I’ve never had a problem cutting people off. It’s one of the things about me that unsettles people when they find out, since I don’t give warnings. I gather my evidence, and sometimes that takes me a minute, but once I’m certain, there are no conversations, no closure, no going back. I’m happy to burn a bridge I’m never crossing again. I’ve always been this way, and it’s protected me more times than I can count.

I recently ended two friendships, one with a woman and one with a man. The circumstances were different, but the outcome was the same. We just weren’t on the same page anymore, and something about their energy felt off. I didn’t feel I could trust where things might go, since neither of them had a strong enough sense of self. So I let both friendships go. There was no drama or big announcement – just a quiet ending from a grown woman.

This is the part I really want to talk about, because hardly anyone does. After I cut them off, I felt the urge to do a return-to-sender ritual. Not because anything is wrong – my business is fine, my money is flowing, and my life is good. It’s because ending a friendship only severs the connection; it doesn’t undo what’s already been sent your way, and it doesn’t stop someone from sending more after you’ve closed the door. Blocking them only removes access. It doesn’t mean they forgot your name. It also might piss them off. The people who handle a fallout gracefully were never the problem. It’s the ones who already had weird energy, the ones with no sense of self, who really struggle with it. And when someone keeps talking about you night after night, they’re doing something, even if they don’t realize it.

So I’m doing a return-to-sender ritual as routine maintenance.

What Actually Gets Sent

I want to make sure you understand what I mean. When women hear about work being done against them, they picture something formal, like candles, ceremonies, or someone’s abuelita working in a back room. That kind of thing happens more often than you might think, and ignoring it won’t keep you safe. Still, most of what gets sent your way isn’t that organized.

Focused envy is a kind of working. Resentment that gets replayed every night is a working too. When someone keeps telling others what you did to them, again and again, with anger each time, that’s also a working. Intent is the engine, and it doesn’t need an altar. A person doesn’t have to believe in any of this to be doing it. Some of the strongest negative energy in a woman’s life comes from people who would laugh at the idea of a ritual.

Distance doesn’t solve everything. The block button can’t fix it either. People I’ve cut off can’t see my posts, text me, or contact me anywhere. But that doesn’t change their intentions. What someone sends isn’t limited to apps.

Family is part of this too, and I know nobody wants to hear it, so I’ll be direct. The people who’ve known you the longest often hold the oldest resentments, and being blood doesn’t protect you from that. Maybe it’s a relative whose life stayed small while yours grew, or someone who feels like they’re losing a competition you never agreed to. Some of the heaviest work gets traced back to a person who smiles at you across a dinner table. Cutting off family is the hardest thing to do, and many of you have done it. But the same rule applies: closing the door doesn’t erase what already came through.

The Second Half of the Cut

How I see it these days is that when you cut someone off, you’ve only done half the severance. That’s the physical part. They’re gone from your phone, your social media, your plans, and your future. That step is important, and many women never even reach it, so if you have, much respect.

But there’s also an energetic part that almost everyone skips. Whatever was already sent toward you before you cut ties is still on its way, if not already underway. And whatever gets sent after – all that heat from someone sitting alone with the story of what you did to them – still falls on you, even if you never hear from them again. You cleared your life, but left the atmosphere unsettled.

That’s the purpose of a return-to-sender. It isn’t about revenge because you don’t have to name anyone. You don’t need a suspect, a theory, or any proof of malice, and you shouldn’t spend your night trying to figure out who’s to blame for your life or money being stalled. That only leads to paranoia, and paranoia is poison. The petition is simply addressed to whoever. Whatever was sent against me returns to the one who sent it. You’re not targeting a specific person. You’re redirecting everything that was never meant for you back to wherever it came from.

And if nothing was ever sent your way, then nothing happens. This work can’t affect an innocent person, because it doesn’t go looking for one. It simply follows what was sent and returns it to where it started. If there’s no origin, the candle just burns down on your table, and you’ve lost nothing but an hour. Whoever sent something decided for themselves what would bounce back.

What This Has To Do With Your Money

The rootworkers before us already knew money was a target, so they created a special tool for it. Reversal candles come in pairs, each meant for a different part of life. Red and black candles reverse negative energy aimed at your love life. White and black candles are for your health. There’s also a green and black candle made to turn back crossed conditions on money and business. They made this tool because they saw that money problems tend to show up first and hit the hardest. They figured this out long before anyone started selling courses about abundance blocks.

Money is often targeted because it’s the most apparent part of your life. People who don’t know you personally can still see your business flourish. They see your prices go up or watch your life expand. Because your financial success is visible, it’s also where anyone may direct their envy or criticism. And the women most likely to be reading this – those building something meaningful and protecting it – are exactly the women with lives worth watching.

You don’t do this work because you’re under attack. You do it because being visible attracts attention. Just as you cleanse your space, ward your home, and salt your doorway, you occasionally need to return everything that’s accumulated that was never yours.

Read more

I used to watch a friend of mine settle and wonder, is this really what we’re doing now? I had a front-row seat to her life. Plans that never went anywhere, men she made excuses for, and a bigger vision for her career that she always talked about but never built. She was the last person I ever expected it from. When I first met her, I thought she was a warrior – accomplished, well-traveled, and self-made. She had real achievements, and I respected that, which matters here, because settling doesn’t always look like weakness. Most of the time, it looks like a capable woman who’s lost touch with her desires

I would sit there listening, genuinely confused. I wasn’t following that path. I was focused on building my own life, with a list of things I wanted and no plans to compromise. Thankfully, her way of settling never rubbed off on me, but I saw how it affected the women who spent more time with her. Their complaints started to sound like hers. Their plans became less clear. The men in their lives seemed to get worse, and their excuses for those men kept piling up. No one made any real decisions. And after a while, everyone in the group ended up with the same limits.

Settling is contagious, yet no one really talks about it. It spreads through women you love, women who’d be there for you, women who want the best for you, at least in theory. It also spreads through poor advice. If you hear “he’s not that bad” enough times from someone who has put up with worse, it stops sounding like her situation and starts sounding like wisdom. And if you watched your closest friend ignore her own goals for long enough, your personal sense of urgency can start to feel over the top. In any group of women, the standard tends to shift toward what most people are willing to put up with. That standard usually drops because it’s easier to tolerate than to build something better, and there are always more people choosing the easier path. But contagion was only part of what I saw. The rest was even worse, and that’s what pushed me to write this.

The Part Where They Start To Hate You

A woman who’s decided to settle doesn’t want to stand next to a woman who hasn’t. She might not be able to explain why, but your higher standards are a mirror with a spotlight on it. If you’re refusing what she accepted, it shows her decision was optional, which means she chose it. And nobody wants to sit with that. It’s much easier for her to decide there’s something wrong with you. That’s when the recruitment starts. It usually isn’t obvious and might even come across as concern or playful teasing.

One night, this friend – let’s call her Stacy – asked me to go to a party with her. I said no because I just wasn’t in the mood, and I didn’t feel like I had to explain. She told me that by staying in, I wasn’t living my life. But every day, I was living fully, focused on things she never noticed or asked about. What she really meant was that I wasn’t living her life. For her, living meant going out, so seeing someone at home working on something didn’t seem like living at all. People who’ve settled can’t understand choices they haven’t made. Underneath her comment was the real request, and it was never about the party. It was: come do what I’m doing, so what I’m doing feels less like a choice.

I told her something along these lines: “Just because I’m not going to the party tonight doesn’t mean I’m not living my life. I have things I’m doing every single day.” She was upset, and it took me a while to figure out why. My saying no wasn’t about rejecting her. But to her it was proof that her nights were a choice, not something she had to do, and she wanted me there so they wouldn’t feel that way anymore.

That was when I started to see things clearly. The end of that friendship took longer, as it often does, showing up in small moments like the way her face changed when I shared good news. I’d tell her about a win and get a quick, flat congratulations before she changed the subject. If I talked about something I was working on, I could see her interest fade right away. She never said anything mean, but she didn’t have to. I could sense the shift and began to hold back. Eventually, I stopped sharing it at all. By then, I had learned what every woman in proximity to someone who settles eventually learns: your success feels like an insult to someone who chooses less.

What Settling Does To Your Money

You need to say your goals out loud, not just repeat them as empty affirmations. When a goal stays in your head, it’s easy to ignore or let your inner critic talk you out of it. Speaking your real goal, with real numbers, in front of someone else turns it into a commitment. Every woman who has built something understands this. That’s why they invest in masterminds, coaches, and communities built around ambition. They’re looking for people who will hold them accountable and not accept excuses.

Think about what happens when everyone around you is settling. You can share your real goal and get a half-hearted congratulations, hear someone say ‘must be nice,’ or deal with fake concern. Or you can share a smaller version of your goal, or say nothing at all. Most women end up saying nothing and call it privacy, and sometimes that’s true. But often, it’s because there’s never been anyone safe to share it with. So on tough days, when you need someone to remind you what you’re working toward, there’s no one, because no one knows. You end up relying only on your own beliefs, with no support, which is the psychological equivalent of holding your breath.

The women who’ve invested in support are not smarter than you. They have simply found people to witness their growth. They have created a system where someone expects them to show up, asks about their progress, and keeps them accountable. You can build that kind of support too. While it can take longer than most people admit to find those women, there is one witness you already have right now. This witness has heard every version of your goal and has never doubted it. That witness is you. I know this might sound strange, but stay with me.

Read more

This week, I landed another big client and told my mother about it. She replied with a voice note offering her advice. She said, “Live like you don’t have it. Be frugal. Buy only what’s necessary so you can save.” Then, almost in the same breath, she said, “It’s not that you have to live poorly, it’s that you have to live smart and abundant.” To me, those two ideas seem to contradict each other.

Living frugally isn’t the same as living abundantly. These are two different messages, and I think my mother truly believes one while the other is just something she’s heard before. I don’t follow her advice about money anymore. I tried it, but living like a pauper only taught me how to go without.

I Already Lived That Way

I learned how to live without much because I did it for years and got pretty good at it. When the money ran out and nothing was coming in, I decided that time had to matter. I treated it as a lesson I was supposed to learn and let myself settle into it. I made a home out of that season – a beautiful one, really. I became skilled at making almost nothing seem like enough, and part of me felt proud of that.

Subscribe now

At some point, I began to think this was just how things would always be. This was my life now, and all I could do was show I could handle it. So I did exactly that. I kept my head down and didn’t talk about what I wanted. I ate the can of beans and smiled, and I really meant it, because I believed God was watching to see how well I could go without. It felt as though complaining the least would eventually be rewarded. It wasn’t. No one rewards you for being good at deprivation. You just get used to it, and the more you do, the longer you stay.

I know I don’t need much, and I could live that way again if I had to. But neediness and desire are not the same thing. Neediness feels desperate, and what I wanted back then wasn’t about desperation. I wanted things simply because I wanted them. I desired things because I’m allowed to desire. There were things I wanted in my life then, including the luxuries I now have. But I didn’t get them because I proved I could live without them first.

That’s why I don’t follow my mother’s advice about money. It’s not that she’s wrong. She spent years struggling with money and had to figure things out on her own, so she pieced together what worked, and she offers it to me because she loves me. But she’s handing it down to a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. So instead of following her advice, I do the exact opposite of what she’s suggesting. I choose to live in excess intentionally, and I encourage any woman reading this to try it too.

What Excess Actually Means

Excess simply means having more than you need. For a long time, you’ve only allowed yourself what’s necessary, using necessity as the standard for everything. You ask yourself: “Do I need this? Can I justify it? Is there a cheaper option?” Most of your wants never made it past those questions.

This isn’t about spending money. You’re not buying things you can’t afford, or living beyond your means. Excess here is the deliberate use of everything you already own, all at once, for no reason except that you exist. The perfume you’ve saved, the jewelry tucked away, the unopened wine or champagne bottle, the dress with its tags still on – you own all of it, but you haven’t used any of it.

It needs to be excessive, not moderate, because moderation is already your habit. You’re used to only a careful amount of pleasure, and that’s what needs to change. You can’t undo years of holding back by just allowing a little more. It has to be more than what feels reasonable, or you won’t notice a thing.

Self-Worship Is Not Self-Care

Self-care has been marketed to you as maintenance. Rest so you can get back to work. Take a bath so you can be useful again. Drink water, get your 10,000 steps in, do the face mask, and then return ready to serve. All of it is framed around your capacity to keep functioning for other people, which is why it often feels like one more thing on the list.

Self-worship isn’t about being productive. You’re not doing it to recover, and you’re not getting ready for anything else. You’re simply treating yourself as someone who deserves care, and that care is the point. That’s why it should feel a bit over the top. Giving yourself just enough attention is maintenance. Giving yourself more than you need is self-worship. If you’ve never experienced your own generosity, you probably won’t notice it when someone else gives it to you.

You’ll notice the word makes you uneasy. Worship usually means looking up to something greater than yourself, so calling this self-worship probably feels like too much. That discomfort is the same feeling that tells you to save the good perfume for another time. You learned that focusing this kind of attention on yourself is seen as arrogance, and that a decent woman should direct it toward others. So it feels excessive, which is correct, because that’s what it is.

The rest is for paid subscribers. Behind this paywall is a three-night ritual of excess, the three rules that make it work, and what tends to come up while you’re doing it. Subscribe for a new ritual every Friday.

Read more

I am so sick of the fake positivity in the manifestation world. No, I’m not talking about manifestation itself – I know it works, and I’m not here to debate that. What bothers me is what women are being taught along with it, which is that certain feelings are dangerous and you’d better not have them.

When I was struggling the most with money, I trained myself not to think about being broke. That’s what I was told to do: don’t focus on the negative, focus on the positive, because what you focus on is what you attract. So I wouldn’t let myself think about not being able to pay rent. Whenever the thought came up, I would turn it around. I’d affirm the exact opposite: “Money comes to me easily. I always have more than enough.” I would say these things even while staring at a negative bank account.

But I wasn’t affirming from some abundant place inside me. I was affirming because I was terrified that if I let myself think about lack for even a minute, more lack would come. So, fear was really in charge the whole time. I stayed stuck in that pattern for a long time. Manifestation does work, but in my case, it was fueled by the very thing I wanted to avoid.

Money Doesn’t Just Appear

I sat through a masterclass once where a woman talked about how much she loved logging into her bank account. Every time she opened it, she’d imagine a large number waiting for her. And every time, a large number was indeed waiting for her. I remember sitting there thinking, “Well, of course it is.”

But she never mentioned the things she’d done to get there. She only described picturing the number and then seeing it in her account, and she made it sound so effortless. I knew it wasn’t that simple. She had an audience, clients, and a business that brought in money every day, which explained why the number was there. Still, I tried it. Every morning for weeks, I opened my bank account, closed my eyes, and pictured the number I wanted. The whole time, it felt silly. There was nothing there.

The truth is that money doesn’t just materialize in your bank account because you wished it so. Someone has to find you, stick around long enough to want what you’re selling, and trust you enough to pay. It’s a chain, and every link matters. I was standing at the end of that chain, hoping for money to appear, even though the first steps weren’t there.

I want to be clear that I wasn’t lazy about it. I was working constantly. But I was neurodivergent and didn’t understand what that meant yet, which looked like me hyperfocusing on the parts of my business that felt safe and avoiding the parts that actually mattered. I built the back end, and built it beautifully. I put all my energy into systems and structure, the things no one could see, and avoided the visible work of getting in front of people, which was the only thing that would have brought in any money at all. Avoidance is part of how a neurodivergent brain works. The most important task is often the one you avoid for months. So I knew exactly what would bring people in; I just wasn’t doing it, and I had a daily practice of imagining money appearing in an account that had no reason to receive any.

Future-Faking Your Own Life

The manifestation instruction goes like this: don’t look at your reality. Your reality is in the 3D, and you’re trying to get to the 5D, and the 5D version hasn’t caught up yet, so if you keep looking at what’s in front of you, you’ll stay stuck in it. Instead, step into the life of the woman you’re becoming. Feel it as though it’s already here. Live from the end.

You know what that is? That’s called future-faking yourself. At least that’s what it felt like to me. It wasn’t inspiring or visionary. It felt like I was lying to myself completely and just hoping that lie would somehow turn into the truth. And for me there was another layer. I tend to take things literally. That’s just how my brain works. So trying to imagine a life I couldn’t see, to embody a version of myself who didn’t yet exist, or to feel wealthy while I was counting coins, felt almost impossible.

I couldn’t envision her. Doubt filled me, and it made sense. I was looking at my life, and my life was looking right back at me. So I did the only thing I could do. I tried not to think about my bank account or the rent. I kept quiet about it. Avoiding things became my routine, and I got pretty good at it.

The Shame Spiral

When it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t, there is only one explanation available to you in that framework. You did it wrong. You weren’t positive enough. You let a negative thought slip through. You said the affirmation but didn’t feel it. Your vibration was off. You need to want it more, or want it less, or detach from the outcome, or get more specific, or stop being so specific.

Every time you fail, it just feels like proof that you’re doing something wrong. So you double down. You repeat more affirmations, watch your thoughts even more closely, and put even more effort into fixing what’s going on in your mind, even though nothing in your actual life changes.

I also set myself impossible challenges during those years – unattainable goals with no infrastructure underneath them and no honest assessment of what I could actually do. And when I didn’t hit them, which I never did, I blamed myself. I got stuck in that cycle for far too long.

The Missing Piece

Here’s what was missing, and it took me years to uncover: your subconscious is running a story that was written when you were a child, before you could evaluate it, and it tells you what you’re allowed to have. You did not choose it, and you cannot talk it out of anything.

Affirmations are only words. They show up in your conscious mind, but that’s not where the story lives. So you can stand in front of a mirror saying, “Money comes to me easily” for a year while deep down, another voice says, “No, it doesn’t, and you don’t deserve it anyway.” There’s a mismatch. You desperately want the thing you’re trying to manifest, but underneath you don’t even believe you can have it.

Pay attention, because this is the part that really matters: you manifest from the story, not from the affirmation. So if the story is based on fear, then fear is what you get back. It doesn’t matter if you have a negative thought or not. Fear was the fuel the entire time, powering every affirmation you made, and that’s what you end up building.

But it’s not just that these methods don’t work – they can actually make things worse. Psychologists call this the backfire effect. When you try to challenge a belief with a statement that contradicts it, repeating that statement can actually make the original belief stronger. In fact, research shows that people with low self-esteem who repeat positive self-statements often end up feeling worse than when they started.

Leave a comment

So every morning I stood there telling my empty account that money comes to me easily, I was just making that belief even stronger. That’s why it never worked for me before. It always felt fake, and honestly, it was. I was working against a dysregulated nervous system and a subconscious that had already made up its mind, and the words were never going to penetrate that. You have to work through your story first, then you can manifest. There are teachers who say this, but that wasn’t my experience. The space I was in used affirmations as the primary method, with no extra steps.

Get Fucking Angry

So the fear is the fuel, which means the real question isn’t how to stop feeling it. It’s what to do with it, and the answer isn’t to smother it and hope for better. Fear makes you shrink. It freezes you, and everything about it says, “Wait, don’t move, don’t make it worse.”

Anger is the opposite. Anger is your body preparing to do something. It’s mobilizing. And unlike the calm you’ve been manufacturing, you can’t fake it into existence or hold it down for long. It’s honest by nature, which is exactly why the world that trained you out of your feelings is most afraid of it.

Anger also has a direction; fear does not. Fear only tells you something is wrong, without any guidance. Anger tells you what’s wrong, who’s involved, and that it shouldn’t be accepted. Every woman I know who finally raised her rate, or left, or stopped doing free work for people who never asked what it cost her, did it from something much closer to fury than to peace.

So if you’re stuck because your manifestations haven’t moved, and you’ve been affirming your way around it, get fucking angry. Not as another technique, but because you have every right to be, and because what you’ve been doing so far has kept you exactly where you are.

The Practice

This is a somatic practice that happens in your body, and takes about an hour.

1. Let yourself be angry about one specific thing:

Focus on just one thing. Think about the block that hasn’t shifted, the number that stays the same, or the situation you keep avoiding. Bring it to mind intentionally and allow yourself to feel all the emotions you’ve been holding back. Don’t try to see it differently. Don’t search for a lesson or ask what it’s supposed to teach you. Let it feel as unfair as it really is.

2. Get it out of your body:

You can’t get rid of rage just by thinking about it. It needs to move out through your body and your voice. Play whatever music helps you get into that feeling. For me, it’s anything by Korn, Metallica, or Marilyn Manson, loud enough to drown out everything else. Move your body – dance, even if it’s messy. Scream into a pillow, hit the bed, or stomp your feet, jump on the bed. Let the feelings rise up and leave your body. Keep going until you’re tired, which will probably happen sooner than you expect, because this takes real effort. If you can’t make much noise where you live, use a pillow to muffle the sound. Hold it over your face and scream into it, or press your head into the bed and let it out.

3. Rest, and then be good to yourself:

This is the part I don’t want you to skip.

Lie down and take some deep breaths. Notice that the weight you felt an hour ago is no longer weighing on you. Next, do something nice for yourself, just because you can. Take a bath, order your favorite food, bake something, pour a glass of wine, or treat yourself to a sweet treat.

Don’t do this to raise your vibration or as a reward. Do it because living in fear and always forcing yourself to be positive is exhausting as fuck, and you finally set that burden down for a while.

Where I Am Now

What changed for me wasn’t about getting better at manifesting. It was finally learning to understand myself. I know how my mind works now, where my limits are, what overwhelms me, and what burnout looks like before it happens. I don’t push past those limits anymore. I also don’t set impossible goals and then blame myself for not reaching them. Which means the shame spiral has nothing to feed on. It ended because I stopped supplying it.

I’m not dysregulated anymore. I’m in my body, and I can feel what’s happening in it, including the things I spent years refusing to feel. And now when I want something, it feels possible. Not because I’ve gotten better at pretending, but because I look at what I’ve already built and use that as evidence for what’s coming. I’m not manifesting against a story about why I don’t deserve it. I’ve already faced that story. That work came first. It always has to. You’ve spent long enough faking a feeling you didn’t have. Let yourself feel what’s real for you now.

I Took the Long Way

I spent years repeating affirmations that didn’t change anything, feeling stuck in shame, and not realizing that an old story was the thing running everything. Since no one guided me the way I needed, I had to figure it all out on my own.

That’s why I created my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. Every morning I identify what’s actually running underneath what you’ve told me, what it’s doing to you, and what has to go, then I give you the exact move to make that day. After fourteen days, you’ll be able to see the story you’ve been manifesting from. And once you recognize it, you can stop letting it shape your life.

The investment is $397. That’s the difference between understanding why it hasn’t worked and getting to the part where it does. I took the long way, but you don’t have to.

Find the story you're manifesting from

There was a time in my life when I was so broke that I honestly didn’t know if I would survive it. I had never felt that kind of darkness before. I was lost, had no answers, and felt completely alone, and my thoughts were destroying me. There were nights I didn’t want to live anymore because I couldn’t see an end to any of it, and it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced.

Then I would get a few days of seeing light. On those days, I’d make a plan or try something different to bring in money, and sometimes it worked, though it was never consistent enough to survive on. So the good days became their own cruelty, because they’d show me I was capable and then take it back, and I’d go under again. That went on for months.

When I Ran Out Of Ways To Do It Alone

Eventually, I hit my breaking point and was forced to move back home, which, aside from the struggle, was a hard call to make because it meant coming to terms with the fact that I could no longer do this on my own. And if I’m honest with you, I hadn’t been able to do it on my own for a while before I admitted it. I swallowed my pride, accepted my family’s help, and they bought me a plane ticket.

I thought I’d be there three months. Get in, work on my money, and get out. I stayed for over a year.

The Plan I Couldn’t Do

I went home to lock in and heal my money wounds, but I couldn’t do any of it. My nervous system was shot. I’d try to start simple tasks, but I just couldn’t begin, no matter how much I wanted to. I’d stare at something that should take 20 minutes and end up sitting there for hours, unable to do anything.

It was during that time that I found out the extent of my neurodivergence. I’d suspected something for years. I had friends with diagnoses, I would read things that sounded like me, and I figured I was somewhere on the spectrum but barely. What I learned that year was that I’d been masking my entire adult life, which had been doing damage all along, and I had just spent years running a business by myself with no support. That’s what took me out – years of carrying a load that was never going to be sustainable for the way my brain actually works, and I had no idea that’s what I was doing.

Once it came apart, I couldn’t put it back together. The masking stopped working, and I’ve never been able to go back. At the time, it felt like losing the only professional skill I had.

It wasn’t just burnout. This is what happens when you’re neurodivergent and force yourself through things that come easily to everyone else, without knowing that’s what you’re doing. You push past your limit because you don’t know it’s a limit. You think you’re just not trying hard enough. So you try harder, and you keep trying harder, and eventually your body stops negotiating and makes the decision for you. Mine did more than stop. Forcing it for so long woke something in me physically that I am still managing. My health had to come first. There was an order of operations, and I didn’t get to pick it.

What I Found When I Went Looking

I started Dark Feminine Codes during that time. My business had been burning me out and bringing in nothing, so I stopped working entirely. But I’d spent years working every single day, pouring everything into my business, trying to find the thing that would finally break me out of the famine I was in. Going from that to nothing wasn’t something I could do cold turkey. So I gave myself a new hobby. There was no pressure, and I got to be excited about something for the first time in a long time. I could also show up however I wanted because there was no identity attached to it, unlike with my other business.

Eventually, my health began to recover, and once it did, I finally had the room to do what I’d come home for. I was working through Existential Kink at the time, doing the practices in the book, and it sent me back through everything I believed about money. I went looking for the beliefs in my subconscious about what money is, what it does, who’s allowed to have it, what happens when you want too much of it, and what it said about me for having none. Every question I asked took me further back than I expected. What I found underneath those questions had nothing to do with money.

Being broke meant I had been abandoned. It meant God had looked at me and found me unworthy, and this was what I deserved, or that I was supposed to struggle to prove something, to earn my worthiness or my way back into the world and into being loved. Some days I was being punished. Some days I was being tested. Either way, the conclusion was the same: I wasn’t good enough, and this was the evidence. That’s what I had identified with. It wasn’t about being broke, but being the woman God left behind. And I wanted out so badly it was making me sick, but I still couldn’t move, because you cannot walk away from something you’re tethered to.

The rest is for paid subscribers. Behind this paywall is a nine-day cord-cutting ritual to sever the tether to the identity you’ve outgrown. I explain what that identity is, why it’s still running your decisions, walk you through the ritual, and tell you what changed for me on the other side. Subscribe for a new ritual every Friday.

Read more

No one I grew up around ever expected to be given anything. If you wanted something, you had to ask for it, and if you didn’t, that was your fault. These women had one piece of advice they gave each other: “Open your mouth and say what you want, because nobody is going to guess. Closed mouths don’t get fed.”

They were right. Say nothing and nothing comes. Wait to be offered and you’ll end up with whatever someone else thought was enough for you. But that advice leaves out something important, and that’s where things get interesting. Because when you keep your mouth shut about money, you are keeping it shut everywhere else too, and it does the most damage where you would never think to look.

Nobody Checks the Bedroom

Your sex life is the last place you’d look to explain your money. You’ll take apart your spending, your pricing, your childhood, but will never once think about what happens when your clothes come off, even though it’s the same closed mouth in both places.

It shows up when you get into bed with a partner you like and they’re going too fast or too hard, or in the wrong spot, or they try something they saw in porn that has never once worked for you. You know within seconds that this isn’t going anywhere good. But you don’t say anything.

You just shift your hips a little, trying to guide them without speaking, hoping they’ll notice. They don’t. So you force yourself to moan, because keeping quiet would be worse. Eventually you figure out that the quickest way to finish is to give them an ending, so you do. You fake your orgasm. Then they roll over, pleased with themselves, while you lie there in the dark, wide awake.

And if your friends ask you about it later, you’ll say it was fine, that you weren’t really in the mood anyway. You didn’t want to make it weird, or hurt their feelings, or turn a good night into a conversation about technique. Every one of those excuses is a way of saying their experience was more important than yours. You would rather fake an orgasm than tell them to slow down.

Now Look at Your Money

You expect your work to speak for itself. That’s the good girl rule, and you’ve followed it whether you work for someone else or run your own business. It’s why you’ve spent years doing your best and waiting for recognition. But then someone else gets the promotion, or a client chooses another woman whose work you know isn’t as strong as yours. You end up thinking you just needed to work harder.

Subscribe now

So you work harder, but working harder only goes so far. You start giving more than you’re paid for, staying late on tasks no one is billing for, and perfecting work that’s already done, all in the hope that someone will notice your contributions. No one says anything. Why would they? Your actions don’t show that you want anything in return.

After a few years, resentment starts to build, but you have nowhere to direct it, so you blame yourself. You tell yourself to be more grateful and to stop keeping score. Then you repeat the cycle, because working hard with your head down is the only way you know. Meanwhile, the woman who spoke up about what she wanted got exactly that.

Why It Never Gets Corrected

This is hard to notice when you’re in it because the system works. It just doesn’t work for you.

Your partner had a great night. They tell their friends you’re amazing in bed, and they mean it, because you gave them exactly what they wanted and never made things complicated. The client got a bargain and sent you three referrals because you were so easy to work with. Everyone around you seems to be having an amazing time. You’re the only one who isn’t.

No one complains, and that’s the problem. There’s no feedback or anyone telling you that you’re doing something wrong. Keeping your mouth closed costs you nothing today, but the real cost takes years to show up. By your mid-thirties, you realize that it’s been years since your income has grown. And you also can’t remember the last time someone made you cum.

This Isn’t Generosity

Generosity is a choice; it means you decide to give. But what you’re doing is letting go of your own preferences before anyone even knows what they are. This gets in the way of what you want most. You say you want real intimacy and to be truly known, but you’ve spent years altering yourself to be accepted, doing whatever it takes to keep whoever you’re with pleased. With your partner, who they are getting to know isn’t really you. So when intimacy doesn’t happen, it’s not because they missed seeing you. It’s because they were never actually seeing the real you.

You did the same thing in your career, and now that version of you is what you get hired for. Once they know you won’t say no, you become the answer to every problem nobody wants. What grows is the workload, not the pay, and not your position. You built a reputation on being accommodating, and it’s the only thing anyone thinks to call you for.

You Know Something’s Wrong

You already know things aren’t working. That much is clear. You feel it in your relationships, and you feel it in your career. It’s been going on so long that it barely surprises you anymore.

But you’re missing the other side of things. It’s not just about what’s wrong, but about what you actually want instead. In the bedroom, you knew something felt off, but you couldn’t articulate what you wanted your partner to do instead. With work, maybe it’s the position, more money, or the role you’d prefer.

There’s a reason for this. You’ve spent your life learning how to read other people. You can walk into a room and quickly sense who’s upset, who needs support, and what everyone wants before they even say it. That’s a real skill you’ve developed since you were young. But in exchange, you never learned to focus on yourself. No one ever asked what you wanted and waited for your answer, so you never had to figure it out. Eventually, you just stopped knowing what to say.

There’s also something you might not want to admit. Sometimes, not knowing what you want actually protects you. If you don’t have an answer, no one can reject it. You never have to find out if your desires are too much, if your partner would say no, or if others would think you’re asking for too much. Keeping things vague has kept you safe, but it also meant missing out on everything you never asked for.

So you fall back on what’s familiar. You work harder, try to please others even more, and hope someone will notice you. But none of it works, and it feels like that’s all you can do. You can’t ask for something if you’ve never allowed yourself to want it.

Where This Actually Starts

Before you can ask anyone for anything, you have to find out what you want, and you can’t do that with somebody else in the way. There’s no way around it. Even if you woke up tomorrow with the nerve to tell someone exactly what you wanted, you’d have nothing to tell them.

• Treat yourself to the kind of night you wish someone else would plan for you. If you want romance, create it for yourself. Light candles, pour some wine, set out roses – whatever you’ve hoped a partner would do. Take your time setting things up, since that’s part of the experience.

• Skip the porn, since watching something is just another way to escape, and you already know how to do that. Stay present for this moment.

• Next, explore how you like to be touched. Where, how much pressure, and what you want more of. Spend an hour on this and don’t rush to the end, since finishing quickly isn’t the goal.

• You’ll probably find yourself rushing. You might catch yourself trying to get it over with, treating your body like a task to get through, and that’s the real exercise. It’s the same thing you do with everyone else, but here is the one place you can watch it happen with nothing on the line.

What Happens Instead

The women I work with don’t become difficult. That’s always the fear – that saying what you want will somehow make you a problem – but it just isn’t true. What happens is that people finally see who you really are, and the ones who matter adjust without any trouble at all.

Your partner says okay, slows down, and even seems relieved that you spoke up. Clients agree to what you asked for, and afterward, you feel something new – a feeling you can’t quite describe – which is what it feels like to get exactly what you asked for.

That’s what my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive is for. Each morning, I help you see what you’re avoiding, what it’s costing you, and what needs to change. Then I give you a clear action to take that day – not a plan for the future, but something you do before the day ends.

After two weeks, the good girl stops answering for you. You'll know what you want, you'll say it to the person who can give it to you, and you'll stop waiting for anyone to guess.

Start Getting Fed

This year I’ve been growing fast, and I don’t only mean with money. My work found its people, my name started reaching places I never expected, and the life I spent years building in the dark finally started showing. And right on schedule, some of my close friends changed on me. It wasn’t just that I was growing; I was moving past them, and sometimes that’s where friendships reach their limit.

The change was subtle, which somehow made it worse. That’s when I realized that not everyone watching you succeed is happy for you. There was the friend whose congratulations started to feel a little insincere, who made jabs dressed as jokes, or gave compliments that somehow hurt – suddenly, distance coming from someone who used to be so warm when I had less. Although, it was never obvious enough to confront or clear enough to prove, I still felt it, like noticing a draft in a warm house without knowing which window it’s coming through.

I’ve had to cut several people off this year. Before, it was easy for anyone to access me, but that changed when I finally understood something about elevation that nobody prepares you for: the higher you climb, the more eyes on you, and not all of them have good intentions. I could have let it get to me. I could have shrunk back down to a size that drew less attention, downplayed my achievements, or tried to be less noticeable. Women do that every day, and it costs them more than they realize. So instead, I chose a different path. I decided to alchemize it, to turn that attention into motivation and protect what I’ve built, starting with the thing that travels furthest without me – my name.

Because right now your name is in the mouths of people you don’t even fuck with. In conversations you’re not part of, group chats you’ll never see, held by people who smile in your face and people who have never even met you. This has always been the case for any successful woman whose achievements are visible, and there has always been protection for it. The women who came before us understood envy in ways we were taught to forget, and today I’m giving you their oldest defense.

The Oldest Belief on Earth: Evil Eye

My grandmother’s generation, hell even my mother’s, would’ve known immediately what I was feeling, because they had a name for it, one that almost every culture on this planet discovered on its own.

The evil eye is the single most widespread belief human beings have ever shared. It shows up in Mesopotamian incantations from 5,000 years ago, in Greece as mati, in Rome where people carved protections into doorways, in Turkey as nazar, in the Middle East as ayin hara, in Italy as malocchio, in Latin America as mal de ojo, and in India as drishti. Cultures that never met, separated by oceans and millennia, all came to the same conclusion: envy is not just a harmless feeling that remains within the person who feels it. It moves. It travels through a look, a word, or even attention itself, and it strikes whatever it lands on. This was never just a fringe belief held by the uneducated. Plutarch sat at dinner parties debating with philosophers how the evil eye worked, just as we might talk about any force of nature, because for the ancient mind, the only question was how it worked, not whether it did.

All of these cultures agreed that the evil eye targets anything clearly thriving, such as a healthy baby, a beautiful bride, an abundant harvest, or a prosperous home. People never thought the evil eye touched those struggling, because struggle draws pity, and pity doesn’t harm. The evil eye finds what is rising. Which means our ancestors, all of them, everywhere, understood something that modern positivity culture has spent a century unlearning: being seen doing well is a condition that requires protection.

They built entire etiquettes around it. In much of the world, you still don’t praise a baby without adding a blessing, because a compliment without one is an open channel, and admiration is understood to carry envy with it. Some languages even have a word you must say after giving praise, like mashallah or kinehora, so the compliment arrives protected. The old people knew where the evil eye usually came from, and it wasn’t strangers. The oldest warnings say it comes from inside the house – from family, close friends, or those near enough to watch your success closely, because envy needs proximity to feed, and nobody has a better view of your blessings than the people at your table.

These defenses were everywhere, often created by women. The blue glass mati hanging in doorways from Istanbul to Athens, the hamsa, the horn, the red thread around a wrist, mirrors facing the door, salt across a threshold – none of it was just decoration. It was all part of the foundation, generations of women protecting what they loved, because they knew that anything that shines draws attention.

Most of you are of the first generation of women taught not to believe in any of this. You were told to be visible, post your successes, to share your launches, to celebrate openly, and to build your lives in public, but you were given no protection. You were told that everyone watching you means well, and that any doubts are just paranoia. Meanwhile, you’ve felt it. The subtle jab after you share good news. The friend who pulls away when things go well for you. The compliment that feels more like sarcasm. Your body remembers things your worldview won’t let you read.

The Tax on Rising

Any woman who is growing or succeeding publicly eventually faces the evil eye, and that attention often leads to a choice typically made without much thought. Most women choose to shrink, which looks like softening her announcements, keeping launches quiet, no longer sharing her wins, saying “it’s going okay” instead of admitting things are going better than okay, avoiding raising her prices to keep from drawing attention, and editing good news before sharing it. Some friends and relatives will never hear the real numbers, because she already knows what their faces will do. This isn’t humility. It’s warding, done badly, because nobody taught her real protection, so she reached for the only defense that comes without teaching: disappearing.

And the training started long before money was involved. Somewhere in the past, you learned to downplay your achievements – you probably can’t place it anymore, but there was a moment when you shared good news and saw someone you cared about react with something other than happiness. Kids notice these things, and girls quickly learn whose faces change when she shines, so she starts editing before she understands what she’s editing for. By the time she’s grown, this editing becomes automatic, and she thinks of it as her personality, just being private or modest. But really, it’s the oldest defense she has, installed decades ago, still controlling what the world gets to know about her.

Trying to stay invisible is actually the most costly way to protect yourself, because visibility is where revenue comes from. A launch you barely mention makes less than one you talk about everywhere; hidden wins convert nobody into buying from you. Prices raised apologetically get tested harder than prices raised confidently, because people take their cues about your value from how you carry it. Your business only grows when people can see it. So every time you shrink to keep somebody comfortable, you’re paying for their comfort through your revenue, and losing money every month.

The ancients would have recognized this immediately and said it’s backward. You don’t protect yourself by hiding what makes you stand out. Hiding is letting fear win before it even finds you. The real goal is to protect yourself so you can shine as brightly as possible. That’s what the blue glass and red thread were for – not to hide, but to be visible and protected. The bride wore her protection and still had her wedding. The house hung the mati and stayed successful, out in the open for the entire village to see.

The trade on the table is to stop paying the envy tax out of your income, and pay it with a ritual instead. One option drains you slowly over the years. The other simply costs you an evening.

The rest is for paid subscribers. Behind this paywall is a ritual for warding your name. I explain why your name can be a path for envy to reach you, share the history of name-magic from ancient Egypt, and give you clear steps on what to write, what to say, and how to keep the ward strong as you move forward. A new ritual every Friday.

Read more

It’s 11 PM, and you’re reading his text again. You already answered it hours ago, after drafting your reply three times. But here you are, going over his last message once more, looking for something new in words that haven’t changed – the way you’d reopen an empty refrigerator expecting food to appear suddenly. All day you were handling business, but now the most valuable part of your day, where your mind is finally free, is going to a man’s phrasing, the same attention everyone else has to pay for.

And tomorrow the labor continues. You’ll pick the analysis back up with your coffee. It’ll ride through your morning calls, and if a girlfriend phones, he’ll get most of that hour too. Because somewhere along the way your friendships became a place where he gets examined instead of a place where you get fed.

This is what I want you to really think about, and it has nothing to do with heartache. Fuck the heartache – we’ve all cried over a man before. I’m talking about the economics. Every dollar you’ve ever made came from the same source: your attention. It built your business, helped you close clients, wrote your offers, and earned every cent attached to your name. So add up this week alone – from rereading texts, morning replays, to girlfriend hours – and put a price on those hours, the same way you would if a client was paying for them. You’ve been giving your most valuable time to someone who doesn’t even pay for it, and then you wonder why the empire grows slow.

There Is One Center

Everything in your life organizes itself around whatever matters most to you. Your calendar, your energy, your decisions, and your body all fall in line behind it, whether you realize it or not.

Having a man in your life isn’t the problem. I want to make that clear right away, because this isn’t an essay about leaving him, hating him, or pretending you don’t want love. Love is fine. Love is good. A man in your life can be a beautiful thing.

But putting a man at the center of your life is a different arrangement entirely. It means his moods set the weather in your house. It means your friends get whatever’s left of you after he’s been managed, your family gets scheduled around him, and your work gets the remains of your focus after he’s taken his share. It means decisions that should’ve been yours alone have become joint property: where you live, the trips you take, when you start something new, all of it filtered through what works for him, what he thinks, and how he feels. And it means the question running through your days is some version of how are we doing, a question you check as often as the weather. You can run a company while living this way – plenty of women do. But you can’t truly run your own life, because you’ve given up control but kept the title, and you’ve called that love.

You’ve spent years building yourself – your skills, your work, your style, your mind, your body. You are the most valuable part of your life, and that was true before any man showed up. So look at the arrangement you’ve been running: you, offered up daily, at no charge, to someone who hasn’t done the bare minimum to match what you bring. There’s no version of that trade that stays contained to your love life. When you give away your most valuable asset for nothing in one area, every part of your life takes note of what you think you’re worth. Your money has just been listening the longest.

You Were Trained For This

If you find yourself wondering how you got here, remember that you were taught to expect this.

Think about the stories you grew up on. The princess’s plot resolves when he arrives. In romantic comedies, the last scene is often the airport chase, and no one talks about what happens to her career after that. As a child, you were handed dolls to practice tending while boys were handed blocks to practice building. By the time you could read, you had already learned the lesson: a man is not a part of a woman’s life – he’s the point of it, and every other achievement is what she does while she waits. Your grandmother organized her existence around a husband because she legally and financially had to. Your mother did it out of habit and called it a partnership. And you, with your money, your options, and your degrees, do a modernized version of the same thing and call it being in love, because the training goes deeper than a bank account can reach.

Look, I’m not saying this to give you an excuse. I’m saying it because you can’t take back something you didn’t know was taken from you by design, and half the women reading this will think their male-centered attention is just their personality. It’s not. It’s an inheritance, and you’re allowed to refuse it.

“I’m Successful, So This Isn’t Me”

I know what you might be thinking, because I hear it from successful women all the time. “I have a business, money, and a title. I’m nobody’s doormat. This essay is about those other women.” But look closer.

Subscribe now

You built everything you have in the hours when you weren’t focused on him. Your business only gets what’s left of your attention, and it shows in ways you’ve stopped noticing. Think about the offer you never launched because that season of your relationship swallowed you. The deals you missed. The mornings when your best ideas went to replaying last night’s conversation instead of working on what actually pays you. And here’s the tell you can verify for yourself: your business grows during the gaps. The single periods, the stable stretches, the months while he was away – look at when your revenue increased, and compare it to what happened during the chaos. For years, your income has followed the ups and downs of your relationships, but you probably never thought to track it.

You produced everything you’re proud of while running on half-empty, and because even that took you further than most, you decided it was enough. But you’re not stuck because you can’t go higher. You’re cruising at exactly the altitude a woman can reach when a man is guzzling half her tank, and there’s a cap on that altitude no matter how good the view is.

That’s why it’s so hard to notice this pattern when you’re successful. When you’re struggling, it feels like a crisis. When you’re doing well, it just looks like balance. But the limit is always there, and it’s set by how much attention you have left to give.

“I Already Decentered Men”

Here’s the other exemption, and it’s even trickier. You know all the right words. You’ve put in the work. And now you have standards. You vet, you don’t chase, you’ve listened to the podcasts, and you could probably give a TED talk on red flags. Decentering men? You’ve done that too. Just ask anyone.

Except look at what all of it is about.

The vetting rules are about men. The standards you set are about men. The healing journey you narrate to your girlfriends is about a man. Your journal entries, voice notes, podcast queue, and therapy sessions all keep coming back to him. The compatibility charts and late-night conversations – men are at the center of it all. You renovated the building, but he still owns it. Strategizing about men is still centering men. Analyzing men is still centering men. Even for some women, hating men is still focusing on them. Resentment is just another form of devotion, and the real estate he takes up in your head doesn’t care whether the tenant is love or litigation. Decentering men isn’t about how you feel about them, good or bad. It’s how many of your surplus hours they occupy, in any form.

And if you’re feeling defensive right now, good. Pay attention to that. Defensiveness is just the old pattern trying to hold on.

Single Women Aren’t Exempt Either

Some of you reading this are single and feel relieved. No man, no problem. But some of you are already thinking about a man you haven’t even met yet – the future one you’re currently preparing for.

You know if this is you. You keep your life a bit flexible in case he shows up. You soften your edges so you stay choosable. You hold back your ambition so it won’t scare anyone off, because you’ve figured out what being your full self might cost in the dating market, and you’ve been paying the difference with your future. Hours given to dating apps, which you treat like a part-time job with no salary. Dates that go nowhere, postmortems on dates that also went nowhere. You keep manifesting, preparing, and staying ready. There’s no man, but he’s still at the center – a vacancy you organize your life around. Auditioning for a man who isn’t even here yet means putting him first before he exists, and some women do this for years, waiting for a tenant who never signed anything.

The Role You Gave Him

Here’s a harder question: Why does a woman who is so capable still put a man at the center of her life?

It’s because he fills a role for you, and you know it even if you’ve never said it. You know how to make money. You can run a company, command respect, and solve almost any problem with enough focus. But what you haven’t figured out yet is how to feel okay on your own. You still look outside yourself for that. His attention is where you go to check whether you’re okay. His mood tells you how much you’re worth. This relationship was never just about love. It’s your verification system, and you check it with the compulsiveness of someone checking a vital sign, because for you, it is one.

Here’s why having wealth can actually make things harder. As you become more self-sufficient everywhere else, there are fewer places where you still need anyone, so all your remaining need ends up focused on him. Your mother’s approval stopped mattering years ago. You outgrew your mentors. Now you sign the checks, and every outside source of reassurance has been replaced – except for this one. He’s the last connection, carrying all of it. That’s why his silence can hit you so hard, even if you just closed your biggest deal of the year. The deal can’t give you the answer he does. Nothing you’ve built can, at least not yet. And the bitter joke is that he’s terrible at the job. His moods – data you watch so closely – are really about his hunger, his stress, his phone battery, or his fucking fantasy league. You’re looking for meaning in noise that was never about you. Even the most rigorous woman I know can run her business on hard numbers and run her worth on a man’s exhale.

You can’t fire a vendor while you still need the service. That’s the trap, and it’s why no amount of simply knowing better has ever been enough to help you move on.

Your Attention Is the Asset

From the beginning, I said that your attention is the source of every dollar you earn. It’s not about talent. Many talented women never build anything, and it’s not about time either, since we all have the same hours in a day. Attention, compounded, is the entire game. You’ve seen the proof in your own revenue: when you’re focused, you earn more, and when you’re distracted, you earn less. You know the difference between a week when your mind is on your work and a week when you’re stuck on a conversation you keep replaying. One of those weeks brings in money. The other one costs it.

So run the audit like an investor, because that’s what you are. The man in your life is holding the biggest share of your time, energy, and focus. But what are you getting back? If a fund manager gave you these results, you’d fire them. You wouldn’t let a business partner use up your best resources and give you so little in return. The only reason he still has this role is because no one showed you how to measure this kind of value. Each year, this position compounds against you, because attention invested in your work returns clients, offers, and reach, and attention invested in monitoring a man returns more monitoring. The real question isn’t whether you can afford him. You can afford almost anything. The real question is what your empire could look like if you took back that space for yourself. Deep down, you already know, and that’s probably why reading this makes you uneasy.

So here’s what taking it back looks like.

Decentering men, in its true sense, isn’t about breaking up or making a vow. It’s more like changing seats. Put yourself at the center of your life, your work, your body, and your name on the throne of your existence, and everything else finds its orbit around you, including a man, if you want one. A good man belongs in your orbit. He was never supposed to be the thing you revolve around.

Begin by honestly tracking your time for one week. Each day, notice the extra hours that are truly yours and see where they go. Pay attention to time spent thinking about men, talking about men, consuming content about men, or preparing for men. Count the girlfriend calls too, and be honest about what percentage of those conversations are about him. Don’t try to change anything yet. Just get the real number, because you can’t reclaim your focus until you recognize where it’s going, and I promise the number is bigger than you think.

The Withdrawal Is Real

Then comes the part nobody warns you about, so I will. At first, trying to pull your attention back doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like anxiety. You might catch yourself reaching out, then stop, and the urge lingers. Your mind will offer him up in every idle moment – in line for coffee, sitting at a red light, or whenever your focus slips – because that’s when you used to check in. This checking wasn’t just a habit. It was your regulation system. It’s how you’ve been managing the question of whether you’re okay for your entire adult life, and removing it leaves you raw before it sets you free.

Some women make it a few days before they manufacture drama, pick a fight, or send a message they didn’t need to, just to feel that old connection again. It’s not because something is wrong. It’s because the silence where you used to monitor things feels unbearable at first, and any contact – even if it’s negative – brings back a sense of normalcy. If this happens to you, don’t see it as a failure or a sign you’re doing something wrong. The discomfort means you’re closing that old loop. It’s like your attention is returning to a home it hasn’t been in for years. Just like any homecoming after a long time away, the first few nights feel strange before they start to feel good.

On the other side, you’ll find what you’ve only experienced in glimpses throughout your career – those rare times when your mind was fully focused on your work and everything just flowed. When you take your attention back from him, it doesn’t disappear. It redeploys, and the first places it goes are your work and your body. This isn’t just a figure of speech; it’s how things actually work. You’ll start to see the first returns within a month.

Why You Can’t Just Decide This

But here’s what I know from the inside, and why this essay alone can’t solve everything. You didn’t decide to center your attention on him, so it can’t be undone by deciding. You need to start finding your sense of okayness within yourself, or your focus will drift back to him whenever you’re not paying attention, no matter what you decide while reading this. That shift doesn’t happen just by understanding the problem. You might understand every word here and still end up messaging him by next Thursday, because the body doesn’t take orders from insight. It takes reps.

This is exactly what I help with in my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. For two weeks, you get one assignment each day, tailored to you based on what you share with me the day before. Together, we focus on where your sense of okayness really comes from, why your attention goes back to him when you’re not watching, and how to stay centered, even through the withdrawal, until it finally feels safe to do so. By the end, you’ll feel in control again, and everything you work on will come from a place of real strength for the first time.

It’s $397, which is less than what you might lose in just one week by letting your attention stay stuck.

It's time to center yourself

I can feel the exact moment I do it. I’m meeting someone new, and before a word has left my mouth, the subtle adjustments start, my face softens, my voice gets friendlier than I feel, and I begin this act of pretending to be harmless. Underneath it runs the belief that if I don’t do this, they’ll think I’m a bitch.

I’ve been told all my life that I’m too intense. It’s in my face, which people read as hard before I’ve said a word. Or it’s my energy, which has never once been subtle. Some of that is simply what I am. I’m a Latina Scorpio, and I’ve never known how to be soft about anything. Some of it is where I’m from, because a woman doesn’t grow up in New York without building a face that tells people not to try her. And some of it is older than that, the demeanor you develop when your body learned early that being soft wasn’t safe. I’ve also been called unapproachable because of my beauty. Because of this, I’ve made adjustments for years, shrinking myself for people who hadn’t even asked me to, trying to come across like everyone else when I have never once been like everyone else.

I did the same thing with my first business. I built it through a version of myself I thought people could handle. I kept my darkness out of it, held back the things that genuinely fascinated me because I thought they’d scare people off, and ran everything I said through a filter of what I thought a feminine embodiment coach was supposed to sound like. I worked harder than I’ve ever worked at anything, and that version of me nearly went broke, because the version of me that built it was diluted, and nobody’s moved by watered-down anything. The money didn’t come until she was gone.

Glamour Was Never a Compliment

The word comes down from “grammar,” of all things, because in the old world, book learning and magick were the same suspicious craft, and “gramarye” meant occult knowledge, enchantment. In Scots, it slid into “glamour,” and to cast a glamour over someone meant to bewitch their eyes, to change what they saw when they looked at you. Glamour is perception magick. It has never meant being beautiful. It means deciding what the eye that beholds you is permitted to see.

Which means every woman is already casting one. You cast a glamour every time you enter somewhere, with your look, your posture, the register of your voice, the space you occupy or surrender. There is no opting out of it. The only question is which spell you’re casting, and for most of my life, without knowing it, I was casting a spell of less, one that made me softer and smaller than I am, and friendlier than anyone needed me to be. A glamour that said, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing formidable here.” And their eyes believed me. That’s the thing about glamours. They work.

The rest of this is for paid subscribers. Below is the story of Morgan le Fay, the sorceress from whom the word glamour was born, and Morgan’s Mirror, a glamour magick ritual for revoking the spell of less and casting what replaces it. Subscribe for a new ritual every Friday.

Read more

For most of my adult life, my energy belonged to everyone but me. One man had it, then another, men I didn’t even like, who got my body and my attention in exchange for a feeling that never lasted the drive home. I told myself that it was fun, or that it was connection, but it was a transaction, and I was on the losing end of it every single time, handing over the most concentrated force my body produces for a few hours of being looked at.

Women got their share of my energy too, years of it, given to women I could never have grown next to, envious women, small-minded women, women who spent their lives talking about other women because building something of their own was out of the question. I sat through their gossip because they were my friends, or that’s what I called them. I let their smallness set the temperature of my life, then I shrank to fit it, because that’s what you do when you don’t yet understand that the company you keep is either feeding your fire or devouring it.

And when it wasn’t a person draining me, it was my business, which turned out to be the biggest leak of all. I poured everything I had into it, and I mean everything, every waking moment, every strategy, every angle a struggling business owner can try. And I did it all while hiding who I really was, presenting a version of myself I thought people wanted, straddling the edge of authenticity but never once going over. So I bled from both ends, giving all of my energy to something while pretending to be someone else, and there’s no faster way to empty yourself than that.

I fought tooth and nail for money in those years, and it never came. The harder I poured, the less I had. And eventually, I’d given so much away that the only reserve I had left to draw on was my body.

The Collapse

My body collected the debt. It started with illnesses no one could explain, one strange thing after another, symptoms that didn’t add up to any known diagnosis, my system failing in ways that made no sense on paper. I kept working through it because working through it was the only mode I had. I pushed harder. I tried new angles on my business while my health crumbled underneath me because I still believed the problem was strategy, and one more adjustment would finally turn it. Yet it never once occurred to me that the problem was that I was giving everything I had to everything but myself.

Then I collapsed, and the decision got made for me. The business failed, and my health went with it. And I, a grown woman, moved back in with family because I could no longer take care of myself. I couldn’t work. Some days I could barely function. Everything I had been pouring into was gone, and for the first time in my adult life, there was nowhere for my energy to go.

The spiritual world loves to dress up a rock bottom, call it a dark night of the soul, or say the universe is redirecting you. Mine was just a collapse, complete and humiliating, and it did the one thing I would never have done voluntarily. It forced me to stop. I stopped forcing my business, I stopped strategizing, I stopped trying to resuscitate what was already dead, and turned toward the only project I had left, which was healing my body after years of running it into the ground.

By then I’d already stopped having sex. I stopped in my late thirties, before the collapse finally finished me, because some part of me had figured out that I had bigger fish to fry than merely being desired, and that every hour I spent trying to fill that void was stolen from the problem that was nearly killing me. But stopping was only the beginning.

Abstinent and Still Leaking Energy

For the first two years, no man touched me, but my energy kept right on leaking anyway. I was giving myself quickies just to handle the feeling, burning through my potency like it was nothing, five minutes, done, gone, the same energy that can grow life inside our bodies, spent like loose change. I was still trading gossip, still filling hours with small talk that fed nothing, still not taking myself seriously – not my time, not my mind, and not what I might be capable of if I ever pointed all of it in one direction. The men were gone, but I was still bleeding energy.

Then, two years in, something shifted, and I couldn’t tell you the day it happened, only that my mind started operating differently. I was deep in healing my body by then, meditating every day because it was one of the few things it could reliably do, and in that stillness I started to feel my energy. It was alive in me, moving, restless, because desire doesn’t die when you stop having sex. Mine was wide awake, and it had nowhere left to spend itself.

And one day a question arrived, so simple it was almost funny. Since I’m not giving this to men anymore, why am I still throwing it away? Why not give it back to myself?

The Serpent

I’ve always known the energy was a serpent. Spend enough time studying what I study, and the serpent finds you everywhere, wrapped around every goddess the old world worshipped, coiled through every tradition that ever took power seriously, guarding every temple, feared by every institution that came later. So when I closed my eyes and looked for my energy, of course it had scales.

Here is the sexual transmutation practice I built during the years I was putting myself back together:

I lie down or sit with my eyes closed and breathe until I can feel my energy, low in my body, in the womb, warm and unmistakable once you know to look for it. Then I watch it move. The serpent rises out of my womb. It doesn’t climb up through me the way the old texts describe, straight up the spine like a rope. Instead, it leaves my body entirely, arcing out in front of me through the air, a curve I can see clearly with my eyes closed, and it re-enters me at the crown of my head. It penetrates my crown, travels down my spine, through my womb, and out again, one continuous circle, half of it running inside my body and half of it moving through the space in front of me. A serpent swallowing its tail. The ouroboros, turning through me and around me. There is no release at the end. The energy exits through my womb and returns through my crown, and every pass makes it stronger.

Subscribe now

I found out afterward that women have known this serpent for thousands of years. The oldest traditions on earth describe its energy exactly this way and have built entire systems around raising it. Finding that out confirmed what my body already knew. No one taught me this. My body walked me to a door that has always existed, and I opened it alone. And what came through that door was creation. Ideas arrived in a way they never had when I was grinding for them. Offers assembled themselves in my head while the serpent circled, and I’d come out of a meditation with something I could build and sell, when for years I couldn’t get a single thing to work, no matter how hard I tried. The energy that used to end up in some man’s bed, or in five wasted minutes, or spread thin across women who secretly resented me, was now returning to me daily, and I was creating from it.

The Return

Then came the day I decided to come back, and it was a bigger decision than a business relaunch, because I wasn’t bringing back the burned-out version of myself. I had the tools by then. But more than the tools, I had something I’d never once brought to my work, which was myself, undiluted. The collapse hadn’t only healed my body; it destroyed the palatable version of me. That woman had poured herself into a business and run it into the ground. I had no intention of resurrecting her. So I came back as I am. I started sharing the work the serpent had built in me, about the things I genuinely love, the things that light me up, but had kept private for years because they were too dark or too weird for the person I’d been pretending to be. And I did it in front of people who had no idea who I was.

The money came in like it had been waiting. Money I fought for, that refused to come no matter how hard I poured, now came easily and naturally. People found my work, my offers sold, and women I’d never met connected with what I was making. Opportunities arrived that I hadn’t chased. After years of pushing a boulder uphill, the ground had tilted, and I knew exactly what had changed. The energy was circling into me instead of leaking out of me.

And here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t have told you then: becoming myself wasn’t a separate piece of work I did alongside the practice; it came from the practice. When your energy stops leaking into men, gossip, and people who secretly resent you, it has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is you. I filled up with myself. And once that happened, the watered-down version fell away on her own, because you can’t keep serving up a diluted version of you when the real one is finally full. The money followed that, and it has never stopped.

What This Has to Do With You

If you’re earning well and it still feels like pushing a boulder, look at where your energy goes when no one is watching. Who gets it? How much of it goes to people who could never grow beside you? How much gets handled in a five-minute mindless quickie? How much goes into maintaining an edited version of yourself? You can have the revenue and still be running the exact economy I ran, with everything flowing outward but nothing circling back: an entire life funded from a tank that never gets refilled, and the exhaustion you keep calling “burnout” is just the gauge reading empty.

The practice is yours to use. Tonight, alone, no one else required. Close your eyes, breathe down to where the fire lives, and let it move, as long as every bit of it returns to you.

But I’ll tell you what I couldn’t have known three years ago: the moment you begin, two things surface together, the leak and the mask, because the same life force that builds your work is the life force you’ve been sapping to keep everyone around you comfortable, and you cannot seal the circle while you’re still performing. That’s the work I do inside my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. It took me a collapse, two years of leaking energy, and a third year to find where my power was going and turn it around.

You don’t need the collapse. For two weeks, I send you an assignment, aimed at whatever is draining you, the people, the habits, the version of yourself you think you have to be. By the end, your energy has one destination: you. It’s $397, and it costs less than another year of running on empty. I spent three years finding this out alone. You can have it in fourteen days.

Seal the Circle

A while back, I was running my business alone and barely holding it together. Money was too tight to hire anyone to help me, so I was doing all of it myself, one woman with too many jobs and not enough certainty about any of it. And when you’re in that spot, unsure about money and carrying the whole thing on your back, you start watching other women – the ones who seem to be doing better than you. You tell yourself you’re looking for ideas, and part of that is true, but part of it is something else.

I watched women in my field who were further along than me. I watched what they posted, how they sold, and where they seemed to be going, and I told myself I was in search of direction, which, to be fair, is half of what I was doing. But there was another thing happening underneath that I didn’t want to look at, and it took an interaction with another woman for me to finally see it.

The Woman Who Became My Mirror

We first connected online, and when I saw that she was visiting where I lived, I reached out and asked if she’d like to grab dinner at one of my favorite spots. She hadn’t been, so she was in. When we first made the plan, it was easy; I was excited to meet her. But in the days before the dinner, I started looking more closely at her because it was becoming real, and I wanted to know who this woman I was about to meet actually was. I went through her page, and I saw how easily everything seemed to come to her. I already knew she was successful. She’d been traveling before arriving in my town. And sitting there, having done none of that, I started to feel it. I was budgeting just to make this dinner work, and she was moving through the world like money and ease were nothing. That gap opened up something in me.

Then the voice came, the one I think every female entrepreneur knows intimately. It started asking questions like, What does she have that I don’t? What is she doing that I’m not doing? How does she have all this success and I don’t? What am I doing wrong? Am I just not enough? Every question pointed to the same answer: that she had cracked a code I hadn’t, and every one of those thoughts hit harder than the last.

Nothing about her had changed. She hadn’t done anything to me. The only thing that changed was that I got close enough to hold myself up against her, and the second I did, I started losing.

It Had Been Happening for Years

That dinner wasn’t the beginning – it was just the first time I caught it while it was happening.

Comparison had been running in me for years by then, yet I never once called it what it was. I told myself I was researching, that I was studying successful women so I could learn from them, and this was how you figured out the game. But what I was actually doing was going through another woman’s business, her posts, her launches, her funnels, and making a list of everything she could do that I couldn’t. A list of everything she had that I didn’t. I was itemizing my inadequacy, line by line.

And here’s the part that gives it away: I would choose women making millions while I was barely making anything at all. Not women a step ahead of me, whose path I could actually follow. Women whose lives had nothing to do with mine, whose numbers I couldn’t have reached in five years of perfect execution. That’s not what you do when you’re looking for a roadmap; that’s what you do when you’re looking for proof. I wasn’t studying them to figure out how to get there. I was gathering evidence for a case I had already decided that I would never be successful, I didn’t have whatever they had, and every impossible woman I found was another exhibit.

It also never propelled me. Not once. I might have come away with a tactic or an idea, but it never made me successful. I came out smaller than I went in, every time, and then I did it again the next week.

Leave a comment

Every hour I spent cataloging another woman’s success was an hour I did not spend on my own. And the work I wasn’t doing was the work that would have made me money. I wasn’t finding my voice. I wasn’t figuring out what I was actually passionate about, what I had to say that no one else was saying. I wasn’t finding my people, talking to them, or learning what they needed. I wasn’t mining my own work for what was already good in it. All of that was sitting there waiting for me, and instead I gave those hours to women who didn’t know my name.

That’s the theft. Comparison took the exact hours it requires to build a business and spent them on someone else’s, leaving me with a longer list of my own shortcomings as the receipt.

What I know now, on the other side of it, is that I don’t have women I look up to. Not because I think I’m above anyone, but because I don’t want what anyone has. I can look at a woman who’s built something extraordinary and admire the work, admire the roads she’s paved for other women, and feel nothing but respect, and then go back to my own life without measuring a single thing.

That’s what it looks like when the comparison is gone. No smugness, just the absence of wanting. Because when I stopped watching other women and finally spent that attention on myself, I found my own road, and it turned out I never wanted theirs. All those years I spent grieving lives I would have turned down if you handed them to me. All that time proving I could never do what she does, when the truth was I never wanted to do what she does. I wanted to do what I do.

You cannot find that road while you’re standing on someone else’s, and that’s the cruelest part of comparison; it keeps you facing the wrong direction. Your life is behind you the entire time you’re staring at hers.

What It’s Taking From You Right Now

I want you to be honest with yourself about how many hours you have given to this. Scrolling through her page, reading her copy, totaling up what she has and what you don’t. Add it up over the last year. That’s not time you lost, that’s time you spent, deliberately, building the case against yourself, and while you were building it, your business went nowhere.

What did it cost you? The offer you didn’t make because she was already doing it better. The price you didn’t raise because she seemed more established, polished, or more entitled to the number than you. The post you didn’t write, the pitch you didn’t send, the thing you didn’t launch, because you’d already decided how it ends. Every single one of those was money, and comparison talked you out of all of it.

She isn’t taking anything from you. She doesn’t know you’re doing this. She’s just living her life, building her thing, and getting richer, and the whole time you’re watching her do it, comparison has its hand in your pocket.

Where This Actually Ends

You can’t quit comparison by deciding to quit comparison. I tried, and the comparing always came back, because I was treating the symptom and leaving the wound wide open.

It ends when you know what you’re worth without needing another woman’s life to measure it against. Then there’s nothing left for comparison to feed on. You can look at any woman, at any level of success, and none of it rocks you, because what you’re worth doesn’t get decided by what she has.

Comparison is the thief of joy. But if you’re building something of your own, it’s also the thief of your time, your money, and your success, and it will keep taking for exactly as long as you let it.

This is the work I do with women in my 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. It’s two weeks of daily one-on-one work with me, delivered by email, where we go after the worthiness wound underneath comparison, the one that has you measuring yourself against every woman who’s further along and coming up short every time. Every day you get an assignment built specifically for you. It’s $397, and it’s for women who are done watching everyone else build while their life waits.

Stop losing money to comparison

Everyone thinks they know Venus, because the version handed to us is the goddess of love on her seashell, all soft light, roses, and pretty curves, there to be looked at and desired and nothing more. Even the women who call her the goddess of divine love and holy beauty are seeing only half of her, the safe half whose beauty was meant to lift a man’s eyes toward heaven. Because the goddess the ancient world actually knew was cleaved in two somewhere along the way, and the half they kept was the one who could never hurt anyone, while the half they buried was the one with blood on her hands.

The people who built her temples and carved her name into stone knew a goddess who had almost nothing in common with the one we were given. They worshipped her in Corinth as Melainis, Dark Love, and elsewhere they called her Skotia, The Dark One, and Philopannyx, Lover of the Night, honored in darkness rather than in the flattering light we picture her in. They called her Androphonos, which means The Killer of Men, and Anosia, The Unholy, and Tymborychos, The Gravedigger, and Epitymbidia, She Who Sits Upon the Tombs, because she ruled death as surely as she ruled desire. In Sparta and on Cythera, her oldest statues didn’t show her draped and demure and waiting to be admired, but standing in full armor with weapons in her hands, because they knew her as Areia, The Warlike. Some of her most ancient images showed her seated and veiled with her feet bound in chains, because the people who made her understood that her power was the kind you carved restrained; otherwise it might get loose.

And none of it was buried in some collapsed temple waiting to be dug back up, because it was written down and preserved for centuries, in Pausanias, in the temple inventories, and in the epithets carved into her worship and spoken for centuries. Which means someone had to work to make you forget it. Someone had to take the goddess of war, death, and appetite and shave her down, decade by decade, century by century, until the only thing left standing was the pretty version who wants nothing, threatens no one, and waits on her shell to be chosen. I need you to feel how much was stolen in that patient act of vandalism, because the exact same thing was done to you.

What They Did to Her, They Did to You

You were born with all of it too, the appetite, ferocity, and capacity to want enormous things and take up enormous room, the same fire that runs through the armored goddess with weapons in her hands. And somewhere very early, before you were old enough to defend yourself against it, the same instinct that turned a war goddess into a greeting card went to work on you. It taught you, with a thousand small punishments and a thousand small rewards, which parts of yourself the world would tolerate and which parts it would make you pay for.

The parts it tolerated were always soft: your loveliness, giving, and ease; your wanting kept politely muted; earning wrapped in apology; and being desirable without ever once being dangerous. So you learned to lead with the pretty half of yourself and buried the rest somewhere it couldn’t embarrass anyone. They taught you to call that burial by soothing names like maturity, humility, generosity, and being a good woman, in precisely the way they called the gutting of a goddess an improvement. And it worked. It worked so well that you now do it to yourself without anyone having to stand over you, shrinking your number before it leaves your mouth, handing back the money before you’ve finished earning it, making yourself agreeable, useful, and small, and explaining that exhausting performance away as humility, when what it really is is the residue of a theft.

Because that is what it was, a theft. They took the fullness you were born with, handed you back a fraction, and told you a fraction was all a woman is permitted to be. You have spent your one life grieving something you were never even allowed to claim, feeling the phantom weight of a power you were talked out of before you could remember having it, wondering why success never fills you, why the number always stops climbing at the same insulting height, and why wanting more feels like a sin. The answer is that you were robbed, early and thoroughly, of the exact parts of yourself that would’ve carried you past every financial ceiling you’ve ever hit.

The Black Venus matters to you right now because she is evidence that the fearsome version was always the real you and the sweet little valentine was always counterfeit. And if that’s true of her, then it’s true of you, which means the parts of yourself you were trained to bury were never your flaws and never your shame. They were the power that was cut out of you for exactly that reason, and the work in front of you now is not to become someone new but to go down and get back what was taken.

The rest of this is for paid subscribers. Below is the story that maps the path back to your worth, why the goddess was carved in chains and what those chains reveal about the size of what they were built to hold, and the Friday ritual that begins the reclaiming, a ceremonial bath for taking back what was stolen, done on Venus’s day. This is the first of the Friday rituals; there will be a new one every week.

Read more

You’ve heard “What’s meant for you will not pass you by,” or some version of it, so many times that it no longer sounds like a claim and has started sounding like a fact everyone already agrees on. Apparently, your soulmate will find you without you having to lift a finger, the money is already on its way, the life you want is circling back to reach you, and your only job in the meantime is to keep your vibration high, your heart open, and your energy clean, because the universe is arranging it all behind the scenes on your behalf. You don’t chase, you don’t push, and you certainly don’t grind. You align, and you receive, and what’s yours simply arrives.

It’s on Substack, Instagram, and on the tongue of that friend who takes your hand across the table when you’re heartbroken and tells you that if it’s meant to be, it will be. It comes at you from every direction at once, so many voices saying the same thing that you stop questioning it, because who would want to? It asks nothing of you. It promises that your deepest desires will arrive with little effort and no risk, and there’s almost nothing a tired person wants to hear more than that.

But I call bullshit.

Start with the phrase itself, because it doesn’t even mean what they’ve turned it into. “What’s meant for you will not pass you by” comes from an old Scottish proverb, “Whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye,” and the Scots who said it weren’t people who sat around waiting for the universe to deliver. They were some of the hardest-working, most self-reliant people on earth, and the saying was never permission to do nothing. It was something you told a person after a disappointment, a way of saying “Don’t despair, keep going; what’s truly yours won’t be lost just because this one thing slipped away.” It assumed the work. It assumed the grit. It was comfort for the resilient, not a pillow for the passive. Somewhere along the way, that got stripped out too, and the saying got handed to women as a reason to stay still.

I do believe some things are meant for you, and that there’s a life with your name on it, a version of you that you were made to become, and a place in this world that belongs to you and to no one else. None of that is the lie. The lie is the promise that it’ll reach you no matter what you do and that it’s coming for you whether you get up to meet it or not. That promise is a sedative, and it’s been so thoroughly diluted that no one remembers where it came from anymore. So I’m going to resurrect it.

This Is 200 Years Old, and It Was Never About Vibes

The phrase is the harmless part. What matters is the belief system that got attached to it, the one that tells you to vibrate high, align, and wait for the universe to deliver. That belief system is what you’re being sold as ancient feminine wisdom, but it isn’t ancient, and there is nothing feminine about its origins. It has a name, and the name is the Law of Attraction, and it didn’t come from the goddess, the moon, or some lineage of wise women. It came from a man named Phineas Quimby, a clockmaker turned mesmerist and faith healer in 19th-century New England, who came to believe that the mind alone governed the body, that sickness was nothing but wrong thinking, and that if you corrected the thought, you corrected the flesh. That was the seed: mind over matter, thought as the only true cause, reality bending to belief. His followers built a movement out of it called New Thought.

The energy talk, vibration, and the idea that your consciousness shapes reality, none of that started with New Thought. They took it from older Eastern traditions and threw out what it actually meant. In Buddhism and the Hindu philosophy they lifted this vocabulary from, the teaching was never that you raise your vibration to attract a house or a husband. It was the opposite. Craving is the root of your suffering, and the work of a lifetime is to loosen your grasp on wanting, not to sharpen it into a tool. They took words meant to point you toward surrender and used them to sell you a better way to grip.

And here’s what they don’t tell you: in the beginning, it was about healing the body, but around the turn of the century, the movement turned its attention to money, and the mind-cure became the money-cure. The whole apparatus pivoted from healing the sick to attracting wealth, and out came the books that are still shaping your feed 100 years later: Wallace Wattles and The Science of Getting Rich in 1910, Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich in 1937, the entire genre of get-rich-by-thinking that has never once gone out of print. So when you feel tempted to manifest your income, raise your money frequency, or become an energetic match for wealth, understand that you’re not practicing anything sacred or old. You’re running a hundred-year-old American self-help program that was built, from the start, to sell people the idea that they could think their way rich.

Leave a comment

Then, in 2006, a film called The Secret took that century-old doctrine, simplified it down to almost nothing, dressed it up as a mystical revelation, sold it to millions, and detonated it into the mainstream, where it never left. What you’re seeing now, the soft feminine influencer telling you to sit in your worth and let the money find you, is simply the latest repackaging of Quimby’s 200-year-old idea.

They Even Cut Out the Part Where You Act

But here’s the detail that should make you genuinely angry, because it’s the proof that what you’re being sold today is a corruption of even its own source.

The original teachers of this doctrine, the ones who actually built it, didn’t tell you to sit still. Wallace Wattles, who wrote the foundational text on attracting wealth, said plainly that thought brings the thing you want toward you, but action is how you receive it. Action. It was right there in the doctrine from the beginning, the insistence that you had to move, that thinking opened the door but your own two feet had to carry you through it. The founders of the very philosophy now being used to keep you passive were adamant that passivity would get you nothing.

And the modern version cut that out. It kept the flattering half, that your thoughts, feelings and frequency pull the thing toward you, and it deleted the half that asked something of you, the half that said you have to get up and act to receive what your thinking summoned. What you’re being sold today isn’t even the real thing. It’s the real thing with the work amputated, the permission slip extracted and the responsibility thrown away, a doctrine gutted of the one demand that made it function at all.

So when a woman who wants to make real money follows this, when she keeps her vibration high, cleans her energy, sits in her worth, and waits for the wealth to arrive, yet it does not arrive, month after month after month, she’s not failing at manifestation. She’s faithfully following a broken version of it, engineered, whether by laziness or by design, to remove the only part that ever produced a result.

It Grew Out of the Same Church You Left

If any of this feels familiar or rings some old bell in you, that’s because you’ve met this before, in a pew.

New Thought didn’t fall out of the sky either. It grew straight out of American Protestant Christianity, out of the belief that God rewards the faithful, that provision comes to those who believe hard enough, and that your circumstances mirror your spiritual state. Strip God out of the prosperity gospel, slot in the universe, and you have manifestation. It’s the same architecture, with the same promise and the same demand: keep believing, stay grateful, and never let doubt in, because doubt is what blocks the blessing. The church told women to stay humble, have faith, and wait on the Lord’s provision, and this took that same stance of holy waiting, dressed it in crystals, and sold it right back to them.

Subscribe now

And both of them are built so they can never be blamed. When the provision doesn’t come, the church doesn’t question itself; it questions you. Your faith was too weak, you harbored doubt, you wanted the wrong things, or you wanted the right things for the wrong reasons. Manifestation runs the identical defense. When the money doesn’t arrive, it’s never the method that failed; it’s your frequency, your limiting beliefs, or the resistance you didn’t clear. The system is never wrong – you are. So you go back and try to believe harder, cleanse deeper, want more purely, and the whole time the one thing you’re never allowed to do is the thing that would actually change anything, which is to question whether sitting still and believing was ever going to work at all.

Because underneath both of them is the same theft. They take what was always yours, the will to act on your own behalf, and convince you to hand it over, to God, to the universe, to the process, to anything but your own two hands. And that’s exactly where I part ways with all of it.

The Law I Actually Live By

I’ve come to know something for certain since I started practicing Thelema and its central philosophy, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” People love the sound of that and turn it into permission, hearing in it to do whatever you feel like, take whatever you want, follow every impulse wherever it leads. But it has never meant that, not once, not to anyone who studied it. It means find your true will, the real reason you were put here, and then live it with everything in you. It asks you to use your free will to go and discover your purpose and then bend your entire life in its direction, and I don’t know what could be more beautiful than that you were handed a will of your own for the express purpose of reaching toward the thing that was made for you.

Reaching was always the point. You weren’t given a will so that you could lie back and let the current take you wherever it happened to go. You were given one so that you could choose, again and again, the harder, more authentic thing, and in that choosing, become the person your life was waiting on. That is the exact opposite of sitting in a tower with your heart open, hoping your frequency does the work your hands, feet, and nerves were meant to do.

What’s Meant for You Was Meant for a Particular You

Here’s the part that’s tougher to accept: what’s meant for you was never meant for you exactly as you are right now, in whatever half-built state you happen to be standing in. It was meant for a particular version of you, the version who does the work of becoming ready to hold it.

Wealth, if wealth is what’s yours, is meant for the version of you honest enough to hold onto it without it rotting you from the inside. Love is meant for the you who did the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone worth meeting and, harder still, someone worth staying for. Purpose, the work you were built to do, is meant for the you who used her freedom to grow strong enough to carry its weight without buckling. None of those versions of you arrive on their own. You build them with your choices in the years when no one is watching or applauding.

Leave a comment

And your free will is the one instrument you were handed to build her. It’s the whole of what you were given. If you take it and you spend it lying your way to the top, betraying the people who trusted you, and abandoning yourself for the easy thing over and over, then you do not become her. You become someone else, and the life that was waiting for the first one closes to the second, not as a punishment and not because some scorekeeper in the sky is deducting your points, but for a reason far simpler and more final than that. The door was only ever going to open for who you were meant to be. And you used your freedom to turn into somebody else.

The Two Women

I think about two women when I write this – they’re not real people so much as two roads I’ve watched a hundred women walk down.

The first one hears that what’s meant for her cannot pass her by, she exhales, and settles in to wait. She keeps her vibration high, journals her desires, lights her candles, and tells herself that her only job is to stay open and receptive, so when a year goes by and nothing has changed, she decides she just wasn’t ready yet, that the timing wasn’t divine, and that the universe is still arranging things behind the scenes on her behalf. She’s patient. She’s peaceful, in a way. And she’s exactly where she started, because the peace was never the fruit of trust – it was the anesthetic that let her avoid the terrifying work of trying and maybe failing. She’ll call this faith for the rest of her life, and it’ll cost her the rest of her life.

The second one hears the same promise and something in her bristles at it. She believes, too, that something is meant for her, but she can’t make herself believe that believing is enough. So she gets up, does the frightening thing, sends the message, names the price, and walks into the room where she might be told no. She trusts and moves at the very same time, holds the faith in one hand and does the work with the other – she fails sometimes, and it stings, but she gets back up. And gradually, she becomes a woman who can finally hold what she was reaching for. So when it finally comes, and it does come, everyone around her calls her lucky. They say it was meant for her, as if that settles it. They never see the 10,000 small acts of will that turned her into someone the thing could be given to.

The cruelty of the lie is that it makes you the first woman while letting you feel like the wise one. It tells you your fear is surrender and your stillness is trust, and you believe it, because believing it is so much easier than getting up. And the second woman, the one you could’ve been, is out there living the life the two of you were both promised, because she understood that the promise was a door and not a delivery.

Where the Real Work Begins

So no, what’s meant for you will not simply find you while you sit still, keep your frequency high, and wait for the money to arrive on its own. It never has and it never will, not because the universe is cruel, but because you were built to reach. What’s meant for you can absolutely pass you by, and the only thing that decides which way it goes is what you do with your freedom, day after day, in the hours when no one is watching, and nothing is forcing your hand.

But I already know what you’re going to say, because I’ve heard it from nearly every woman I’ve worked with. You know all of this. You know the vibrating isn’t working. You know you have to act. And yet you still don’t. You sit at the edge of what would actually change your money, the price you won’t raise, the offer you won’t make, the room you won’t walk into, and something in you locks, and waiting starts to look so much more comfortable than moving. It’s not laziness, and it’s not a lack of desire. It’s fear, and it’s old, and it lives in your body, not your beliefs, which is why no amount of knowing better has ever once been enough to move you.

This is the work I do with women inside the 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. For fourteen days, I write to you directly, and we go straight to the place where acting on your own behalf, raising your price, letting yourself be seen wanting money, and reaching out loud for what’s yours, makes your body seize up, and we take that apart piece by piece. We get your freedom back down out of the sky, where you were taught to leave it, and put it back in your own hands, so you can finally do what was always going to make you money, which was never vibrating and was always moving.

It’s $397, and it’s the difference between waiting your whole life for what was meant for you and becoming the woman who reaches out and takes it.

Begin the Work

I get paid well now without much effort. I know what makes me money, so I do it, and the money comes. My body stays open and receptive, none of the old shrinking that used to run underneath. I let money come toward me and actually enjoy having it, instead of waiting for the guilt to show up seconds later to steal the pleasure before I’ve finished feeling it. It wasn’t always like this. For a long time, even when the money came, the shame came with it. From the outside, it might look like I get paid to exist.

So I’m not writing this from above any of it, looking down at the women who tell you that you can get paid to exist. I’m one of them. I embody the exact ease they’re selling, the money that comes without struggle, which is why I can tell you the truth about how it really works.

And the truth is that the ease is real – that part isn’t the lie – the place where receiving money feels good in your body instead of frightening, where it moves toward you and you let it without bracing for a punishment, that place exists, and it’s worth wanting, and some of us are living it right now. The lie was never the ease itself. The lie is in how they tell you a woman gets there, because the getting there is the whole story, yet the getting there is the part they leave out.

They Sell You the Endpoint and Hide the Machine

Every woman who gets paid while she sits back and breathes is sitting on top of a machine, and that machine didn’t build itself while she meditated. She built it, over years, by hand, usually through a stretch of her life she doesn’t put on camera. What you’re observing when you watch her receive so easily isn’t the building. It’s the machine running, which is the very last part of a long and ugly process, but the result is the only part she shows you.

From here, I show you what’s actually blocking you, where it lives, why it was built, and why no affirmation has ever come close to moving it. The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to get weekly deep dives into your pricing, pleasure, and the codes running underneath, including weekly live chats with me where the real work happens.

Read more

It isn’t. It was never true. And the part that not many know is that it was never even the real sentence.

The actual line, written by the Apostle Paul, is that the love of money is the root of all evil. Not money, the love of it. It was a warning about greed, worshiping wealth in the place of God, and letting the wanting become the whole of you. That’s a careful, narrow caution, but careful cautions are no use to anyone trying to control a population. So somewhere across the long centuries of repetition, three words fell off, “the love of,” and what survived was the blunt, false, weaponized version that got carved into culture and passed down through generations of women like an inheritance nobody questioned. Money is the root of all evil. Full stop. A lie built from a truth by cutting away the part that mattered.

The damage that lie did was specific. It left women unable to ask to be paid for their own work.

What the Lie Does to a Woman Who Heals

Picture the woman whose work comes from the deepest part of her. She coaches, heals, teaches, and makes things that change people. Her gift is the kind that moves through a person, and she’s good at it, good enough that people seek her out and tell her she transformed their lives.

Ask her to charge what the work is worth and watch what happens. She will lower the number before you finish your sentence. She will talk about an energy exchange, about keeping it “accessible,” about not wanting it to be about the money. She will offer the work for a fraction of its worth, feel virtuous doing so, and sense something close to nausea at the thought of declaring a real price and holding to it. She has decided, somewhere she can’t quite point to, that work this sacred should be nearly free, that charging properly for it would taint it, or that the purity of what she does and the act of being paid well for it cannot occupy the same room.

None of this began with her. The belief was installed long before she ever set a price, and if you trace it back, past her hesitation and past whatever she absorbed as a girl, you arrive at that flattened sentence and the institution that spent more than a thousand years pressing it into the bodies of women. The conviction that sacred work and money are enemies was never a spiritual truth she discovered for herself, it is a piece of theology she inherited without consent, and it is costing her a living.

It Was Not Always a Sin to Be Paid for Sacred Work

Here’s what makes the lie collapse the moment you see it: for most of human history, the women who did the sacred work were paid for it lavishly, and no one thought the money made them less holy.

Subscribe now

In ancient Egypt, the women who served the temples ran vast estates and held fortunes that rivaled the king’s. The God’s Wife of Amun was the highest-ranking priestess of the Amun cult in ancient Egypt, who presided over the rituals of the most powerful god in the land while collecting daily tribute from the priests beneath her, and one of them governed eleven provinces in her own name. The sacred in one hand and a fortune in the other, and not a soul saw a contradiction, because there was none.

In ancient Greece the priestesses were salaried, and we know it because the payments were cut into stone that still survives. The priestess of Athena Nike drew a yearly wage from the city treasury and kept the hides of the sacrifices to sell for more, and the law fined anyone who tried to pay her less than her due. There were legal penalties for underpaying a holy woman. In the Jewish Temple, a tax on every man built a treasury so vast the historian Josephus called it the storehouse of an entire people’s wealth.

For thousands of years, the woman who stood closest to the divine was rich, landed, powerful, and adored, and her wealth was counted as part of her holiness rather than a stain on it. The idea that real spiritual work should be given practically for free would’ve been unthinkable to every one of them. It is not ancient, nor is it eternal. It was manufactured, at a specific moment, by people who grew rich the instant women believed it.

How Poverty Became a Virtue

It happened when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Overnight, everyone was a Christian, and the most devout needed a way to set themselves above the ordinary crowd who had joined for convenience. They found it by turning poverty into the highest virtue and the body into something to be conquered. Desire of every kind became the enemy of the spirit, the desire for money along with the desire for comfort, pleasure, and sex. The man who made himself the poorest and most deprived was now the holiest in the room, and wanting more than the barest minimum became a mark of spiritual failure.

And while they were teaching ordinary people that their lack was holy and their wanting was sin, the institution doing the teaching was swelling into the wealthiest power on earth. The monasteries swallowed enormous estates, bishops moved into palaces, and treasuries overflowed. The same church that called poverty a gift to God was funded, coin by coin, by people who had almost nothing and were told that handing it over made them holier. Nobody had to steal a thing, they convinced the poor that their poverty was sacred, then they passed the plate, the poor stayed poor, and the institution did not.

Leave a comment

That’s the lie in its full glory. It wasn’t simply that money is evil, but that being without it is good, that the truly spiritual person wants little and asks for less, and that there is something corrupt in expecting to be paid for the holiest work you do. It is the most profitable belief ever sold, because it convinces the people generating the value to give it away and feel righteous for the giving.

You Left the Church. The Lie Stayed.

You can leave the religion completely and it changes nothing, because this was never in your beliefs. It was set into your body, and it stayed long after the theology was gone.

It’s in the woman who can’t say her price without shrinking, who undercharges and calls it humility, who gives her best work away and feels holier for it, and then cannot understand why she’s always running out of money. She thinks it’s a personality trait or a sign of integrity. It’s neither. It’s a fourteen-hundred-year-old lie masking as virtue, and it’s been keeping women poor while teaching them that poverty is proof of their goodness.

That’s why no amount of insight breaks it. She can know every word of this, agree with all of it, and the next time she goes to charge what she’s worth, her throat will still close, because the lie doesn’t live in the part of her that knows better. It lives in the part of her that freezes when money comes near. You cannot reason a clenched fist into letting go. You have to go down to where it was set, and the mind cannot make that journey by itself.

What Was Taken

Let yourself feel it, because anger is more useful here than understanding.

What belonged to you was the temple woman, paid like a queen for the sacred work she did, holding wealth and holiness in the same body without apology. What you were handed instead is the forgery, the good woman who gives until she’s empty and is taught to see the emptiness as virtue. That exchange wasn’t the will of God and it wasn’t an accident of history. It was a business decision, made by men who were never poor a day in their lives, enforced by an institution that has never once been humble, and it has kept women giving their gifts away for fourteen centuries while convincing them that asking to be paid would make them less good.

Every time you shrink your price, you tithe to a church you may have walked out of years ago. Every time you give your work away because charging for it feels wrong, you fund a treasury that was overflowing before you were born. And every time that voice tells you that wanting to be paid for your gift is greedy, you are obeying a sentence that was never true and was never even whole.

You were never meant to be the one giving everything away and calling the emptiness holy. You were meant to be paid, fully and without shame, for the sacred work that only you can do, the way women were for thousands of years before anyone told them otherwise. The lie is a lie. It always was. And it begins to lose its hold the moment you stop repeating it.

Where to Begin

But knowing it’s a lie won’t free you. You have felt the truth of every line here, and your body will still seize the next time you go to declare a real price, because the lie is older than your language and runs deeper than your reason, and it’s bound to the people who raised you and the faith they handed down. Reading about the wound shows you where it lives; it doesn’t close it.

Closing it is the work of the 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. For fourteen days I write to you directly, and we go all the way down to where this was set in you, to the exact guilt and the exact clench and the exact voice and whose it truly is, and we give your body the one thing no essay can hand it, the felt experience of charging and keeping and holding money with nothing waiting on the other side to punish you for it. We take the lie apart where it actually lives, in the body, and we do not stop until your nervous system finally understands that being paid for your gift was never the sin you were told it was.

It’s $397, and it ends a debt you have been paying for fourteen hundred years.

Begin the Work

The women around me, in my thirties, could build a rich life and burn down a rich woman in the same breath. I sat at those tables and watched it happen for years. The plans were detailed and the wanting was palpable – the house they’d buy, the trips they’d take and everything they’d finally do once money stopped being the problem. And then a woman who actually had that life would walk past, and the table turned on her. They went after her clothes, her voice, her husband, or whatever she must’ve done to get it. ‘Must be nice.’ ‘Who does she think she is?’ The same mouths that had just furnished a dream could strip a woman down to the studs in under a minute, and no one ever seemed to feel the contradiction.

I felt it because I also wanted what those women had, but my wanting and theirs weren’t the same. I loved watching wealthy women, the way they moved through a room and put themselves together, and I spent money I had no business spending to put my last dollar on something beautiful so I could hold a corner of that world too. Wealth felt impossibly far away, another country with no visible road in, and still, the women who lived there inspired me. The whole thing would’ve cost a single sentence to undo, the one I was already thinking back then, ‘I want what she has, and I don’t know how to get it.’

That sentence was just as true for every woman sitting there, and they refused to say it. The wanting had to go somewhere else, so it went sour and came back out as disgust.

What the Disgust Actually Is

Knowing you want something and having no idea how to get it hurts, and it hurts more the longer it goes on. For most of those women it had been going on the better part of their lives.

Disgust ends that pain in an instant. ‘She’s fake, it’s her husband’s money, she stepped on people to get there, she’s secretly miserable underneath all of it.’ All of those verdicts add up to the same thing. They turn ‘I can’t have what she has’ into ‘I would never want what she has,’ and the pain goes quiet for an afternoon. From the inside it never once feels like envy. It just feels like having taste.

Not everyone with money got attacked. A rich man would walk by and barely register, because he was playing a game these women had never been entered into, and his money said nothing about their lives. A rich woman got the full treatment, and where she came from just changed what they accused her of. If she was born into it, she never earned a thing, and if she built it herself, she must’ve done something to get it. The one who got it worst was the woman who came up from the same world they did. She had done the thing they said they wanted, and rather than let that mean it was possible, they decided she must’ve fucked her way there.

The Rule Underneath It

Stay at one of those tables long enough and you’ll hear the line that holds the whole thing together. ‘I may not have money, but at least I’m real.’ or ‘She’s rich, but I have integrity.’ It sounds humble, but underneath it is a law that says a woman gets to be rich or she gets to be real. She cannot be both.

Once that law is in a woman’s body, money becomes a threat. Every step toward it reads as a step away from herself and away from being one of the good ones, so she undercharges, or stays quiet when she should ask for more, and feels principled while she does it. Wealth stops looking like freedom and starts looking like a costume, the costume of the very women she’s spent her life proving she isn’t.

Leave a comment

It’s also why no wealthy woman could ever be innocent at that table. If money and realness can’t share a body, then every woman with money has already lost her realness somewhere, and the only open question is which accusation fits, whether she married for it, scammed for it, or fucked for it. No one ever needed evidence, because the verdict came in before she’d finished walking past. Their dream never once fell under the same suspicion. The imagined version of themselves with money stayed pure, deserving, and real, while every woman with money was guilty on sight, and those two beliefs sat side by side and never touched, because the whole arrangement only survives in the dark.

The Part Nobody Wants to Look At

The realness they’re protecting is counterfeit, and that’s the part that’s hard to say out loud.

A woman with real integrity doesn’t pick a stranger apart to feel better about her life, and she doesn’t lie to herself about what she’s feeling while she does it. So the trade these women believe they made, money handed back in exchange for keeping their soul intact, never actually happened. The realness was only ever the story that made the handing-back feel like a choice they made on purpose. What they’re left holding is an empty account and a daily habit of lying to themselves about their hearts, and they file both of those things under having character.

And the only person it actually costs is her. The wealthy woman across the room never feels the disgust. She doesn’t even knows it’s happening. The one paying for it is the woman holding it, quietly arranging her whole life around staying broke enough to keep believing she’s good, because the verdicts feel like the most real and righteous thing about her.

See If It Lives in You

Bring a wealthy woman to mind, and not a celebrity, but a woman whose starting point looked something like yours. Picture her telling you about her life, and somewhere in it she mentions what she paid for something, easily, a number that would change your entire month.

Watch your stomach while she talks, and catch the first thought you have about her, and notice whether it’s generous. If the verdict shows up fast, sharp, and a little bit satisfying, there it is. You just felt the thing that’s been standing between you and the money you want this whole time.

Then sit with the harder part, which is that the response didn’t come from your opinions and you cannot talk yourself out of it. You’ve probably already tried. You’ve done the affirmations and told yourself that abundance is your birthright, then watched your body do the exact same thing the next time a woman with real money opened her mouth. The disgust never cared what you decided to believe about it, because it comes from somewhere underneath the part of you that decides anything at all.

Why You Can’t Think Your Way Out

This is the part I need you to sit with, because it’s where most women stay stuck for years without understanding why.

Understanding the pattern changes nearly nothing on its own. I’ve just laid the entire machine out in front of you and your nervous system hasn’t moved an inch, but that isn’t a failure of insight on your part. It’s the nature of where the rule actually lives. It was installed before you had language for it, by women you loved, inside a body that was trying to keep you safe by keeping you one of them. It’s wired directly into your sense of belonging, which means your body experiences becoming wealthy as becoming exiled, and no amount of reading reaches that wiring, because the wiring doesn’t speak in arguments. It speaks in the exact drop you just felt in your stomach.

It’s also specific to you in a way no essay could ever be. Your disgust has a particular shape, aimed at particular kinds of women who remind you of a particular thing, protecting a particular belonging you are terrified to lose. The verdict you hand down has a voice, and that voice belongs to someone you can name. Until that exact structure gets traced and brought into the light, your body will go on enforcing it underneath everything you consciously want, and you’ll keep mistaking the result for bad luck, or bad timing, or a market that simply won’t pay you what you’re worth.

You can’t see the water you’re swimming in, and I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s the whole reason it’s still running you. The verdicts feel like the truth, the ceiling feels like plain reality, and the self-sabotage feels like a series of principled decisions you’re making of your own free will. From the inside, a cage built this early is impossible to tell apart from the shape of the world itself.

What It Takes

What changes it was never going to be more information, because you have more than enough of that now. What changes it is having someone trace your specific pattern alongside you, line by line, back to the exact tables where it got built and the exact people whose approval your body is still working to keep, and then walking you through the slow and physical work of teaching your nervous system that wealth on you is not a betrayal of anyone.

That’s the work I do inside the 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive. For fourteen days I write to you directly, and every email is built from what your answers reveal, because your version of this carries fingerprints I can’t guess at from here and you can’t make out from in there. We find the women whose verdicts you absorbed and the belonging the disgust has been protecting, and we find the precise place your body slams shut the moment money comes close, and we stay with it until it stops.

It’s $397, and it reaches the part of you that every book you’ve ever read has left untouched.

Begin the Work

The Vibrator I Couldn’t Put Down

I had a vibrator for years. A brand had gifted it to me, and it sat there charged and ready for the nights when my body felt restless and my mind needed to shut off. I’d feel the urge, go to my room, turn it on, rub one out, and go back to whatever I was doing. It would take me ten minutes, sometimes less, then the drawer would close and the night would continue as though nothing happened.

I never thought about what I was doing with my body during those ten minutes because I wasn’t doing anything with my body. The vibrator was doing it for me. My hands were merely holding a device instead of touching my body. I was completely absent from the most intimate act I could have with myself, outsourcing it to something that buzzed through the build-up, skipped the depth, and delivered a surface-level orgasm that left nothing behind except the brief satisfaction of release.

What I didn’t realize, and what took me a long time to see, is that this pattern was training my body for how it received everything, including money.

When your body learns that the fastest route to satisfaction is something plugged into a USB port, it stops trusting its own hands. It forgets that it was designed to feel deeply without assistance and starts to believe that depth requires something outside of itself to make it happen. That belief doesn’t stay in the bedroom. It leaks into how you earn, how you hold money, and how you allow yourself to receive anything good without immediately rushing through it to get to the next thing.

I was doing creative work at the time, yet I never once connected my orgasms to my creativity. They lived in separate rooms of my life and the idea that the two could feed each other would’ve sounded absurd to me. But that’s because the orgasms I was having weren’t connected to anything. A vibrator doesn’t ask you to be present or breathe into the intensity as it rises or direct the energy somewhere intentional. It asks you to hold still and let it do the work, and in exchange, you get an orgasm that evaporates the moment it’s over.

Everything changed on a trip to Mexico City, where I walked into a store and found a mahogany obsidian crystal wand that I almost didn’t buy. I left without it but couldn’t stop thinking about it, and went back the next day because my body wasn’t going to leave the country without it.

The experience was nothing like the vibrator because there was no fast track to release. The wand was cool stone that warmed slowly against my body, and because there was nothing vibrating, I had to be the one creating the sensation. I had to move slowly, feel what was happening inside my body, stay present with it instead of zoning out while a device did the work. The wand didn’t take me anywhere on its own. It went where I took it, at the pace my body set, and that created an intimacy with myself that I’d never felt with the vibrator.

My practice became intentional in a way it had never been before. I started using my orgasms to channel energy toward what I was building. And I’m not talking about some vague manifestation ritual where I thought about money while I came. I’m talking about what happens when your body learns to generate pleasure slowly and stay present through it without reaching for something external to finish the job. Your body learns that it is the source. That everything it needs to feel deeply and fully can come from inside itself without a device doing the work. And that lesson changes how you relate to money, creativity, and receiving in ways I genuinely did not expect.

Money moved after that. My body became one that could hold sensation without discharging it immediately, and that same body started holding money differently too. The capacity for depth that I’d been bypassing with a vibrator for years was finally online, and it turned out that capacity wasn’t just sexual. It was financial, creative, and spiritual all at once, and it had been waiting for me to stop numbing my way past it.

Look, I’m not anti-vibrator. Plenty of women use them alongside everything else in their practice and their connection to their body is alive and well. The vibrator becomes a problem when it’s the only thing you reach for, when your hands have forgotten what your own skin feels like, when you need a motor to do what your body was designed to do on its own. That kind of disconnection doesn’t stay in the bedroom. Your wealth feels it too, even if you’ve never connected the two.

The Men I Was Fucking

I spent years not being honest about this and it cost me more money than I care to calculate. I was fucking broke men. And I don’t mean men who were temporarily between jobs or going through a rough patch – although any man with money problems has no business being inside you. I mean men whose entire relationship with money was scarcity, chaos, and avoidance, and I was letting them inside me on a regular basis as though that exchange was free.

Read more

There’s a reason your money never stays. You earn it, and within days, sometimes hours, it’s gone. Bills, yes. Responsibilities, sure. But also the impulse buy you didn’t need, the dinner you could have skipped, the subscription you forgot to cancel, the thing you purchased at midnight because your body was restless and your thumb was faster than your brain. And by the time the next deposit hits, you’re already back to zero, wondering where it all went and promising yourself that this time will be different.

It never is, though. Because the problem was never the spending. The problem is that your body cannot tolerate the feeling of having.

I want you to think about what happens in your body when your bank account is full. Not just enough to cover the bills, but genuinely full. More than you need. A cushion. A surplus. Money that is sitting there doing nothing except existing in your name. How long can you leave it alone before the itch starts? Before your mind begins scanning for reasons to move it somewhere, spend it on something, redistribute it to someone? Before the fullness itself becomes so uncomfortable that the only way to relieve it is to empty the account back down to a number your nervous system can tolerate?

That itch is not financial irresponsibility – it’s a somatic response. Your body has been trained to treat accumulation as dangerous, and every time money builds past a certain threshold, your nervous system fires a signal that says too much, get rid of it, this isn’t safe. You don’t even recognize it as fear because it doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like generosity when you give it away, like responsibility when you pay something off early, like treating yourself when you buy the thing you didn’t need. But underneath every one of those justifications is a body that’s trying to return to the financial baseline it was taught to maintain, which for most women is just barely enough and never more.

Now I want you to think about edging.

If you know what edging is, your body just responded to that sentence. If you don’t, stay with me.

Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm and then pulling back before you tip over. You stay in the build-up. You let the intensity climb until every nerve in your body is screaming for release, and then you choose not to. Not because you don’t want to cum, but because you know that what’s building inside you right now is more powerful than the immediate relief of letting go. You hold the tension. You breathe through the ache. You let the pleasure compound on itself until the eventual release, and when you finally let yourself fall, it doesn’t just release. It detonates. Your entire body convulses with the accumulated weight of everything you refused to let go of too soon, and for a few seconds you don’t exist as a person anymore, you’re just sensation, pure and overwhelming and worth every second of the restraint it took to get there. That is what the body is capable of when it’s allowed to build instead of being rushed to the finish.

That is the practice I want you to apply to your money.

Because the way you spend is the way you release. And most women are releasing their money the same way they’ve been taught to release pleasure: quickly, quietly, and before it has a chance to build into anything that might overwhelm them.

The Body Doesn’t Distinguish Between Financial and Sexual Release

Your nervous system processes money and sex through the same reward pathways. The same dopamine system that fires when your body builds toward orgasm is the system that fires when your bank account builds toward surplus. They share the same architecture, which means the patterns your body learned around one are running the other whether you realize it or not.

Leave a comment

A woman who was taught that pleasure is dangerous, that desire is shameful, or that wanting too much will be punished, carries that instruction into every area of her life. It shows up in the bedroom and it shows up in her bank account, because her body learned a long time ago that accumulation of any kind, whether it’s sexual energy or financial energy, needs to be released before it reaches a level that attracts attention, consequences, or punishment.

This is why you can’t save money even when you earn enough. This is why a full bank account makes you anxious instead of peaceful. This is why you find yourself spending after a good month as though the surplus itself was the problem. Your body is doing with your money what it does with pleasure: reaching the edge and then letting go before the build-up can become something that changes you.

Edging interrupts that cycle. It teaches your body, through repetition and practice, that the build-up is safe. That sitting in the tension of having without releasing doesn’t lead to punishment. That the ache of wanting to spend, of wanting to give it away, of wanting to return to the comfortable emptiness of zero is not a signal to act. It’s a signal that you are right at the edge of something your body has never been allowed to hold, and if you can stay there, if you can breathe through the discomfort and keep your hands off the release, what builds on the other side of that restraint is wealth that actually compounds.

What Edging Looks Like Applied to Money

You get paid. The deposit hits and your body’s first impulse is to move the money. Pay the bills immediately, transfer it, buy the thing, redistribute it, or do anything to bring the balance back down to the number that feels safe. You feel the itch, the urgency, the low-grade anxiety of having more than your nervous system is comfortable with.

And instead of acting on that impulse, you sit with it. You don’t move the money. You don’t open the shopping app. You don’t send it to someone. You just sit with the discomfort of having, the way you’d sit with the build-up of pleasure during edging, and you let your body learn that the fullness is not going to hurt you.

The first time you do this, it will feel unbearable. Your body will generate every justification it can find for why you should spend, why this bill needs to be paid right now, why you deserve to treat yourself, why it’s smarter to move the money before something happens to it. Those justifications are not logic. They are your nervous system’s survival strategy for keeping you at the financial baseline it was programmed to maintain.

You don’t argue with the justifications. You acknowledge them the way you’d acknowledge the urge to release during edging, by noticing them, breathing through them, and choosing to stay on the edge anyway. The money stays in the account. The discomfort peaks and then, if you hold long enough, it starts to shift. Your body begins to acclimate to a new threshold. The number that used to feel dangerously full starts to feel normal. And the next time you get paid, the edge is a little further out, the tolerance a little wider, and the itch a little quieter.

That is how wealth builds in the body. Not through budgets or spreadsheets or willpower. Through the slow, erotic discipline of teaching your nervous system that holding more than you need is not only safe but pleasurable.

Why Women Specifically Need This

Men were never taught that having is dangerous. A man with a full bank account feels secure. A man with surplus feels powerful. His body was trained from childhood to associate accumulation with safety, with status, with manhood itself. Nobody told him that wanting more was greedy or that keeping money for himself was selfish. The instruction he received was the opposite: earn more, keep more, build more. The fullness is the goal.

Women received a different instruction. Women were taught to give. To share. To make sure everyone around them is fed before they sit down to eat. To feel guilty when they have more than they need while someone nearby has less. To associate financial surplus with selfishness and financial sacrifice with love. And that instruction didn’t just shape how women think about money. It shaped how their bodies respond to it. The anxiety you feel when your bank account is too full isn’t a thought –it’s a sensation. It lives in your chest, your stomach, and your hands. It’s your body executing an instruction it received decades ago from women who received it from women who received it from a culture that needed women to keep giving and never accumulating.

Subscribe now

Edging is the antidote because it works at the level where the instruction lives. You can’t think your way out of a somatic response. You can’t budget your way past a nervous system that panics at a certain number. But you can train your body, slowly, through practice, to hold a higher threshold of having. The same way edging trains your body to hold a higher threshold of pleasure without discharging, edging your money trains your body to hold a higher threshold of wealth without spending it away.

The Ache Is Where the Wealth Lives

I want to reframe something that most women have been taught to avoid. The ache, the discomfort, the almost unbearable tension of wanting something and not letting yourself have it yet, that feeling is not the enemy – it’s the engine.

In sex, the ache of edging is what builds the orgasm into something that moves through your entire body. Without the ache, without the restraint, the release is fast, shallow, and forgettable. It happens on the surface and leaves nothing behind. But when you hold the tension, when you let the ache build and build until your whole body is vibrating with the intensity of what you’re holding, the release when it comes is so much deeper that it changes the way you experience pleasure from that point forward.

Money works the same way. The women who spend everything the moment it arrives are having shallow financial orgasms. Quick relief, temporary satisfaction, nothing left over, and the cycle starts again with the next deposit. But the women who can sit in the ache of having, who can feel the itch to spend and choose to hold anyway, who can let their bank account build to a number that used to make them physically uncomfortable and stay there until the discomfort transforms into something else entirely, those women are building wealth that compounds the way edged pleasure compounds. Slowly at first, then with an intensity that changes everything about how they relate to money.

The ache is not a problem to be solved by spending. The ache is the wealth being built. And the longer you can hold it, the more powerful the result.

How to Begin

You don’t start by trying to hold everything. You start small, the same way you’d start with any edging practice, by finding your edge and sitting with it just a little longer than feels comfortable.

The next time you get paid, before you move a single dollar, sit with the full number for 24 hours. Don’t pay anything. Don’t spend anything. Don’t redistribute. Just let the money be there, in your account, with your name on it, and notice what your body does. Notice the itch. Notice the justifications that start rolling through your mind. Notice where the tension lives in your body and what it’s trying to get you to do. And don’t do it. Not yet.

After 24 hours, take care of whatever genuinely needs to be paid. But pay attention to the difference between what needs to be paid and what your body is urgently trying to get rid of because the fullness is uncomfortable. Those are two very different categories, and most women have never separated them because the urgency of the body’s release response makes everything feel equally pressing.

Leave a comment

The next time, hold for 48 hours, then 72, then a full week. Each time you extend the hold, your body recalibrates. The number that used to trigger the itch becomes your new normal, and the edge moves further out. You are literally retraining your nervous system to tolerate a higher level of financial pleasure without discharging it.

This isn’t about deprivation or denying yourself pleasure. This is about discovering that the deepest pleasure, the kind that actually changes your life, lives in the holding. Not the spending. The holding.

The One Thing Worth Releasing For

There’s an irony in asking you to hold your money and then inviting you to spend $397 on a coaching container, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist. But there’s a difference between spending that empties you and spending that builds you. The midnight impulse buy is a release. Investing in 14 days of personalized coaching that rewires how your body responds to having is something else entirely.

If you read this essay and recognized yourself in every paragraph, if your body was itching just thinking about your bank account sitting full and untouched, the pattern is deeper than a spending habit. It’s in your nervous system, in the same place that controls how you experience pleasure, desire, and accumulation of any kind. And if you’ve tried to change it on your own and the itch keeps winning, it’s because willpower doesn’t rewire a somatic pattern. Accountability does.

The 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive is where we go into your body and find where the release pattern was installed. For 14 days, I write to you, and every email is built from what your body reveals in your responses. We trace the spending back to the same place we trace the pleasure, and we teach your nervous system that holding is not only safe but is the most powerful thing your body can learn to do.

It’s $397 and it’ll change how you earn for the rest of your life.

Begin the Work

I’m starting to think the comments on my essays deserve their own column because the women writing them are doing more of my work for me than they realize.

Every few weeks, a woman shows up on my page and tells me something about herself she doesn’t know she’s telling me. She thinks she’s offering feedback. She thinks she’s being helpful, or grounded, or spiritually above whatever I’m writing about. But what she’s actually doing is handing me a perfect case study in the exact wound I write about, gift-wrapped in unsolicited advice.

One woman recently suggested that instead of helping women earn money, I should be teaching people how to convert money into vital sexual energy, and that my work “feels a little like turning vital energy into another materialistic trap.” She came to a page about women and money and wanted to know why everyone is so obsessed with money.

I hear versions of this constantly. Women who frame their discomfort as wisdom, who dress their money wound in spiritual language and hand it to me like a correction, who genuinely believe they’re offering perspective when they’re actually telling me and every woman reading along that wanting money is a character flaw and talking about it openly is worse.

And here’s something that might piss you off, but I need to say it because it’s true: in all the time I’ve been writing about wealth, not once has a man shown up to tell me I’m too focused on money. Men don’t care. A person talking openly about earning is so unremarkable in their world it doesn’t register as something worth commenting on. The shaming always comes from women, and that’s worth sitting with because it reveals something much uglier than a disagreement about content.

He’s Ambitious. She’s Obsessed.

The reason men matter in this conversation is because they show you what the absence of shaming looks like. A man says he wants to build a million-dollar company and the room nods. He’s driven, he’s building something, and his desire for money is treated as the most natural thing in the world. Nobody asks him to examine his relationship with wealth or tells him he should be converting his ambition into vital energy. Nobody suggests that wanting more is a character flaw he should work through.

A woman says she wants to earn more and the room shifts. Suddenly she needs to justify it. She needs to explain what the money is for, how she’ll use it, what higher purpose it serves. She can want financial freedom or security for her children or a way out of a bad marriage. Those are acceptable reasons. But if she just wants money because she wants money, because she likes how it feels to have it, because she enjoys the power and options and pleasure that come with a full account, the room gets uncomfortable and the first person to say something will almost always be another woman.

The language is always moral, always framed as a correction, as though the woman wanting money has wandered off the path and needs to be guided back to where she belongs, which is anywhere that isn’t openly, unapologetically wealthy.

Why She Polices and Who She’s Really Protecting

If the patriarchy wanted to keep women from building wealth, it couldn’t have designed a more effective system than the one women run on each other for free.

The woman who tells you you’re too focused on money is almost always a woman who can’t charge for her own work. She gives everything away, underprices, over-delivers, and calls it generosity. She watches other women earn and feels something rise in her chest that she’d rather call concern than envy. And when she sees a woman talking openly about wealth without wrapping it in charitable purpose, she can’t sit with what that brings up in her, so she reaches for the only tool she has: shame.

Leave a comment

She doesn’t shame men because she never expected them to be different. A man wanting money is just a man being a man. But a woman wanting money violates something she absorbed so long ago she doesn’t even recognize it as an instruction anymore. Women are supposed to be modest about what they want, supposed to lead with purpose instead of profit, supposed to care about things that matter. And money, apparently, doesn’t qualify unless it’s being given away.

So she polices. With comments and raised eyebrows at dinner and the subtle shift in energy when you mention what you made this month. With the friend who says “must be nice” instead of “I’m proud of you.” With the colleague who asks what you charge and then goes quiet in a way that makes you wish you hadn’t answered. She does all of this believing she’s offering perspective, believing she’s grounded, believing she’s above the obsession. But what she’s actually doing is keeping the fence intact around a yard she can’t bring herself to leave, and she wants you back inside it with her because your freedom is a reminder that the gate was never locked.

When a Woman Calls You Obsessed With Money

She’s not describing you. She’s describing what happens in her own body when she watches you do something she can’t.

You say the number out loud. You don’t apologize for wanting more. You charge for your work and sleep fine afterward. You treat your financial ambition as something that deserves the same space as your creativity, your relationships, your health, and you don’t pretend to be modest about it to make the room more comfortable.

For a woman who has spent her entire life being rewarded for not wanting too much, watching you do that is unbearable. She was the good girl who never made anyone uncomfortable with her desires. She said “it’s not about the money” so many times she actually started to believe it. And then she found my work, where I write about money like it belongs in the same conversation as sex and power and the body, and everything she’d been sitting on came rushing up and she mistook it for an opinion about my writing. She doesn’t have an opinion about my writing. She has a wound, and my writing pressed on it.

The Women Who Celebrate and the Women Who Correct

You already know which women in your life do which. You can feel it in your body before they even speak. There are women who hear your number and smile, who say “raise it” when you tell them what you charge, who send you clients without worrying it takes something away from them. These women have their own relationship with earning sorted out, or they’re actively working on it, and your success doesn’t threaten them because their sense of their own value doesn’t depend on yours staying low.

And then there are the women whose energy changes when your income comes up. The ones who find a way to redirect the conversation or insert a joke about being bougie in a way that’s supposed to sound light but doesn’t. The ones who ask what you charge and then say “wow” in a tone that isn’t admiration. These women are carrying something they haven’t looked at yet, and instead of looking at it, they’re projecting it onto you in the form of casual comments that feel heavier than they pretend.

You don’t owe them a softer version of your ambition. You don’t owe them a disclaimer about how it’s not really about the money. And you don’t owe them any performance of modesty to make your desire for wealth small enough for their nervous system to handle.

The Real Cost of Going Quiet

Every time a woman swallows her ambition because another woman made her feel like it was too much, the wound gets reinforced. Not by a man, not by a system, but by a woman sitting right next to her who couldn’t handle watching her want something out loud.

The women who go quiet about their money goals don’t stop wanting. They just stop saying it. They shrink the number in their head. They frame their business as a passion project instead of a company. They tell people they do it because they love it, and that might be true, but it’s also a shield against the accusation that they do it for money. They learn to lead every financial conversation with purpose and impact and mission because those words are acceptable in a way that “I want to make a lot of money” never will be in a room full of women who’ve agreed that wanting money is ugly.

Over years, the ambition gets buried so deep that the woman herself forgets it was ever there. She calls herself balanced and content with what she has. And underneath all of that language is a woman who wanted more and was shamed out of saying so by the very women she thought were her community.

That’s the real cost of the policing. Not the money she didn’t make. The wanting she stopped doing.

Where to Begin

The shaming, the shrinking, the swallowing of your own ambition – none of it lives in your head. It lives in your chest when someone asks what you charge, in your throat when you try to say a number that feels too big, and in your stomach when a woman you respect implies that your relationship with money is a problem.

The 14-Day Email Coaching Intensive is where we go into your body and find where the instruction was installed. For fourteen days, I write to you, and every email is built from what your body reveals in your responses. We trace the shaming back to where it started, find whose voice you’ve been obeying when you shrink your prices and swallow your ambition, and give your nervous system the experience of wanting openly without being punished for it.

It’s $397 and it will change how you earn for the rest of your life.

Begin the Work

I got a notification this evening from a woman who clearly thought she was writing the most brilliant takedown of my work. She dissected my essay line by line, made jokes about Babylonian priestesses running luxury nervous system bordellos, compared my paywall to her uncle handing out escort cards at a bazaar, and wrapped the whole thing in enough sarcasm to fill a TED talk nobody asked for.

Her issue wasn’t the writing. She liked the writing. Her issue was that while reading something that was clearly doing something to her body, she saw an invitation to become a paid subscriber. The essay itself was completely free. She had full access to every word. And the mere suggestion that more of my work costs $9 a month offended her so deeply that wrote a 400-word note about it on her own page.

She’s not the first. She won’t be the last. But she’s not who I’m writing this for.

Read more