We reveal our values in small decisions and daily actions – the ones that no one would blame us for ignoring or pushing through.

This is one of those times for me. I’ve decided to listen to my inner voice that’s saying, “Enough for now.”

After this post, I’m going to take a short end-of-summer pause from publishing here. There won’t be any new posts on August 20, 27, or September 3. I’ll return to our regular rhythm on September 11.

For those of you who are paid subscribers, I’ll be pausing subscriptions during that time and extending everyone’s subscription by a month. It feels like the appropriate way to honor the break.

Nothing is wrong, I’m just tired. There is a difference between being the primary parent and being the sole surviving parent. And I’m trying, as honestly as I can, to practice what I preach: listening to my body before it has to shout or shut down.

This is a full season. This week my youngest has turned 13 – I can’t believe we’re here already. Before the summer ends, we’ll celebrate my oldest’s 19th birthday before he moves into his first apartment. It’s time for doctor and dentist appointments, haircuts, last minute shopping, university and scholarship application preparation for my middle son, endless paperwork, garden harvesting, and all the ordinary things that mark back-to-school and the season changing.

These moments matter and I want to be fully present for them.

Mini Mindset Tip: You Don’t Have to Get Away to Get Away

We’ve tried something new this summer. We’re saving for a visit to Georgia next year, so we haven’t taken a summer vacation. Instead, every 10 days or so we’ve claimed a day as a family to be together and have some fun.

One afternoon we went downtown to pick up new glasses for the boys. We turned that practical errand into one of my favorite days of the summer. We wandered into the Distillery District, treated ourselves to amazing gelato at Soma and picked some chocolate to take home, watched a delightful magic show, got thoroughly turned around on PATH, and ended the day watching the filmed production of Hadestown.

Nothing extraordinary, but nevertheless unforgettable.

So here’s a mindset shift for you: Rest doesn’t require a perfect week away. Instead, one intentional day can change the texture of a month.

• A day with the people you love

• A day entirely to yourself

• A day doing something you love, that tends to get put aside in the busyness of life.

I’d love to hear what sort of break you took.

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Over these next few weeks, I’ll certainly be enjoying family time. But I’ll also be working behind the scenes: meeting with clients, tending the less visible parts of my business, preparing for autumn, and allowing a new project to take shape before I make it public. Some projects need privacy before they need an audience. I’ve learned not to rush it.

Thank you for making this a place where I can practice what I mentor and write about, not just write about it.

That’s a gift.

I’ll see you back here on September 10. Until then, I hope you make room for rest, whether that’s a few minutes, an afternoon, or one beautiful, ordinary day with people you love.

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This summer, I’ve been practicing surrendering to serendipity a bit more than normal. Some of my experiences brought to mind our 2024 March Break trip to Montréal to check out McGill University. I left everything either until the last minute or to chance. And you know what? It all worked out beautifully.

If you’ve been trying to force things recently, I hope this story reminds you that receiving is also an essential skill with results that can be better than you imagine.

You know how when you were a student, you waited until the last minute to write your paper?

(Y’all, I was a professor after being a student for a million years. I know you did this. We all did.)

What was the reason and/or purpose of that?

Was it laziness?
Inattentiveness?
Lack of care?
Overwhelm?

While it’s possible that it was a bit of those things, the primary reason people procrastinate writing is to override the censor in their head. It works, but it’s exhausting.

HINT: It’s much, much more effective to show up at the page everyday. The Muse arrives when you have a regular appointment. But that requires trust and discipline and sometimes both are in short supply.

Procrastinating-until-you’re-backed-into-a-corner is not a healthy way to live, nor does it work all the time.

But, sometimes, it does work.

It works because at a certain point you must surrender and trust that what you’re doing is enough. It forces you into that state of surrender, and state of trust.

On Friday (in a post I wrote the previous Monday before leaving Wednesday morning) I told you how we were headed to Montréal, but I hadn’t done anything except decide we were going to go. I made the decision to trust that it was all going to be ok, even though I hadn’t booked anything, even though there were no University tour appointments available. And it all fell into place:

• There was room in our favorite place to board the dog.

• A hotel next to campus slashed last minute room prices.

• The drive was easy.

• The weather was unexpectedly glorious for mid-March in Montréal, with a high of 11C/52F both Thursday & Friday.

We dedicate Thursday to touring McGill on our own. We entered the Chemistry Building and started wandering around. My eldest protested, not seeing the point, “It’s not like we’re going to see a lab, Mom.”

And out popped the Director of Undergraduate Studies, Dr. Sam Sewall, asking if we wanted a tour.

If I wasn’t so practiced at receiving, I might have said, “I wouldn’t want to bother you.”

But I am practiced, so instead I answered, “yes, please.”

And he gave us an in depth tour, proudly showing off the undergraduate laboratories and all their new, cutting edge equipment. He described how the program worked, the research opportunities available, how double majors and major-minors worked with other departments, what their undergraduates went on to do, etc. It was wonderful – and my eldest considered it the high point of the trip.

Later we went to the Physics Building and wandered around. We came across a small museum and the lights were on, so I knocked. An elderly man answered and agreed to let us look at the collection. He was Professor Emeritus Jean Barrette, a distinguished Canadian nuclear physicist, long retired Chair of the Department.

Professor Barrette gave us a tour of the collection, which, among other things, showcases the equipment used by Ernest Rutherford to detect radiation – work for which Rutherford won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Professor Barrette retired 20 years ago, so he didn’t feel he could tell us much about the current program. But he was a wonderful storyteller and teacher, and situated the Department in the history of physics and told us about notable graduate successes. My eldest and I were both fascinated.

Afterwards, as we were walking through campus, we passed a large tour group – the one I was too late to book – and my eldest expressed his relief that we weren’t in that group and his certain knowledge that we had a better, more in depth tour, focused on his interests.

We surrendered, opened ourselves to receiving, and it worked better than we could have imagined.

When you’re backed into a corner, you can go all snarly and defensive, or you can surrender. And because we valorize “fighting back,” sometimes we don’t see that surrender is the bravest option, with the deepest rewards.

• Surrender opens us to receiving all the assistance that is available to us.

• Surrender allows room for things to work in our favor.

• When we surrender, we get out of our own way.

When things aren’t working our for you, look for where you’re holding onto resistance. Ask yourself, is this a productive fight for you? Is there a reason to fight it? (Reserve your energy for the worthwhile and consequential battles!)

If surrender seems scary to you, work through the possible consequences: what is the worst that can happen? Is that really a big deal? Or are you making it into an issue? Do you fear the consequences? Or do you fear shattering your illusion of control?

Practice surrendering with small things and continue to work with them until you feel reasonably safe. Then move onto the next level, where you feel uncertain but safe from dire consequences. Every time you practice surrendering, it will become easier.

All of us will face times when we must surrender, when there are no other choices. These times shatter our illusion of control. Practicing surrendering, having facility with surrendering, means that when we are faced with these circumstances, we can better regulate our nervous systems and see the possibilities when they arrive.

Because they will arrive. They always do.

How will you practice surrendering today? What examples do you have of surrendering working out better than you could imagine? Hit reply or let me know in the comments! Hit the heart to let me know if you liked this post – and to make it easier for others to find it!

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A career ends, our bodies change, something that was easy becomes hard, creativity goes quiet, or a relationship shifts. We naturally conclude that because the outward expression has changed, the relationship itself has ended.

This month’s Still Point begins with a story from my own life a…

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Over the past several weeks, I’ve been exploring what happens after intuition speaks. This week’s video looks at why recognizing what is true is often easier than living with it. This essay follows that question into the ordinary decisions of daily life, where fear, obligation, or practicality can change what we’re trying to solve. If you’d rather listen first, you’ll find the companion video at the bottom of this post.

When David and I bought our house in 2014, I was overwhelmed by Toronto real estate prices.

Every listing required compromise. Houses in the neighborhoods we liked felt impossibly expensive, while larger or less expensive homes were farther away, in sketchy school catchments, or were tear-downs. Before we ever started looking seriously, we sat down with our realtor and talked about what mattered most.

Our first priority: we wanted to be within about fifteen minutes of David’s work in normal traffic.

That wasn’t an arbitrary number. David worked long hours, and we had three young boys. Every extra minute he spent commuting was time he wasn’t home with us. A larger house wasn’t worth less time with Daddy.

We had spent time talking about the life we wanted, so we already knew what we were looking for beyond the commute. We wanted a neighborhood where we could raise our family, room for my baby grand piano, good schools, and a backyard large enough for fruit trees, all without taking on a major renovation.

Then I started finding listings online and ignored the very priorities we had just established. Some were farther away. Others needed extensive work. A few were simply bargains that caught my attention because they looked like an opportunity too good to ignore. I sent a long email to my realtor and he replied with a question,

“Has your first priority changed?”

It hadn’t.

Nothing had changed except my anxiety.

I was frightened by the cost of buying a house, and without realizing it I had started evaluating every option according to a different criterion. Instead of asking whether a house supported the life we wanted to build, I was asking whether it reduced the financial risk I was feeling.

His question brought me back to my priorities.

We bought the house.

My boys grew up here. I planted the fruit trees we imagined when we were house hunting and learned to love gardening. Every time I walk through the front door, I’m reminded that one gentle question brought me back to the life we had already decided we wanted to build.

I suspect very few of us have someone regularly asking, “Has your first priority changed?”

Without that question, it’s easy to begin evaluating our decisions according to something other than what matters most. One reasonable decision follows another until fear, obligation, practicality, or other people’s expectations quietly become the standard by which we’re evaluating everything else.

I think we do this in many areas of our lives. We decide we want a quieter, more spacious life, but we keep saying yes because we don’t want to disappoint anyone, and our calendars remain full. We recognize that a relationship is no longer right for us, then decide to stay because changing it would disrupt everything around it.

These shifts don’t announce themselves, and they don’t feel like abandoning our priorities, our intuition, or ourselves. They feel responsible and mature.

Instead, we’re evaluating decisions according to whatever became loudest: money, obligation, fear, other people’s expectations, or the desire to appear sensible and practical. These things are also important. They deserve our attention. The problem is when they become the question we’re trying to answer.

Looking back, I realize my realtor wasn’t making the decision for me. He was helping me notice that anxiety had quietly changed the question I was asking. That distinction has stayed with me because it reflects an important part of the work I now do with my own clients.

My job isn’t to tell people what to do and it isn’t to replace their intuition with mine. It’s to help them notice when fear, obligation, exhaustion, or other people’s expectations have become the standard by which they’re evaluating a decision.

Then we work with whatever is creating that pressure until they can hear themselves clearly again. Often, this means reflecting back the priorities they named before the decision became complicated and helping them work with the pressure that has since gathered around it.

For example, a client told me that protecting her health was her first priority. Several weeks later, she explained why she felt she had to accept another commitment.

I didn’t tell her to cancel. I reminded her of the conversation we had a month earlier.

“You told me your health had become your first priority. Has that changed?”

Together, we explored the pressure surrounding the decision—the fear, obligation, and anticipated reactions—until she could evaluate the commitment from her own priorities again.

As clients become more practiced at staying connected to their priorities, those conversations become less necessary. They begin recognizing the shift while it’s happening. They catch themselves before they’ve reorganized an important decision around a priority they never actually chose.

That’s what the Intuitive Integration Mentorship is designed to support: helping you stay connected to what you’ve already recognized as true while life becomes noisy around it.

Over four months, we meet privately eight times, with support between sessions so we can work with your actual decisions as they arise—not only after they’ve already been made. Because these patterns don’t appear once. They appear again and again, in different forms, until we begin recognizing them much earlier.

I work with only five mentorship clients at a time so there’s room for that kind of ongoing support and attention.

Years ago, one thoughtful question changed the way I made one of the biggest decisions of my life.

Has your first priority changed?

It’s still a question I return to whenever life feels noisy.

Sometimes the answer really is yes. We grow, our lives change, so our priorities should change too.

But sometimes the answer is no. Nothing has changed except the pressure surrounding the decision.

If that pattern feels familiar, the Intuitive Integration Mentorship is a place to work with it directly—not so I can tell you what to do, but so you can become more able to hear yourself clearly, stay connected to what you know, and recognize when pressure has begun changing the question.

A no-obligation Chemistry Call gives us a chance to talk about what you’re navigating and whether the mentorship is the right fit for both of us.

4 years.

1461 days.

Endless time and no time at all.

That’s how it feels, as if time has no real meaning, and yet is zooming by faster than I can register. How does it feel for you, I wonder. Like anything at all?

I’d like to think I’m a bit more competent with it—the being a widow part I mean—than I was before. Not as much surprises me. It takes a lot to upset me.

Well, that’s not true. Just look at the state of the world, of my native country. It upsets me every day. What on earth would you have made of it? How did we get to this point? I mean, come on, Greenland?

Yes, yes, I know. Greed. Corruption. Venality. Not so difficult to trace, when you try. My country is no longer the exceptional one, if it ever was, I can hear you say.

I’m getting used to things. I’ve gotten used to being the person who does all the driving, just an annoying component of doing all the parenting.

We’re having a good summer. Mostly quiet. You would have enjoyed having the World Cup here. I finally replaced the sofa. I think you’d love the new one. Fares built a pergola for me—and he gave me the painting above the new sofa. My boulevard garden looks great. So does the Paradise Garden we planned together. But still waiting for the tomatoes, as always. We have had a padrón chile ripening though! Hopefully more are coming, despite the heat.

I got your message, the one I set aside in the midst of widowing and forgot all about until a couple of months ago. Thanks for that, and the reminder, babe. I needed it. And your timing remains impeccable.

S is in summer school. Not some relaxed humanities blow off course for his summer, oh no. He’s taking a year’s worth of calculus and statistics. He’s had a great first year of University. Made friends, loved living in the dorm, kept his grades up. He’s at Toronto, so just downtown. I’m so grateful he stayed here.

K is entering Grade 12. He’s looking at urban planning programs. It’s very exciting to see him find something he loves. He’s doing well. Fulfilling his volunteer hours this summer as a swim instructor. Got that same first scholarship that S got, now worth twice as much. He loves teasing his brother about getting twice the money.

G is entering Grade 8. Unbelievable, don’t you think? And yet, here we are. It took some time, but now he’s fully settled into his junior high, way across town, and soon we’ll be applying for high school programs. He loves volleyball. His bones ache, so I know it won’t be long until I’m the shortest—probably just a few months now.

Some things have settled for me too. I no longer forget in the midst of my day. I no longer search for you in my dreams. You are gone and you’ll see me when you see me, I know. But I still talk to you. Or maybe to the dog—he’s doing well too.

I miss you, my love.

If you didn’t know David

I’ve written about David, our life together, and grief many times over the past few years. A few places to begin:

• How to Recognize Your Soulmate — our love story

• What Is Required for Dignity? — David’s experience with ALS

• The Widow’s Ring — on grief, memory, and making something new from what remains

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Over the past month, I've been exploring what it really takes to create lasting change. This week's video looks at why transformation is often much quieter than we expect. This essay begins where that conversation leaves off, exploring what to do during the seasons when our usual sense of connection feels lost. If you'd rather listen first, you'll find the companion video at the bottom of this post.

Sometimes the thing that has always helped just doesn’t anymore. Prayer feels empty, meditation is distracting, journaling offers no insight. You sit in the garden, take your usual walk, or listen to music that once brought you peace, and instead of feeling grounded, you feel... nothing.

Or perhaps not nothing. Grief. Exhaustion. Confusion. Darkness.

It’s easy, in moments like these, to conclude that you’ve somehow lost your connection. To your intuition, to yourself, to God.

Many years ago, when I was living in Santa Fe, I knew a remarkable woman who was one of the facilitators of the adult Sunday School class I attended. She was wise and grounded, with a faith expressed through a steady, lived relationship with God.

Then tragedy struck.

Her only child, his wife, and their baby daughter were all killed in a car accident.

Months later, she told me something that has stayed with me for more than twenty-five years.

“I can’t pray anymore,” she said. “It’s all dark.”

I don’t remember exactly what we talked about after that. What I remember is the feeling underneath her words. It wasn’t simply grief. It was the fear that the darkness might never lift.

Looking back, I’m amazed that my twenty-six-year-old self had the confidence to respond. I remember thinking, “Who am I to be saying this to her?” I had experienced very little of life by then. But I had spent years learning and teaching piano, and somehow that became the language I reached for.

When students learn an instrument, they spend an extraordinary amount of time practicing scales and finger exercises. Most of them find it tedious. I certainly did. Often, they don’t understand why they’re repeating the same patterns over and over when what they really want to do is make music.

The purpose of scales isn’t to produce beautiful scales. It’s to embody technique so deeply that one day it appears naturally in the music itself.

I told her I thought prayer might work something like that.

Keep praying, even if all you experience is darkness. Continue showing up, even if you can’t feel anything happening. Trust that the relationship is larger than today’s experience of it.

A few months later she told me the image had stayed with her. On the days she wanted to stop praying, she would think, I just need to practice my scales.

She wasn’t pretending to feel connected or manufacture faith. The image gave her a way to keep showing up until prayer began to feel like prayer again.

I still think about that conversation because I’ve seen the same pattern in so many different forms. Chronic illness, writer’s block, burnout, transitions, and grief. The stories are different, but the fear is the same.

I’ve come to believe that we often mistake the loss of a feeling for the loss of a relationship.

Grief had made it impossible for my friend to perceive what had once felt so natural. That isn’t the same thing as saying the relationship had disappeared.

I think the same can be true of our relationship with intuition.

Sometimes it goes quiet. Or rather, it seems to.

Fear, exhaustion, the practical demands of survival all become louder. Those voices drown out the gentle ways intuition usually speaks. When that happens, our instinct is often to abandon the very practices that have sustained us in the past. We stop journaling because it doesn’t feel helpful. We stop walking because it doesn’t feel restorative. We stop sitting quietly because nothing seems to happen.

Perhaps those are the moments when we need those practices most.

Sometimes practice becomes the way we honor a relationship until we can experience it differently.

I’ve seen this in grief as well.

Death doesn’t stop love. We carry people with us, consult them, hear them in our own voice, and sometimes in our children’s voices. Our relationship changes, but it doesn’t disappear. And love continues, even though it no longer takes the same corporeal form.

Perhaps our relationship with intuition is more like that than we realize.

Mini Mindset Tip: Return Before You Replace

If your intuition seems to have gone silent, don’t immediately search for a new answer. Return, gently, to the practices that have connected you in the past.

They won’t produce a feeling on demand, but some relationships are sustained by continuing to show up, even during the seasons when all we can see is darkness.

Today marks the twenty-third anniversary of my immigration to Canada.

I first wrote this essay in 2024, but rereading it, I realized it wasn’t really about Canadian English. It was about belonging. About the ways cultures welcome us, test us, and remind us that becoming part of a place is never quite the same as becoming from that place.

It still feels like the right conversation for Canada Day.

The first time I apologized to a lady who ran into me, I was in the Community Centre down the block. She nodded and mumbled sorry in return and went on her way. I started laughing and kept laughing for a good 10 minutes. When the boys finished their swimming lessons, I told them I had something important to tell them. “Today,” I said, “I became a Canadian.”

“How so?” my eldest asked, skeptical that his American mother could ever be (truly, authentically) Canadian. 

“A lady ran into me and I apologized.”

“Did you apologize first?” my middle son asked. 

“I did.”

“Huh,” my eldest said, “that’s a start.”

When we got home I emailed every Canadian living in America that I knew, seeking the validation my kids withheld. The messages trickled in over the next few days. 

“Welcome to the club.” 

“You’ve been assimilated now.” 

“Oh, sorry, I thought you were already Canadian.”

When I first immigrated, I used to call out my students for apologizing constantly. “You’re here,” I’d tell them. “You deserve to take up space. There’s no need for you to apologize.” Because to an American, not only the word but also the tone Canadians use sounded like an apology for being – as in “I’m so sorry I put myself in your way so you could run into me.” I listened for sarcasm, and didn’t hear it. I didn’t want them to discount their authority through apologizing and ending their sentences in a question (linguists call it “the Canadian rise”).

But for Canadians, sorry is (usually) neither an apology nor sarcastic. Canadians use sorry as social lubricant.

It is meant to diffuse conflict and avoid confrontation. It can mean “I need your attention” or “Excuse me.” And sorry sometimes means “It’s no big deal,” “I don’t mind,” or “I forgive you.” Or even occasionally, “we’re all in this together.”

Sorry is so central to Canadian English and identity that in 2009 the Province of Ontario passed The Apology Act, which clarifies that an apology is not an admission of liability, whatever those American lawyers might think.1

I’ve noticed that when I’m actually apologizing, I say sorry like a Texan (Sahr-ree) and when I’m using it as social lubricant I pronounce it in Canadian English (Sore-ree). So I’ve assimilated, but not as much as I’d like to think. 

I wrote a Canadian sorry in an email a few days ago, and the American reading it responded with, “There’s no reason to apologize.”

And that both irritated me and made me laugh. She just doesn’t know what sorry means here. No reason she would.

Canadian English is not American English. It’s a whole other country, after all.

American befuddlement is often about not fully accepting that the upstairs neighbour is not the same as us, and, furthermore, has no wish to be the same.

The other day, I went to Tim Horton’s to write while I was waiting for my eldest to finish an exam, and when I got to the counter, I froze. Usually my kids order for me, and before that, my husband. (My husband was a political refugee from the Republic of Georgia. He knew seven languages and did not find Canadian English a challenge.) I tried to remember my Timmie’s specific vocabulary and then decided to just say what I wanted and assume, like any American would, that they’d understand. 

But I wasn’t quick enough. 

I’ve been in Timmie’s in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and PEI where the staff and locals had long, leisurely conversations. But this was outside of Toronto and things move fast. The lady behind me asked what I wanted to order and then translated that into Timmie’s specific Canadian English. I thanked her told her I wasn’t sure what had happened, that I’d been here 20 years.

She patted my arm and said, “That’s ok. Americans always struggle.” Everyone around me nodded. They, or their parents or grandparents, had all adapted and embraced this element of Canadianness. Many of them were adept at code switching.

I had all the privileges of white Americanness and hadn’t figured it out in 20 years. And because of this privilege, no one really expects me to.

Sometimes my anthropologist brain kicks in and I wonder if it’s a whole linguistic system meant to mark boundaries and borders. If you understand it, you belong, and if you don’t, we’ll help you because kindness is a Canadian value, but you’ll remember who you aren’t. 

Vocabulary is just a matter of memorization and practice. But phrases can come across as secret codes. 

One phrase I still find delightfully confusing is yeah, no and all its variations. Canadians somehow manage to communicate entire paragraphs with two contradictory words.

Even after all these years, I sometimes need to translate them in my head before I know what was actually said. Like German with ie and ei, it’s the second word that matters here.

My kids taught me that trick.

Like the recent visit to Timmie’s, I’m frequently reminded that I still don’t understand Canadian English.

My middle son got a call when I was driving him to his first high school dance. 

“Where are you?” his friend asked. 

“On my way,” he said. 

“Tell your mom to speed or you’ll be locked out!” the boy said. 

“Mom,” he said, “you have to get me there before coat check ends at 5:45.”

“Why the rush? You don’t have a coat to check.” It was weirdly warm for winter. 

“Mom, ‘coat check ends’ means if you aren’t there by 5:45, they lock the doors and you can’t go inside.”

“Huh,” I said. “Surely that would be a fire hazard.”

“Mom, it’s not literal. They just won’t let you in.”

“Why didn’t they say so?”

“They did say so. What did you think it meant?”

“I thought it meant coat check ends at 5:45. I thought it implied that dinner would be served around 6.”

He sighed in the way only a fourteen year old can, muttered “American” under his breath, and shook his head. “Just get me there on time.”

I did. We arrived at 5:41 because traffic started to clear. We were lucky. 

And now I know that “coat check ends” has a different meaning here. And that I’ll never fully adapt, being American. There will always be something that befuddles me. And that my kids are happy to mark the boundaries and borders between Americans and Canadians. 

Twenty-three years later, I still occasionally misunderstand Canadian English.

I suspect I always will.

I’ve stopped seeing that as evidence that I don’t belong. Instead, I’ve come to see it as one of the small reminders that belonging isn’t the same thing as becoming identical.

If you’ve built a life in a country other than the one you were born in, I’d love to hear about one of those moments when you suddenly realized you had become just a little bit more local—or discovered there was still something wonderfully foreign about you.

Over the past few weeks, I've been writing and speaking about intuition, self-trust, and the difference between knowing something and living from it. This essay is one story from my own life that helped me understand that distinction. If you'd prefer to listen, you'll find this week's companion video at the bottom of this post.

The summer after my junior year of high school, I attended a program at the Eastman School of Music. The purpose of the program was simple: to help talented young musicians decide whether they wanted to attend a conservatory.

At the time, I thought I might become a professional musician. I was serious about piano, directed the children’s choir at my church, and spent most of my free time immersed in music. Eastman was a great program and it changed my life.

Right after orientation, I talked my way out of a required voice ensemble and into a course called Introduction to World Music. During the first class, the professor walked into the room carrying a djembe and began playing and talking about music from around the world.

It was a breathtaking love-at-first-sight moment for me. I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I had considered music theory, performance, pedagogy, and history. None was quite right. But this – this combination of music, culture, stories, people, travel, language, history, and anthropology – was exactly what I had been seeking.

The field was called ethnomusicology, and at sixteen years old I fell head-over-heels in love with it.

The next twenty years of my life unfolded around that decision.

I attended the University of Illinois, then one of only two universities in North America with an undergraduate ethnomusicology program. I studied with Bruno Nettl, one of the founders of the field. I completed my master’s degree and PhD at the University of Chicago. While I was there, the department became recognized as one of the strongest ethnomusicology programs in the world.

Then, in 2003, I landed a tenure-track position at the University of Toronto. The impossible quest, fulfilled. By most measures, everything had gone according to plan. Everything was perfect.

But early that first year, I understood the problem almost immediately. Not all the details, of course, but intuitively, I understood there was a problem before I could explain it.

I knew my teaching responsibilities were unusually heavy. I had too many students and TAs who knew nothing about the field, and since they weren’t required to learn, were far more trouble than assistance. I knew I needed to finish my first book quickly. I knew I needed a major article that would establish my place within Canadian scholarship. I knew I was spending far more energy on teaching than was professionally wise. I knew that I had walked into a political minefield and I didn’t know where the mines were buried.

I also knew I was tired.

I had moved to a new country. I was building a life from scratch. I lacked the support systems I had relied upon in graduate school.

None of this was invisible to me.

That’s the part that strikes me now. When people talk about intuition or self-trust, they often imagine that the challenge is figuring out what’s true. And that can be the case. But more often, we know. We understand intuitively what is going on.

I knew what needed to happen professionally. I was well trained. The issue was that knowing didn’t make it easier to do. It didn’t give me more time, energy, or support.

Then life became more complicated. I got married and had children. My pregnancies were complicated and high risk. My oldest son didn’t sleep through the night for two and a half years. By the time he finally did, I had another infant. I was already exhausted before becoming a mother, so motherhood didn’t create the problem, it magnified it. And at the same time, my chronic illness became more difficult to manage. My husband helped as much as he could, given his own work, but there were some things that belonged to me. And the political situation in the department worsened.

Looking back, I can see that I spent years trying to solve a problem that no longer had a solution. Every semester I told myself some version of the same story. Once the book is finished. Once the boys are sleeping. Once I’m healthier. Once this project is behind me. Once I catch up.

The finish line kept moving and I acted as if I truly believed that if I worked harder, organized myself better, found the right strategy, and pushed through one more obstacle, I could accomplish anything.

I always had before.

What I couldn’t admit was that I no longer wanted the life on the other side of it. That’s a difficult thing to say about a dream you’ve carried since you were sixteen years old. I loved ethnomusicology. I still do. I loved the questions, the fieldwork, the research, the writing. I loved watching young people discover ideas that changed the way they saw the world.

But loving something and being able to sustain a life built around it are not the same thing. Part of me knew this, maybe even most of me, and I knew it far earlier than I admitted. And yet I kept trying to talk myself out of it.

I certainly believed that effort would save me. Practice more. Study more. Work harder. When something wasn’t working, the answer was usually to become better at it. I approached academia the same way. I never seriously considered that effort might not be the solution.

It took me years to understand that I wasn’t trying to solve a professional problem. I was trying to keep a promise I’d made to myself at sixteen. That girl at Eastman had found the thing she loved, the thing she was willing to organize her entire life around.

How do you walk away from that? How do you admit that something can be wonderful and still not be right for you anymore?

I couldn’t answer those questions, so I kept working. I kept trying to finish the book, to catch up, to become the version of myself who could somehow make all of it fit together.

Years passed that way.

Eventually my husband said something very simple.

“You don’t have to stay, you know.”

He wasn’t giving me information. I knew leaving was an option. What he offered instead was permission to trust this version of myself.

I remember feeling something loosen. I remember feeling space, as if I could breathe again, and the possibility that leaving wasn’t failure. That I had already done enough. And that the girl who fell in love with ethnomusicology at sixteen had not been wrong. Perhaps she had simply carried me as far as she could.

For a long time I thought I needed a better plan, but what I needed was permission to stop trying to rescue a future that no longer belonged to me.

Sometimes knowing isn’t the difficult part. Letting go is.

But that isn’t how life usually works.

Some of the most important moments in our lives involve competing truths. We can be ready and fri…

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In grad school, I was a master at making color-coded schedules, certain these would hold the secret to not falling behind or having to rush at the end. But that’s not how it worked. I’d make the schedule, post it on my bulletin board above my monitor, and proceed to ignore it thoroughly.

I have what we mental health care workers tend to call a rebellious personality.

On the other hand, my best friend in grad school didn’t need a schedule. He was a master at knowing exactly how long an assignment would take, and how long he needed to study for his exams.

I was always amazed by this otherworldly ability. The only time we argued over it, he was convinced he didn’t have time to apply for both the Fulbright and the Humboldt. I had a strong intuition that he would get the Humboldt, that he would be the first graduate student in his field to get it. I knew he didn’t want to hear about my intuition, that would make him less likely to apply, so instead I used all my powers of persuasion to convince him. And I agreed to stay up all night when it was due and call him at 2 hour intervals to see how it was progressing. He did the same for me a year later, when I had a hard deadline.

He won the Humboldt.

It has always been easy for me to trust my intuition for other people, and to trust it for myself with the big things. But for the smaller things, I have had to learn how to override my knowledge and certainty of “the right way” to do things.

I have so many garden chores to complete that I’ve triaged them. But earlier this week, I raised my blinds and looked into the Paradise garden and thought, “if I could just get this one thing done.”

I had done bits and pieces of it already, and it wasn’t important or essential to weed it that day. There were many more important things to do. But I listened to my intuition, to the urge that brought me out there, and spent the morning completing that one task. And now when I open my blinds in the morning the first thing I see is a garden that looks beautiful. I no longer feel overwhelmed. And I’m getting far more accomplished. My intuition knew what I needed better than my triaged task list.

A few of days ago, I wrote an article for this week. But I was dissatisfied with it, it felt circular. Then I printed it out and Prof. Cain edited it with her vicious red pen and killed all my darlings.

Instead of rewriting it yesterday, I painted. Usually when I need to work through a knotty problem, I take a walk, or garden, or nap. But occasionally I get a little manic. Yesterday was one of those days.

I consider myself a proficient painter. Not artist-painter, interior house painter. I certainly did a lot of painting for myself and friends, back in the days when we all helped each other move and paint.

So I decided that since I’m just “touching up” 12 year old paint instead of changing colors or doing a larger project (which I’d like to do, but not right now) and my contractor is busy, that I’d do it myself.

And I did. It’s not as good a job as my contractor, but I think a better job than the painters twelve years ago, who came in on (Canadian) Thanksgiving so we could have fresh walls moving it. We were lucky to find anyone.

But y’all, the last time I did this was 2003. I was 28, new to Canada, and a week away from meeting my late husband. I’ve had good reasons to hire painters ever since. So I’ve forgotten how much energy the prep work alone takes. And I’m 23 years older and tired.

But now it’s done and I have beautiful clean walls to hang my gorgeous new artwork. And I get to keep my identity as a proficient painter.

I decided it would be ok for me not to send out an Intellect & Intuition article this week, even though I want to tell you about my new mentorship. Making that decision, and my level of fatigue, lifted enough pressure for me to move forward and write this this morning. Not in my proper schedule, but definitely with the right timing.

We tell ourselves all sorts of things:

I don’t have time. Organized people stick to the schedule. I’m the sort of woman who stays married.

None of these sound like stories when we’re living inside them. They sound like facts. That’s what makes them so powerful.

My friend eventually released the story that he didn’t have time and that nobody in his field could win a Humboldt anyway.

I released, at least temporarily, the story that productive people stay on schedule.

Prefer to listen?

This week’s video explores a related question:

What happens when what we know collides with the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves?

This essay began as a conversation about a kind of burnout that often goes unnoticed—the kind that doesn’t stop you from functioning, but slowly distances you from yourself. If you’d prefer to listen, you’ll find the companion video at the bottom of this post.

About fifteen years ago, after attending a conference in Los Angeles, I spent a few extra days with my best friend from college.

At the time, she was dividing her life between Los Angeles and Chicago, and she planned nearly everything. She knew the restaurants, the neighborhoods, the scenic drives, the gardens worth visiting. She asked for my preferences, of course, but I remember telling her quite honestly that I didn’t care.

Looking back, that’s the part that catches my attention. I’m not generally easygoing. I have, as my aunts always said, OPINIONS. About museums, where I’d like to spend an afternoon, and definitely about gardens, though at the time I hadn’t yet realized how much I loved them.

The truth was that I was tired. My middle son was a toddler. My eldest was three and a half. I wasn’t sleeping much. My academic career had begun drifting in a direction that no longer felt sustainable, though I didn’t fully understand that yet. I felt unsupported, overextended, and responsible for more than I could comfortably carry.

At the time, I thought I was simply a tired mother, and I was. But I was also much deeper into the burnout that would catch me than I realized.

What felt luxurious wasn’t the trip itself, it was the absence of decisions, the relief of having someone else choose the restaurant, where we were going, and how to get there. We wandered through beautiful gardens. We visited Walt Disney Concert Hall. We drove through Carmel. It was wonderful. Glorious. Beautiful. What I remember most clearly is the relief. I had preferences, but I was too exhausted to reach them.

When Rest Stops Working

When most people think about burnout, they imagine collapse, the moment someone can no longer function. The medical leave. The breakdown. The inability to get out of bed. And certainly burnout can look like that. But in my experience, it begins much earlier.

It begins when rest is no longer restorative, when a vacation helps during the vacation, but not afterwards, when a weekend disappears and you still feel depleted on Monday morning. And when the things you care about still matter deeply, but you can’t quite bring yourself to care about them the way you once did.

The garden is still beautiful. The work is still important. The people are still loved. But you are distant from all that. Either growing distant or fully-out-of-your-body distant.

I think many sensitive people live in that space for much longer than they realize. Highly functioning, we continue showing up, working, caring for children and aging parents and friends and partners and communities. From the outside, we often look completely fine, but our inner world becomes harder and harder to hear.

The Cost of Hyperawareness

During my husband’s illness, I learned how exhausting sustained awareness can be. As his ALS progressed, communication became difficult. Long before David lost the ability to speak entirely, I was already paying attention differently. I listened constantly for changes in his breathing, for signs of discomfort, for small indications that he needed something, for signals that another person might never notice.

Many ALS caregivers eventually develop symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress because the nervous system spends years in a state of vigilance. It learns that paying attention is necessary, important, protective. When caregiving, hyperawareness makes sense. It serves a specific purpose and the nervous system understands the assignment.

The problem with hypervigilance is that we, as humans, are not designed to live there indefinitely. And what I’ve witnessed in my clients is that many sensitive people are living in a milder version of that state all the time. No, they’re not caring for someone with a terminal illness. But modern life demands our continual attention. The endless news cycle, constant interruptions from our phones, economic uncertainty, climate anxiety, political instability, and our immediate family concerns. There is always another notification, another headline, another problem, another demand on our attention.

This all affects sensitive people more. And we notice the tension in a room, the sadness in a friend’s voice, the anxiety beneath someone’s words, the thing that wasn’t said or was almost but not quite said. We are barometers for the emotional weather systems moving through our homes, workplaces, friendships, and communities.

All that noticing is heavy. It consumes so much of our energy. And it’s not long before many people are carrying more information than they can comfortably process.

I sometimes think that what we call burnout is, in part, an attention problem, that we’re paying attention to too many things at once. Monitoring, tracking, anticipating, managing, absorbing. And doing all this, continually, for years and years.

The Signal Beneath the Noise

Then one day someone asks us what we want for dinner, or where we’d like to go, or what we want next. And we discover that our answer feels strangely far away. People often interpret that experience as a loss of intuition, confidence, or self, but I don’t think that’s usually what’s happening. I think the signal is still there, it’s just competing with too much noise.

And sometimes, if I’m being honest, we help create that noise ourselves as a type of protection. We don’t want to listen to one more thing, even if it is ourselves.

When that happens, we distract ourselves. We stay busy, scroll, overthink, research. We occupy ourselves with what doesn’t matter because we already feel overloaded. So sometimes muffling our own inner voice becomes one more way of reducing input. This is understandable, but it comes at the cost of losing contact with our own preferences, desires, and knowing. They haven’t disappeared. They’re just buried beneath everything else we were carrying.

I don’t think most sensitive people need more information. I think many of them need less static, less monitoring, less carrying, and less responsibility for things that were never theirs to manage in the first place.

Because beneath all that noise, the intuitive signal is still there, quieter, harder to hear, sometimes muffled by exhaustion or self-protection. But still there, waiting patiently beneath the interruptions for enough space to be heard again.

The season begins with water.

Not officially. The calendar declared spring weeks earlier. But spring in southern Ontario has become increasingly strange — cold hanging on too long, then suddenly collapsing into heat. This year, we seemed to leap directly from chilly gray days into summer temperatures.

So for me, the garden season truly begins when I fill the water.

The stock tank pond goes first. Then the pot fountain in the Paradise Garden. Then the ceramic pot filled with floating flowers under my Evans sour cherry. Water changes everything. The birds return immediately. The air softens. The garden stops looking dormant and starts feeling inhabited again.

And this year, almost overnight, the boulevard garden began growing by leaps and bounds. Every morning something had stretched taller or unfurled further. We moved directly from late winter to summer, skipping spring.

Which, judging from Europe right now, is becoming a more common experience.

As many of you know, I’m a native Texan living outside Toronto. Usually my southern knowledge is entirely unhelpful here. Texans are not particularly equipped for six months of Canadian winter darkness. But suddenly, I’m useful.

So here is my inherited southern wisdom, passed through Texas grandmothers and Chicago heat-wave summers: open the house while the air is still cool. Create cross breezes with windows opposite each other. Tilt blinds upward to block direct sun while still allowing airflow. Ceiling fans matter enormously and should rotate counterclockwise in summer. Box fans in windows can help pull cooler air inward or push hot air out. My grandmother used to hang damp sheets in front of fans. It truly helps.

And perhaps most importantly: know where the cool air is. Libraries. Movie theaters. Cafés. There is no moral virtue in suffering through dangerous heat.

Also: iced tea exists for a reason.

Or, in my case, hibiscus tea.

For years, I’ve made a version of jamaica — the deep ruby hibiscus drink common across Mexico and parts of Latin America. During my pregnancies, when I was avoiding both sugar and caffeine, I started making it with hibiscus, rose hips, and true cinnamon, somewhere between herbal tea and agua fresca. Recently I made a batch of concentrate in the Instant Pot and threw in a spent orange for the flavor of the peel. It’s unsweetened, ice cold, and perfect in the heat.

Not Everything Returned

This year has been a challenging gardening season in ways both ordinary and strange. Some of the damage from last fall’s drought is only becoming fully visible now. Several roses died back hard over winter. My Venus dogwood — usually spectacular — produced perhaps seven blooms total. The butterfly magnolia offered only a handful.

So this spring, assuming some roses were truly dead, I bought replacements.

And naturally, several of the “dead” roses have now resprouted. From the rootstock or above the graft? I’m not sure, and gardening has a way of humbling certainty.

In March, everything looks dead here. By May, some things still look dead. But underground, life is often busy making different plans.

Not everything returned, though.

Last year I couldn’t find my rhubarb, but I wasn’t yet willing to give it up for lost. This year, I finally did.

Dave loved rhubarb. We had the old green kind, and I used to make what we affectionately called “snot jam” from it — thick green rhubarb preserves that looked objectively terrible and tasted wonderful. Like asparagus, rhubarb is really a crop for people who have help eating it. Too much abundance for one person unless you preserve aggressively.

If I replace it, I think I’ll plant the pink kind this time, not recreating exactly what was there before, just continuing differently.

And then there’s the arugula.

The summer that Dave died, I discovered that while my carefully planted seedlings struggled, self-seeded wild arugula had quietly taken over an entire bed. I remember standing there laughing in relief. The garden had fed us anyway.

This year, once again, the self-seeded arugula is thriving.

Technically it’s not perennial here. It simply reseeds itself enthusiastically enough to feel perennial. Every year it decides where it wants to live, and every year I mostly surrender to its opinion.

There’s something reassuring about plants that return without being asked.

Asparagus. Self-seeded arugula. Fruit brambles and shrubs planted by previous owners decades ago, and by us far more recently. Perennials pushing upward after winters that looked too harsh. Not flourishing, exactly. Not this year at least. But surviving. Continuing.

Puttering

Which brings me to friendship.

A close friend was recently visiting for work again. He came in from a frustrating meeting and, instead of stewing indoors, went outside and started gardening.

Not light gardening, either.

He weeded aggressively, lifted flagstones to weed underneath them, moved large shrubs and plants I couldn’t have shifted alone. The kind of heavy, invisible maintenance work that changes how a garden ages over years.

I wasn’t even outside while he was doing it. The heat and sun were too much for me and my sun allergy. Instead I kept looking out the window in disbelief that someone was voluntarily working that hard in the afternoon heat.

My mother understood it immediately. She laughed when I told her and reminded me how Dave used to come home and “putter” in the garden for fifteen or twenty minutes after work.

I never really considered his “puttering” real work at the time, but tiny acts accumulate. Clearing a little here, tying something up there, watering during a dry week, pulling weeds before they seed. The difference between a garden thriving and slowly collapsing is often consistent attention over time.

Maybe that’s also why I find the self-seeded arugula so reassuring every year. It returns without fanfare or any real help from me. It doesn’t need my attention.

And this year, I have new roses waiting to go into places the old roses may not have fully vacated.

The rhubarb, however, is truly gone.

The water is running again though. The sour cherries have bloomed and are beginning to form. The boulevard garden is surging upward daily in the heat. Birds are bathing in the stock tank pond. Vancouver Mystic Gem is flowering on a bean arch. The new rose and two clematis are climbing slowly toward the pergola.

The garden doesn’t care whether I feel ready for the season or not.

Summer arrives anyway.

Structured Intuition is a practical framework for working with intuition as embodied discernment rather than magical certainty. The presale ends tonight, after which the course moves to its regular price.

Explore Structured Intuition

I think one of the reasons intuition becomes such a confusing subject is that people are usually offered only two possible relationships with it.

Either intuition is treated as something mystical and almost supernatural: a kind of infallible inner knowing that arrives fully formed and should immediately be trusted without question.

Or it’s dismissed entirely. Reduced to projection, anxiety, bias, wishful thinking, or emotional reasoning dressed up as insight.

Neither framework has ever felt fully accurate to me.

Not because I object to mysticism. I don’t. If people want to dance barefoot in the moonlight, light candles, read tarot cards, or approach intuition through explicitly spiritual frameworks, I have no problem with that. Human beings have always used ritual, symbolism, and embodied practices to help themselves access deeper forms of perception and meaning.

But I do think many people quietly assume intuition only “counts” if it feels magical enough.

And if they themselves are too intellectual, too skeptical, too analytical, too scientifically minded, or too psychologically complex to experience intuition that way, they conclude they must not really be intuitive at all.

And yet, I suspect that’s simply not true because intuition is much closer to embodied discernment than magical certainty.

I think a lot of what gets called intuition is actually sensory and cognitive processing happening more subtly, more quickly, or more relationally than conscious thought can immediately explain.

That doesn’t make it imaginary. It also doesn’t make it supernatural. It may simply mean human perception is more complex than our current explanatory systems fully account for.

A few years ago, Western medicine formally identified the interstitium, a fluid-filled connective tissue network that had apparently been present in the human body all along while remaining largely unrecognized in conventional anatomical models. Meanwhile, many non-Western healing systems had already been working for millenia with concepts of energetic and connective flow that Western medicine often dismissed as unscientific or mystical.

I’m not saying this “proves intuition.” I’m wary of over-sciencing intuition almost as much as I’m wary of reducing it to magic. But I do think human experience often precedes explanation. We notice things before we fully understand how to measure them.

It may just be because I’m a musician, but I think music offers a more useful model for intuition than mysticism does.

Years ago, while researching ethnomusicology and jazz, I became fascinated by Paul Berliner’s book Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation,1 which explored how jazz musicians actually learn to improvise. One of the things Berliner documented was the extraordinary amount of disciplined listening, repetition, practice, technical study, pattern recognition, and embodied training that sits underneath improvisation that outsiders often perceive as effortless, mysterious, spontaneous, or almost magical.

And because jazz is so deeply entangled historically with assumptions about Blackness, embodiment, and “natural talent,” there has been a tendency to romanticize improvisation as something instinctive or divinely gifted rather than rigorously developed through practice.

But the more musicians study, practice, listen, internalize structure, and refine perception, the more freely improvisation can move.

At a certain point, though, all that structure starts disappearing into the body. A great improviser doesn’t sound like someone mechanically applying scales and theory in real time, even though years of scales and theory lie underneath the music. What you hear instead is the way a player leans slightly toward the drummer, or hears a change in energy half a beat before the rhythm section fully shifts underneath them.

From the outside, this looks almost mystical, especially if you don’t see the years of listening and practice that made it possible.

I suspect this is part of why intuition gets mystified in the first place. Once perception becomes deeply embodied, people stop seeing all the listening and repetition underneath it. We tend to imagine intuitive people as receiving sudden bolts of certainty from nowhere, when in reality many intuitive experiences are much quieter and more physical than that.

• A hesitation you can’t fully explain yet.

• The sense that a conversation is becoming draining before anything overtly unpleasant has happened.

• The feeling that you should pay attention to something, even though you can’t logically justify why yet.

• The way the body sometimes reacts before the intellect has assembled a coherent narrative around what’s happening.

None of this makes intuition infallible, of course. Improvisation isn’t infallible either. Even extraordinary musicians can lose the thread of a performance, misread what another player is doing, or push something too far.

But we generally understand musical perception as something that develops through relationship and practice. Nobody expects a person to sit down at a piano for the first time and improvise like Thelonious Monk. We understand that listening changes through training. Perception changes through repeated contact. Over time, our hands become more skillful and ears more refined.

I believe intuition develops similarly, not as magical certainty, but as embodied discernment.

Since certainty is such an impossible standard, many people end up distrusting intuition altogether. If intuition is supposed to arrive as absolute truth, then any mistake starts feeling like evidence that the entire thing was imagined. One incorrect read and people begin questioning not only the conclusion, but also their own capacity for perception in the first place.

But discernment is different from certainty.

Discernment assumes ongoing relationships, attention, interpretations, and context. It leaves room for complexity, for partial understanding, for misreading, for emotional interference, for learning. It assumes that human beings are perceptive, but not omniscient.

Honestly, I find that framework much more useful and much more humane.

It also reflects how intuition tends to behave in ordinary life. Most intuitive responses do not arrive as cinematic revelations. They show up much more subtly than that. A body that relaxes around one decision and tightens around another. A growing sense of exhaustion around someone you technically still like. The strange experience of realizing you knew something emotionally long before you could articulate it intellectually.

The more I work in this area, the less interested I become in convincing people they are “gifted,” and the more interested I become in helping them recognize the forms of perception they are already having all the time.

That’s part of what Structured Intuition has been trying to explore from the beginning.

Not intuition as performance or identity, but intuition as something deeply connected to embodiment, discernment, relational awareness, and the ongoing practice of staying in contact with your own perception inside a complicated world.

But honestly, I think many sensitive and perceptive people are already noticing much more than they realize. The harder part is often what happens next.

Interpretation, explanation, social conditioning, the desire to be reasonable, all arrive. And before long, the original perception has become difficult…

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This week’s contribution to the ongoing question of why intelligent people keep arguing with instincts they already had — one of the ideas sitting underneath Structured Intuition, my short course on intuition, discernment, and emotional processing.

Years ago, I was trying to convince my late husband of something, maybe related to the garden — I don’t remember. What I do remember is that he had already agreed with me, and I kept talking anyway.

Finally, he interrupted me and said, “When you get a yes, you stop.”

He was one of the top Audi salesmen in Canada and explained that if a customer has already decided and you keep talking, you can move them back into uncertainty by introducing doubt.

I have thought about that conversation many times over the years, particularly in relation to intuition.

Because I think many sensitive and intellectual people do some version of this internally all the time. They know they do not want to go. They know they do not want the client, the collaboration, the second date, the additional commitment, the group chat, the weekend away. Some part of them has already registered the response.

And then the internal committee meeting starts.

Maybe you are being unfair. Maybe you are missing context. Maybe you should wait a few days before deciding. Maybe saying no without a more impressive reason makes you sound difficult, selfish, flaky, dramatic, ungrateful, insufficiently evolved, etc.

Sometimes this conversation happens entirely inside your own head. Sometimes it spills out into actual conversations where, somewhere in the middle of explaining yourself, you can feel yourself drifting further away from what you originally felt.

Now, I grew up in Texas around women who could end a conversation with a raised eyebrow and a well-placed “Bless your heart,” so I am fully aware that not all women struggle equally with overexplaining. The women in my family were warm and socially skilled, but they were also capable of making a decision and standing in it without writing a dissertation in support of their own preferences. Still, I think many women learn early that “I don’t want to” is treated as incomplete information. We learn to soften, contextualize, reassure, elaborate. We become very skilled at explaining ourselves in ways that make other people more comfortable.

Instead of addressing the patriarchal issues that cause this, I want to consider how this process also disconnects us from our own clarity. Because explanation, thoughtfulness, and intellect are not the problem. But there is a point where explanation stops functioning as communication and becomes a negotiation with ourselves.

You can sometimes feel the shift happening in real time. A decision that felt settled in your body and mind twenty minutes earlier suddenly becomes strangely unstable. You begin constructing counterarguments against your own instincts. You start defending the other side to yourself. What felt clear becomes muddy.

Intellectual people are especially vulnerable to this because we know how to build convincing arguments. Give an overeducated person enough time and we can explain ourselves into almost anything.

I don’t actually think this is because intuitive knowing is weak. I think many people would rather submit a twelve-point argument with citations than simply admit, “Something about this feels wrong to me.”

Explanation feels sturdier, more legitimate, and definitely less vulnerable than intuition, especially when the intuition arrives before the evidence does.

Life rarely offers that kind of certainty.

Sometimes you leave a meeting feeling depleted long before you can explain why. Sometimes a project looks perfectly reasonable on paper while your entire body keeps resisting it anyway. Sometimes you agree to something while secretly hoping the other person cancels first.

Your explanation for the feeling may not arrive until afterward, if it arrives at all.

This is especially challenging for people who are both highly intuitive and highly intellectual because we often experience an almost reflexive need to translate inner knowing into externally defensible language before allowing ourselves to trust it. And to be fair, sometimes more reflection genuinely matters. Sometimes you learn something later that changes the entire picture. That happens too. Intuition isn’t infallible. But neither is endless analysis.

One of the strangest things about overexplaining is that it can slowly erode the emotional clarity that existed before the explanation began. You can talk yourself so far away from your original response that eventually you can no longer remember what felt so obvious in the first place.

Most sensitive people spend years explaining their perception away. This creates a sense of disconnection from both intuition and body.

Perhaps this is where discernment actually begins: with noticing when enough understanding has already arrived and resisting the impulse to keep reopening the question simply because uncertainty remains.

And learning that when you get a yes, you stop.

In today’s edition of “intellectual people accidentally overriding intuition through excessive research,” we have roses and a Mini Mindset Tip from my short course Structured Intuition.

The intuitive part was instant. The intellectual part took several weeks and involved multiple nurseries, gardening forums, a garden designer, and an unreasonable number of photographs of dark plum roses.

I recently spent an absurd amount of time trying to choose the perfect rose for a raised bed I’m redoing beside my extension. I blame the British garden designer , whose gardens are so beautiful and atmospheric that they make you feel as though you should immediately begin restructuring your entire relationship to color. In her book The Gardener’s Palette,1 she uses the David Austin rose Munstead Wood frequently, this extraordinary velvety dark crimson-to-plum rose that somehow manages to feel both dramatic and restrained at the same time.

Naturally, I wanted it.

Unfortunately, Munstead Wood is not available in Canada, at least not that I could find. I would also have happily bought a rose called Wild Rover, another deep plum variety that Jo featured in Chelsea last year, but that one also proved elusive. We are often a few years behind on these things here.

And so began the research phase.

I asked in local gardening groups. I discussed roses at two separate nurseries. I consulted members of . I zoomed into photos. I read comments. I compared bloom forms and growth habits and shades of magenta versus burgundy versus oxblood. I spent a surprising amount of time trying to determine whether a particular rose would “read too purple” or “too crimson” in evening light.

I love research, as the PhD after my name probably suggests. And to be fair, one of the pleasures of gardening is precisely this sort of low-stakes rabbit hole. Plants invite a kind of dreamy obsessiveness. You imagine future summers. Future light. Future versions of yourself drinking coffee near a border that has finally come together exactly as you hoped.

But somewhere in the middle of all this, I realized I had drifted away from what I had actually felt drawn toward in the first place.

Early on, while looking through photographs online, I had seen a Kordes rose called Dark Desire and immediately felt that little internal click. Not certainty exactly, but recognition. The sort of feeling that says, “Ah. There you are.”

And then, almost immediately, my intellect arrived with follow-up questions.

There were comments online saying it could sprawl. Maybe it would get too large for the space. Maybe the color would lean too purple in person. Maybe another rose would perform better or be a better size. Maybe there was something I hadn’t considered yet. Since I had never seen any of these roses bloom in real life, the internet became an increasingly elaborate attempt to bridge the distance between information and experience.

In the end, my large local nursery put all their roses on a 30% off flash sale and I went over and bought Dark Desire.

And then the next day, I stopped by my favorite smaller nursery, where the owner immediately said, “Oh, I have a rose I think you’ll love,” and walked me directly over to Dark Desire.

Which honestly made me laugh because that is so often how these things work.

Not always, of course. Sometimes more information genuinely changes the picture. Sometimes research matters. Sometimes your first impression is incomplete. Intuition is not infallible and intellect is not the enemy. Eventually, I realized I was comparing photographs of roses taken in completely different climates and lighting conditions while trying to determine whether a bloom might be “too magenta.” which was probably a sign that something besides horticultural discernment had entered the chat. All that research didn’t clarify my decision. Instead, it made me aware of every possible thing that could go wrong with it.

I think a lot of intellectual people do this. We keep researching partly because research is pleasurable, uncertainty is unpleasant, and the internet keeps offering the fantasy that one more opinion, one more article, one more comparison photo might finally remove the vulnerability of having to trust yourself.

Unfortunately, this is not how intuition works. Or gardening.

Mini Mindset Tip:

If you notice yourself circling the same decision repeatedly, try pausing before gathering one more opinion, opening one more tab, or rereading the same Reddit thread for the fourteenth time. Settle into your body and ask for your first reaction to return.

More information may genuinely help. Sometimes you really do need more time. But occasionally it becomes clear that what you are searching for is not another opinion, but relief from the vulnerability of having to trust your own perception.

And sometimes it turns out the rose you liked in the first place was, in fact, the right rose.

Sometimes people ask me whether I believe in energy vampires, usually in the same tone they would use to ask about ghosts or psychic predictions or whether Mercury retrograde is secretly ruining their lives. Half curious, half embarrassed, as though they already know the “rational” answer and are mostly checking to see whether I’m going to say it too.

I do think energy vampires are real.

Not in the gothic sense, obviously. I am not suggesting there are pale immortals wandering around faculty meetings feeding on the life force of adjunct professors, although if you’ve ever sat through a badly run departmental meeting, you may feel the distinction is largely academic.

What I mean is simpler, stranger, and for sensitive people, often immediately recognizable in the body.

There are people, environments, and systems that interact with us in extractive ways.

You leave an interaction feeling oddly depleted, far more exhausted than the actual conversation should warrant. Your attention stays hooked long afterward. You replay the exchange while making dinner, while trying to fall asleep, while standing in line at the grocery store the next day. Your body feels heavier. Your nervous system remains activated. It becomes difficult to fully return to yourself.

And importantly, I am not talking about ordinary human need here.

We all go through periods where we are grieving, frightened, ill, overwhelmed, needy, lonely, heartbroken, dysregulated, or exhausted. Loving someone through difficulty can absolutely require energy. Parenting requires energy. Caregiving requires energy. Friendship requires energy. Sometimes we lean heavily on the people who love us because life is difficult and we are human.

That is not what I mean.

I’m talking about a different phenomenon, one that many sensitive people recognize almost immediately once it is named. Some people consistently plug into the attention, emotional bandwidth, nervous systems, or energetic openness of other people in order to stabilize themselves, soothe themselves, amplify themselves, or avoid contact with their own internal state. Sometimes this is deliberate. Often it is not. I don’t think it is necessarily about morality. Very few people wake up in the morning plotting to drain the life force of others. But intention and impact are not the same thing.

What interests me more these days is not simply the existence of energy vampires, but what repeated exposure to these dynamics does to sensitive nervous systems over time.

Some interactions don’t seem to end when the interaction itself ends. You leave dinner, or the phone call, or the meeting, but part of your attention remains with the person afterward, still turning things over, still subtly responding, still open. Sometimes you can feel this almost physically, as though your nervous system never fully returned to its resting state after the interaction was over.

I used to speak about this more directly in energetic terms: cords, energetic connections, filters, energetic leakage. I still think those frameworks can be useful, particularly for people who naturally perceive the world that way. But increasingly I find myself paying attention to the overlap between energetic experience and nervous system experience, especially in highly perceptive people whose systems tend to stay open longer than they realize.

Sensitive people often assume this ongoing openness is a sign of empathy, kindness, maturity, or emotional intelligence. Occasionally it is. But sometimes it is simply overexposure. Some people and environments keep pulling on your attention long after you’ve physically left them, and if you grew up believing that attentiveness was the same thing as love, or safety, or goodness, it can take a very long time to notice how exhausting that becomes.

After enough experiences where openness led to overwhelm, intrusion, emotional chaos, or exhaustion, many people begin protecting themselves automatically. They describe themselves as numb, shut down, avoidant, detached, “bad at people,” when often what has actually happened is that their systems adapted. Accessibility started to feel unsafe. Openness started to feel expensive.

I think a lot of people are living somewhere inside that feeling right now, especially given the political atmosphere in the United States and how it is affecting the entire world. Even people trying to limit their news intake still seem to carry around a constant background sensation of alarm, vigilance, anger, disbelief. You open your phone for a few minutes and can feel your body tighten almost immediately. A headline pulls your attention outward and suddenly you are no longer fully in your own day, your own thoughts, your own life. Part of you is now emotionally entangled with events happening hundreds or thousands of miles away, many of which you have very little direct power to change.

Under those conditions, it makes sense that people become more defended. Armor is adaptive. It works. Until eventually it begins blocking not only what is intrusive, but also what is nourishing, calming, connected, or alive.

That’s why I think the goal is not permanent openness, but discernment. Learning how to stay connected to yourself while interacting with demanding people, environments, and systems. Learning that sensitivity does not require endless availability. Learning that you can care deeply without allowing every interaction to take up residence inside your body.

The difficulty is that once you have spent enough time around extractive people or environments, discernment and defensiveness can begin to feel identical. You stop answering texts. You avoid crowded places. You become more careful about who gets access to you. Sometimes this is wise. Sometimes it is exhaustion speaking.

Years ago, I used the language of armor a lot in my work because that is often what it feels like energetically. People become defended in order to survive environments that felt intrusive, chaotic, emotionally demanding, or chronically dysregulating. And again, I think that adaptation makes sense. Sensitive people are not imagining the exhaustion. Their systems are responding intelligently to what they have experienced.

But armor has limitations. It protects you from what drains you, but it can also reduce your ability to receive what restores you. Over time, some people become so focused on avoiding depletion that they lose contact with openness altogether. Their world becomes smaller, flatter, more controlled. Safe, perhaps, but also disconnected.

This is one of the reasons I’ve become increasingly interested in filters rather than armor. A filter allows discernment. It lets some things in and keeps other things out. It recognizes that sensitivity itself is not the problem. The problem is remaining completely open, all the time, without enough structure to recognize what belongs to you, what does not, and when your system has moved beyond its actual capacity.

That distinction sits underneath much of what I teach in Structured Intuition. Not simply how to notice intuitive signals, but how to stay connected to yourself while receiving information from the world around you. How to recognize when your attention has become entangled with someone else’s emotional state. How to remain compassionate without becoming endlessly permeable. How to stop confusing total openness with love, goodness, or spiritual maturity.

Because sensitivity is not a flaw. It just needs structure sturdy enough to support it.

Structured Intuition is currently in presale, and today’s post includes a short preview clip from Week 6, “Scope of Action.” If you’ve ever struggled with knowing what to do with an intuitive message once you receive it, this lesson will likely resonate with you.

Explore Structured Intuition

Sometimes the hardest part of intuition isn’t receiving or recognizing the message, it’s knowing what to do with it once it arrives.

When we first begin receiving clear intuitive information, there’s an almost overwhelming urge to tell people what they “need to know.” This makes sense because surely, if something arrives clearly, if it feels important, protective, or emotionally charged, why would you have received it if you were not meant to share it?

This is why we must learn intuitive discernment.

Here’s an example from my own experience: A number of years ago, I told someone close to me that he was about to meet his future wife. He had despaired of meeting anyone so I was excited for him. I described the circumstances around it, including the invitation out-of-the-blue that he would receive from an old friend that would bring him to the place where they would meet.

The next week, he got that invitation. But things didn’t unfold as I had foreseen, because he didn’t go.

He became anxious and self-conscious. He got in his head about what I had told him, and instead of enjoying (what I saw as) his destiny, he got in his own way. At the time, I thought accuracy was the point. But he wasn’t ready.

Now I understand that accuracy is only one part of intuitive maturity. Something can be true and still not be useful in that moment, or clear and not yours to say. Something can arrive through you and not be your assignment.

Clarity is not permission.

A few months later, I received another very clear message for that same person. He was about to leave in his car, and I suddenly felt a strong, unmistakable urgency to contact him. This time, I didn’t tell him everything or explain or make a prediction. I simply texted, “Be careful.” I’m not his mom, so that’s not a text I’d normally send.

Later, he told me that while he was driving, he started to look down to change the radio station and suddenly remembered my message. He looked back up just in time to see a truck stopped abruptly ahead of him, and he was able to move safely out of the way.

Same intuition, different discernment.

In the first situation, I shared too much detail too soon. In the second, I understood that my responsibility was not to control the outcome or explain anything I had received. It was to ask what was mine to do, and then do only that.

This is one of the core teachings inside Week 6 of Structured Intuition, in a lesson called “Scope of Action.” I could have called this lesson Mind Your Own Business. Because the question is not just, “What am I receiving?” It’s also, “What is mine to do with what I am receiving?” That distinction protects your energy, your relationships, and the integrity of your intuition.

In Structured Intuition, you’ll learn how your intuition actually moves through your system, so you can recognize it, stay with it, and use it in real life. We look at what happens after the first intuitive signal arrives, why you may notice something clearly, then lose it, and how sensitive people often absorb too much information and take too much responsibility. We give the intuitive process structure.

You’ll begin to notice your own patterns. Maybe you explain away your first response. Maybe you override it because someone else’s emotions become louder than your own clarity. Maybe you flood yourself with more information until you can no longer tell what you originally noticed. Once you can see those patterns in real time, intuition becomes much more stable and usable because you finally have boundaries around the process.

The lesson I am sharing today is about discernment in action, the space between receiving and responding. It’s about learning to pause long enough to ask, “Is this mine?” “Would sharing this serve?” “What level of detail is appropriate?”

One of the things I see most often with sensitive people is that they confuse noticing with responsibility. The moment they perceive something clearly, they feel obligated to intervene, explain, warn, rescue, fix, or carry. But intuition doesn’t make you responsible for another person’s path.

Those questions sound deceptively simple, but they completely change the quality of intuitive work because they move you out of over-responsibility and into discernment. They help you stop confusing access with assignment and allow you to receive information without immediately turning it into intervention.

That is what I mean by structured intuition. It isn’t intuition stripped of mystery or tenderness. Structure, in this sense, is a container. It gives your intuition enough steadiness to remain clear, grounded, and useful.

If you are sensitive, perceptive, or intuitive, you already notice more than you realize. People assume something is wrong with their intuition when really, they just haven’t learned how to work with it yet.

This week’s piece looks at what happens after something already feels clear—and why that clarity doesn’t always hold. This is the central problem Structured Intuition is designed to address: how what you notice gets layered, interpreted, and often overridden before you can use it.

If you’d like a clearer sense of how your intuition tends to show up, there’s a short quiz here. There’s a video at the end that approaches this from a slightly different angle.

“How could I have missed all the signs? It was going wrong from the first.” My client was upset about a situation at work, yet more frustrated with herself than anything else. Her new job was problematic, but what troubled her most wasn’t the situation itself. It was the sense that she should have known.

I reached for my notebook and flipped back through the past few sessions.

In the first week, she described the role as promising, but mentioned a moment in the interview process that had given her pause. She didn’t dwell on it. It didn’t seem significant enough.

The following week, she noticed a pattern in how decisions were being made. Something about it didn’t sit well. She assumed she needed more context and more understanding of workplace culture.

By the third week, there had been a conversation with her manager that left her unsettled. She could explain why, but she moved on from it quickly.

Each time, something had registered. Not strongly, but clearly enough that she mentioned it in her sessions.

She hadn’t missed the signs. If anything, she had been careful with them. She noticed them, told me about them, set them aside, and kept going.

You didn’t miss the signs

She called it second guessing, which is what most people call it, but that isn’t quite right. Second guessing suggests uncertainty from the beginning, as though nothing was clear and you were trying to work your way toward an answer.

What I see more often is simpler than that: something is clear at the beginning. It may be subtle, but it’s not vague. A shift in the body, a change in attention, a simple sense that something fits or doesn’t. It registers before it has been thought through.

And then, very quickly, something else begins to gather around it. Thoughts come in. Context fills out the picture. You consider what would make sense, what would be fair, what you might be missing. You begin to account for consequences, for other people, for how things might develop over time.

None of that is out of place. It’s how we make sense of things, especially when something matters. But as that happens, the experience changes. What was initially a single, direct response becomes one part of a larger field. It is joined by other forms of information—more detailed, more structured, and easier to explain. The original intuitive signal is still present, but it is no longer distinct in the same way. At that point, a shift becomes almost inevitable. You respond to the whole field, rather than to the initial response.

People describe it to me like this:

“I thought about it more.”

“I realized I needed more information.”

“I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.”

All of that is reasonable, but something has changed. The first response hasn’t been replaced. It has been layered over. And once enough layers are present, it becomes difficult to tell where things began.

Why clarity seems to disappear

And so interpretation starts to drift. If you’re looking back from the outcome, it can seem as though your intuition wasn’t reliable. That it shifted, or faded, or failed to hold.

But if you trace the sequence more carefully, a different picture comes into view: there was an initial response, additional considerations, and then a movement towards stability—something you could explain, justify, or stand behind.

The decision comes from there, which is why the outcome can look inconsistent. The sequence itself does not.

When I read my notes back to my client, she sat very still. She realized she hadn’t missed the intuitive signal, but instead the ability to stay with it once everything else entered the picture.

In the video below, I call this layers, mostly because that’s what it feels like when you’re in it. Nothing has gone wrong. Instead, different kinds of information are arriving and then being treated as if they belong together.

• A direct response

• An interpretation that builds on it

• Practical considerations

• Awareness of other people

Each of these moves differently and has its place, but when they are not distinguished, they begin to blend. And then it becomes difficult to tell what you are responding to, so clarity feels unstable

What makes this particularly challenging is that the later layers have advantages.

They’re easier to work with. You can explain them without much effort. They hold up if someone questions you. They sound like the kind of thinking we’ve been trained to trust, especially when something matters.

The first intuitive response doesn’t behave that way. It doesn’t build a case or argue for itself. It doesn’t become more convincing the longer you sit with it. It simply registers. That means, in a crowded field, it’s rarely the loudest voice.

Once you can see how intuition works for you, your experience begins to shift. The layers are still there, but you can recognize them as layers, understanding what arrived first, and what developed after. You can feel the difference between something that registered immediately and something that formed in response to it.

That distinction is small, but it changes how decisions are made. It allows the initial response to remain in view, even as other information comes in.

I’ve been working with this process directly for a number of years, both in my own experience and with clients, and it’s what I’ve built my small course Structured Intuition around.

The focus isn’t on getting clearer signals. It’s on understanding what happens after something has already registered, so that what you notice can remain usable rather than getting absorbed into everything that follows.

If you recognize this pattern in yourself, you can read more about it here:

Explore Structured Intuition

Nothing was wrong with my client’s intuition.

And there is nothing wrong with yours.

You simply need a structure to work with it.

If you’d like to work with this more directly, you can join Intellect & Intuition. Paid subscribers receive the seasonal gift, The Intuitive Discernment Practice, along with 20% off all courses, including Structured Intuition.

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Most people are intuitive.

In the same way, most people are musical. This can be hard for me to admit as a former music professor. But I also conducted the children’s choir at my church and was executive director of a youth symphony, so I do feel this strongly.

In music, there’s an underlying capacity, ability, or gift. You can hear when something is off. You can recognize what fits, what doesn’t, and when something lands. You don’t have to be trained for that part. You don’t even need practice.

But being able to hear it isn’t the same as being able to do something with it.

That’s where training comes in.

My late husband had perfect pitch. He could hear immediately when something was off. But he didn’t have formal musical training, so he didn’t have a way to work with what he heard. If anything, it made things more frustrating. The sensitivity was there, but without training and practice, it wasn’t usable.

Intuition works the same way.

You might notice something right away — a reaction, a sense, a quiet knowing. And then, not long after, you’re not sure anymore.

You think about it. You take in more information. You turn it over, consider what it means, what you should do. By the time you try to use what you noticed, it’s no longer the same.

That’s where things start to get confusing.

You feel clear, and then you don’t. You notice something, and then you question it. You make a decision, and later find yourself revisiting it.

After a while, it starts to look like inconsistency. Like your intuition changes. Like you can’t rely on what you notice, even when it felt obvious at the start.

So you try to compensate.

You wait for stronger clarity. You gather more information. You try to feel more certain before you act.

And still, the same thing keeps happening.

The clarity is there. It just doesn’t stay.

Most advice about intuition focuses on getting clearer signals. Feeling more. Trusting more. Becoming more intuitive.

Sometimes that helps. But when it doesn’t, it leaves you in a strange position. You’re noticing something real, but you can’t hold onto it in a way that feels usable.

So the question becomes: what’s actually happening here?

Because if the clarity is there at the beginning, and then it changes, the problem isn’t whether you’re intuitive.

Something is happening in between. You’ve probably felt that shift, even if you couldn’t quite name it.

I made you something:

It’s a short course. I called it Structured Intuition.

It’s not that your intuition needs to be controlled. But instead, like music, even a little training gives your intuitive ability somewhere to land.

Inside the course, you’ll learn how to:

• recognize your first intuitive signal

• see what happens to it after it arrives

• understand what is and isn’t yours to act on

• receive without shutting down or becoming overwhelmed

• make decisions that feel clear and stable

You don’t need to try harder. Instead, Structured Intuition teaches you to understand what’s already happening and work with it directly.

If you’ve taken the quiz, this is the next step.

It’s where you stop trying to figure out your intuition and start working with it in real time.

Because your intuition isn’t unreliable. It’s being changed before you can use it.

Explore the course here:

Explore Structured Intuition