With a teenage daughter about to launch, I am constantly reflecting on our “lasts” with her at home, the world she’s stepping into, and the messages she’s absorbed from our modeling.

We are all imbibing messages from the world around us that we must filter through and decide what’s ours.

But in my lifetime, the messages for girls have changed significantly.

Some no doubt, for the better. But I believe some of the things we’re failing to say to our daughters will do them a great disservice down the road.

Here are three truths no one wants to say to today’s girls…

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You are not a man. Living your life like one will have consequences.

In an effort to prove how equal we are, we’ve spent the last few decades competing with men—for jobs, for leadership roles, for head of household and more.

But men are built differently than women. They have 15 times the testosterone that women do. So it’s no wonder we see today’s women suffering from staggering rates of burnout. McKinsey's 2025 Women in the Workplace report found that among senior-level women specifically, 6 in 10 report frequent burnout, the highest that figure has been in five years. And this is just in the career space.

If you’re in a relationship, and you both wear the pants—playing the traditional masculine role—you can forget about intimacy. Chemistry in a relationship comes from polarity. And it can be hard to snap out of “man-mode” after a long day of living from it, and then come home to reidentify with that feminine softness, playfulness, and calm.

Man-moding your life as a woman, despite what’s fashionable right now, will leave you brittle and bitchy. We’re just not built for it.

Your ambition is multifaceted. It can be shared beyond just career.

We have always overvalued the masculine way of being. And so, women—the great adapters—do what is necessary to become what is needed. Today’s women are accomplishing groundbreaking things, graduating college at rates that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Women now earn 59 percent of bachelor's degrees. Men earn 41.

And society favors these public facing kinds of ambition—leadership roles, titles, credentials, etc.

But ambition has many faces. The quieter skills of maintaining a positive family environment, a loving relationship with a partner, a comfortable home, cooking healthy meals, maintaining a healthy body, volunteering, nurturing plants, animals, neighbors, schools, and the greater community, are often overlooked as “nice to have,” yet not essential.

I believe we're seeing the consequences of the absence of this feminine devotion in our children. The share of high school students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 26 percent to 44 percent in just over a decade. One in five American children now has obesity, nearly triple the rate from the 1970s.

Nobody is in the home or in the kitchen anymore, and our kids are feeling it…

Prioritize family.

For today’s women, we have made career the God, and family takes sloppy seconds. We build our entire lives around professional aspirations and advanced degrees. By the time we pick our head up from that hustle, we’re marching towards 40, hardly having thought about family.

Many women who wanted kids can no longer have them. By 35, live birth rates from embryo transfer drop from 39 percent to 31 percent. By 43, they're down to 4 percent.

While men are biologically impelled to produce results, women are impelled to connect. It's hormonally driven. This is the foundation of Alison Armstrong's work on gender difference, that men and women are wired for fundamentally different purposes.

It’s our connections—our relationships with others—our kids, our parents, our friends, that bring the most meaning in our lives. NOT our accomplishments, as we’ve been led to believe.

For a young woman, planning for family as much as career would pay off over the course of a life.

Here’s to telling our daughters the truth about what matters.

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Hello my dearest,

I hope you’ve had a fabulous summer. We are back-to-schooling over here, and it is in live time, so we are adjusting like right quick. New schedules, new schools, new pimples, new friends, and new, overpowering colognes and hair clays.

It’s all happening.

And I am coming out swinging today because I feel I have earned a particular parenting badge-of-honor I’d like to brag about today.

My daughter said FUCKING. And she said it in my direction.

It wasn’t a full FUCK YOU, Mom. (I’m guessing that will come from subsequent siblings). She softened it by commenting on my “fucking rules,” instead of ME exactly, mind you.

But it was a FUCK, nonetheless. Clear as day.

And it was just in time…

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I am reminded of this time when I was in high school (same high school, coincidently)… a junior or a senior maybe, and it was 3am.

My dear friend, who will remain nameless for the sake of this post, was lying in my bed, puking on the floor and into a trashcan (when her aim served her), and yelling at my parents, who stood in my doorway watching the whole drunken debacle unfold.

“You are HORRIBLE parents! You are so unkind to Brie! She should come and live with my family who is SO much more reasonable!…”

On and on she wailed, between pukes in the trash bucket I held.

I don’t remember everything about that night. (Yes, we were wild ones). But what I do remember is my parents…

Dad, arm leaning against the doorjamb. Mom, scooting back and forth between my room and the bathroom. Both of them, looking at us, shaking their heads, and laughing.

Laughing. Can you imagine? What a brilliant response.

So when that flying F bomb was delivered plop into my lap this morning before 8am whilst sitting on her bed (no puking—bless, bless…), my gut reaction was to laugh. I couldn’t help myself.

Because hallelujah! We have arrived. We have officially done our job as parents.

In truth, I was beginning to get a little worried. The girl is almost TOO good. Always listening, always communicating, always kind, and following through, homework done before the deadline, blah, blah, blah.

“You gotta be a sinner before you can be a saint,” my dad’s said to us both over the years.

She’s a senior now. Sinner, step forth.

Because how could I possibly send her out into the world to face all the catty bitches and sleazy dirtbags every girl must face on the path if she’s always ONLY sugary sweet?

I’d like to thank you, dear bitchy friend for being so condescending, exclusive, and shallow, and for stealing my boyfriend. Namaste. And you, dear Sir for commenting on my breasts, grabbing my ass in public, and not giving me the job because of your discomfort with my attractiveness. Thank you. I’ve learned a great deal.

Fuck no! A girl’s gotta have a little fight in ‘er.

If she doesn’t at first push back on her parent’s unreasonable fucking rules, it’ll be a long road of hard learnings out in that big, bad, dirty world.

So with pride I say: I think she’ll be ready for college now.

Have a blessed fucking day,

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Hello dearest reader,

Thank you for being here.

We’re had a few adventures lately, and it’s reminded me of the preciousness and the wisdom in space.

I am taking a little summer quiet from posting, as I have in years past.

I want to leave more room for living, reading, family, and whatever may be forming beneath the surface, without forcing myself to publish simply because another week has passed.

I’ll return this fall when I have something that feels alive and worth sharing.

I hope your summer holds some spaciousness too.

And I thank you for your continued readership…

With so much love,
Brie

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Hello dear friend.

I have been in a Cocoon Season of life. I don’t think we talk about these periods enough.

For the past year and a half, I have found myself wanting to pull back on so many things in life. I have felt myself wanting to be quieter. Less available. Less out there. More to myself and to the people that matter to me most.

This comes on the heels of years of needing to be out there to communicate messages, and promote my work. It’s a bit of a conflict to want to pull back when I simultaneously yearn to attract women to do the deep work of retreat, and to share messages via my writing.

So it’s been a wee bit sticky and conflicting to navigate. Perhaps you can relate. The pull to create something new for yourself. And the tender breaking off from what came before. And the drifting that happens in the middle of that.

The thing about a Cocoon Season is that it is characterized by being in between. You float between both cliffs, in the middle of the ravine. It is unfinished and undecided. A threshold. You don’t quite know what is next, yet you’re not entirely content living the same as before.

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And this transition is live. Always changing. Not entirely easy to describe or welcome people into.

You mostly want to do it alone.

Quietly.

Caterpillering your way through it until your next metamorphosis you can proudly stand behind.

For me, this cocooning brings a lot of reflection on the quality of the energy from which I’ve been living. For so many years I’ve been driving, striving, working, creating, pushing and owning this life of mine, charging forth head on, and taking full responsibility for it all.

There is something recently that beckons me to let life do a bit more of the leading. Surrender to what is happening before me instead of forcing my will upon it.

While I absolutely believe the choices we make, our psychology and our actions, influence our lives, a bigger part of me feels that we have less control than we’d like to think. And our work is merely in our responses to life. And in keeping ourselves open.

How do I stay open even in the midst of this?

How do I stay open even now?

I think it is the hubris of youth and health that leads people to believe they have total control over their lives. When things go your way, it’s easy to think it was “all you.”

Yet, time shows us all that good people get sick or leave us too early. That seemingly undeserving people face unthinkable challenges. And that none of us is immune to this unfolding.

And so I find myself here.

Inside the cocoon.

Not gone. Nor lost exactly.

Just being rearranged in ways I don’t yet have language for.

Maybe this is the part we don’t talk about enough. Sometimes becoming does not look like expansion. It does not look like launch dates, full calendars, better branding, or some shiny declaration of arrival.

Sometimes becoming looks like disappearing for a while.

Letting old ambitions grow quiet. Answering fewer texts. Sitting in the strange discomfort of not knowing what comes next. Watching the former version of yourself dissolve before the new one shows inklings of who she’ll be.

I believe Cocoon Seasons are sacred places of undoing, uncomfortable though they may be.

They are places where life softens our grip. Where we stop forcing every door open. Where we begin listening for what is still alive beneath the noise instead of dictating it.

I don’t know exactly what is coming next.

But I know I want to stay open.

Open to beauty. Open to grief. Open to love. Open to the women I am still meant to gather with. Open to the words that still want to come through me. Open to a life that may be wiser than the one I keep trying to micromanage into submission.

So, I’m still here, inside the tender belly of the unknown.

Maybe you are too.

And if you are somewhere between what was and what will be, I hope you will be gentle with yourself. I am sure trying to be.

Not every season is meant to be witnessed.

I believe some are meant to remake us.

Quietly.

From the inside out.

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In every family line, perhaps to some degree in every woman, there are parts left unexpressed. Parts that from girlhood sought wings and distances. But in adulthood, instead, learned patience and quietude.

I imagine this is true of manhood, too. There were parts that were told to settle down. Sit still. Now is not the time for this.

But I am so curious about the ways in which women have so skillfully learned to tighten and temper our embers. And what happens to us because of this.

Menopausal women have been thought of as mad. Lunatics. Some, even unfit for society. From this, the crazy lady archetype was born.

But standing on the precipice of menopause myself, I can’t help but see it as a threshold. That gaping black hole between girl and elder, not able (or willing) to settle into either.

And the rage at this point not at all crazy, but earned. Righteous. From years of turning away from ourselves; we can no longer pretend.

With so little of those nurturing hormones pumping through our bodies anymore, we can’t help but see things as they really are. Not as our bodies, drunk with baby-making impulses, first led us to believe, softening every situation for everyone.

We are no longer life’s softeners.

Praise be.

We give less fucks. Put up with less shit. We say that thing out loud we would have never said a decade earlier.

We see our temporality more than ever.

And those un-lived dreams? Menopause asks, how long will you betray yourself by keeping them hush hush?

It is in this threshold where we decide who we’ll become. No longer taken by the wants of the world for the notion of woman, expressed through our bodies, hearts, and words.

Will I be a woman who becomes, bringing out the guts of me, blazing forth with truth? Or will my internal furnace burn with holes plugged, smoking myself sick from the inside out? Playing out the pattern of the good woman for others, for the rest of my days.

We cannot blame the woman who never becomes.

While becoming is our responsibility, the lack of having done so is not always our fault.

Life hands us a pretty paper-mache booklet with a bow entitled: How to Be Woman.

How long do we listen?

So much of our becoming has been about who we are to others.

We’ve poured confidence and care into children, partners, workplaces, and friends, rarely checking in on that now flaccid what do I want? muscle.

It’s unfamiliar flex, so out of practice.

But there was a girl once who knew.

How exactly do we turn the volume up on her?

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My daughter came home from a leadership camp last summer inspired, but quiet. She was teary eyed when I picked her up from the airport. I let her be until she was ready to talk.

What if I never live up to my potential, Mom?

I saw the pain in her face at the weight of it. It felt innocent and precious. But also ancient, and true.

What if I never live the truth of me?

She was 15. She already knew the question. So do we all.

I suppose the asking is the beginning.

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Dear friend,

Yesterday, I completed another trip around the sun.

I love birthdays because they force me to slow down, reflect, and touch in with the dreams I still hold. A birthday offers me an opportunity to be honest about what might need to shift, and what I want to keep.

This week, I’d love to share with you what I know now.

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I have become like one of those knuckleheads who used to send email chain letters to all their friends and family, KEEP READING! DO NOT IGNORE! TO ONLY MY FAVORITE PEOPLE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD!!!!!

Member those?

Only I’m doing it to my kids with Instagram videos.

Like this one I saw last night of a guy who went in to get a mullet cut and came out with more of a renaissance do:

The video was of a woman laughing her ass off and sharing some of the comments in response to his new cut.

My favs:

• How many shillings did you pay for that cut?

• Maybe they didn’t hear ye hear ye correctly?

• And you just river-danced on out of there without saying a word?

• What does your barber do for a living?

• Tomfoolery up front knavery in the back

It had me rolling on the floor.

My two older kids have not yet opened it.

True. I haven’t asked them to FORWARD ON TO TEN OF YOUR OTHER FAVORITE PEOPLE OR YOU WILL HAVE SEVEN YEARS OF BAD LUCK!!!!

But I can’t help it when I find myself cracking up about a video just sending it right along to their DMs thinking they’ll enjoy it.

My 16-year-old daughter used to humor me and give me a heart back. Now, she doesn’t even open them. It’s gotten that bad. And trust me, it’s not a lack of her checking The Gram.

My 14-year-old son will sometimes watch them, usually not. And recognizing that Instagram Videos is one of my unconscious love languages, he has learned to use it to his advantage. He sometimes send me these videos of cute things singing, “I love you mom!” It was only recently that I realized that was his way of buttering me up for his next ask.

My 11-year-old has no phone. Therefore his only way of getting in on videos is via my device. So he’ll watch whatever the hell I think is funny just so he can drain his braincells into said coveted piece of technology. He usually laughs. He did ask to watch this renaissance mullet video with me again.

One point Mom.

All this points to the fact that I believe my humor caps out at about 11 years of age. So that’s comforting.

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Every woman I know is in between something.

In between working and retiring. In between raising kids and letting them go. In between the body and mind she recognizes and a new one she some days doesn’t. In between sadness and joy. In between marriages, birthdays, seasons, even identities.

My in-between is more a remembering. Or maybe, a recreating.

For the past near two decades I’ve measured my life by my summers.

This summer is already different. A mere two days in…

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I plan our family dinners on the weekend and food shop for the week. Cooking is a way I offer love. But lately, I’ll make a big meal, wait for my honey to get home, and realize, yet again, it’ll be just the two of us.

Smashed burgers with all the toppings, fries and a salad, left untended on plates around the table.

One kiddo is here, another is there, another will be late. Like 10pm late. Can you please put it in the fridge?

Come dusk, Luke and I look around the kitchen, and back at each other as if in shock. Wanna go on another hike?

It’s a lovely situation to be in, more time to myself. One I yearned for when I had babies and toddlers sitting on my lap even in the loo.

But in the quiet, in this new space, I have not yet figured out what to place there. Or who I am this time.

A liminal woman.

This is who I am.

It is not quite sadness, and not quite joy. A tender ache, but a budding glimmer of what may be possible now.

I just don’t know it yet.

I spoke with a dear friend on the phone yesterday about our current stage of mothering. “It’s like we get to be the main character in our lives again!” I loved how she said it. I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’d gotten so comfy playing supporting role.

I have been the master of ceremonies for so many years. I am good at schedules, at fitting it all in, balancing the many things, and still making a delish meal at the end of the day.

But I feel myself an edge dweller again, staring off the face of the cliffs like I did in Ireland a few years back, hair whipping in the wind.

No answers. No clear plans. Just breathing the salty openness.

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Sometimes I get bent out of shape about living in the same town I grew up in. How can I possibly still be here, I think to myself? I would have thought I’d be living in a different country at this stage.

And then, there are times when the magic of my history here gives me a cosmic wink.

Like this year, my youngest son's teacher is the sister of a dear high school friend. My middle son has the teacher I personally helped hire — the one who stepped into my classroom when I left teaching. And my daughter's high school counselor is the daughter of my childhood Girl Scout leader, a woman who was a close friend of my mother's.

They’re like my secret insiders, guiding the fate of my children.

There are invisible threads everywhere. And this week, as both of my boys graduate, I can feel them more than ever.

One of my boys leaves fifth grade. Another leaves eighth. Elementary school ends for one. Middle school ends for the other.

Two boys, two different thresholds. Two versions of childhood quietly packing up their backpacks and walking out the door.

I have packed the lunches, and signed the forms, and gone on the field trips, and bought the shoes, and reminded them, for the millionth time to put on deodorant.

But we did not get them here alone.

Our children are carried by so many hands. Teachers who learn their faces and come to love their quirks. Counselors who notice quiet friend struggles and offer solace. Coaches who teach them how to lose with dignity. Friends’ parents who feed them without making it weird.

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My youngest started kindergarten during COVID. I remember him sitting in his room with a laptop, trying to listen to his wonderful teacher perform near backflips to keep her squirmy five and six year olds engaged.

My son, after two minutes: “I’m done.”

He’d shut his computer. Enough “learning” for one day.

Now I watch him do 100 sit-ups every single night without fail, astonished at how long his limbs are and how committed he is to those six pack abs. What a gift that the child who started school through a screen was helped across this threshold by someone connected to my own girlhood.

And I remember my eldest son, who used to dress up every poetry day with a beret, a mustache, a scarf, and glasses to stick the landing on the Beatnik vibe.

I now watch him painstakingly perfecting his hair in the mirror before school in the way the boys today do. Equal parts boy and young man, morphing into something almost unrecognizable before my eyes. And the teacher who stepped into my old classroom became one of his favorite teachers, helping him step out of middle school and into his next chapter.

Beginnings and endings have a way of showing us what we missed while we were busy living the ordinary days.

This week I see it more than ever.

I see my boys growing and childhood shifting again. I feel the ache of what is ending, and the promise of what is beginning.

And I see, maybe more clearly than I have in a long time, that even here, in the place I once thought I was supposed to outgrow, something holy has been happening all along.

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My memories as a small child are incredibly clear. Summers walking to the neighborhood pool - sun tanned and poolside picnics. Big wheels around the high school track with my brother while my mom jogged. Nighttime walks to get ice cream, then back to the playground until bed. Playing with our bunny in the yard. Naps next to my brother, cartoons in the afternoon heat, knocking on neighbors’ doors…

In all of my memories, my mom was present. Or at least nearby.

I’ve come to know in my bones that her unwavering presence was the greatest gift she ever gave me.

My first jobs were all in daycare.

I worked for the YMCA summer camps for years. And then, in after school care.

I remember a girl named Shelly who was not cut out for the burly halls of afterschool care. She was quiet and small for her age, underdeveloped and scared. She was incessantly picked on, and, no matter how the counselors in our teens and twenties tried to protect her, she was always the recipient of school yard abuse.

Her parents were kind people, ambitious professors with full lives and no family in town. So Shelly was often the last to be picked up from daycare at 6pm after being at school all day. She was only six years old.

Then there was William. It was clear that he was getting hurt at home. He also was small for his age. But he had a big personality. He spit in counselors faces, bit our hands, and kicked our shins; he was often in some kind of scuffle with other kids at after school care.

One time, my advisor asked me to restrain him physically in the halls until his father could pick him up; he was hurting too many other children.

He also was a first grader, but sized like a three year old. I could barely hold him. He bit me until I bled and I did my best to coax him into calm, singing to him until his father came.

His dad, who had to leave work to get him, yelled at him down the hall as he approached. William, who just seconds ago hollered and bit me, cowered in my arms, asking to please not go with his father.

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Back when I was working in Boulder’s daycares, institutionalized care was utilized mostly by underprivileged families — those who didn’t have the support of family, single mothers, and new to the country folks who were trying to get their footing.

But over the course of my career in care, the population of kids who spend long hours in summer camp daycare, and after school care has dramatically shifted.

No longer is it just the underprivileged. It’s a ubiquitous step for nearly all elementary and middle school kids, who no longer have the option to spend summers and after school hours chilling, eating chips, and binging cartoons at home.

Who raises children is no longer a question of privilege. Rather, it’s one of priorities.

Feminist voices have been important for women and the freedoms we have today. But the second wave of feminism, the post-suffrage voices like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem left some confusing messages for mothers that still leave a sour taste in many of our mouths.

Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique that “women who choose to “just” be housewives are ‘in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps’” — and called the suburban home a “comfortable concentration camp.”

Gloria Steinem declared before Congress in 1970 that “most American children seem to be suffering from too much mother.”

These are the women we credit with our liberation.

And in many ways, rightfully so. The second wave of feminism dismantled real walls. Women earned the right to their own bank accounts, their own credit, their own ambitions.

These were not small things.

But in the urgency to get women out of the home, a question got left behind.

Nobody asked what happens to the children.

To ask it was to risk being called retrograde or sentimental. A “traitor” to the cause. So the question went underground. And generation after generation of children grew up in the silence where that answer should have been.

I met some of those children: Shelly, William. And hundreds more over the years. What I was witnessing was the absence of maternal presence. And the cost of it, written plainly on small bodies.

What I didn’t yet know was that I’d still be watching those same children pay that cost fifteen years later.

Here is what we now know.

The security established in a child’s earliest years — through consistent, attuned, available presence — predicts how they will regulate emotions, navigate stress, and form relationships for the rest of their lives. Insecure attachment is now directly linked to the depression, anxiety, and self-harm defining a generation of teenagers.

The crisis did not arrive from nowhere. It has roots. Long ones.

Underneath all of it is a question we are not asking: what did these children’s earliest years feel like? Was someone there?

In our rush to free women from a diminished life, we accidentally diminished the role of maternal presence in a child’s life. And we never named its shadow.

The shadow is the generation of children who needed someone and found a system instead. The shadow is the teenagers we are desperate to reach now, whose earliest years we are not willing to examine. The shadow is every woman who chose presence and was quietly made to feel she had chosen less.

She had not chosen less.

Research consistently shows that securely attached children are more emotionally regulated, more resilient, more socially competent — and more likely to become peer leaders, form lasting friendships, and build trusting relationships well into adulthood. Here is the paradox: presence produces independence. The child who was held well is the child who eventually needs to be held less.

This is the maternal presence advantage.

This is not a small inheritance. That is everything.

Mother’s Day is almost here.

Every year, we reach for the flowers and the cards printed with words like unconditional and always there. We mean them. And they are not enough.

When we honor a mother who simply showed up, day after unremarkable day, we are honoring something our culture has never had the courage to name.

My mother left me a legacy I didn’t have words for until now. She was simply, consistently, unremarkably there. Because she was, I know how to be there for my own children. That is the legacy I carry. That is the one I intend to leave.

To every woman who built her days around her children’s formation: what you give is not nothing. The science is finally catching up to what you already know.

The presence you give is not the absence of ambition.

It is the fullest expression of it.

Happy Mother’s Day, dear friend.

With love,

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There is a lunchbox, that sits in my son’s elementary school entryway.

It has been there for many moons, all snuggled up betwixt the neatly folded sweatshirts, jackets, and lone, left-behind mittens of elementary school kittens.

The lost garb gazes at you as you enter the school, proudly displaying their fancy sports team emblems, and mountain towns visited across their chests, waiting to be claimed.

“Are you my mommy?” They ask of each passerby.

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I walk by that bastard lunchbox, time and time again, unwilling to claim it as one of ours. Knowing the truth of its origins. Knowing the depth of my deception.

For inside, I cannot imagine what festers there.

Mold, upon mold, upon mold.

Amoebas.

Planets, probably.

It’s been sitting atop the lost and found pile for over a month, sealed tightly. Sitting there with its shiny stainless steel veneer, all prissy and upper-fucking-class, thinking all this time it was better than the baggie at holding a damn PB & J.

Boy, was it wrong.

So when I enter my son’s school, I see it: He Who Shall Not Be Named, and strut on by. Pretending the glimmer off his annoying stainless steel clasps did not just accost me in the eyes. Pretending I have nothing to do with that dirty little secret.

It reminds me of the Booger Wall.

10 years old — there was a wall between my younger brother’s room and mine. I fancied it the Booger Wall. I placed my squishy, varying colored specimens on said wall with regularity. The wall, conveniently, was closer to his room than mine.

One day, to my great surprise (and also evil, older-sister delight), I came home to find my younger brother, spackling the boogers off the wall under my mom’s orders, crying “I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me!”

I smiled, and walked on with confidence then.

Apparently, I have always been this way.

I have thought about just picking it up, and putting it in the trash. For a split second I thought about bringing it home and just dealing with it. Putting on a mask, grabbing some rubber gloves, and making right of the situation.

But then I forgot.

One time I suggested to my son that he should grab it, as we walked in the school together, both eyeing that little prick. We looked at each other and exchanged a sly glance.

I went to this school as a kid, ate lunches out of my own Care Bear lunchboxes here, exchanged dolls with friends on playgrounds, had favorite teachers, first crushes, field days, and talent shows. Quinton is my last kiddo here. This May he graduates, and we walk out of these halls for the final time, closing something that has held parts of my history and family for years.

But this lunchbox will likely stay.

Forty-something years of history with this building, and this is what we’re leaving behind: one sealed stainless steel lunchbox, contents unknown, yours now, dear Bear Creek.

Consider it our legacy. Give it a few years and that lunchbox will have outlasted entire kindergarten classes.

We look at the lunchbox and then at each other. We keep walking. He is definitely my kid.

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My daughter’s prom was last weekend.

Popping over to her friend’s house to watch all the girls scurry about — music blasting, hairspray spraying, and eyelash curlers, curling irons, flowers, and left-behind dress sparkles flying this way and that, was a full blown sensory experience.

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Parents who hardly know each other stand awkwardly in the living room making small talk, awaiting our moment to snap photos. We all search youthful and unrecognizable faces for kids we remember from our particular child’s elementary years, shocked at how they’d grown, and baffled by how quickly time has gone by.

They are little women now, both in action and in form. In heart though, we know they’re still our little ones.

At least, this is what we tell ourselves…

Caravans of parents and gussied up prom-ers drive on to Chautauqua trail, to capture the perfect moment, under the perfect mountains.

I watch as my daughter bobs in and out of friend groups, laughing easily, and looking like a 25 year old superstar in her sparkly pink dress. It’s amazing the difference between girls and boys at sixteen. Girls looking almost thirty. Boys, still praying for facial hair, and maybe passing for fourteen if they’re lucky.

“Mom can you get this angle. No wait, turn the camera like that, please.”

She trained me before we got there on how to get the right shots. Kids these days — so skilled at the selfie, at the perfect pose, at looking like the influencers they all emulate.

I think back to the disposable cameras of my era. How we had just 24 chances to get the right photo. We’d snap one or three for such a momentous occasion, then cross our fingers that we got a keeper.

I notice how soft and intentional her makeup looks. I think about those awkward, youngish teen years she spent watching YouTube tutorials to learn to do so. All of the girls, painstakingly, breathtakingly beautiful underneath the setting sun and the bold, purple mountains.

She is four years old. It is nap time. I am pregnant with my youngest, and my middle kiddo naps in his room. She is meant to stay in her room during nap time and play.

“Mom!” she calls from the bathroom. “Mom!”

I waddle down the stairs as quickly as my body, full of baby, can muster so she won’t wake her sleeping brother.

“What is it, Babe?”

“Look, Mommy!”

On the countertop sits the giant (now empty) tub of Vaseline. The large one. Costco-style.

“Lotion!”

I flick the light on and see she looks like a wet rat. Her hair slicked back, arms and legs covered in a thick layer of shiny viscous goo. She went to town on that damn Vaseline. It took 3 weeks to get it all out of her hair — no amount of shampoo could get that job done.

She smiles at me as I photograph her in another arrangement of friends, posing differently this time.

Where does the time go?

They drive off to go to dinner, and I corral a car full of parents back to our starting point. We don’t all know each other. But we’ve been through something together, now. An important snapshot in time never to be lived again.

I know that all night, I’ll be sitting on the couch thinking about her far more than she is thinking about me. Wondering who she is dancing with, talking to, kissing in the hallway, how much she’s drinking, who will drive her home, and on and on.

And my daughter, who used to call me to her for every Vaseline snafu, won’t spend a second thinking about me. Just as it should be.

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“I’d like to establish a new relationship with God.”

It felt like an out-of-body experience as it dropped from my mouth. At the start of the year, sitting in a circle of women, blankets draped and markers scattered across the floor, we shared our aspirations.

“Wha? Excuse me?” My inside self said, now, slightly embarrassed. I could have just gone with get a new car, write a new book, or plan that family vay-cay.

Instead, I swung for the fences. Perhaps more aptly, the gates. The pearly (golden?) ones.

My relationship with God has been, how should I say, a wee complicado.

I grew up in the Catholic Church. And as a kid, I loved going to church. Not because of the messages, the priests, or the Bible. I loved the space of church. I loved all the babies and families. The stained glass and high ceilings. Even the gruff nuns who loved you underneath their stern facades. I loved when we’d be instructed to say hello to those around us during mass.

Peace be with you…

And also with you…

I wasn’t particularly seeking something else when I jumped ship to Buddhism. I still frequented church groups even on my college campus when desiring community.

But I struggled with the idea of God, who, in my mind, was some bearded old man in the sky. I wasn’t a fan that the gays were being excluded, all whilst little children were being abused at the hands of trusted religious authorities.

So many things felt off to me.

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At 20, sitting at a lecture in Kathmandu, sipping chiyaa and listening to a Rinpoche speak on Buddhist philosophy felt like divine intervention, to say the least.

I was transfixed.

I fell hard for karma, non-attachment, non-duality, and the absence of a singular creator God. It felt like every doubt I had ever held about my childhood faith had finally been answered. Or at least elegantly rerouted.

Perhaps this was it.

With the same fervor I bring to everything, I went in hard. Super duper. By the end of my semester abroad, I had taken refuge in a new faith. I’d been given the name Tsering Yangzom, meaning “fearless.”

Behold, I was a Buddhist now. And a super Buddhist, at that.

And for a long while, it fit.

To this day, I am still deeply moved by Buddhist philosophy and the practice of meditation. It shaped me. Saved me, even. But over time, the religion part of it began to lose some of its luster. Not because the teachings stopped mattering, but because I started to see that the contradictions I had once found in Catholicism were there too.

Just in a different costume.

Different incense. Same humans.

So, there I sat. A recovering yogini. A Catholic school dropout. A disillusioned dharma darling.

A seeker, nonetheless.

But this time, I wanted something different. Not your parents’ kind of God. Nor the dreadlocked hippie chic down the street’s loosey goosey talk about the universe and vibes and things (though I do love that).

A way of understanding God that could hold the beauty of the Bodhisattva path, the intelligence of meditation, the mystery of dreamwork, the shimmer of the cosmos, and still leave room for the word God without me wanting to crawl out of my skin.

Could it be possible?

This weekend, I returned home from a week-long retreat. If you’ve ever retreated, you know it’s hard to put into words the impact these experiences have on your life.

It was fantastic. Also, it was hard. I met my limitations. I climbed the walls of my mind. I hated things that were happening, and then pretended it was those things instead of my own mind.

And then, I settled the heck down.

I sat with myself for longer than I wanted to. I came out the other end. I remembered how humbling and powerful meditation is. And how far I’d strayed from having it be an important part of my life. I’d been treating it more like a brief knuckle bump, and less like the long-held soul hug that gives you chills.

I’ve been falsely believing this material existence is all there is.

But then, something opened.

This retreat helped me remember…

Lying on the floor in the middle of meditation, it hit me. God, the kind that I’ve been seeking, has been with me all along. All I needed to do was reflect. The breadcrumbs had always been there, proof in my life that I am, and have always been, guided.

We all are.

In the family I was born into. In my siblings. In the landscape that raised me. In this body of mine. In lifelong friends and new ones. In my husband. In my children. In my callings. In my failures. In the people who have hurt me and the people who have healed me. In our animals. In these mountains. In every beautiful and brutal turn my life has taken.

All of it. Every last bit.

That is God. He/she/it (they? - so progressive) is just on the other side of the veil. In you and in me. There in every moment. Never apart. No church, or monastery, or slyly coercive youth group leaders, or Easter Sunday outfits necessary.

Praise be.

As I write this, I realize I am trying to explain a realization that hit me like a ton of bricks, but that reads like a gentle bit of influencer faff. Like trying to explain the entirety of your mushroom journey to your friends over coffee the next day.

I SAW God. Like for reals. (Cue dreadlocked neighbor in moon pants.)

At any rate, it felt big.

And I come home feeling more trust in my life, and ease in my heart knowing that I don’t have to grind quite so hard. It is already written. God is in every last bit of everything.

And so I will allow myself to cuddle my cat who never leaves my lap, instead of pushing her aside so I can “get back to work,” and let the conversations with my parents on the phone linger for longer than I believe I have time for. I massage my kids’ backs for another minute longer at night because they still want me to. Because in every single exchange, it’s just another example of God colluding with God, every mundane moment just as holy as the next.

To the Divine in all of us,

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Dearest Reader,

Last night I sat quietly with my daughter while she did homework after getting home at 9 p.m. from her long day of a million things. Then this morning, I heard her leave the house at 5 a.m. for the gym.

I had that feeling again. That ache that comes when I realize how much of her life is happening right in front of me, and how easy it is to miss the weight of it because she carries it so well.

She leaves for college in just one year.

It is enough time, I know. But also, it is not. Not really.

She leaves her mark these days less by her actual presence, and more by her things, her smells, and her sounds. Her latest rose body spray wafting through the basement. Her million pairs of shoes by the door. Her jewelry, textbooks, and art scribbles, in heaps on the countertop, strewn about. The sound of the front door opening in the dark before dawn. Proof that she is still here. Her life moving beside ours with so much discipline, so much steadiness, so little fanfare.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about daughters. Oldest daughters, especially. The girls who somehow become strong in ways a family quietly comes to rely on. The girls who sense things. Who read the room. Who seem to understand early that it helps to be capable, to be composed, to keep going. No one may ask this of them outright, but they pick it up anyway. They become sturdy. Dependable. Internally organized. A little bit woman before they should have to be.

And it’s beautiful. But sometimes it breaks my heart too.

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Because I think we can love these daughters fiercely and still take them for granted. Not in some cruel way. Just in the way families do. We lean where there is strength. We relax around a child who keeps it all together. We trust one who handles herself and does not ask for much from us. We let her competence reassure us.

Meanwhile, I know she is carrying more than we may realize.

That is what I feel with my daughter. Maybe you do, too. Or maybe you are that daughter.

It’s not just pride and admiration I feel toward her, though there is so much of that. It is also an awareness of how much of the emotional fabric of a family can be held by a girl like this. How much steadiness can live inside her. How much self containment. How much quiet labor can hide beneath words like mature, responsible, driven.

Sometimes I think oldest daughters become part of the structure of a home. Not in a flashy way. More like beams in the walls. You do not always notice them because they are doing their job so well. And they make our job as a parent easy. They always have.

And with college only a year away, I feel the tenderness of that more than ever. I can feel how much I will miss not just her, but who she is for our family. The confidant for her middle brother, the cheerleader for her youngest. How, more like a friend than a daughter, she asks about my day after telling me about hers. Just the force of her. The goodness of her. The quiet emotional weight of her sweet, steady presence in our orbit.

It makes me want to notice more carefully. And to not confuse strength with not needing anything. To not let my trust in her become a way of looking past her.

That may be the ache of motherhood in a nutshell. Realizing the beauty of what has been right there all along. And then having to let her go.

Sometimes the daughters we take for granted are the ones whose strength has become so woven into family life that we forget to name it. Forget to marvel at it. And at the same time, we forget to wonder what it costs them.

I think about her leaving at five in the morning, in the dark, without waking anyone. How she has always done it that way. How I have always trusted her to.

And mostly, I just want her to know I noticed.

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Dear Friend,

I hope your spring is off to a good start.

We just returned from Costa Rica for break. I’m usually down there hosting retreats, so to get to go for mere enjoyment felt like a gift. It felt important.

I first walked that beach eleven years ago, alone, sipping coconuts by day and napping through the heat of the afternoon. My three young kids were with my parents. Five days felt like an eternity to leave them, but I needed to remember who I was.

I came home a new woman. That trip changed the core of me.

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That same beach has been the backdrop for some of the most important decisions of my life.

Four years ago, my husband and I walked it each morning while our kids slept in the rental, debating whether to leave Boulder for Montana. How would the kids react? What about his job? Could we really go through with it? A year later we returned, then living in Montana, walking the same stretch of sand at sunrise, spinning in circles about whether to cut bait from Boulder entirely.

It had been three years since we’d been back this time. We did the same early morning walks, the same beach, holding space for our deepest dreams, hopes, shifts, and conversations.

I find it hard to get real perspective on my life when I’m right in the middle of it.

Something about being in a new environment opens windows that normally remain only cracked. What needs to stop. What must shift. What dreams I am ignoring that I’ll regret if I don’t pay attention now.

This time, my changes are quieter, more internal. No moving to different states, as this stage of life requires more rootedness for our kids. Instead, more a shifting of focus, of time, of energy. The beckonings are quieter, but feel just as essential.

On the last morning, my daughter joined us at 6am to catch the sunrise. We found a baby turtle alone on the sand, struggling toward the ocean. We watched him for a long while. The waves kept returning him to shore.

He appeared fragile and delicate, and even our attempts to help couldn’t change his fate. It immediately made me think about my parenting, as all things do these days. As we watched him struggle and tried to help him, I understood that the baby turtle had to do it on his own. No amount of my help could rescue him.

It is such a funny thing, this stage of life as a parent, watching my kids’ wins and challenges, wanting to help, but knowing my help is the last thing they want or need.

Their struggles will make them. I know this, despite my impulse to jump in when I shouldn’t.

The turtle also reminded me of the preciousness of my own temporal existence—how fragile, how fortunate. And to offer patience to myself, protection, and wisdom.

Another woman came to watch the baby turtle’s journey, and we left to catch our flight. I hope he made it to the ocean. I won’t know. But I trust he is on whatever path is meant for him.

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Last night, my 14 year old laid on the couch with me for a brief moment in time. Holding him felt like cuddling a ski equipment bag: all kinds of pokey and uncomfortable angles jabbing into my sides, arms, and chest.

I was the first to get up.

I woke up thinking about that. And regretting it.

He asked me a question, and I sat up to launch into some overly longwinded explanation that he hardly cared to hear. I don’t think it was about the answer. It was his way of staying close for a moment.

I wish I would have just held onto him. Maybe said a few less words.

It was a lucky moment in the life of a mom of teens, him, falling into my arms.

I sometimes forget that he is not who he was five or ten years ago, despite the fact that I still see his juicy baby cheeks when I look at him. The little boy version of him “saving all the bugs” and donning Superman costumes still lives in my heart and mind, like a spirit floating in the backdrop. Silent, but felt.

I have to savor any offering he’ll give to me. Any hug. Any small detail about his sports, his friends, his school, his crushes—anything at all.

These offerings get more fleeting as he ages, I can feel it in my achy mom heart.

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On my recent retreat, I had two incredible women I had not met before. They shared about their relationships with their adult sons, both of them, boy moms to two grown men. Listening to them felt like time travel, like a ghost of Christmas future.

Each of them had one relationship with a son to whom they were very close. And another, with whom they felt very distant.

Hearing them reflect on their stories and their pains about the distance between their sons made me feel introspective and quiet.

I am in the stage of raising kids where it is easy to be haughty and certain.

Where I am, a parent takes their proximity to their children for granted, falsely believing we will always have this access, this authority, this significance in their lives.

But I know it won’t always be like this.

And these women were gentle reminders that I can’t possibly know what the future holds for my relationship with each of my kids.

They will fall in love (I hope), they may one day marry, have kids, and careers, and friends of their own. They may remember some good things about their childhood, about me, and about their dad. But they also might remember things they hated about us. Ways in which we royally screwed up. Ways in which we missed them. Ways in which we made them feel small without meaning to.

They might live their lives in reflection of our example. Or despite us. Probably both.

These are things I just can’t know yet. Nor control.

What I do have is right now. Whatever offering comes my way today. The access for this moment in time.

I think next time the ski bag lands on my lap, I’ll hold on for a little longer.

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Hello Beautiful Soul.

How are you?

I am fresh back from the DREAM Retreat.

One of the great blessings of hosting DREAM was that holding space for other people’s dreams turned up the volume on my own.

In preparation, I did loads of research on the history and science of dreaming. How to read them, their significance, key historical and psychological players in the dream conversation, and more.

There are varying beliefs about the role of dreams in our lives.

Some theorists believe dreams are simply the side effects of neural activity in the brain. Others, notably Freud and Jung, support the idea that dreaming allows us to sort through unresolved, repressed desires.

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Since recording my own dreams regularly from retreat, I can’t help but lean towards the “dreams have significance” camp.

Not because I need them to be mystical. But because dreams have become one of the few places in my life where I can’t perform or play a role. Where I can’t be efficient, focused, or on task. Where I can’t care about being likable or wise. And mostly, where I can’t make it all make sense.

Their messages are not always comfortable. Not always clear. But somehow, I find hidden gems there when I shine light on my dreams by acknowledging and thinking through them.

I believe dreams tell the truth sideways.

And sideways truths are strangely helpful at bringing us back to what is quiet and true.

This morning, I woke up and wrote down a dream from last night.

I was on a houseboat with my husband, kids, and all our animals. The house was sinking into the ocean, bit by bit. Water leaked through the cracks in the windows and walls as we sunk. And there was a shared understanding that we could not be rescued. No one was coming to help.

I woke up multiple times during this dream and found myself wanting to get back into it. Despite the grief I felt from what was happening, I wanted to be there, experiencing it.

So I kept diving back in after each waking, going further and further into what came next…

It’s my experience that dreams rarely speak in literal instructions. They speak in emotional truths. They show us what we haven’t been able to name in daylight.

Here are three roles dreams have been playing in my life lately…

Dreams show me what I’m avoiding in daylight.

I often find that what I ignore in daily living surfaces in images and emotions in the undirected comfort of the night. Not in a scolding way. In a compassionate way. Like, “Hey you, we can’t keep stepping around this forever...” Or if I’ve made a decision I feel uncertain about, the truth of it will surface once my conscious mind is offline.

Dreams reveal the emotional truth under the storyline.

Typically, dream plots make no sense. But the feeling can laser-precise. Grief. Longing. Relief. Panic. Tenderness. The emotion is the message because our subconscious minds speak to us not in direct language, but in IMAGES and EMOTIONS.

Dreams return me to my intuition.

They train me to trust subtlety again. They remind me that there are parts of me that know things before my mind can make a spreadsheet or blog post about them. My most creative connections and ideas come at night, or first thing in the morning. I believe our source of creativity is intimately linked with the subconscious mind, the shadow side, and the dark.

I don’t know that every dream is profound. But I do think they’re honest. And sometimes honesty is the most spiritual thing available to us.

Here’s to turning up the volume on your dreams. And to the gems you might find there.

🌙If you feel like sharing in the comments: what’s a dream you still remember years later, and why do you think it stayed?👇🏼

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Dearest Reader,

I hope this email finds you well. I’ve missed you. I’ve thought about you.

But I’ve needed to Go Dark.

By Going Dark, I mean to slip away into the quiet, create space in my own little world, and become invisible.

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I was a late adopter of social media. My two oldest kids were really small when social was blowing up and taking over. I’d seen too many moms breastfeeding their babies while scrolling their feeds and think: this is a real travesty. Not to mention terrible modeling.

No part of me wanted to jump on that wagon. To me, social media was just one massive distraction.

I signed my first literary agent for a novel I wrote back before social media really took hold in publishing. Back then, books could sell on the concept and the writing, without a whole circus of visibility.

And then, the shift came. And big.

Suddenly, everything became about how many followers you had, how visible you were on all your “socials,” how many emails you had, and could you prove that they would all buy your book?

My first agent prodded me to get online. Post. Share. Say something. Make yourself look attractive to publishers.

Damn.

Writing books had always been my dream. What was I to do?

Sometimes dreams require us to grow in ways we may not have otherwise chosen.

Despite my reservations, I wasn’t willing to give up the dream. I started a few accounts. I learned the dance. I played along.

And now the requirements for visibility as a creative have intensified. It’s not one channel, it’s many.

“What about LinkedIn?”

“Have you started confessionals on TikTok?”

“Have you considered starting your own Podcast?”

Fucking hell.

Creatives are not only working to create, we’re expected to talk about it, share about it, tease it, market it, and make it sound hot before the thing even has legs! It hardly matters what you’re saying. Just that you’re saying something. Constantly.

Humility was always a virtue in my house growing up.

And while I understand we are living in different times, I can’t help but feel a little uneasy about what this “always on” expectation does to the creative soul.

I believe being ON all the time deters creatives from our real work.

Part of the role of the artist is to dip beneath the surface, dive for buried treasure in dark places where most people don’t want to venture, and listen in a world where everyone is fucking talking.

That’s the only way to find gems worth coming up for air to share about.

I started hosting retreats because I was exceptionally good at Going Dark. That’s it. And I thought maybe others might like to Go Dark, too. Not because I had some wild delusions of becoming a wellness influencer. Fuck no.

I use Going Dark as a creative tool for 3 main reasons:

Cognitive Freedom

The fewer constraints we have on our time, energy, and availability, the more room we have for real work. When I’m unreachable, my mind can finally stay with an idea long enough to shape it. Deep work doesn’t survive constant input from the outside world.

Psychological Depth

Depth takes time. Patience. Staying with what’s uncomfortable long enough to learn something true. In a world trained to perform and polish, it’s honest depth (not oversharing, not trauma dumping) that actually feeds us. It’s what reminds us we belong to each other.

Enhanced Creativity

When I stop broadcasting, something subtle comes back online. Dreams. Intuition. That quiet inner messaging I can’t access when I’m always “on.” Privacy is power.

I just submitted another proposal for a new book to my agent this week. I haven’t been posting on any social channels, or writing in any other places. That proposal took everything I had.

And I’m telling you because I don’t think I’m the only one who feels the cost of constant visibility. I don’t think I’m the only one who can feel how the culture demands performance when what we actually need is presence.

Here’s to Going Dark y’all. And the treasures we find when we’re down there.

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Dear One,

I had a conversation with a good friend recently about how quickly we say yes to adventures, and camps, and classes, and clothes, and vacations and back-to-back fucking spend-the-nights for our kids. But how, with the same light-speed, we say no to ourselves.

We delight in our partners taking that river trip, or attending that conference, or buying that new gear thingy. And then say “I need to think about it a wee bit more…” when considering something similar for ourselves.

Oy. What gives?

Well woman, you aren’t alone. Here are five reasons why women are so damn accustomed to putting ourselves last.

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1. We were trained to equate care with self-erasure

Many of us learned early that love looks like anticipating needs, smoothing edges, staying agreeable. Being “good” often meant being low-maintenance. Over time, disappearing a little became second nature. We judge other women who are outspoken and have mad demands. Self-care then feels less like nourishment and more like betrayal of an unspoken (albeit fucked up) contract.

2. Our nervous systems are oriented toward others

Women are often the emotional first responders. We track moods, manage energy, read rooms, hold relational glue. This constant outward attention wires the body for vigilance. Stillness can feel unsafe. Rest can feel like something is about to go wrong if we stop monitoring, or like we’re not doing “enough” to be a good woman. Freaking frack.

3. We confuse exhaustion with virtue

Because so much of women’s labor is invisible, it rarely gets named or reciprocated. What does get rewarded is endurance. Pushing through. Being “amazing” while depleted. Look how much I can juggle at one flipping time! Eventually, slowing down feels like failure instead of wisdom (which it is damn well not).

4. Having needs once cost us something

Many women learned that expressing need led to dismissal, shame, or emotional withdrawal. So we adapted by becoming self-sufficient, anticipatory, capable. Self-care now asks us to feel the old discomfort of needing something and risking disappointment. That’s not laziness. That’s some serious emotional memory.

5. We’re offered self-care inside systems that rely on our over-giving

We’re told to rest, but not too much. To care for ourselves, but without disrupting anyone. To heal, but quietly, please. Self-care becomes another performance, another thing to optimize, rather than a real reclamation of time, energy, and choice.

Here’s the quiet truth underneath all of this…

If caring for yourself feels hard, it’s not because you lack discipline or devotion. It’s because real self-care asks you to interrupt patterns, piss people off, ask for what you damn well please, and ultimately make choices that go against what once kept you safe and loved.

Often, the first step isn’t doing more for yourself. (Okay, the first step is never doing more!) It’s letting go of the idea that your worth is tied to how much you carry.

Oof. This is a hard one to let go of.

Alas, I do not want to be a cranky bitch my whole life. So I must grow the edges of myself that might ruffle the feathers of others. I am no expert. But this is my current quest at this stage of womanhood.

What do you say, wanna join me on meeting yourself a little bit more in this next year?

PS - I am curious, which one of the above five reasons women betray themselves had you nodding like Snoop and Dre in G Thang the most?

2, 3 and 5 hit pretty hard for me.

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To find our more about my transformational Retreats, to buy my book: You Should Leave Now, to schedule your Soul Session, or learn more about The Self Retreat Kit, please see my website. xxo

Dear One,

I hope you’ve had a wonderful, restful holiday season.

I find myself slow to jump back in, still hanging onto the softness that came from the long, undirected days and nights of wintering.

Each year, there’s a particular feeling that shows up for me right about now.

The break is over, school and work are back in session, and the volume on our calendars start to turn up, up, up.

Yet something in us hasn’t fully stood up.

It’s not exhaustion. It’s not resistance. It’s the strange disorientation of being asked to move at full speed while our nervous systems are still stretching and unfurling, a cozy cat atop a blanketed lap.

Winter didn’t end because the calendar said so. And neither did whatever softened in you while life slowed down.

So instead of restarting, here are a few ways I’m experimenting with returning gently, without betraying the version of myself that emerged during the quieter weeks…

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1. Let one thing stay slow on purpose

Not everything needs to accelerate at once. We can choose one area of our lives to remain unhurried.

Maybe it’s mornings, or meals, or how quickly you say yes to the new (this is the one I’m dabbling in).

This isn’t indulgence. It’s integration.

Winter teaches us that slowness is not the enemy of momentum. It’s the necessary pace equilibrator that makes periods of movement sustainable.

2. Notice what felt heavier once things went quiet

During the break, certain obligations likely revealed themselves more clearly.

Some things probably felt nourishing, while others felt oddly burdensome once the noise dropped.

That information matters.

Gentle re-entry doesn’t require immediate action. It simply asks that we don’t unsee what winter showed us.

Pay attention to what your body resists now.

It’s usually telling the truth.

3. Resist the urge to emotionally “catch up”

Many of us feel pressure not only to catch up on work, but on energy.

We feel we have to be immediately responsive, available, and up to speed emotionally, mentally and physically.

But we don’t have to match the pace of our inbox.

Our systems are still recalibrating. This isn’t a flaw. It’s intelligence. We can let our energy return before we demand performance from it.

4. Let intuition set the pace, not urgency

Urgency is loud. Intuition is quiet.

During slower weeks, intuition often becomes easier to hear. Returning to routine can drown it out if we’re not careful.

Before agreeing, rushing, or fixing, I’m experimenting with pausing just long enough to ask myself:

Does this actually need to happen now? and Am I the one that needs to do it?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But often, it’s habit masquerading as necessity.

5. Carry one winter truth forward

We don’t need to preserve everything, just one thing.

One boundary.
One insight.
One rhythm that felt more like yourself.

Let it come back with you as life resumes.

Winter doesn’t ask us to stay still forever. It asks us to remember how we want to move.

We get to decide what comes back with us.

Here’s to returning from a quieter, more attuned place.

❄️PS-What’s one small thing you’re letting stay slower as life picks back up?

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To find our more about my transformational Retreats, to buy my book: You Should Leave Now, to schedule your Soul Session, or learn more about The Self Retreat Kit, please see my website. xxo