journey easier; to know that in some way, to a lesser extent, it is shared.

Here is what I am offering as guidance for the men who love a woman that is on this journey.

Do not tell her she is broken. Do not remind her she is struggling. Do not make aging and this natural journey a flaw.

The mirror you hold up to her should reflect light, not darkness.

You do not need to fix her. You need to stand beside her in the fire, and not shrink. As she has for you over and over again. You need to help her see what you see; that the imperfections are not failures. They are the history of someone who has lived fully, loved deeply, and given more than she has taken or kept. And they only make her more beautiful.

Do not expect her to always tell you how to help. Often she does not know because she doesn’t understand her feelings herself. Sometimes the help is simply being there. Hold her. Assure her. Let her cry if she needs to cry. Be the person she does not have to perform for.

Wabi-Sabi is not passive. It is the active, intentional choice to find beauty in what has been cracked and to fill those places with something more luminous than what was there before.

If you love a woman in midlife: be the gold.

She has earned grace. She requires space. She deserves presence. She needs the people who love her to understand that the light is still there and burning bright within her.

Second Ascent aspires to be a home for women in midlife. I am building it because I have not had the partner or husband to offer me what I am suggesting every woman deserves. But, I have found this support and sanctuary in the women who love me fiercely and have helped me navigate this journey knowing truly, deep down, I am never alone. We all deserve a place where we can arrive without performing, to be held, witnessed, and discover that the cracks do not need to be repaired.

The cracks are where the beauty lives if filled with love.

That is Wabi-Sabi.

That is midlife.

That is, when you look at it honestly, rather beautiful.

— Ashley

There are those of us that not only track the moon, but we feel it in our bodies as it cycles through phases, like a rhythm. And others that simply note its beauty when they see it, and never give the moon much thought beyond whether it is pretty or bright.

If you are the latter, this essay still has meaning for you. If you are the former, I suspect the experience I write about in this week’s essay will feel familiar.

The Buck Moon takes its name from the male white tailed deer who grows new velvet antlers at this time of year. The velvet is soft, living tissue that covers the antlers while they develop. In late summer, when the antlers are fully formed and hardened, the buck sheds the velvet. It falls away, having done its work. What is revealed beneath it is the strength that was growing all along, beneath the surface.

That is the energy of this moon. Shedding what has served its purpose. Revealing what was developing underneath.

I sat on the beach last Wednesday night, alone, soaking up the light of this sacred moon. Here is a picture of it in all its glory from that night.

I have lived by the sea for almost ten years and have come to understand something about the moon that I could not have known living in the city [New York]. Here, her power is visible. You can see it pulling the water. You can feel it when you drink water bathed in it. You can hear it in the sound of the tide. You can feel it in the particular quality of the light on the ocean at two in the morning when you cannot sleep and you walk outside and the sea is silver and calling to you, inviting you to offer it your worries, hopes and fears.

The moon has always been connected to women. Not metaphorically, but ancestrally, linguistically, and biologically. The word menstruation comes from Greek and Latin roots meaning both month and moon. The sacred monthly feminine rhythm that has governed women’s bodies for millennia runs approximately twenty-eight days. The lunar cycle runs twenty-nine and a half.

Ancient wisdom did not consider this a coincidence. Our ancestral mothers and sisters named a woman’s monthly rhythm ‘the moon cycle’. Tracked it by the same light. Understood, in a way that modern medicine has largely abandoned, that the rhythms of women’s bodies and the rhythms of nature were in genuine conversation with each other; they communicated.

I am in perio-menopause now. My body is no longer on that cycle; it has a mind of its own. And yet I feel more connected to the moon than I ever have. Perhaps because living by the sea makes her power impossible to ignore and also because when the biological rhythm ended, I began to seek a relationship with her and mother earth consciously rather than simply inhabiting it. The moon still marks my time. She still gives me a sense of rhythm and return. Full moon is a time to release. New moon is a time to plant seeds. The cycle continues even when the body’s version of it does not.

Last Wednesday I did something I have been building toward since this journey began for me.

I released.

Not dramatically, but with intention. With ease. With peace. And a feeling so natural it surprised me. Sitting on the beach, in the light of the Buck Moon, I recited a prayer written by the well known and respected, Dr. Mahenoor Punjani. (@manifestwithmahe) The prayer is part of this week’s practice, it is so good I will share it with gratitude, to her, but for the purpose of this essay, I will simply share the first part:

Dear Self, Universe, God, or Divine Source, (use whatever speaks to your belief system)

Tonight, beneath the light of the Full Moon, I choose honesty.

I acknowledge everything I have been carrying.

The emotions I haven’t expressed.

The dreams I have been afraid to pursue.

The fears I have hidden beneath strength.

The parts of myself that have been asking for love instead of criticism.

May this moonlight illuminate what I am ready to see.

What the moonlight reflected back to me was what I had been circling for a long time without acknowledging and addressing directly. I have been carrying fear. Not the productive kind that serves you to not repeat mistakes or saves your life or that sharpens you and keeps you honest. The fatalistic kind. The fear of being hard to love. The fear about money and security and the sky always being about to fall in some form, on some timeline. The voice that says brace, not build. The moon mirrored back to me my truth, and sitting there, with its light shining upon me I had nowhere to run and no ability to use brute force to hide from its light.

That fear has a name in our culture right now. It is called scarcity. And it has been so thoroughly woven into every dimension of how we live and exist in western culture. It has become a constant low frequency message that there is not enough, that when someone else has, their portion diminishes what you could have. That the pie is finite and you had better defend your slice of it. The pervasiveness of this narrative results in most of us no longer noticing its presence.

It is a lie. And, it is corrosive to our hearts, souls, minds and chips away at our ability to forge meaningful, new human connections. Particularly with those that are different.

And last week, in the light of the Buck Moon, I chose to let that shit go.

Here is a framework I have sketched that emerged from the practice that has helped me with elegant simplicity. I believe it holds some of the most important inner work any of us can do.

There are three categories of what we carry.

The first is what is yours to release. The fears that are not protecting you, only limiting you. The beliefs written into you by people and experiences that have no claim on your future. The things you picked up so long ago you forgot they were not originally yours. The baggage you have been dragging through every departure gate of your life because no one ever told you that you were allowed to leave it on the curb. Or, like me, you chose to acknowledge how your experiences and others affected your world view because you thought it gave even more power to those that had already hurt you, often deeply. The second is what is yours to carry and slowly unpack. Not everything you carry is wrong to carry, but can’t be released until metaphoric baggage is empty. Some of it is real and will only resolve itself if faced. Real grief, real responsibility, real weight from real things that happened. The work here is not to drop it but to unpack it gradually, so it becomes lighter over time rather than heavier. The goal is to make it light enough to carry onto the plane yourself, and ensure it fits in the overhead bin. You do not want to keep paying the cost of checking it in, every time you want to travel.

The third, and this may be the most significant work of all, is what others should be helping you carry. The places where you have been hauling something alone that was never meant to be a solo journey. The areas where the people in your life; partners, children, colleagues, friends , all should have their hand on the bag too. Recognizing where you deserve that help, and having the courage to ask for it, is the work that most of us have avoided the longest. This sometimes includes items that wholly and rightly belong to another, often a person you love, that you have been carrying for them. This is simply not your job, nor does it truly serve them for you to continue to do so.

Because we have been so capable of carrying everything alone that the people who love us have simply forgotten to offer.

The release is not the destination.

The release makes space.

And in that space that is created by putting down what was never yours, by slowly unpacking what is, by finally asking for help you have deserved all along, here is where your joy lives.

And I believe this exercise of self-love and excavation is part of our best Second Ascent. It is not the arrival at some imagined summit of healed and whole and fully figured out that we are bombarded with in social media accounts.

The ascent itself is the reward. The gradual, intentional, sometimes trembling climb toward a life that is actually yours to live.

The Buck Moon gave me this gift of understanding last Wednesday night on the beach.

I hope this essay gives you the same gift.

— Ashley

This week’s essay was inspired by a Buck Moon — a full moon in late July, named for the male deer who sheds the velvet from his antlers at this time of year. The velvet falls away, having done its work. What is revealed beneath it is the strength that was growing all along, underneath the surface.

You do not need to track the moon to do this practice. But I want to offer you in this practice what full moon energy invites: not a beginning, and not an ending, but a reckoning. A moment to see clearly what you have been carrying and make a conscious, intentional choice about what you will carry forward. This is exactly what every woman in the State of Midlife describes in some fashion, as a part of her midlife journey - a series of reckonings.

That is what this week asks of you to be open to.

One more thing before we begin. The prayer at the center of this practice was written by Dr. Mahenoor Punjani, a mindset and manifestation guide whose work I deeply respect. You can find her at @manifestwithmahe on Instagram. I encountered this prayer, or affirmation, you may call it either, and return to it as either, during my own releasing practice on the beach last Wednesday night. It broke something open in me. I offer it to you in the same spirit it arrived to me: as an invitation to honesty, and as a gift from one woman to another.

Now. Let us begin.

ARRIVE Two to three minutes

Find your place. If you can be outside under the sky tonight or the rising sun in the morning, that is ideal. If not, a window where light enters is enough. Sit comfortably, spine tall, hands resting open in your lap, palms facing up.

Close your eyes.

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.

Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of eight. Longer out than in. This is your nervous system receiving the signal: I am safe. I can soften. I can be honest now.

Again. In for four. Out for eight.

One more time.

Feel your shoulders drop. Feel your jaw release. Feel whatever you have been holding today begin to loosen its grip just slightly.

You have arrived. Welcome.

FEEL Five minutes

Keep your eyes closed.

Bring your attention to your body and ask yourself, without judgment:

What am I carrying right now?

Not as a list. As an embodied experience or feeling. Where does it live in you? Is it in your chest showing up as the compressed weight of emotions you have not expressed? Is it in your shoulders as the physical shape of holding everything up? Is it in your belly, audible as the low hum of fear or uncertainty that has become so familiar you have stopped noticing it is there?

Find it. Place one hand there.

You do not need to solve it or release it yet. You only need to acknowledge it. To say, without words: I know you are here. I see you. I have been carrying you.

Breathe into it. Let it be exactly what it is.

This is the first act of honesty. And it is enough for now and a place to begin.

LISTEN Seven to ten minutes

This week the LISTEN section holds the prayer.

You may read it silently, slowly, to yourself. You may read it aloud if you are alone. If you are doing this practice with another woman, you may take turns reading it aloud to each other, be witnessed by another as you speak the words, one voice offering it, the other receiving it.

There is no wrong way to hold these words. Move through them at whatever pace your body requires. If a line stops you, stay with it. If something releases, let it. If tears arrive, they are information, not interruption.

This prayer was written by Dr. Mahenoor Punjani.

Dear Self, Universe, God, or Divine Source,

Tonight, beneath the light of the Full Moon, I choose honesty.

I acknowledge everything I have been carrying.

The emotions I haven’t expressed.

The dreams I have been afraid to pursue.

The fears I have hidden beneath strength.

The parts of myself that have been asking for love instead of criticism.

May this moonlight illuminate what I am ready to see.

Show me the beliefs that are keeping me stuck.

Show me where I have abandoned myself to gain approval.

Show me where I have been settling for less than what my soul truly desires.

Give me the courage to face these truths with compassion instead of judgment.

Tonight, I do not ask to become someone else.

I ask to remember who I have always been.

The version of me beneath the conditioning.

The version of me beneath the disappointments.

The version of me who knows their worth without needing to prove it.

May every experience that has hurt me become wisdom.

May every setback become redirection.

May every closed door reveal a better path.

Where there is confusion, bring clarity.

Where there is heaviness, bring peace.

Where there is fear, bring trust.

Help me trust the timing of my life.

Help me trust that what is delayed is not denied.

Help me trust that some things leave not because I am unworthy, but because they are no longer aligned with where I am meant to go.

As I stand in this moment, I open myself to receive.

Not only abundance in money, but abundance in opportunities.

Abundance in love.

Abundance in health.

Abundance in meaningful connections.

Abundance in joy, creativity, confidence, and purpose.

May I become available for the blessings I have been praying for.

May I recognise them when they arrive.

May I have the wisdom to receive them without fear and the courage to keep growing into the life that is calling me forward.

Tonight, I surrender the need to know exactly how everything will unfold.

I choose faith over certainty.

Trust over control.

Alignment over force.

I leave this Full Moon lighter than I arrived.

More connected to myself.

More open to guidance.

More available for miracles.

And deeply grateful for all that is already here and all that is making its way to me.

Sit in the quiet the prayer leaves behind.

Do not rush back. Let whatever arrived, arrive. Let whatever released, release.

WRITE Ten minutes

Open your journal.

This week the essay offered a three part framework for what you carry. Use it now as your prompt.

Divide your page into three sections and write freely in each:

What is mine to release — the fears, the beliefs, the baggage that was never originally mine, the things I have been dragging through every door that I am ready to leave on the curb.

What is mine to carry and slowly unpack — the real weight from real things. What I am not ready to put down yet, but am committed to making lighter over time.

What others should be helping me carry — where I have been hauling something alone that was never meant to be a solo journey. Where I deserve to ask for the hand on the bag.

Write without editing. Write without performing. Write what is actually true.

When you are finished, read it back once. Quietly. As a witness to yourself, not a critic of yourself.

CLOSE One minute

Place both hands on your heart.

Take one full breath — in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Say aloud, or in a whisper:

I choose to let go.

Sit with that for a moment.

Then open your eyes.

A note on returning to this practice.

The prayer at the center of this week’s Coming Home is one you can return to at any time, not only at the full moon, not only on Wednesdays. It is a practice of honesty. And honesty does not require a lunar event. It only requires a willingness to sit with yourself and see clearly.

If this prayer resonated, follow Dr. Mahenoor Punjani at @manifestwithmahe. Her work is worth your time.

Coming Home is a weekly practice from Second Ascent, published every Wednesday as a companion to Tuesday’s essay. Practices like this — somatic, contemplative, rooted in the body and the breath — are foundational to what Second Ascent is building. This is a taste of what the Founding Circle will hold: a community of women doing this work together, with intention and care, in a space built specifically for them.

Return to this practice as many days this week as calls to you. Even two minutes of the breath is enough. If it stays with you, stay with it.

If this landed for you today, share it with a woman who needs it. And if the Founding Circle feels like it is calling you, please reach out to me at ashley@secondascent.co.

Welcome home.

Now the time has come to name what they are asking for.

Not what they should want. Not what the wellness industry has decided they need. What they actually said, in their own words, when given the space to answer honestly.

And the answer, that is a throughline across the entire dataset, one woman after another, is more simplistic and more radical than anything a product or a program could deliver.

She needs to be seen.

Not assessed. Not advised. Not coached. Not fixed. Not optimized, managed, or handed a protocol.

Seen. Heard. Understood.

But most importantly, witnessed.

Witnessed in a way that can only be done by other women who understand this chapter from the inside, not because they have been trained to help, but because they are on the same journey, although a unique path, but still walking alongside one another.

The numbers in Chapter 7 tell this story with a clarity that should stop every wellness entrepreneur, every healthcare provider, and every employer in their tracks.

Sixty-five percent (65%) of the women in this survey named their friends as the most helpful thing in navigating midlife. Twenty percent (20%) named their doctors.

Not therapy. Not medication. Not a program.

Each other.

And forty-two percent (42%) reported loneliness as a defining experience of this chapter. Not because they are isolated, but because they are surrounded by people who do not fully understand what they are living through. The particular loneliness of being in a room full of people and still feeling unseen.

The women in this survey are not looking for someone to tell them what to do. They have been told what to do their entire lives. They are looking for someone to sit beside them in the truth of what this is, without flinching, without fixing, without rushing toward the silver lining.

Said best by a line in one of my favorite poems by Oriah Mountain Dreamer called, The Invitation:

I think this so deeply expresses what so many women in midlife are asking from those they have cared for and loved, and love today. To walk with them, without fear and to not shrink back when the journey is hard for them.

This is for what I am asking.

When asked what kind of community would feel genuinely valuable, not just another thing on their to-do list, the answers were specific, consistent, and nothing like what the market has been offering.

One woman wrote:

“Low pressure, high intensity. No performative sharing or wins only. People who do things, not just talk about doing things. A consistent group of people who show up and know each other. Mutual support with boundaries — something between therapy and networking, with people who are at all different stages, not just where I am.”

Not a course. Not a conference. Not a curated online community where everyone arrives looking polished and put together.

Something real. Something consistent. Something that holds the hard and the beautiful simultaneously without asking anyone to perform either.

Another named exactly what she was not looking for:

“Nothing woo. Women who want to have gritty, real conversations about the hard stuff and the beautiful stuff. Real humans, real conversations, real connection.”

She has been ‘sold to’ enough. She is not looking for another product dressed up as a community. She does not desire for anyone to profit from her pain anymore.

She is looking for truth. And for the people willing to stand in it with her.

One of the most striking patterns in Chapter 7 is how consistently women named the same things. They did not paint a world with rose colored glasses. It was not ideals for which they asked, but rather absences they noted. What they described wanting was simply what they had been going without.

Presence. Consistency. Freedom from performance.

One woman described it this way:

“Community that is rooted in physical presence and daily life and interactions, where I do not need to worry about ‘executive presence’ or fulfilling expectations. I want to be able to express my enthusiasm and deep love and spend my time in mutual care for myself and others.”

She is describing a place where she can be fully herself. Where the parts of her that have been managed, performed, and optimized for everyone else’s comfort can simply rest.

After decades of performing, that is not a luxury.

That is survival.

Behind all of it; the community, the connection, the consistency, lies the simplest and most human ask in the entire dataset. A desire that brought me to tears because I cannot grasp any woman, or human for that matter, being deprived of the most fundamental human need.

One woman wrote, when asked what she needed most:

“I most need to be seen, heard and understood. To be asked: how are you, really.”

Not a program. Not a prescription. Not a keynote speaker or a retreat package or a twelve-week curriculum.

Someone who asks how she is and means it. And stays for the real answer.

That is the finding at the center of Chapter 7.

After everything the previous six chapters have documented, the body in transition, the mental load with no bottom, the medical system that looked away, the career that gave her everything and remembered nothing, the done-ness that is actually reclamation, what she needs is not more information or more intervention.

She needs a room where she does not have to arrive already okay.

This week I sat in a room with a group of women and led them to breathe together. Hum together. Witness each other in ways that do not require language. And I thought about this chapter as I taught. I reflected on what the research has been telling me for months and I gained clarity in that moment. Clarity that has greatly affected what we are building at Second Ascent - the reason we did this research in the first place.

The data is not describing a gap in the market.

It is describing a gap in the culture.

Women have always known how to heal each other. The Tend and Befriend (see Tuesday’s essay) response that is written into female biology is not a theory. It is a practice as old as the species. What is missing is not the knowledge. What is missing is the space, held with intention, built with care, offered without agenda, where that practice can happen.

That space is what Second Ascent is building. A place where women are held, and their uniqueness honored.

One woman at a time. Sitting with other women in a circle. Making space for honest conversation. Breathing together until their hearts beat as one.

This is the last chapter dispatch before the full State of Midlife 2026 report arrives.

All seven chapters. All the data. Every voice. The complete truth of what one hundred and fifty five said about what this chapter of life actually is, and what would make their lives feel more purposeful, more their own, more fulfilled, more meaningful…more alive and ready to ascend.

The report is coming. When it does, it will be the first thing you see here.

If you know someone who should read it, a woman in midlife, a doctor, an employer, a leader, a partner, a daughter, please share this newsletter with them now. The report belongs to every woman who pressed submit and trusted me with her truth. And to every woman who needs to know she is not alone in hers.

Thank you, ladies.

This is not a wellness story. It is a story of truth. And it is just beginning.

— Ashley

Every practice until now has been yours alone. Your breath, your body, your journal, your quiet. That was right for where we were. The practice of coming home to yourself first is the foundation of everything.

This week expands our practice beyond a singular, individual experience, to a shared one, rooted in the power of the collective to heal and hold.

This week’s essay asserted a belief, rooted in science, in anthropology, in decades of research: women are biologically built to heal in community. Not just to feel better in community, but to actually heal uniquely, with improved outcomes, when they are in the presence of other women who are doing the same work.

Dr. Shelley Taylor called it ‘Tend and Befriend’. I call it what it has always been: the most ancient and powerful technology women have ever possessed.

Sisterhood.

This practice is designed to be done with another woman. Or in a circle of women. In person, if at all possible. What you are about to experience is partly physiological, and the body needs proximity to feel it fully. A phone call or video can hold some of it. Shared space can hold all of it.

Find your person. Find your circle. And begin.

Before you start.

Sit facing each other. Close enough that you could reach out and touch the other person’s hands if you chose to. Far enough that you each have your own space.

Take a moment simply to arrive in each other’s presence. No agenda. No performance. Just the quiet acknowledgment that you are here, she is here, and something is about to happen between you that could not happen alone. Pause to look into one another’s eyes with the intention to see, and be seen.

ARRIVE Two to three minutes

Begin with your own breath.

In through the nose for a count of four. Out through the mouth for a count of eight.

Do this three times, on your own, feeling your own nervous system begin to settle.

Now, allow a shift. Let your breath find hers. Without speaking, without counting aloud, begin to breathe together. Not forced. Not perfectly synchronized. Simply listening for each other’s rhythm and allowing your own to meet it. In together. Out together. Slower. Softer.

Notice the ease and safety that lies within your shared breath.

This is not a metaphor. When women breathe together, their nervous systems begin to regulate each other. This is the biology of tend and befriend made physical. Your oxytocin levels rise. Your stress response softens. Your body registers: I am not alone in this.

Stay here for two to three minutes. Just the shared breath.

You have arrived. Together.

FEEL Five minutes

Keep your eyes soft or gently closed.

Place one hand on your own chest. Place the other hand open in your lap, palm facing up — an offering and a receiving.

Now, without speaking, let yourself feel whatever this week has placed in your body. The weight of the world you have been carrying. The pain of the people you love who are hurting. The grief of watching a world that feels harder and more divided than it should. The hope that lives alongside all of it, quiet and stubborn and real.

Feel it in your chest. Feel it in your belly. Simply notice.

Now comes the part that is the magic of being in person and sharing space.

Begin to hum. Any note. Whatever your body wants to make.

Do not choose a song. Do not worry about pitch or beauty. Simply let sound come from inside you. Low, resonant, felt in the chest rather than heard from the throat.

Let her hear it. Let her add hers.

Do not try to match each other immediately. Let the sounds find each other slowly, the way breathing did. Two voices, two notes, circling toward each other until they meet somewhere in the middle until you stumble upon a shared vibration, a frequency that belongs to both of you and to neither of you alone.

Stay here for two to three minutes. Let the hum do what words cannot.

What you are feeling in your chest right now is not imagination. Humming activates the vagus nerve directly. It stimulates the same neural pathways as social bonding. When two people hum together and find a shared frequency, their nervous systems are communicating below the level of language, below the level of thought.

This is the oldest form of medicine women have ever given each other.

LISTEN Five to seven minutes

Let the hum soften and fade. Sit in the quiet it leaves behind.

Now look at each other.

Not the performed eye contact of a first meeting. The real kind. The kind that takes a moment to settle into but, once there, holds something words do not reach.

Hold each other’s gaze for one full minute. Breathe. Stay.

If emotion arrives, yours or hers, let it. You are safe. You are held in this moment. You do not need to manage it or explain it or apologize for it. It is information. It is the body saying: this matters. She matters. This space between us is real.

After the minute, one of you asks the other — gently, without urgency:

What are you carrying right now that you have not said out loud?

The other answers. Fully. Without editing.

Then you switch.

No advice. No fixing. No silver linings offered. Simply receive what she gives you and let her feel the weight of it honored.

Listen to hear.

This is tend and befriend, made a practice. This is what women’s nervous systems have been doing for one another, transcending culture and throughout time.

You are not doing something new. You are remembering something ancient.

WRITE Ten minutes

Open your journal. Write for ten minutes without stopping.

This week, what you write is meant to be shared. Write it knowing she will read it. Not a performance, but an offering.The opening of your heart to be seen for the purpose of healing. The thing you most want her to know about what you are carrying, what you are healing, what you are becoming, and what it means to you that she is here doing this work alongside you. Write knowing it will be held sacred by her.

When you are both finished, exchange what you have written.

Read each other’s words slowly. Without comment.

When you have both finished reading, one of you says, simply, without elaboration:

I see you. I am with you. You are not alone.

The other receives it. Fully. Without deflecting.

Then she says it back.

CLOSE One minute

Reach out and take each other’s hands.

Close your eyes.

Take one full shared breath together. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Then say, together or in turn:

We rise together.

Hold that for a moment.

Then open your eyes.

A note for those doing this practice alone this week.

If you cannot find a partner for this practice today, do not set it aside. Do the breath, the hum, the writing. When you reach the eye contact and the question, ask it of yourself in a mirror. It is not the same. But it is not nothing. And then find your person before next Wednesday. Because this practice deserves to be shared.

— Ashley

Coming Home is a weekly practice from Second Ascent, published every Wednesday as a companion to Tuesday’s essay. Practices like this — somatic, contemplative, rooted in the body and the breath — are foundational to what Second Ascent is building. This is a taste of what the Founding Circle will hold: a community of women doing this work together, with intention and care, in a space built specifically for them.

Return to this practice as many days this week as calls to you. Even two minutes of the shared breath, remembered and replicated alone, is enough. If it stays with you, stay with it.

If this landed for you today, share it with a woman who needs it. And if the Founding Circle feels like it is calling you, please reach out to me at ashley@secondascent.co.

We rise together.

On the last day of this week-long retreat, after days from 7am to 830pm doing the kind of work that is not easy to describe from the outside. Breathing, stillness, singing, dancing, chanting, movement, and most notably, the slow and unglamorous excavation of what had accumulated in my body over decades of living at the pace I had chosen and the pace that had been chosen for me. By the time of our final practice, something had shifted.

The shift wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t all at once. But it was a loud whisper that required listening to hear.

I sat in the quiet at the end of it and felt my world view shift. The world, which had been presenting itself to me as a series of problems to be solved and crises to be managed, suddenly felt lighter. I was able to feel hope and see possibility, in the same places I had found it difficult to simply find my breath. I could feel purpose where I had been feeling pressure. I was both a better version of the self that arrived seven days earlier, and yet a different person altogether.

In that moment, with the certainty that lives in the body rather than the mind, I understood something I had always believed but never felt compelled to say loudly that I knew with certainty in every cell of my body:

If we heal women, women will heal the world.

I have been living with greater confidence and ease since, and most importantly with purpose, knowing this to be a truth. An absolute truth that has driven me to begin this work, to write, to build. And this week in particular, in a world that feels so far departed from a shared sense of humanity and loving kindness, the loud whisper has become a scream of declaration.

The world is full of pain now and far reaching human suffering has been normalized to some extent in our media and consumption of it. Not the ambient, manageable discomfort of ordinary life within a western existence. Something heavier and more pervasive. The pain of war, scarcity and suffering, and the people living inside it. And for some reason, right now, at this moment, the weight feels unbearable to me, and others, at times. Heavy. Overwhelming. Without bound. Relentless.

I feel, as do many women, a particular grief of watching a country, and a world, feel less safe or filled with possibility and hope than it did before. The pain of political policies that feel targeted, at women, at the marginalized, at the bodies and futures of people who were never given a voice. At the gas pump and in the grocery aisle for every parent trying to feed their child on a working class wage. In the ER room, when visited as a last resort because of lack of access to preventative care. In medicare funded memory care facilities where it seems like your elders just go to die, not live. And in every classroom that practices and drills in preparation for darkness to break down its classroom door.

And for women, who are, as I will come back to, biologically wired to feel this deeply, in their body and heart, who have almost nowhere to put it down.

One woman in the State of Midlife survey wrote what I believe many of us feel but rarely say aloud:

“I need the world and our country to be a better place. I need the hatred to go away. I need people to care about others and accept everyone. I need to feel that we will be leaving our kids and grandkids a beautiful future.”

She is not asking for the impossible. She is naming the most fundamental human need there is. And she is carrying it, the way women carry most things, quietly, completely, without anyone asking how much it weighs, if they can help her, or if she is ready to put it down.

Here is what science has to say about why women carry it this way.

In 2000, UCLA psychologist Dr. Shelley Taylor and her colleagues identified something that decades of stress research had missed entirely: women do not respond to stress the way men do.

The prevailing theory had always been fight or flight. Threat arrives and the organism either confronts it or runs. This became the foundational model for understanding human stress responses and was informed almost entirely on studies conducted on male subjects.

What Taylor found, after analyzing hundreds of biological and behavioral studies, is that women respond to stress with what she called ‘Tend and Befriend’. Under threat, women move toward, they do not hide. The move toward their children, toward each other, toward the building of social networks that provide collective protection and comfort.

Not fight. Not flight.

Tend. Befriend.

The researchers suspect that oxytocin, a hormone released in response to stress, plays an important role in establishing this pattern. In women, oxytocin promotes bonding, reduces anxiety, and amplifies the impulse toward care.

Women are not socialized to respond to pain with connection.

They are physiologically built to do so.

This is not softness. This is design.

Beautiful, sacred and deeply needed by the world today, wisdom of design.

For most of human history, in tribal societies organized around survival, this design was understood. Women were the weavers of social fabric. The keepers of the community. The ones whose networks held the group together when threat arrived from outside. They did not fight the predator. They built the structure that made the group strong enough to survive it.

That understanding has largely eroded. But our wiring remains intact.

Another woman in the survey named the role of women as she sees it with candor that deserves an, “Amen!”:

“They are the badasses of the world that keep picking up the shit men destroy — both literally, as in war, and figuratively.”

She is not wrong. She is describing something larger than frustration. She is describing a function. Women clean up. Women rebuild. Women hold communities together after the breaking. The bombing. The destruction. The forsakenness. This is documented, researched, and consistently overlooked.

When women participate in peace processes, the probability of the resulting agreement lasting at least two years increases by twenty percent (20%). The probability of it lasting fifteen years increases by thirty-five percent (35%). The participation of civil society groups including women’s organizations makes a peace agreement sixty-four percent (64%) less likely to fail.

64%.

And yet in 2023, women comprised only nine point six percent (9.6%) of negotiators and thirteen point seven percent (13.7%) of mediators in peace and ceasefire agreements.

The world is in the pain it is in, at least in part, because it has not yet understood that the people most biologically wired and capable of building durable peace are the ones most systematically excluded from the rooms where peace is on the agenda and intended to be made.

When I talk about building Second Ascent, a community dedicated to healing women, I sometimes encounter a reaction that is both understandable and worth examining. The worry that focusing on women means neglecting men. The sense that love and resources and attention are finite a pie, and every slice given to women is a slice taken from someone else.

I understand where that fear comes from. And I want to answer it as clearly as the research does.

Healing women is not zero sum. It is the opposite.

Higher levels of gender equality are associated with a lower propensity for conflict, both between and within states. The data does not suggest that empowering women diminishes men. It suggests, consistently and across decades of research, that communities where women are well and thriving, supported and heard and healed, are more stable, more peaceful, more resilient for every member of the community.

I am increasingly unafraid of this work as I continue on this journey. The data supports that healing and helping women will be a rising tide, and that showing up and providing women the sanctuary to heal and reclaim herself will ultimately elevate and improve the world as a whole.

One survey respondent put it with the simplicity the argument deserves:

“When women flourish — the world flourishes.”

Three words. Decades of research. The same conclusion.

This is what Second Ascent is. Not a wellness company. Not a retreat brand. Not a subscription to self-improvement.

A movement.

One that begins the way all movements begin. Not with a march or a manifesto, but with one woman doing the work of coming home to herself. Healing what has been fractured. Building the capacity to feel fully, give generously, and receive in return.

That woman, healed and held and supported by other women doing the same work, goes back into her family, her community, her workplace, her relationships, carrying something different than she brought in. Her children feel it. Her partner feels it. The people she leads feel it. The community she inhabits feels it.

One woman at a time.

That is not a small thing.

That is the rising tide.

And the tide does not ask which boats deserve to rise.

It rises all of them.

I went to Guatemala in December searching for something I could not yet name. I came home knowing it in every cell.

If we heal women, women will heal the world.

Not because women are better, stronger or more evolved. Simply because we are biologically built to tend and befriend, to weave social fabric, to build the structures that hold communities together when everything outside is threatening to break them.

The world needs that now more than it has in a very long time.

Second Ascent exists because the healing has to start somewhere.

It starts here. It starts with us.

— Ashley

The research cited in this essay includes the following sources:

Tend-and-Befriend
Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R., & Updegraff, J.A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429. University of California, Los Angeles.
taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu

Oxytocin and the tend-and-befriend response
Same source as above. Additional reporting: ScienceDaily, UCLA Researchers Identify Key Biobehavioral Pattern Used By Women To Manage Stress (May 2000).
sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000522082151.htm

Women’s participation increases probability of peace agreement lasting two or more years by 20%; fifteen years by 35%
UN Women. Facts and Figures: Women, Peace, and Security.
unwomen.org/en/articles/facts-and-figures/facts-and-figures-women-peace-and-security

Women’s civil society participation makes peace agreements 64% less likely to fail
Nilsson, D. Cited in: Council on Foreign Relations. Women’s Participation in Peace Processes.
cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes

Women comprised 9.6% of negotiators and 13.7% of mediators in 2023
United Nations. Women, Peace, and Security.
un.org/en/peace-and-security/page/women-peace-and-security

Countries with greater gender equality are more likely to resolve conflicts without violence
Council on Foreign Relations. Women’s Participation in Peace Processes.
cfr.org/womens-participation-in-peace-processes

Survey quotes
The State of Midlife Women 2026. Original research conducted by Second Ascent. Survey of 130 women ages 40–65, conducted May through June 2026.
ashleyjswartz.substack.com

We are all in this room together.

This week’s essay was about two women sharing a meal, arriving at the same understanding from completely different directions. What we want is not complicated. What we refuse to sacrifice to get it is not negotiable.

This practice is about that. About coming home to the love you deserve, not as a someday destination, but as a felt truth you can locate in your body right now. Today. In whatever imperfect and sometimes trembling state you arrive in.

You do not have to be without fear to begin. You only have to be here.

ARRIVE Two to three minutes

Find your place. If you have a dedicated space for your practice, go there now. If not, wherever you are — sit, settle, arrive.

Spine tall. Hands resting open in your lap, palms facing up. A gesture of receiving.

Close your eyes.

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.

Exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of eight. Longer out than in. This is the signal your nervous system needs to move from protection into presence. You are telling your body: I am safe. I can soften. I can be here.

Again. In for four. Out for eight.

One more time.

Feel your shoulders drop. Feel your jaw release. Feel the slight unclenching in your hands.

You have arrived.

FEEL Five minutes

Keep your eyes closed.

Bring your attention to your chest. Not your lungs. The center of your chest — the place where you feel things before you think about them.

Place one hand there now.

Notice what is living there this week. It may be grief. It may be longing. It may be the particular ache of wanting something real and not yet having it. It may be the quiet, persistent fear of not being enough, of being too much, or not the right kind, or the kind that people choose and then reconsider.

Let whatever is there be there. You do not need to fix it or release it or transform it into something more manageable today.

Just feel it. Acknowledge it. Say without words: I know you are here.

Now bring your other hand to your belly. Below your navel. The center of your power and your worth; your divine feminine.

Notice what is living here. Joy of creation. The anxiety that settles in the gut when love feels uncertain. Excitement for new beginnings. The low hum of waiting for something to end. The swirling of anticipation. The place where self-doubt collects when it has nowhere else to go.

You are holding both now. The heart and the belly. The duality of joy and longing, excitement and fear. Breathe into both simultaneously.

And know this: the fact that you can feel all of this is evidence that you are alive to your own life. That you have not gone numb. That the capacity for love, real, full, honest love, is completely intact in you. For others and for yourself.

Fear is not a problem; it serves us. Being fearless is not our goal. It is to the courage to sit here, now, in this that is proof of how much you are capable and deserving.

Breathe. Stay. Feel all the feels.

LISTEN Five to seven minutes

Now let’s find the signal in the noise.

I do not want you to think or meditate upon love. I want you to feel it.

Not a person. Not a face. Not a specific relationship past or future. The feeling itself. The quality of it. What it actually feels like in the body to be loved in the way you deserve.

Let yourself feel, not imagine, feel what it would be like to be held without being consumed. To be seen without being diminished. To be chosen, fully and without reservation, exactly as you are. Not the managed version. Not the smaller version. Not the version that has learned to make herself easier to love. The person holding you can be another, or you can choose to hold yourself.

The full version of yourself. Sit in your truth and know that love remains there. Whatever your truth may be. The version that is certain and ambitious and tender and fierce and sometimes a lot and always, always worth it.

For every version, love remains.

What does that feel like in the chest?

What does it feel like in the belly?

Let the feeling grow. Not as fantasy. As truth. As something that already exists in the universe and is already on its way to you. You are not wishing for it. You are recognizing it. You are allowing it. You are making space for it by feeling it now, before it arrives, so your body knows how to receive it when it does.

Stay here. Breathe. Let yourself be loved — if only by yourself, if only in this moment.

That is enough. This is where true love begins; within.

WRITE Ten minutes

Open your journal.

This week we are not reflecting on pain. We are not excavating wounds or revisiting what has not worked.

We are writing toward what we deserve.

Begin here:

The love I deserve feels like...

Write without stopping. Write without editing. Write the feeling, not the story. Not who. Not when. How. What does it feel like in your body, your mornings, your quietest moments? What does it sound like? What does it ask of you, and what does it never ask you to give up?

Write it as if you are describing a love that is already on its way to you.

Because it is.

When you are finished, read it back once. Quietly, to yourself.

This is not a wish list.

This is a standard.

Hold it.

CLOSE One minute

Place both hands on your chest.

Feel your heartbeat beneath your palms.

Say aloud, or in a whisper:

I am deserving of the love I desire.

Let it land in the chest. Let it land in the belly.

Then take one full breath . In through the nose, out through the mouth.

Carry one word into your day.

Tender.

Not as softness only. As strength. The particular strength of a woman who knows what she deserves and refuses to accept less. Who chooses herself, every day, with whatever trembling courage she has available.

That is you.

Open your eyes.

Coming Home is a weekly practice from Second Ascent, published every Wednesday as a companion to Tuesday’s essay. Practices like this — somatic, contemplative, rooted in the body and the breath — are foundational to what Second Ascent is building. This is a taste of what the Founding Circle will hold: a community of women doing this work together, with intention and care, in a space built specifically for them.

Return to this practice as many days this week as calls to you. Even two minutes of the breath is enough. If it stays with you, stay with it.

If this landed for you today, share it with a woman who needs it. And if the Founding Circle feels like it is calling you, please reach out to me at ashley@secondascent.co.

Welcome home.

— Ashley

I am not going to say more than that. Some weeks earn a full accounting and some ask only to be acknowledged and released. This is one of the latter. I am back at the beach, the week is behind me, and I am sitting with something that arrived quietly at a dinner on Osprey Way that I did not expect to find so clarifying.

My neighbor lost her husband several years ago. She has built a life of beauty and intention in the years since. The kind of life that requires both courage and a willingness to inhabit your own company without apology. On Sunday night we sat together over dinner, the way we do on this street, and she asked me about being alone. About how it felt after my last relationship ended. About what I had found in the space it left behind.

I told her the truth, which surprised me a little as I said it: it has been good.

Not because I do not want love. Not because partnership does not call to me. But because being alone, genuinely, intentionally alone, has allowed me to come back to myself in ways I had not realized I had drifted from. My independence returned. My mornings became mine again. My decisions, my space, my energy, directed first by my own needs rather than organized around someone else’s presence.

She nodded with the specific recognition of a woman who understands this from the inside.

And then she said something that has stayed with me since.

She described her own life, so different from mine on the surface. She had been a wife and a mother, her world organized around her family, her husband present in all the traditional and meaningful ways, their roles clear and complementary. She had treasured that life. She had built something real inside it.

And yet here she was, on the other side of loss, wanting exactly what I wanted.

Not just partnership. A partnership that would not cost her the self she had finally found space to inhabit. Connection that would not require her to disappear back into a role. Love that could hold her without consuming her.

Two women. Opposite paths. The same shore.

This is the thread I keep finding in the State of Midlife research. Whether a woman has poured herself into a career, a family, both, or some version of life entirely her own, she arrives, somewhere in the middle of the second half, at the same essential reckoning.

She has been shapeshifting for decades.

Not consciously. Not always willingly. But consistently. The subtle and not so subtle adjustments we make to fit the roles we are handed, inherit, or choose — wife, mother, daughter, lover, partner, professional, caregiver — carry a cumulative cost that only becomes visible when we finally stop. When the relationship ends, or the children leave, or the job disappears, or the grief of loss creates a stillness that was not there before.

In that stillness, she finds herself. And realizes how long she has been away.

Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet:

I have been thinking about that since our dinner conversation. About how much of what I accepted as love, in relationships, in friendships, in the professional bonds that shaped my career, was actually possession in softer clothing. Love that asked me to be less of myself in exchange for its continued presence. Love that was sufficient unto itself only when I made myself insufficient.

That is not love. That is a negotiation disguised as one.

I am not without fear. I want to say that clearly, because the courage I am describing is not the absence of it. And I desire more than anything to share my life with a partner that loves me wholly, and allows me to love them the same, without a cost of sacrificing ourselves to walk life’s journey together.

There are two demons I have been fighting for as long as I can remember. The first is the belief that I am hard to love. Not unlovable, but too much. Too certain, too full, too unwilling to soften the edges that make other people comfortable. The second is the quiet, persistent expectation of abandonment. The conviction, written so early it feels like fact, that love arrives and then leaves. That I am the kind of woman who is chosen and then reconsidered. That the end, in some form, is always coming, and to no surprise, always does.

These are not small fears. They have shaped who I chose, how I showed up, and how quickly I began protecting myself before protection became necessary. They have followed me into relationships and friendships and boardrooms. They have cost me more than I am willing to keep paying.

And they do not go away simply because I can name them now.

What has changed is this: I can see them clearly enough to refuse to let them make my decisions. The demon that whispers I am hard to love no longer gets to determine what love I accept. The demon that predicts abandonment no longer gets to make me leave first, or disappear into smallness, or shapeshift into whoever I believe will be easier to stay for.

I am not willing to shapeshift again. Not for a relationship, not for a role, not for someone else’s comfort with the fullness of who I am.

The fear is still there some mornings. So is the pain. I am not pretending otherwise.

But every day I get to make a choice. And every day, with whatever imperfect and sometimes trembling courage I have available to me, I choose myself.

That is the whole practice. That is the whole point.

The love I want now, the love I will not accept less than, is the kind Gibran describes. That gives without taking. That creates space rather than filling it. That stands beside rather than requiring me to stand behind.

And I have found, in being alone, that this is not a renunciation of love.

It is the first honest definition of it I have ever lived by.

My neighbor and I sat together as the evening settled in over Osprey Way, sharing a meal made with love by another sister of our Osprey tribe. Two women who had arrived at the same understanding from completely different directions. What we wanted was not complicated. What we refused to sacrifice to get it was not negotiable.

Care for ourselves, first. Not instead of love. As the foundation of it.

This is what Second Ascent is for.

Not to teach women to be alone. Not to celebrate solitude as the destination. But to create the space — the community, the sisterhood, the sanctuary — where a woman can come home to herself completely, so that whatever she chooses to build from there is built on something real.

Whether you poured yourself into a career and watched it be absorbed without your name attached. Whether you poured yourself into a family and are now learning, for the first time, to pour into yourself. Whether you have been doing both simultaneously and are exhausted in ways that a single evening at dinner cannot fully hold.

You arrived here. At this shore. At this particular stillness.

So did she. So did I.

We are not behind. We are not broken. We are not too late.

We are, finally, exactly where we are meant to be.

— Ashley

Every Tuesday, the Second Ascent Letter asks you to feel something. To look at your life honestly. To sit with the research, the stories, the data, and the truth of what women in midlife are carrying.

Coming Home is what happens next.

Every Wednesday I am going to offer you a practice — somatic, contemplative, written, or some combination of all three — rooted in whatever Tuesday’s essay asked you to hold. It is a way of taking what landed in your mind and letting it move through your body. Of metabolizing the feeling rather than setting it aside until it piles up with everything else.

This is the work I do every morning. Not perfectly. Not on a schedule that never breaks. But consistently and with intention. It has changed me more than any amount of thinking has.

Each practice is designed to take between fifteen and twenty minutes in full. But I want to be clear about something: you do not have to do it all at once, and you do not have to do it only today.

Return to this practice every day this week, even if only for a few minutes. Even if you only do the breath. Even if you only write one sentence. The part that resonated most — go back to it. Sit with it again on Thursday. Return to it on Sunday when the week has softened you. If a practice stays with you longer than a week, let it. There is no rule that says you must move on before you are ready.

And if you prefer to receive Tuesday’s essay by listening rather than reading — you can do that. The Substack app reads essays aloud. It is not my voice. But it is a way to take the words with you on a walk, in the car, while you make dinner. However the essay reaches you is the right way.

One more thing before we begin. I want to say something about space.

One of the most important gifts I have given myself in this season is a dedicated place to practice. It does not have to be an altar in the formal sense, though mine is, and if you read Tuesday’s essay you now know what lives on it. It can be a corner of a room, a chair by a window, a cushion on the floor. What matters is that it is yours — a place marked specifically for you to sit, breathe, reflect, honor, move, and return to yourself. Having that place already carved out makes it easier to make the time. The space itself becomes the invitation. Your body learns that when you arrive there, this time belongs to you. That is a sacred and wonderful gift to give yourself.

If you do not have a place like that yet — consider this your permission to make one.

Now. Let us begin.

For the Women Who Came Before

This week’s essay was about the women who carry everything. Who stay. Who show up, generation after generation, for the people they love, and who are too rarely held themselves.

It was about my aunt Brenda, and my mother Deborah, and my stepmother Stephanie, and Sandy, and Christina, and the nearly half of all women in the State of Midlife research who are currently caregiving for aging parents while managing everything else life requires of them.

It was also about the women who came before. The ones on my altar. The ones who shaped us by how they lived, what they carried, and what they passed on, whether they intended to or not.

This practice is for all of them.

And for you, if you are one of them.

ARRIVE Two to three minutes

Find your place. Sit comfortably, spine tall, hands resting open in your lap.

Close your eyes.

Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.

Now exhale slowly through your mouth for a count of eight. Longer out than in. Let the exhale empty you completely.

Again. In for four. Out for eight.

One more time.

This breath is not decoration. The extended exhale activates your vagus nerve. This is the body’s pathway to safety and rest. You are signaling to your nervous system: I am here. I am not in danger. I can be present now.

Repeat this three to five times, or until you feel the quality of your attention shift. You will notice it. Something settles.

You have arrived.

FEEL Five minutes

Keep your eyes closed.

Bring your attention to your body. Not to fix anything. Not to assess. Simply to notice.

Begin at the top of your head and move slowly downward. Your forehead. The space behind your eyes. Your jaw. Let it soften. Your throat. Your chest.

Somewhere in the body, this week’s essay is living. Grief has a location. Gratitude has a location. Love has a location. So does exhaustion. So does the particular tenderness that comes from thinking about a woman you love who is tired.

Find where it is sitting in you.

Place one hand there. Let your awareness be accompanied by energy..

You do not need to move it or release it or transform it into something more manageable. You only need to acknowledge it. To say, without words: I feel you. I know you are here.

Stay with that for a few minutes. Breathe into it. Let it be exactly what it is.

LISTEN Five to seven minutes

I want you to call in the women who shaped you.

They may be living or they may have passed. They may be your mother, your grandmother, your aunt, your great aunt. They may be women you never met whose lives built the ground you stand on. They may be the divine feminine figures you feel most drawn to; Mary, Kali, Tara, Magdalene, or whoever lives in the sacred architecture of your own belief.

Invite them, one by one, to come and sit with you.

See them arrive. Take your time. Let each face become clear before you call in the next. Notice how they hold themselves. Notice what they are wearing, what expression they carry, what energy they bring into the room.

When they are all gathered, simply sit with them for a moment.

Then ask, silently or aloud: What do you want me to know?

Do not reach for the answer. Let it come. It may arrive as a word, an image, a feeling in the body, a memory, a sense of warmth or weight or light. Trust whatever comes. There is no wrong answer in this room.

Stay here as long as you need.

WRITE Ten minutes

Open your journal. Choose one of the women you called in.

Begin with: Dear _____,

Write her a letter. Tell her what you want her to know. What you never said. What you have been carrying that she would recognize. What you are grateful for. What you are still learning from how she lived.

Do not edit. Do not pause to find the right word. Let it be imperfect and honest and real.

When you are finished, read it back once. Quietly, to yourself.

CLOSE One minute

Say her name out loud.

Then place both hands on your heart.

And say, aloud or in a whisper: I carry you. And I am grateful.

Sit with that for a moment.

Then take one full breath — in through the nose, out through the mouth — and gently open your eyes.

You are done.

Welcome home.

— Ashley

Coming Home is a weekly practice from Second Ascent, published every Wednesday as a companion to Tuesday’s essay. Practices like this — somatic, contemplative, rooted in the body and the breath — are foundational to what Second Ascent is building. This is a taste of what the Founding Circle will hold: a community of women doing this work together, with intention and care, in a space built specifically for them.

Return to this practice as many days this week as calls to you. Even two minutes of the breath is enough. If it stays with you, stay with it.

If this landed for you today, share it with a woman who needs it. And if the Founding Circle feels like it is calling you, please reach out to me at ashley@secondascent.co.

On that day, my mother sat beside her hospital bed and fed her an OG Frosty from Wendy’s, Brenda’s favorite.

They had removed the ventilator earlier in the day. She had not eaten other than through a feeding tube since February. And when my mother lifted the spoon to her lips, Brenda opened her mouth with the innocence of a child enjoying a special treat. The nurses gathered. They cheered her on, the way you cheer for someone finishing something magnificent, which it was. She ate every last bite.

She died a few hours later. She was seventy-eight years old. It was the day after her birthday.

And the last thing she tasted was joy, delivered by the hands of her younger sister, who had sat beside her, advocated for her, and loved her unconditionally through six years of hospitals, illnesses, ventilators and the particular grief of watching someone you love disappear slowly, and then suddenly, all at once. Despite fighting like sisters do, their bond and love were clear to everyone around them.

That is what my mother, Deborah, did.

Not because she was assigned to. Not because there was no one else. Because that is who she is.

I have been home in Pennsylvania since last week. Our small family has gathered, not only to grieve Brenda, but also to visit the burial sites of our elders. My great grandparents. My grandmothers. My grandfathers. Five uncles. My great aunt. The people who built the family I come from. And now Brenda, who will rest beside them.

Standing at those graves, I kept thinking about the women.

The ones who carried everything. The ones who stayed. The ones who showed up, decade after decade, for the people they loved, and then, when those people needed them most, stayed.

My mother cared for her own mother for the last ten years of her life. Her mother died at ninety-three. My mom is now more than two years into her own illness. And in the middle of all of that, she continued to care for Brenda, for whom she has cared for the last six years. Until now.

The math of that love is staggering. And she is tired in the way a person is tired after decades of pouring out, in her marrow, care for others, while trying to heal herself. It is exhaustion so deep in a place that a weekend cannot touch.

She is not alone in it.

My stepmother, Stephanie, has spent many years caring for her ninety-five year old mother with a tenderness I have watched with reverence. My neighbor Sandy gave her mother Sue three more years of life by moving her parents into her home, by showing up to every appointment, by refusing to let a single moment go unlived. My friend Christina is caring for both of her parents.

They are in the State of Midlife research too, these women. Nearly half of the survey respondents are currently caregiving for aging parents, in addition to managing careers, children, spouses, and their own health. They are the ones the data names exhausted. Running on empty. Carrying the mental load that has no bottom.

They are doing the most sacred work there is. In a culture that has largely forgotten to call it that.

I have traveled enough of this world to know that we have lost something in how we hold this.

In Guatemala, where I spent a month at the beginning of this journey, the abuela is not a burden. She is the center. The keeper of the story. The holder of the recipe. The person around whom the family organizes itself, not out of obligation, but out of reverence and pure love. The matriarch is honored because the culture understands, in a way ours often does not, that she is the root system. Everything growing above ground came from her.

In Latin American cultures, this value of familismo, a deep family solidarity, shapes caregiving as a willing and honored responsibility across generations, not a burden to be managed alone. In many Asian cultures, elder care is seen not simply as duty but as a deeply ingrained tradition, one that gives caregivers pride and purpose alongside the weight they carry.

In India, in Nepal, in Tibet, in Bhutan, I have seen the same understanding expressed in different forms. In Tibetan Buddhist practice, there is a teaching I return to often: that every being we encounter has at some point, across the vast sweep of existence, been our mother, has held us, nurtured us, protected us with everything she had. To care for someone and offer grace is not a burden or obligation. It is the repayment of a kindness that goes deeper than this one lifetime. It is dharma. It is love made visible across generations.

We have forgotten this in the West. Or perhaps we never fully learned it.

On my altar at home sit two women who helped raise me.

My grandmother on my father’s side, Ruth. And, my great Aunt Evy. Photographs, placed with intention alongside a tsa-tsa for each, small sacred objects I brought back from Bhutan. In Bhutan, these cone-shaped miniature stupas are tucked into caves, cliffsides, and roadside shrines as devotional votive offerings used to earn spiritual merit, honor the deceased, and ward off negative energy. Beside them: Kali, goddess of destruction and renewal. Green Tara, of compassion in action. White Tara, of protection and healing. Mary, mother of Christ. Mary Magdalene, who carried the truth when no one else would.

Every morning when I sit on my mat, they accompany me in my practice, and more often than not, I believe they guide me in it. I am in their company. I carry them into the day. They are all my mothers and represent a unique divine feminine quality I, at times, need to call upon and other times, aspire to embody in myself. Kali when I need the courage to burn something down. Tara when I need the grace to hold someone gently.

(The other is Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom)

What I understand more fully this week than I ever have before is that these women, the ones on my altar and the ones being laid to rest in Pennsylvania, are not only figures of love and devotion. They are a record. They are the evidence that the work of caring, of showing up, of staying has always been the whole thing. Not the footnote. Not the supporting role.

The whole thing.

And in our culture it is expected and too often overlooked.

My mother is tired. Not defeated. Not broken. Tired in the specific way a woman is tired when she does not have any energy left to care for herself because she has been caring for others as a higher priority.

The tsa-tsa on my altar were brought home from Bhutan as offerings of merit, with the understanding in Buddhist tradition that acts of compassion accumulate something that moves beyond the individual, that circulates through the web of existence and returns in ways we cannot always predict or name. Deborah has been making offerings her entire life. Not clay and prayer. Presence. Care. The spoon lifted to her sister’s lips. I believe that merit is circulating. I believe it is finding its way home to her.

This is what I want for every Deborah. Sandy. Steph. Christina. Every woman who has been the one that does what is expected of them without resentment or obligation, but as duty, the one who stays, who holds the hand, lifts the spoon, sits in the hard hospital chair, and makes sure the person they love is not afraid and not alone.

You are not invisible. You are the whole story.

Second Ascent is also for you.

Rest, Mom.

And Aunt Brenda, rest in peace.

I love you.

— Ashley

She said it exactly that way. It was not as a declaration made with emotion or anger, not as advice, but as a simple statement of fact about how she moves through her life. We were sitting together on Long Island this weekend, she and I, and she was talking about her work the way a person talks about breathing. Not something she does. Something she is.

Anita is a mathematician and computer scientist. She is one of the researchers whose work laid the foundation for what we now call machine learning and big data. She taught at Yale and Wesleyan. She has been at Stony Brook University for forty years. She is still publishing.

She is also my second mother. And she came to this country in 1980 with a daughter not yet two years old and a choice between exile and prison.

You can watch her tell the story herself. Please take a few minutes to honor her and do so.

She says something in the video about how she sees her work, her career, her accomplishments and her obligation to continue to contribute to the world through her research; to leave a legacy.

“It’s not the question of love. It’s the question of who you are.”

She was talking about mathematics and computer science. She could have been talking about anything, as is the case for any woman to make this statement.

I did not go to Long Island this weekend to write an essay. I went to visit someone I love. And somewhere in the middle of a conversation about her life, the dissident years in Poland, the ultimatum, the baby, the leaving, the decades of work that shaped entire fields of inquiry most people have never heard of, she mentioned, casually, the word sabbatical.

She was not describing a rest. She was describing protected time. A period of intentional time away from the relentless obligations of teaching, the minutia of administration and institutional demands, time to write without interruption, to follow a research thread wherever it led, to do the deeper and more generative work that the daily grind of a job, mother, friend, and life make nearly impossible.

I knew what a sabbatical was conceptually, but when I arrived home Sunday, I looked up the definition.

A sabbatical is a period of leave granted for research, writing, and renewal of purpose. The word comes from the Hebrew shabbat, but the practice has never been about stopping. It has always been about going deeper. In academia, it is typically granted after seven years of continuous service. The underlying assumption is quietly radical: the focused, self-directed work makes everything else better. The pause from obligation is not a detour from the purpose. It is where the most important work actually gets done.

I read that and sat very still, with myself, and in my truth for a long moment.

I have been building Second Ascent for six months without a traditional paycheck, without employer healthcare, without the particular security that comes from knowing a deposit is arriving on the first and fifteenth.

This is a choice I made with clarity and intention. I know why I made it. I believe in it.

And still, the doubt comes in. I work hard to keep fear and the monkey of scarcity off my back, but it still creeps in. It is not always my own. Often it arrives wearing the face of someone who loves me. A question asked with care that lands like a weight: Are you okay? Have you been applying for jobs? Any interviews? How long can you do this? When do you run out of money and healthcare?

And because I am human, an empath, and because I love the people who ask, their worry becomes mine. Some mornings I sit down to build and instead of building I audit. Six months. What do I have to show for it? Am I moving fast enough? Have I lost time I cannot get back? Will I fail? Again.

Anita’s re-introduction for me to the word sabbatical was an intervention to my self doubt, fear and halted my swirling.

Here is what I had forgotten.

A sabbatical is not absence. It is presence, simply directed differently. It is the research that cannot be rushed. The writing that refuses to be done in the margins of someone else’s priorities. The slow, unglamorous, invisible work of building something from nothing, without a title or a net or anyone telling you what to do next.

And it is, between every line of the State of Midlife research, exactly what the women in this survey have been quietly asking for without having a word for it. The woman who said she was exhausted. The one who said she was burned out. The one who said she desperately wanted to reinvent but could not find the space or the permission to begin. They were not asking for a vacation. They were asking for exactly this; protected time to finally do the work that is actually theirs. To think without interruption. To build without permission. To feel. To seek, find and honor their truth. To follow the thread of who they are becoming rather than who the job, the household, the family needs them to be.

After thirty years of continuous service, to employers, to children, to partners, to parents, to everyone who needed them first, that is not an indulgence.

That is the most overdue and necessary investment a woman has earned to make in herself.

The State of Midlife research confirms what Anita’s life has always known.

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of women in midlife are experiencing career burnout. Sixty percent (60%) are exhausted from trying to hold everything together. Fifty-four percent (54%) desire reinvention.

They are not describing failure. They are describing people who have been in continuous service for decades, without a sabbatical, without protected time, without anyone suggesting that the pause might be exactly what the next chapter requires.

I want to give them that word.

Not as an excuse. As a framework. As a way of understanding what may feel like falling behind, if you look at it honestly with grace for yourself, is often the most necessary and generative work of a life. The research. The writing. The figuring out. The building in the dark before anyone can see what you are making. Loving and caring for ourselves, making the time and space to seek and design what our greatest joy, versions of ourselves and our lives look like is never wasted.

The act of this is not lost time.

This is the work.

Anita Wasilewska is eighty two years old and still publishing. Not because she has to. Because it is who she is and where the realization of her greatest self and greatest joy lies.

She built entire fields of inquiry and watched other people put their names on the map she drew. She raised a daughter alone in a country that was not yet hers, on a mathematician’s salary, and did not stop working or wondering or writing to do it. She is one of the reasons the devices in our pockets work the way they do. Most people have never heard her name.

She does not want what does not serve her.

At eighty-two, she says that simply and without drama, the way you say something that has been true for so long it no longer requires an explanation.

I am forty years behind her on that journey.

But I am on the path. And deeply grateful that her legacy shines bright to help me light it.

The sabbatical is not lost time.

It is part of the ascent.

— Ashley