I was standing in the hallway between my bedroom and my daughter’s when I stopped, put my hands up, and said, “Help me.”

I don’t know who I was asking, God, the universe, the women who came before me, whoever was listening. My daughter was across the hall going through something that felt bigger than anything I knew how to solve for her, and I was about to walk into her room.

This felt different from the way I usually ask myself what I need. When it’s my life, my body, my decision, I know how to go inside and listen. But this wasn’t only about me. There was another human being across the hall, and I couldn’t go inside myself and know what she needed. I’m not a psychic. I’m her mom. What I could trust was that I would know how to meet the moment when I got there.

So I asked for help and didn’t get some big answer, no download, no perfect sentence, nothing telling me exactly what to do. What I felt was not to fill the silence just because it was uncomfortable. I walked into her room and sat down on her bed. I put my hand on her leg and started rubbing it. After some time, I told her I loved her, though I couldn’t tell you much of anything else I said. Her body next to mine is what stayed with me, more than any words. I trusted myself enough to stay there, another warm body sitting beside her, my presence telling her she wasn’t alone.

I’m creating a retreat called Sovereign Woman, and this is part of what sovereignty means to me. It can sound so big. Powerful. Almost regal. Like something you arrive at after enough healing and personal development, when you finally become this woman who knows exactly who she is and never questions herself again. That hasn’t been my experience. Sometimes sovereignty looks like standing in a hallway saying, I don’t know what to do, and going into the room anyway.

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Twelve years ago, I was in the Netherlands with my sister. We were shopping at a pottery store just outside Amsterdam, and I was trying to decide between two vases. One had that traditional blue and white Delft pattern, and the other was plain white. I turned to her and asked, “Which one should I get?”

She looked at me, frustrated, and said, “Ask yourself.”

I thought, whoa. Okay. Maybe she’s a little grumpy because it’s time to eat. So we went to lunch, and when we sat down I asked her what she meant by that. She told me I didn’t even know what I liked anymore, that I was so concerned about what everybody else wanted and needed that I didn’t know what I wanted.

She was right. I was really good at being agreeable, easygoing, convenient, low maintenance. I was paying attention to what everybody else wanted, what everybody else needed, what would make things easier, what I should do, what kind of wife I should be, what kind of mom I should be, what kind of woman I should be. I spent so much time looking outside myself that I wasn’t asking myself very much at all.

Going inward did not come naturally to me. I grew up learning the answers were outside of me, so turning inward felt foreign. My own voice was quiet at first. I spent so much of my life listening for authority outside myself that I didn’t really know what my own knowing sounded like. I questioned the practice itself: am I doing this right, is this what it’s supposed to feel like, is that actually an answer.

This is part of why I started so small. I wasn’t beginning with should I leave my marriage, or what is my purpose, or what should I do with my life. I got curious about what sounded good for dinner and what movie I wanted to watch. I started paying attention to what kind of movement felt good in my body and whether I actually wanted to go somewhere instead of automatically saying yes. I started asking what I liked and what I needed.

And answers came.

I discovered that I like soup. I used to think soup was a rip-off because you eat it and an hour and a half later you’re hungry again. My body likes soup.

Asking myself became more than figuring out what I liked. One of the questions I began using regularly was, What do you need, sweetheart?

The first time I asked myself that, the answer was a sandwich. I was hungry. It sounds almost funny because we expect our inner wisdom to be more impressive than that, some profound answer about purpose or partnership or the direction of our life, and mine was basically, can you please make me lunch.

Except it was more emotional than I expected. There were many times growing up when my mom didn’t feed us, when I knew what it felt like to be hungry and not have someone notice. So there was something about asking what I needed, hearing sandwich, and realizing I was hungry and could just make myself one. I could feed myself.

Even while writing this article, I paused and asked, What do you need, sweetheart? The answer was lip gloss. My lips were dry, so I got my favorite lip mask, put it on, and kept writing. That’s it. There doesn’t need to be a childhood wound underneath the lip balm. Sometimes your lips are just dry.

Then it got a little more uncomfortable, because having a preference means sometimes it’s different from somebody else’s. I spent years being agreeable and easygoing. If three people were deciding where to eat, it was much easier for me to say I’m fine, wherever you want to go. Once I actually knew what I wanted, I had to decide whether I was willing to say it.

I didn’t suddenly become perfect at that. There were still times I caved or went along with what somebody else wanted. The difference was that now I could feel it. I didn’t understand it then, but I was betraying myself all the time. I just couldn’t recognize self-betrayal when I wasn’t connected enough to myself to know what I was abandoning.

Once I could hear myself, I could feel when I left myself too.

I’ve been practicing Ask Yourself for twelve years now. It’s one of the foundations of how I live and how I coach. I am good at hearing myself because I do it all the time. My intuition isn’t some faint little whisper I’m constantly trying to find. It’s loud.

That relationship was built through practice. I ask, I listen, I respond, and life gives me feedback. Then I ask again. I didn’t wait until I was standing in front of the biggest decisions of my life and suddenly expect myself to know how to trust my own voice. I practiced when the answer was soup. I practiced when it was a sandwich and when it was lip gloss.

That is sovereignty to me. It is a relationship with yourself that gets stronger the more you use it.

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I’ve hosted the Creative Woman Retreat for almost ten years now. I say “hosted,” but that word has never quite captured it, because I’m doing the work too, learning right alongside the women who come.

Creative Woman was built around one idea: you are the creator of your life. For years we’ve looked at what we’re creating from, fear or love, and the stories underneath both, the beliefs we formed too young to understand what we were making them mean, the patterns our nervous systems learned to keep us safe that now keep us stuck. We’ve looked at our bodies, our wombs, our families, our conditioning, released things, reclaimed things, and sat in circles listening to each other more honestly than most of us ever have.

Now the question is, what’s next?

Because at some point, we know a lot. We know how our energy works, what motivates us, the childhood wound and the attachment pattern behind why we people-please or shut down or overgive. We’ve listened to the podcasts and read the books and gone to therapy and hired the coaches and sat in ceremony and pulled the cards.

I’m not saying any of that like it was unnecessary. I needed all of it. I still use a lot of it. The Clarity Code exists because I believe understanding ourselves matters. I’ve spent a decade facilitating this work, and I’ve sat across from hundreds of women in this gap between the insight they already carry and the life they can actually live. I know this space.

At some point, knowing more isn’t what’s next. You have to live what you already know.

That requires action. I can hear myself when I ask, but if I continually override what I hear, I’m teaching myself that my own voice doesn’t matter. Sovereignty gets built in the practice of asking myself, hearing what comes, acting on it, and letting life give me feedback. Sometimes the choice works the way I hoped. Sometimes I learn something I couldn’t have known until I acted. Either way, I get more information, and the relationship gets stronger because I’ve lived it.

Creative Woman has been about returning to the truth that you are the creator of your life. Sovereign Woman asks what happens when you actually live like you believe it.

Can you still hear yourself when you’re falling in love and part of you really wants to be chosen?

Can you stay connected to what you know when money gets tight and the safest-looking option is suddenly the most tempting one?

Can you tell yourself the truth when your life is good and you’re still aware it isn’t the life you actually want?

Can you belong to yourself when belonging to yourself costs something?

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I grew up in systems where other people knew. Parents, teachers, church leaders, the culture and society all had rules and expectations and clear ideas about what a good woman looked like, what a good wife looked like, what God wanted, what you should do when you didn’t know what to do.

I was raised believing the answers were outside of me. Even when I heard a voice or felt a knowing inside myself, I was taught that it wasn’t actually me. It was the Holy Ghost. I didn’t have language for that as intuition, or as my own inner knowing. I wasn’t taught to recognize my own internal guidance as mine.

I still believe in God, in something greater than myself. I still ask for help and guidance, the way I did that night in the hallway. What’s different now is that I understand the knowing I experience inside myself is also mine. I can believe deeply in something greater than myself without giving away the authority of what I know inside me.

There was comfort in that. We don’t talk about that part enough when we talk about leaving religion, or leaving any structure that has given us answers for a long time. It’s easy to talk about freedom afterward. It’s harder to talk about how uncomfortable freedom can feel when nobody is standing there telling you what the right answer is anymore.

I left organized religion years ago. What I didn’t do was immediately stop looking outside myself. The authority just changed clothes. I could still find somebody who knew: a psychic, a tarot reading, a coach, an astrologer, a medicine circle, Google, Chat. I’ve watched other women do the same thing, leave one structure where somebody else told them what was true and unknowingly recreate it somewhere else.

That’s what my sister was actually asking me to reclaim while shopping in the Netherlands. Not just which vase I liked, but whether I trusted anything I heard inside myself as mine to begin with.

I’m not interested in making any of those tools wrong. I use astrology. I pull cards. I work with medicine. I have a coach and mentors. I ask my friends what they see. The question isn’t whether I receive wisdom from outside myself. The question is what happens after I receive it. Does it help me hear myself more clearly, or does it replace me? I can receive information from everywhere and still come back to myself first, asking what I know, what it brings up in me, and what feels true here.

That distinction matters because we hand ourselves over in ways so small they barely register as choices. I can send a text to a friend before sending it to the person because I need someone else to tell me it’s okay. I can pull another card because I didn’t like the first one, or ask Chat what to say before I’ve asked myself what I actually want to say.

Months after that night in the hallway, my daughter was going through another difficult stretch. I didn’t know how to respond to what she was sharing with me, so I took it to Chat and asked for help.

Later she told me she didn’t want to know what Chat thought. She wanted to know what I thought.

That hit hard. It felt so critical to say the right thing that I skipped over my own intuition and relationship with my daughter and went straight to asking something else how I should mother her.

Ask Yourself doesn’t mean I believe I contain everybody else’s answers. When the question is mine, I go inside and something comes, even if it’s small. When the question belongs to somebody else, I don’t get to decide what is true for them. I can listen, bring what I know, offer support, and still not turn myself into the authority over another person’s life. That’s true with my daughter too. We spend the beginning making almost every decision for our children, and then the work changes. We give their lives back to them.

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I knew for a long time that my last relationship wasn’t my forever relationship.

That’s hard to say because he was good to me. We had fun together, and I loved him. I also wasn’t physically attracted to him. I knew that early, and instead of letting it be information, I made myself wrong for caring about it. I told myself I was superficial, too picky, that I should be grateful because he treated me well and surely that should be enough.

At one point I even told myself I didn’t want to get married again. That story made things easier. If I didn’t want marriage, it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see myself marrying him. If attraction was superficial, I didn’t have to admit it mattered to me.

I spent a long time trying to make what I had become what I wanted, and I got critical inside that relationship. I could find all kinds of things to pick apart. Underneath a lot of that criticism was something harder to look at. I was betraying myself. I already knew, and I kept negotiating with what I knew because the truth was inconvenient.

That experience taught me something important about Ask Yourself. Hearing the answer and living the answer are two different things.

Leaving meant losing things I liked, financial support, companionship, someone helping carry pieces of life. I didn’t know who I’d meet next or what my finances would look like. I didn’t know the outcome. I knew what was true for me.

That’s one of the places sovereignty became very real. It is okay to have preferences. Sovereignty doesn’t mean I get everything I want. It means I stop abandoning what I know I want before life even has a chance to respond to it.

I teach this to clients constantly because I watch people negotiate against and talk themselves out of their own desires all the time. One of my favorite questions to ask is, “If you could have anything in the world, what would it be?” Not what’s realistic, not what makes everyone else comfortable, not what you should be grateful for because somebody else would love to have it.

For me, I want partnership. Attraction and depth and laughter and travel and dinners together. A partner my children want in their lives too. I don’t want to choose between the relationship I want and the family relationships I want. I want both. There was a time when saying that out loud would have felt demanding. Now I can let it be what I prefer. I don’t have to lie to myself about the desire just because I don’t know yet how it happens.

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This is also why I don’t believe sovereignty means certainty.

I like knowing, understanding the pattern, having enough information to make a decision I feel good about. But knowing myself and knowing what is going to happen are completely different things. I can know what I need without knowing what happens next, or know I want to leave without knowing what my life will look like afterward.

That distinction has become easier because I’ve spent years listening to the way my body communicates. Sometimes it answers the bigger question, and sometimes what I hear is simply the next thing I need: eat first, sleep on it, wait. I don’t dismiss those answers anymore because they aren’t profound enough. If my body is telling me I need rest before I decide, then rest is the answer I have right now.

Fear can still get loud, and old stories can still be convincing. This is part of why I’ve practiced SNAP for years: stop, notice, ask, pivot. Stopping gives me enough room to notice what’s actually happening in my body, what I know, and what I might be making it mean because it reminds me of something before.

The more I practice, the easier it is to recognize the difference. I know what my intuition sounds like because I’ve listened to it thousands of times. That doesn’t mean every choice works the way I hope. I’m a 1/3 in Human Design, which gave me language for something I was already living: investigate, experiment, adjust, choose again. There are things I haven’t been able to know until I have lived them.

I think that’s part of sovereignty too. I don’t have to know exactly how something is going to turn out to trust what I know right now. I can make a choice, live it, learn something, and choose again. And every time I do that, I get to know myself a little better.

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That’s part of what I’m doing with Sovereign Woman. I’m not interested in gathering a group of women so I can become another person who tells them what their lives mean. I want to help women get better at hearing themselves.

The Sovereign Woman turns routine into ritual. I still have structure, daily check-ins, and the discipline of showing up for myself. What changed is my relationship with it. Instead of automatically walking for twenty minutes because that’s my routine, I can ask what my body actually needs today. Maybe it’s walking. Maybe it’s yoga or Pilates or rest. The structure supports me without becoming another authority I obey.

At the retreat, every woman receives her own oracle card deck. The point isn’t for me to pull a card and interpret what I think she needs to know or tell her what the universe wants her to know. She pulls it herself, notices what she sees, what it brings up in her. The card doesn’t need to know more about her than she knows about herself. It can simply help her listen.

We’re also beginning the retreat in water. Water was the first thing that held us, before any of us had words. This time, these women get to enter it intentionally and choose how they emerge. I believe in letting the body participate in our choices instead of only thinking about them.

And then they go home.

That matters, because the retreat isn’t the end of the practice. Someone will disappoint them, money may get tight, an old story will show up. They’ll be standing in the middle of ordinary life again, and that’s where sovereignty becomes something they live rather than something they experienced at a retreat.

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For a long time, I thought being powerful meant being capable enough that I didn’t need anyone. Little Katie learned that early: figure it out, fix it, take care of yourself. That version of me became incredibly capable. She built businesses, raised kids, and held rooms full of people. I don’t confuse that with sovereignty anymore.

I want to need people. Partnership, someone to carry my suitcase and drive me to the airport, friends who tell me when they see something I don’t. I want my children to affect me. I want mentors who challenge me, and women I can sit beside when I don’t know what comes next.

I want love to change me. I just don’t want to disappear inside of it.

That’s what belonging to myself means to me now. It doesn’t mean I belong only to myself. I can belong to my family, belong inside a partnership, belong to communities and friendships and rooms full of women. I can let somebody matter enough that losing them would break my heart. And I can still remain here.

That’s the part of sovereignty I care about most, not becoming untouchable or needing less, but having enough relationship with myself that I can experience more: more intimacy, more uncertainty, more love, more receiving, more truth, more life. Because I know that even when something changes, even when somebody leaves, even when a choice teaches me something I didn’t expect, even when I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I don’t have to leave myself too.

That night in the hallway, I wanted an answer badly enough that I put my hands up and asked whoever was listening to help me. I didn’t get some big answer telling me what to say to my daughter. That wasn’t mine to know. What I could trust was that I would know how to meet the moment when I walked into the room.

There was a daughter across the hall who needed her mom, and I knew how to be her mom.

So I walked into her room.

Stay close.

I called my cousin because I wanted to see her. We’ve gotten really close over the last few years, and I told her to come down to the beach while I was here. Then I had an idea. What if we invited everybody else?

So what started as the two of us spending time at the beach quickly became a family reunion.

I remember saying to her, this is either going to be the best idea I’ve ever had or the worst, because I know my family.

We’ve been coming to Gulf Shores for almost fifty years. I have memories here from almost every version of us. I love my family. I love the beach. I love having people together, cooking and eating and laughing and staying up too late. Give me a reason to gather people and I’m probably going to make it into a whole thing.

I also knew exactly what I was inviting in.

My family has been sitting around kitchen tables drinking together for much of my life. Sometimes the conversation goes somewhere it probably wouldn’t have gone sober. Something that happened twenty years ago gets brought back into the room. Feelings get hurt. Sometimes people move on by the next morning like nothing happened. Sometimes they don’t talk again for years.

I grew up learning to monitor those rooms, noticing who’d had too much, who was getting irritated, whether I needed to make a joke or change the subject or say something back. I’ve participated in it too. I’ve joined the gossip, gotten loud, said the thing back because somebody else said something first. That’s part of why I recognize it so quickly.

And yet I keep coming back. Actually, I do more than come back. I organize the family reunion. Why do I keep inviting people into my life who I know have the capacity to activate some of the oldest parts of me? I’ve been thinking about that all week.

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When I started planning the reunion, I wasn’t walking into any of this unknowingly. This is actually the work I do.

When I prepare someone for a medicine experience, the ceremony itself is only one piece of it. There’s preparation before, the experience itself, and integration afterward. A sound bath can be a ceremony. A hard conversation can be a ceremony. A family reunion can absolutely be a ceremony.

Life became the ceremony a long time ago for me.

Saturday I made a different choice about how I wanted to show up. More people were coming, with more history between us, and I wasn’t going to drink too much. I wanted access to all of myself. If something hit a nerve, I wanted to be embodied enough to decide what I did next instead of being three drinks past my own awareness when the old version of me showed up.

We were sitting on the beach, people coming and going from the water, when a conversation started about my mom. She wasn’t there, and an old story came up, one that went all the way back to when my sister and I were in college.

The complicated part was that I remembered it too. I remember being young and wanting something from my mom that I didn’t get. I remember wishing she would show up differently. So I wasn’t sitting there thinking none of it happened.

Some of it was true. I’ve been frustrated with my mom about some of the same things. I’ve participated in versions of that conversation before. I could have added my own evidence if I wanted to.

But as they kept talking, I had this overwhelming feeling of déjà vu. I’d heard this before, and not just the story. I knew this whole conversation: the grievances, the roles, the certainty about who someone is.

And I was sitting there thinking, that’s not the whole person I know anymore. My mom has changed. She still has patterns that can be hard for me, but I’ve watched her try. I’ve watched her become more accountable. I’ve watched her listen differently and show up differently in our relationship.

The past hadn’t become untrue. It just wasn’t the whole truth anymore.

The longer I sat there, the more I could feel my body changing. At first I was listening, then I became annoyed and uncomfortable, and eventually I could feel myself getting activated. At another point in my life, I probably would have said something. I might have defended her. I might have joined them. After enough drinks I might have said something sharper than I meant to, and suddenly I would have been inside the exact family pattern I’d spent weeks thinking about how not to recreate.

Instead I remember thinking, okay. Here it is. This is the moment I prepared for.

So I got up and walked into the Gulf.

Almost immediately, I felt peaceful. I didn’t feel like I had swallowed something I needed to say. I didn’t feel weak because I hadn’t defended my mom. I felt like I chose myself.

And I hadn’t only walked away from something. I’d walked toward something too. Out in the water was the cousin I’d originally called because I wanted to see her. The conversation out there was about our lives now, and I could feel the difference.

These were members of the same family, at the same Gulf at the same reunion, having completely different experiences. And I could choose where I wanted to be.

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I kept thinking about that conversation afterward because the story about my mom wasn’t false. It was incomplete.

One time she was staying with me and I left for yoga. When I came home, she was gone. She’d packed up and left while I was out.

I called her and said, Mom, I wish you would’ve waited for me. If I had known you were leaving this morning, I would have gone to yoga later. I wanted to hug you and kiss you and tell you goodbye.

Her instinct was to make it okay immediately. Oh baby, we’re okay. It’s okay.

I told her, I know we’re okay. But it wasn’t okay for me. I wasn’t building a case against her character. I was telling her what happened inside me.

My mom and I have done her Clarity Code together, so we’ve had a lot of conversations about her Human Design and how her energy works. She’s a Projector, and understanding that has given both of us language for some of the patterns we’ve experienced in our relationship.

She gets really excited when she’s planning a visit. I know that behavior because I do it too. But sometimes she plans to stay longer than she actually has energy for, and by the time she leaves, she doesn’t have the same enthusiasm she came with.

So I suggested that maybe next time she could give herself permission to leave earlier. It’s part of why understanding our patterns matters to me. Sometimes seeing ourselves more clearly is enough to give us another choice.

She agreed and said she’d try it.

The next time she came, she told me ahead of time that she was leaving a day earlier than she usually would. I planned around it, and we got to hug and kiss and say goodbye feeling like it was a little too soon and already excited for when she’d come again.

It was simple. Something hurt me. I told her. She listened. The next time she tried something different.

That’s part of what we’re asking people to do when we ask them to change.

At some point I started wondering: how long is a person required to remain the person they were when they hurt you?

If you’ve already decided who someone is, you can find evidence forever. When someone changes and we don’t update the story, it becomes harder to see the change.

That doesn’t erase what happened before. It lets something new be true too.

Is there someone in your life you’re still measuring against who they used to be?

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It didn’t take long for me to see where I was doing the same thing.

My sister and I are close in age. When we were little, we slept in the same bed and I would hold her hand until we fell asleep. We went to college together. We were roommates. There were years when I couldn’t imagine not knowing everything happening in her life.

And now we don’t really know each other’s lives the way we used to.

At one point during the reunion, I mentioned the man I’m dating and she said she didn’t know about him.

I know, I told her. I’ve been trying to call you to tell you.

I don’t think I realized until I said it out loud how much was underneath that sentence. Of course she doesn’t know. We don’t really talk.

And I miss her.

I miss my sister.

A few days after the reunion, I was driving and cried most of the way to where I was going.

Underneath the frustration and disappointment was grief, for us, for the two little girls sleeping in the same bed, for holding her hand while we fell asleep, for the version of sisterhood I thought we might have as adults. Maybe grief for what could have been as much as what actually was.

For a few days I kept circling the same question. Why do I keep trying?

I’m usually the one calling, inviting, and initiating. Part of the answer is obvious. I love her. But there was something else there too. I didn’t know what would happen if I stopped.

When I imagined not reaching out, I could feel this pit in my stomach. Heavy and dark, almost like a hard ball sitting there, and this belief: if I stop trying, I’ll lose my sister.

I didn’t realize how much I believed that until I felt it in my body.

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This is where writing Everyday Medicine gets interesting, because I’m not writing these articles after I’ve figured everything out. My content is my medicine. I’m living inside the thing while I’m writing about it.

So while I was walking one day, trying to understand what I actually felt about my sister, I put my attention directly on that pit in my stomach.

I expected it to get worse. Instead it started moving. I could feel it move from my lower belly up to my solar plexus, into my chest and through my heart, and then into my throat. I started moving my jaw around, letting my body do whatever it apparently needed to do.

I wasn’t trying to create some profound somatic experience. I was just walking and paying attention.

And as the feeling moved, a thought came with it. If I want to see my sister, I can call her. If I want to invite her somewhere, I can invite her. I’m not obligated to, and it doesn’t have to mean anything.

That was it.

I was the one making it so heavy. If I called, it meant I was the only one trying. If I didn’t call, maybe I’d lose her.

And suddenly I could see it. I’d spent the weekend noticing the stories my family holds about one another before I realized I was carrying one too.

If I stop trying, I’ll lose my sister.

Except I don’t actually know that.

I’ve written about X-1 before, this practice of letting people show me what they’re actually giving me without immediately filling the empty space myself. Maybe X-1 with my sister isn’t about forcing myself not to call her. Maybe it’s about noticing why I’m calling.

I can call because I miss her. And I can leave some space without immediately deciding what the space means.

What would it feel like to call someone simply because you miss them, not because you’re afraid of losing them?

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There’s another story I kept coming back to this week.

Long before this reunion, I was sitting beside Lake Tahoe before a medicine journey when I watched a seagull flying alone. It would swoop down into different groups of birds, spend some time among them, and then rise back into the sky on its own.

When I was asked what I thought it meant, I knew. I have a lot of different circles in my life. I can move among them without every circle having access to every part of me. I get to choose where I spend my time, how long I stay, and how I show up while I’m there.

I shared this experience with someone I loved and a year later he wrote me a letter called Becoming the Seagull.

He’d been doing a lot of plant medicine, and he believed he’d been shown something about my life that I couldn’t yet see for myself. His interpretation was that I needed to rise above certain people and relationships in my life. That if I could leave those circles behind, I would be ready for the kind of life and love he believed was waiting for me.

Eventually that same philosophy reached our relationship too. I wasn’t elevating fast enough.

I knew pretty early that his interpretation of the seagull wasn’t mine, but I understand more clearly now why it never sat right with me.

There was a hierarchy underneath it. The idea that some of us are elevated and some of us aren’t, and once we’ve grown enough, healed enough, become conscious enough, the answer is to leave behind the people who haven’t caught up.

But are any of us really qualified to decide who is ahead?

Life ebbs and flows. We’re evolving at different paces in different parts of our lives. Someone can be grounded in their work and lost in their marriage. Thriving as a parent and struggling as a friend. Sometimes we’re the person with capacity, and sometimes we’re the person who needs someone else to have some for us.

Maybe today I have access to something you don’t. Does that make me more evolved than you?

Give life enough time and there may be a day when I need you to remember that about me too.

I don’t want to become someone who mistakes another person’s hard season for who they are. And I don’t want to build a life where the price of being loved by me is keeping pace with my growth.

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I spend a lot of time in medicine spaces, and I’ve watched something happen there that I don’t think we talk about enough. We get so good at identifying what activates us that we start confusing avoiding activation with growth.

But I keep questioning that ease is the same thing as evolution.

There are relationships that need distance, and situations where safety requires leaving. I don’t believe being family gives anyone unlimited access to us. But I don’t think difficulty automatically makes a relationship unhealthy, and someone being in a different place than I am doesn’t mean one of us is more evolved than the other.

Maybe part of the work is learning what to do when we’re activated, instead of just trying to build a life that avoids it.

Have you ever mistaken putting distance between yourself and someone for evolving beyond them?

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I don’t know exactly why we end up in the families we do. Sometimes I wonder whether we made some kind of agreement before we ever got here, whether somehow these particular people were always going to be part of the work. It’s something I think about often and still don’t know what I believe.

What I do know is that my family is literally part of me. My mother’s body was my first environment. I carry DNA from both of my parents, and they carry what came before them. We are intertwined.

So when I think about generational healing, I have a hard time believing the answer is getting far enough away from the generations before us that they can no longer activate us. I know because I keep finding my own patterns in these places.

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I saw one of them again this week.

There was a stretch of time when I didn’t hear from the man I’m dating. Inside the silence, I misread something he’d posted online, and my mind started filling in the rest.

Then I recognized the feeling: not being chosen.

The same heavy weight showed up in my stomach.

Different man, different relationship, different circumstances entirely, but I knew that feeling.

My mind started building a case immediately, reasons this might not be a good fit, things I wanted that I hadn’t said out loud. I didn’t know yet what was old and what was real information about this relationship, so I didn’t act. Instead, I let myself feel uncomfortable without turning the discomfort into a decision.

When I finally heard from him, there was context I hadn’t had. I felt myself relax, but I still told him the distance had been uncomfortable for me. I could understand what happened for him without abandoning what happened inside me.

Changing the person doesn’t automatically change the pattern. I can leave one relationship and fall in love with someone entirely different, and some of the same places inside me can still get touched.

So what am I actually trying to leave behind? The person, or the pattern?

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Maybe that’s part of why family brings this stuff up in a way almost nothing else does.

I’ve built a beautiful life around people I choose. I have friends who are self-aware. I host retreats where people intentionally come together to look at themselves. It would be easy to decide those are my people now and only stay there.

I understand why.

And I also think family gives us something our carefully chosen communities can’t. They knew us before all the language. Before the Clarity Code. Before nervous system work. Before embodiment. Before I learned how to sit with a feeling instead of immediately reacting to it. They know my old patterns because some of those patterns were formed inside these relationships. And I know theirs too.

Family can hold us in old versions of ourselves in a way few other relationships can, because they’ve witnessed so much of our history. Which makes me wonder if there’s also something available there that I can’t get anywhere else.

Who am I here, and what are they here to teach me?

It’s one thing for me to feel embodied on my yoga mat. It’s one thing to be self-aware in a room full of women at a retreat who are practicing the same things. It’s another thing entirely to sit on a beach with people I’ve known most of my life, hear a conversation I’ve heard some version of for years, feel the old version of myself start coming online, and choose something different.

That’s what I was asking myself when I got up and walked into the Gulf. I didn’t need the conversation to stop in order for me to stop participating in it. I didn’t need anyone else to change for me to choose where I wanted to be.

Perhaps that’s what the seagull was showing me all those years ago: I could rise high enough to see clearly and still come back down into the same water with my family.

Coming back without becoming who I used to be is the practice. That’s the ceremony. That’s embodiment.

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And coming back doesn’t mean staying for everything.

The reunion taught me that too. By the fourth day, I could feel some of the old dynamics returning, and I remember thinking, okay, this is information too. Three days was enough. Four was too many.

There are conversations I can leave without leaving the relationship. I can say no even when someone I love wants me to say yes, and I can tell someone when something hurts and pay attention to what happens next. Sometimes that brings us closer. Sometimes it shows me that more distance is needed.

I don’t know what every relationship will require. I just don’t want my personal growth to make my world smaller. I want it to increase my capacity to be in relationship without abandoning myself.

⸻

I’m still thinking about my sister.

I still miss her. I still wish we were closer. There are things I don’t understand and conversations we haven’t had. And I don’t know who either of us will be a year from now.

Maybe that’s the part I want to leave room for.

If I stop trying, I’ll lose my sister.

Except I don’t actually know that.

I can call her because I miss her. I can leave some space and see what happens. I can let her show me who she is now instead of assuming I already know who she is based on who either of us has been before.

And I can offer the rest of my family the same thing.

Enough room for the past to be true and for all of us to keep becoming someone new too.

Maybe the stories we tell about one another don’t have to be wrong. Maybe they just need to stay unfinished.

When you think about the people you’ve known the longest, how much of what you believe about them is based on who they are today? And how much of it is a story you’ve gotten really good at telling?

Maybe that’s the practice. Staying close enough to a story to watch it keep changing.

Stay close.

Yesterday I went for a walk on the beach with my phone. It started the way it usually does. I saw something beautiful and wanted to take a picture. Then taking the picture meant seeing a notification, which lead me to answering the notification, which reminded me of a text I needed to send, and before I knew it, I was somewhere else entirely. My body was still walking down the beach. My attention wasn’t.

So this morning I left my phone in the condo on purpose.

I walked down the boardwalk barefoot, and the wood was already warm underneath my feet. Not hot yet, but warm enough that I remember thinking, give this a couple more hours and there’s no way I’m walking on this without shoes. When I got to the end, I stepped into the white sand. It’s one of my favorite things about the beaches here. The sand is so soft and powdery it feels almost like powdered sugar, and it squeaked underneath my feet when I walked. I noticed the squeaking because I could actually hear it.

I could hear the waves crashing. I watched seagulls flying above me in formation, somehow moving together and communicating without saying anything. Pelicans floated on the water, then flew up, looked down for a fish, and swooped back into the water. I could smell the sea and feel the salt on my skin and in my hair.

At some point I stopped walking and closed my eyes. The wind was blowing across my face and through my hair, the sun was warm on my skin, and I could hear the birds flying past me. I started to feel almost like I was rocking or swaying with the rhythm of the ocean, and it reminded me of the way I used to rock and hum to my babies when they were little and crying, except this time I was the one being soothed. The environment was rocking me.

And standing there, I remember thinking, this is what I’m trying to get to when I meditate. This is what I’m practicing on my yoga mat. Except I wasn’t practicing it. I was living it. For a few moments, there was nothing to figure out. I wasn’t thinking about something that happened yesterday or something I needed to do later. I wasn’t even really observing the beach anymore. I was just there.

I’m here because my second-oldest daughter recently graduated from college, and my mom gave her the use of her condo at the beach for the month. My daughter had never flown completely on her own before, and she was bringing a friend whose parents trusted me to help get them here safely, so I flew down with them. I got them settled, took them grocery shopping, made sure they had what they needed to set them up for success, and then stepped away into my own experience. I’m not completely alone here. I see the girls periodically, and family is coming. And also, I’ve had these long stretches of time by myself, mornings, walks on the beach, and getting ready for the evening, swinging on the swing and just sitting in the condo without anyone else around.

The longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve been thinking about my relationship with being alone, because it hasn’t always felt anything like it did on the beach this morning.

I was married for twelve years, and the day my husband moved out, I danced. I was so happy to be alone. There was relief in having the house to myself and being with myself after spending so long inside a marriage that wasn’t working anymore.

Then something changed. The quiet started getting quieter. At first, I filled it. If someone was available, I wanted to make plans. I could almost always find someone to have dinner with, somewhere to go, something to do. I didn’t think of it as avoiding being alone. I just thought I was social.

Eventually I started noticing that sometimes I wasn’t choosing someone because I really wanted to spend time with them. I was choosing anyone who was available because I didn’t want to be by myself. That was different.

I can remember one of the first times I intentionally decided to stay home and not fill the space. No checking out with TV or scrolling. Just being with myself. At first it felt exciting. And then about two hours later I remember thinking, well, what am I going to do with myself now? What else is there to do? I was so used to accomplishing something, serving someone, taking care of something, going somewhere, or mindlessly filling the time that I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself when none of those things were available.

Have you ever finally gotten the alone time you’d been asking for, and then had no idea what to do with it?

Eventually I started asking myself different questions. What do I actually like? How do I want to spend my time? What brings me joy when nobody else is here? Those questions sound simple until there’s no one around to answer them for you.

My divorce was also the beginning of a long season of personal development for me. I knew the marriage didn’t end only because of him. There were two people inside of it, and once I was alone, there wasn’t anyone left to blame for what I was doing. So I started looking. I hired a life coach, a divorce coach, and a co-parenting coach. I started learning how my mind worked, paying attention to my thoughts and patterns, and eventually understanding more about my nervous system. I paid attention to my thoughts and how automatic so many of them were. I needed that season. I needed to understand what was happening inside of me before I could start changing it.

About fifteen minutes into my first session with my first life coach, he asked me a question. Why do you feel the need to explain yourself? I paused. My mind immediately went to my marriage. Then he asked me when I first remembered doing it.

And suddenly I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. Early in my marriage, after I stopped working and we had our first baby, I came home from Walmart after spending around a hundred dollars. My husband asked me what I spent a hundred dollars on. I immediately started explaining. This was on sale. I bought extra of this because we could put it in food storage. This was for the baby.

Sitting with myself years later, I remember thinking, why didn’t I just laugh and say, oh, a whole new wardrobe, babe, you wanna see it?

Then another memory came. I’d been explaining and defending myself with my stepdad long before I ever got married. I knew that feeling. I knew that role. I just carried it into the next relationship without realizing I was carrying anything.

Soon after that coaching session, someone texted me asking if I could do something. The answer was no. I felt it in my body. So I typed out this long explanation about why I couldn’t do it. It was automatic. Then, I remembered the question, why do you feel the need to explain yourself? I looked at what I’d written and started deleting it, pausing, deleting some more, pausing again. I eventually got it down to basically just the no, and I could feel the discomfort in my throat. I wanted to explain myself so badly. I even started typing another version that was shorter and less explanatory, but it was still an explanation. So I deleted that too.

What made it so uncomfortable was knowing the other person could fill in the blanks however they wanted. Maybe I was rude. Maybe I was selfish. Maybe I was unkind. Maybe they were wondering if they did something wrong. Explanation felt compassionate to me, like I was protecting the other person from whatever they might make my no mean.

The response came back with something like, okay. And even that was uncomfortable. Okay, what? Were they upset? Did they think I was being short? There wasn’t enough information for me to know how they felt, and I wanted more. But I left it alone. In that moment, I felt like I didn’t leave myself, and instead, I chose the practice of not abandoning myself in hopes to make someone else comfortable.

And then life gave me another opportunity to practice it. And another. It got easier. Eventually I started noticing something else. If I decided someone was upset with me, I would begin acting differently around them. I would create awkwardness trying to prevent awkwardness. Sometimes the thing I was afraid might happen was happening partly because I was behaving as if it already had.

Have you ever done that? Assumed someone was upset with you, and started acting like it was already true before you even knew?

There was another layer underneath that one too. I wanted everyone to like me. If someone didn’t like me, I thought it meant something about my value. If they understood me well enough, surely they would understand my intention, and if they understood my intention, surely they would know I was a good person. The price of making sure everyone understood me was exhausting. And even then, they still might not. Their life experience wasn’t mine.

Eventually I was left with a much simpler question. Do I understand myself?

I’ve been reading Jay Shetty’s 8 Rules of Love while I’m here, and early in the book he writes about the difference between loneliness and solitude. The timing made me laugh a little, because I’m living inside that exact question right now. As my friends and I say, you can’t make this shit up. You know, the synchronicities and timing. When it all aligns and you have to smile. That’s what I am talking about.

Five years after my divorce, I entered another relationship, and we stayed together for about five years. When that relationship ended, solitude felt completely different. There was no dancing. It was hard. I was devastated. I cried, had a hard time getting out of bed. I felt lonely and alone and abandoned and isolated. I felt really broken, even though today I don’t believe anyone actually is. Going back would have felt easier in so many ways. There was financial comfort and convenience and support, and I was with someone who was genuinely good to me and loved like I’d never loved anyone before.

And also, I knew I was settling. There were parts of the relationship that didn’t light me up anymore. Two of my children didn’t want to participate in it, which left me feeling like I was being asked to choose between my relationship and my kids. I spent a long time trying to make something work that I knew wasn’t working.

I ask a question often. What’s the price you pay to stay? Part of the price of staying was the disconnection with my children. Another part was the relationship I was losing with myself. Leaving meant choosing something that felt far less comfortable at the time. I had to be alone again, and this time I didn’t want to be.

I’ve been single for two years since that relationship ended, and I’m only now beginning to step into another relationship. I’ve noticed something different in myself this time. The person I was with before did so many thoughtful things for me. He supported me, helped me, took care of things, and there were ways I took that for granted. I can see that now.

Recently, the person I’m beginning a relationship with drove me to the airport. He showed up early, loaded everything into his truck, helped me carry my sound bowls out to the salt flats for an event, and stopped to change a stranger’s flat tire. I feel so much gratitude for the way he shows up. The relationship I was in before contained many of those same kinds of gestures. I just didn’t appreciate them then the way I do today.

Last night I went back to the beach alone. Halfway down the boardwalk I turned around and saw the clubhouse behind me, lit up against the dark, and it was breathtaking. My first instinct was to grab my phone, take a picture, share it. I wanted someone else to see what I was seeing. And then I thought, you had to be here. You know how sometimes you take a picture of a sunset and then look at the picture and it doesn’t come anywhere close to what you were actually looking at? This was one of those moments. So I didn’t take the picture. Instead, I stood there and let myself take it all in and receive it.

When I got down to the beach, it was almost completely dark. Every once in a while I could see the flashlight of someone looking for crabs farther down the beach, but otherwise there wasn’t much to see. The waves were so loud they drowned out almost everything else. Without much sight, my other senses seemed to get louder. I could feel the sand under my feet, the wind in my hair. I could smell and almost taste the ocean. I talk about this with clients often, that something happens when we close our eyes and shut down the sense of sight, our attention starts moving inward. I stood there in the dark and started remembering.

This beach has held so many versions of me. I came here on a date with my first boyfriend. I came here after we broke up. I’ve been here for spring breaks with friends and vacations with my family. I sat on this beach contemplating whether I was going to end my marriage, then went home and eventually did it. I’ve sat here with my sister and had conversations that brought us back into our hearts and back to each other. There have been tears here, grief and sadness and loss, and also so much love.

Standing there, I could feel all of those versions of myself again. I could remember what each of them felt standing of sitting on this same sand, and I felt so much gratitude for every one of them. Especially this one.

I’ve built a really beautiful life. One I used to want a vacation from. And now here I am on vacation, still creating, still working some, still living my life, and I don’t need to escape any of it.

I was completely alone on the beach. I wasn’t lonely. There was even a moment when I thought about how beautiful it would be to share something like that with someone I love. I wanted that. And I was still completely satisfied standing there by myself.

I think loneliness is feeling like a lack or a craving or a longing for something. Not being satisfied with being with yourself. And standing there, I wanted partnership without feeling like anything was missing. I’m still thinking about that difference.

Have you ever wanted someone with you without needing them there to make the moment enough?

Maybe you know that feeling too. Or maybe the second the quiet comes, you find yourself reaching for something to fill it, a phone, a person, work, a podcast, a book, another relationship, another thing to accomplish. I’ve reached for all of them. For most of the last twelve years, I even filled some of that space with personal development. How can I be better? What am I thinking? What pattern is this? What needs to change? I needed that too. I needed to learn how my brain worked. I needed SNAP, the practice of stopping and noticing what I was thinking and feeling before automatically responding. I needed the books and coaches and years of learning about my own patterns.

And lately I’ve been wondering if all of that work was preparing me to eventually stop working on myself so much and just be here.

At first, my own thoughts weren’t especially quiet. They were full of what someone else said and what I should have said and what someone might think about me and what I needed to do next. There was always something to analyze, solve, improve, or understand. But I’ve found, the longer you’re with yourself, the quieter the other voices get.

Another solo walk on the beach this morning, and there were still people talking, kids playing, birds flying overhead, waves crashing. The world around me wasn’t quiet. My mind was. There were even spaces where there was nothing. No problem to solve. No relationship to analyze. No version of myself to improve. Just the wind against my face, the sun on my skin, and the sound of the water.

I keep thinking about how often we say we want more time alone, and then the moment we get it, we reach for something. What happens if we don’t?

I don’t know that I would have asked myself that twelve years ago. Back then, two hours alone felt like too much space. Last night I stood barefoot on a beach in the dark and didn’t want anything from the moment except to be there for it.

Stay close.

For this moment, let yourself get comfortable.

Seated or lying down—choose what feels supportive.

There’s nothing to accomplish here.

Nothing to fix.

Nothing to become.

Just arrive.

Take a slow breath in through your nose…

and let it out through your mouth.

Again.

Inhale gently…

exhale, letting the body soften.

We are in Leo season.

Th…

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The day before, I took a hot yoga class at one of my favorite studios. Twenty-six postures, sixty minutes, the room heated to 104 degrees. Sweat drips down your face and into your eyes in that room, and it burns, and the practice is you don’t wipe it away.

My teacher there challenged me a couple of weeks ago. He told me he goes through the entire practice now without a single sip of water. Did I ever try it, he asked. I couldn’t remember doing it on purpose. So this time I did. No water, on top of everything else I was already working on in that room.

Because none of it came at once. The nose breathing came first, a long time ago, and it didn’t come easily. Early on I’d catch myself back in my old habit, mouth open, especially when things got hard, sometimes even holding my breath without noticing. I’d catch it and return to my nose. Catch it again. Return again. Not wiping the sweat took even longer, so long that by now it barely registers as a choice. No water was the newest layer, the one I added this time. Some days on that mat go easier than others. It depends how I show up, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Some days I feel strong. Other days I don’t. It’s never exactly the same.

There’s a discipline to that room that builds in layers, one on top of the last, each one only possible because the one before it was already close to automatic. Don’t leave the room. Breathe through your nose. Don’t wipe the sweat. Don’t break the pose. There were so many moments in that class to break, to pull out, to reach for the water I told myself I wasn’t going to touch. Staying anyway, again and again, is its own kind of practice.

So I was already sore going into yoga the next day. Monday at noon, I have a standing date with myself at Purify. Gentle yoga with Jeff, whose voice is so low and so steady that dropping into a relaxed state feels almost effortless.

In class that day, we were in pigeon pose, one side and then the other.

They say it’s one of the most intense hip openers there is. We hold so much in our hips. The right side came first, and it was tight, really tight, tighter than I expected. My body wanted out almost immediately. Then the voice in my head got loud. I don’t like this. I want to move. I want to shift. I want to get out of it.

I could hear Jeff’s voice. A reminder to come back to the breath, to notice if there was any place I could soften.

My hip wasn’t actually in danger. I was safe. That’s the first thing, stopping long enough to actually know that instead of reacting like it isn’t true. My nervous system just didn’t like the sensation, and it kept asking the same question. Can we leave? Can this be easier? Noticing that question, without obeying it yet, is another layer. If I tell myself it hurts, that I hate this, that I can’t stand it, the tightness gets worse. But if I ask a different question instead, is this the edge of what I can do, or is this just uncomfortable, something shifts. My body is smart enough to tell me the difference between pain and discomfort, if I let it. So I breathe instead of arguing with it, and that’s the pivot, right there. We’re okay, just breathe. The tightness eventually softens on its own.

Some days I’m almost glad when pigeon comes, because it means my face finally gets to go down toward the mat, and the sweat stops burning my eyes for a minute. It feels like a reward. A reminder that it doesn’t always have to be hard, that sometimes there’s an edge, and sometimes there’s a break.

By the time we moved to the left side, something in me already shifted. I’ve been here before, I thought. I know about how long we’re going to be here. So I took my time getting into it, breathing the whole way down. We’ve got this. Keep breathing. Sometimes the first side is the hard one, because you don’t yet know what’s coming. Sometimes it’s the second side that’s harder, because now you do, and your mind starts calculating the time, the intensity, before your body’s even settled in. This time the second side was steadier. I already proved to myself, minutes earlier, that I could stay.

I didn’t know it yet, lying there, but I was already inside the thing I’d spend the rest of the week writing about. Why do some people leave a medicine journey and change their lives, while others leave with beautiful insight and slowly drift back into the same patterns?

It starts long before anyone ever sits with the medicine.

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That same week, I was on a coaching call with a newer client. Different room, same practice. Her notifications kept going off. I’d asked her to silence them ahead of time. She said she’d make an adjustment. They kept coming anyway, quieter, less often, but they kept coming. I have ADD myself, and each ding pulled me straight out of the present moment while I was trying to guide her into exactly the kind of presence we were building. I’d come back, get us both settled, and another ding would land. She barely noticed them. They were just background noise in her life by then.

Partway through, her dog walker arrived, and she got up to handle it. When she came back, she couldn’t close her eyes. At one point she just stared at me, eyes open.

That’s when I said it. I’m not sure if this is going to work. Maybe we aren’t a good fit.

I watched her face change. Her energy shifted, on the other side of the screen, and I felt it land in my own body too. Heat, starting in my lower belly and moving up through my chest into my throat. I know what that means by now. So instead of explaining myself, I asked what she was thinking. She said maybe we should end the call. I asked again, gently. What are you feeling? Criticized, she said. Angry.

I stayed in the question instead of reaching for an explanation, and the heat in my own body started to move. She told me about her mother, the criticism she grew up with, the particular way it still lands on her, decades later, from someone who wasn’t even in the room.

Do you know that particular kind of gutting, when you say something meaning one thing and watch it land as something else?

Before we hung up, I told her I could see clearly what was happening. This is a breakthrough, I said. I told her I was in. And now I knew exactly what we’d be working on for the next six months.

I got off that call and texted my mentor. She got back fast. Why did you feel hot? Clearing that will help you approach this from a space of neutrality.

I didn’t have an answer yet. I’ve felt that heat before, enough times in my life that I tested it, on purpose, just to understand what it actually was. In the past, when it showed up, I wanted to react. Defend myself. That’s not what I said, you’re twisting my words. Now I know it’s a signal, not a threat. You’re activated. Give yourself your own medicine. Just breathe.

Clients are mirrors. Getting activated by them doesn’t mean something is wrong. I expect it now. The difference is what I do with it. I can breathe through it while I’m still holding space for someone, and ask my own questions later, after the call ends.

That afternoon I drove to see the friend who referred her to me. When I told her everything, she said something I haven’t stopped turning over since. Kate, if anyone can help her, you can. And if you can’t, no one can. She needs to know the why. Why are you asking her to close her eyes? What is that actually going to do for her? She needs to understand the reasoning before she can trust it.

That night I texted my new client, reiterating what I already said before we hung up. She wrote back the next day, and reading it, I could see she misunderstood what I meant. Talking about her mom wasn’t hard for her, she said. That wasn’t a breakthrough for her. She wasn’t wrong about that. Talking about her mom wasn’t the breakthrough I meant. Watching her get activated was, watching her go back to being the little girl criticized by her mother, right there on the call, live. That told me where the real work actually is. For a few minutes, I became her mother.

I wrote her back without defending myself, and asked if I could come sit with her in person instead of finishing this over text. She said yes.

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Somewhere back on the mat, it hit me. I wasn’t improvising with her on that call. I was running the same four-step process I’ve used on myself for years, long before I ever taught it to anyone else.

I just didn’t realize how much I trusted it until I needed it.

I call it SNAP: stop, notice, ask, pivot.

Stop means exactly that. Before you explain, before you defend, before you react, you stop, just long enough to not be run by the next ten seconds. Notice comes next. What’s actually happening in my body right now? On that call, that was the heat, lower belly to throat. On the mat, it was my hip screaming to move. Ask is where most people skip straight past. Do I actually know, without question, that the story I’m telling myself is true? On that call, the honest answer was no. I didn’t know I failed her. It just felt that way. Pivot is the part that actually changes anything. On the call, the pivot was asking what she was feeling instead of explaining myself. On the mat, it was breathing through the hold instead of pulling out. In both places, the pivot was the same four words. We’re okay, just breathe.

This isn’t something I ever graduate out of, and neither does anyone I work with. I practice this every day, still. You don’t outgrow it. You just get faster at catching yourself.

I’ve watched this happen inside medicine too. A client once was in real pain during his journey, his whole body bracing against it, asking me to make it stop. I asked if he trusted me. He did. Instead of asking why, I told him, ask what. What is this? He resisted at first, then he asked. The answer came. I can’t carry all of this alone, he said, and something opened.

We didn’t build that trust inside the medicine. We built it weeks before, on weekly coaching calls and ordinary days, long before either of us needed it.

This is the “why” my friend was talking about.

People sometimes ask me why I ask clients to practice SNAP every day. It focuses on the mental and emotional bodies, the part where you actually notice your patterns and your nervous system instead of moving through your day on autopilot. I ask clients to run it at least once, sometimes with an alarm set on their phone, because the moments that call for it show up so often that the habit of stopping and noticing has to be built on purpose, long before it’s needed in the moment that actually matters.

This is rehearsal, and it’s building something specific. Every time someone stops and notices instead of running on autopilot, they’re interrupting an old pattern and practicing a new one. That interruption is what actually makes room for curiosity, for being able to look at what’s underneath a behavior instead of just living inside it.

What medicine gives someone is clarity. It takes away the stories, the excuses, the narrative, and just shows you exactly what’s real, where you’re getting in your own way, what could actually shift things in your life. What medicine can’t give you is the lived experience of how to embody any of it. That part you have to do yourself, and that’s what the work actually is, in everyday life, in every moment, on a regular Tuesday.

I used to think knowledge was transformation. That if I knew differently, knew better, knew something with more clarity, that was the change. It’s not. It’s the embodiment. That’s my whole work. I’m an embodiment coach, and there’s a reason for that.

Without daily practice, people can come out of a journey with real clarity, even feeling enlightened, and still walk straight back into the same triggers, the same environments, the same old patterns, because knowing what needs to change and knowing how to actually live differently are not the same thing. That gap is where most people stay stuck.

After medicine, you go back to your life. Sometimes what’s waiting is an actual conversation. Sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes it’s just an old nervous system responding the old way, even with new insight already sitting in your body. That’s the moment. Oh, here it is. This is the block the medicine showed me. Having a practice like SNAP is what lets you actually do something different in real time, instead of just knowing you should.

The thing keeping you stuck isn’t outside of you. It’s inside of you. Your trauma, your triggers, your behaviors, your habits. Which is also the best news I know, because it means you can change it. It’s an inside job. No plant, no meditation, no sound, nothing outside of you that’s considered medicine can actually do the work.

You are the medicine.

You have to be willing to make the choice to close your eyes, and every time they open, close them again. To turn off the notifications, to stop the distractions. To take the breath and lean in and stay in it when it’s uncomfortable, instead of choosing to pull out or run.

Life is where you practice it.

Life is the ceremony.

Every pose. Every trigger. Every hard conversation. They’re all asking the same question.

Can you stay?

We’re okay. Just breathe.

Stay close.

The text came in Sunday morning. His ex had been out of town, so he had his boys, and the weekend was already stacked with plans. Then one boy came down with a stomach bug on Friday, then the other, and last night it finally caught up with him too. I was trying hard to not get it, he wrote.

Ughhhhhh. The disappointment moved through my whole body before …

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So it was later, once I finally picked up my phone that morning, that I saw it. She’d texted me the night before, and again early that morning, and I hadn’t seen either message yet. Then her face came up in my feed, and everything else stopped.

A woman I’ve sat in medicine with more times than I could count posted a photo of herself with two words taped over her mouth. Don’t tell. Underneath it, she wrote that the man who sexually abused her as a child died the night before.

I called her before I even finished reading the caption.

She wrote that she didn’t know if she was his first. She knew she wasn’t his last. She wrote about the migraines she got as a child, back when it was happening, and how they stopped once it stopped, and then came back, almost daily, the exact moment her body finally let her remember what actually happened to her. She wrote that the demand to stay silent had been heavy for years, and that on the night he died, she finally chose to put it down. She said she grieved hardest for the ones who came after her, the ones nobody protected because she’d been told not to tell.

Have you ever watched someone put something down in public that they’ve been carrying alone for decades?

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She and I met through a mutual friend, at some gathering I can’t even fully remember now. It wasn’t until later that I learned she was a medicine woman herself. She came through my retreat eventually, the Creative Woman Retreat, though the work with her already started weeks before she ever drove up to the cabin. I sit with every woman one on one before she arrives, and we talk about what she’s actually carrying in her womb, the memory, the generational trauma, her own sexual trauma. I ask every woman coming that weekend to bring something physical with her too, an object that represents the women in her life, something to place on the altar when she arrives.

She showed up over an hour late, obstacle after obstacle in her way just getting there, and by the time she pulled up, the rest of us were already waiting, the altar already set. She walked in frazzled, apologizing before she’d even sat down, like she’d already decided she’d inconvenienced everyone just by walking through the door.

We did breathwork that same night, within hours of her arriving. No words, just breath, whatever wants to move. She started releasing almost immediately, layers of it, pain and darkness and old stories her body had been holding onto so long she’d stopped registering the weight as separate from herself.

The next day we moved into a guided womb clearing, slower and deeper. Her body gave up things she hadn’t consciously remembered yet, not just the abuse but everything underneath it, the neglect, the possession, the fear, all of it. There’s a purge in that kind of release, and purging doesn’t mean it’s over. Sometimes there’s exhaustion on the other side of it before anything lighter arrives. That’s what happened for her.

We closed with a reclamation meditation, reclaiming sovereignty, the body, purity, power, safety, all the things that had been taken from her long before she ever had language for any of it.

Weeks later, on our integration calls, we talked about what it would actually look like to carry this forward daily, not as one breakthrough weekend but as a practice. She’s still doing that work. And part of what that’s looked like, in the time since, is exactly what she did that morning. Speaking her truth out loud instead of holding it the way she’d been taught to.

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We’ve talked about darkness the way some friends talk about weather, because both of us have lived inside it long enough to stop flinching at the word. Eventually the distractions stop giving you what they used to. The scrolling doesn’t work anymore. The next relationship doesn’t work. Staying busy doesn’t work. And eventually you’re left sitting with the one person you’ve been trying not to sit with.

She calls it a womb space for something new. There’s alchemy available in there, she says, but the choosing is yours. You can let the darkness stay darkness, or you can let it become the soil, the ground, the striking of the match.

The things that used to be your weaknesses become your superpower on the other side of it, she told me. The darkness gives you an ability to feel someone else’s grief as your own, because you’ve been there too, in some version of it. She calls it a threshold, and the way she says it, it doesn’t sound like an ending at all. It sounds like a doorway.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, watching her and living it myself. You get to choose the darkness, or life will eventually choose it for you. And if you wait for life to force it, it tends to get worse before it gets there. Louder. More expensive. Harder to walk away from clean. The invitation comes first, quiet, easy to ignore. If you keep ignoring it, it stops asking and starts forcing.

Have you noticed how much louder life gets when you keep putting off the thing it’s actually asking of you?

I don’t just think about her. I feel her, in my body, in the part of me that knows things before my mind catches up. The women in my life have become mirrors to me, all of them, all of us really, at different places along the same journey of learning to lean in, learning to sit with the discomfort instead of running from it. Some days I can’t tell where her story ends and mine begins.

I didn’t understand my own version of this until years later, in a yoga class of all places. I was reading a book at the time called The Body Keeps the Score, learning how the body holds onto what we haven’t processed, every time we betray ourselves, every time we abandon ourselves, every time we say yes when we mean no. The body remembers all of it, even after the mind has moved on or forgotten entirely. I’d been in a practice around that too, catching myself making an assumption instead of asking an honest question, and I brought that with me onto my mat that day without even planning to.

I was in a one-legged pigeon, right leg pulled through and folded under me at the closest thing you can get to ninety degrees. It’s one of the deepest hip openers there is, and it gets loud in your head right before you get there, loud enough that everything in you wants to hold your breath and pull back out. This was my first real yoga practice, over a decade ago, back before yoga was something everyone did. The teacher’s voice cut through the room. Just notice your body. What are you feeling? Where does it feel tight? Where could you breathe into that?

That’s when the pain showed up in my right hip, sharp, nothing like the ordinary ache of a stretch. My whole body wanted out of the position. I could have assumed I already knew what it meant, the way I always used to. Instead I got curious. My mind got loud. Stop. Get out. This isn’t safe. Looking back, I can see exactly what was happening in that moment. At the time, I just thought the pose hurt.

I talked myself through it the way I’d talk someone else through something hard. It’s going to be okay. I can do this. Keep breathing. I trust my body. I can let go. A whole conversation happening at once, and underneath all of it, the only thing that actually worked was staying present enough to keep leaning in instead of listening to the part of me screaming to pull out.

So I stayed. And a memory came up that I hadn’t thought about in years. I was thirteen, in the backseat of a car, with a boy I barely knew. At some point he put his hands where I hadn’t invited them, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t say a word. I just went still and waited for it to be over. I was thirteen and already fluent in a language no one had taught me on purpose. Don’t be the girl who kills the mood. Don’t be the one who isn’t liked. Say nothing, and you’ll still get chosen.

I’d forgotten that memory completely. My body hadn’t. It had been holding it, quietly, for decades, waiting for a moment I finally got still enough to ask instead of explain it away.

The tears came slowly, quietly, dropping onto the mat one at a time. It wasn’t a loud release. It was quiet, the breath doing the work of moving it instead of letting me hold it in. And as they fell, the pain in my hip actually softened. The place that had been stuck and tense and holding on so hard it ached started to open the moment the tears came. That’s when the release happened, the tears themselves the shedding.

I didn’t talk to anyone after class. I stayed longer than usual, slower, more gentle with myself, letting it integrate instead of rushing back into my day.

I didn’t know it yet, not in that exact moment, but that was the first time I understood what it actually means to leave yourself to keep someone else comfortable. A backseat, at thirteen, long before the divorce or anything after it, learning that going quiet was safer than being honest about what I wanted.

And the truth is, it didn’t stop there. It repeated, more than once, with other boys and men, over the years that followed. Each time a little further than the last. Each time the same freeze, the same silence, the same practiced decision to disappear inside myself rather than risk being unwanted. I didn’t consciously choose any of it. I just knew the pattern by then. Go quiet. Wait for it to be over. Don’t be the reason it stops.

A pattern buried is still a pattern, whether or not I was careless, or unlucky, or drawn to the wrong people. Ignore it and it comes back dressed differently. This is the part nobody tells you about doing this work. It doesn’t finish. I’ve spent years peeling back layers of myself, and it still shows up in new forms, dressed differently every time, and I still have to catch it and ask myself the same question. Here it is again. Am I going to choose differently this time, or run it back the way I always have?

Have you ever caught an old pattern showing up again, wearing a different face, and had to decide right there whether to run it back or do something new?

I hadn’t connected any of this to my marriage until much later either. There was a version of that marriage where everyone around me could see it. My sisters. My friends. The way they’d look at me sometimes, careful, like they were choosing their words around something fragile. They could see what I couldn’t, because I was inside it, and inside it is a different place than outside it. You’ve been mind fucked long enough that you genuinely don’t know what’s real anymore, because you’ve abandoned yourself so many times you’ve lost the thread of what your own reality even feels like.

It wasn’t until I reached the point of telling myself I would rather live in a trailer park than stay one more year that something in me actually shifted. I didn’t care about the Mercedes anymore, or the house we were building, or any of it. I had to become willing to lose all of it for my own freedom. It was terrifying, and it stayed hard for a long time after I actually left, not just before.

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Here’s what it actually looks like now. I’m dating, and I notice my nervous system doing the same old thing, wanting to please, wanting to collapse into whoever’s in front of me. It hasn’t disappeared just because I understand it. And also, something is different now. I used to fall in love with potential, the version of a man I could see coming instead of the one actually sitting across from me.

Have you ever caught yourself falling for who someone could become instead of who’s actually sitting in front of you?

There’s real joy in this too, not just the reckoning. I’ve been practicing consent in a way that actually feels playful, checking in out loud with whoever I’m with, not assuming I already know what’s true. I ask questions instead, and I let the answers tell me what’s real instead of the story I’ve already been telling myself in my head, the potential, the version of him I’ve built before he’s even shown me who he is. It turns out that’s its own kind of creation, and it comes from a completely different place than fear does. Where do I actually want this to go? How good can it actually get? Not the old pattern, playing out one more time with a new face on it.

And what I’m attracting now reflects that back to me. The men in my life these days are safe. Genuinely safe, in their own sovereignty, not performing safety to get something from me. That’s not a coincidence anymore. I’m choosing safe men because I’m safe. I’m attracting what I actually am now, not what I’m hoping someone else will become.

None of this, hers or mine, happened alone. That’s the part I want to say plainly. You don’t have to do this by yourself. Community matters. A guide matters, someone who’s already walked through their own version of the dark and can sit beside you in yours without flinching. I couldn’t have done my own version of this without the women who stayed close enough to see what I couldn’t yet see myself. She couldn’t have done hers without a room full of women who weren’t going anywhere.

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She’s free now, in a way that’s hard to describe unless you’ve watched it happen up close. Unattached to the old story. Doing work that isn’t just healing herself but healing generations of women before her, whether they ever get to know that or not. She’s an incredible mother. Safe. Warm. Soft in the ways that matter and fierce in the ways that matter too. Brave. Courageous. Genuinely happy, genuinely abundant, not performing any of it for anyone. Everything else in her life now is a bonus, because the actual foundation, the safety, she built herself. Nobody handed it to her. She built it in a room, on a mat, in her own body, one layer at a time.

That’s what’s actually available on the other side of the darkness. Not the absence of pain. A life you built yourself, solid enough that nothing outside you can take it back.

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If you’re reading this and some part of you knows I mean you, I need you to hear this part directly. I love you. I’m not going anywhere. You don’t have to have it figured out before you call me. I’m not scared of your dark. I’ve been in my own.

Maybe the darkness was never the enemy. Maybe it’s just been waiting for you to come home.

Stay close.

A few months ago, before our first date, I texted him a couple of questions to talk about over dinner. Here’s the truth. I don’t do surface level. That’s just not how I connect with people. Small talk doesn’t tell me much about a person, and I wanted to actually know him, not just know facts about him or how he presents himself online. So I told him he didn’t have to answer them right away. I just wanted us to have something real to talk about as we sat across from each other.

Later that night he told me how much he’d appreciated having time to think about the questions ahead of time.

So this week, before another date, I texted him.

“I was thinking it might be fun to bring back the question game ;) Not that I think we are ever lacking in finding things to chat about… And I remember you appreciating having some time to reflect in advance. Want to play?”

He said, “Let’s,” then, “You go first, hit me up ;)”

So I went first. I sent him one.

“What does ‘home’ feel like to you in a relationship?”

He wrote back, “That’s a good one.”

“Your turn,” I told him.

He sent one back to me.

“What part of your life has shaped you the most, but people would never guess just by looking at you?”

That’s the whole point of doing this before dinner instead of at the table. A question like that isn’t something you answer well on the spot. You need actual time with it, or you just give the version of the answer that comes fastest, not the one that’s the most true.

I felt a little stumped, so I opened Chat and asked it to give me some guidance to help me think about it. If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I would have answered his question the way I did, because I hadn’t taken it that deep before.

Chat responded with, “I actually wouldn’t answer this by looking at the biggest event in your life. I’d answer it by looking for the thing that quietly rewired you.”

And then it said, “Knowing you, I think your answer is probably less about what happened and more about what it taught you.”

This bot knows me well.

Then Chat said, “So let me coach you through it. Don’t answer these quickly. Just notice what comes up.”

So I put my tennis shoes on, opened the front door, and went on a walk.

The first section was childhood, and the very first question was, “When did you first realize you couldn’t count on someone?”

I’d started walking by the time I got to that one, and it caused me to pause because I felt it in my body before I’d even fully answered it.

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My friend hosts it. One of my best friends, actually. We travel together. We’re both business owners, content creators, moms, influencers, women living in a man’s world. And somewhere over the last few years, we each found our way into the same balance of masculine and feminine energy inside ourselves. This particular conversation isn’t a new one for us. We have it often, usually laying by a pool somewhere in Mexico, sun on our skin, something cold in our hands, no real agenda except the one that actually matters, being in our pleasure, being in our feminine, being fully in the friendship, the laughing, the savoring of a life we’ve each built on purpose.

People ask us both the same question all the time. How do you do it all? How do you make it look so easy? So soft, so effortless, so feminine, like none of it costs you anything?

Here’s what’s actually happening underneath that question. We built the structure first. The foundation, the frameworks, the systems, the boundaries. The riverbanks, if you want to call them that. That’s what lets us actually flow through our lives instead of hustling, instead of feeling like we can’t slow down or take a break because more is always better. Because hard work equals success. It doesn’t. Sometimes less is more, and working smarter is how we’ve designed our lives. That’s what lets me lay by a pool in Mexico with the sun on my face and not spend the whole time doing math in my head about everything waiting for me at home. The masculine never left. It just stopped needing to be the loudest.

Before we ever hit record, she asked the hundred women in her group, She Wolf, what they wanted to ask me and what Kate wisdom they wanted me to share.

I opened the comments the moring of, sitting on my patio with a cup of coffee, expecting a dozen different questions. Instead I kept reading the same one, worded a little differently every time but same same. How do I stay in my feminine energy while running a business? How do I stay in my feminine energy in my relationship?

Different women with different words and the same ache underneath every one of them.

I sat with that for a while before we ever pressed record.

I’ve spent years immersed in this work, not just studying it but living it, through masterclasses, retreats, and hundreds of women I’ve coached through this exact pattern over and over. Here’s the actual question underneath all of it. How do I run my business in my feminine energy?

Because so many of these women started somewhere else entirely, soft, quiet, submissive, the good girl, meek and small, making herself easy to be around. And then somewhere along the way, she became the boss, empowered, building something real, running it, growing it, calling herself a boss babe and meaning it. The pendulum swung, hard, from one end all the way to the other. She built that business with her brain, her time, her energy, and now she’s asking herself the question. How do I be in my feminine while I’m running this?

The mistake I keep seeing is believing the answer means giving up the masculine altogether, like being in your feminine and running a business are two different lives you have to choose between. A business built from feminine energy alone doesn’t hold. It needs the structure and the decisiveness and the follow-through just as much. It was never about picking one. It’s always been both.

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We ended up talking for almost two hours. Near the end, she said, Kate, maybe masculine medicine could be an article. People want to go deeper than what we said today.

This is that article.

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I do this thing with my hands when I’m teaching this in person. I’m a visual learner, so it helps me, even if I’m not sure how it lands here. Stay with me. One finger, pointed straight out. That’s giving. The other hand curled into a circle, open in the middle. That’s receiving. I hold them up next to each other and ask the room which one they’ve been living in.

Most hands in the room point. Giving.

Most women hear masculine and feminine energy and assume it’s an either/or. You’re either fully in your masculine, or you’re fully in your feminine. I want to be really clear here, because we’ve been getting it wrong. I don’t usually like to use words like good or bad, right or wrong. For this, it feels right. Let me explain.

First, when I talk about masculine and feminine, I am not talking about gender. I am talking about energy.

Masculine energy is structure, thinking, giving, decisive, protective, tenacious, focused, efficient, self reliant, linear, mind driven, doing.

Feminine energy is the other side of every one of those: freedom, feeling, receiving, open, vulnerable, playful, magnetic, compassionate, connected, cyclical, heart centered, being.

Giving is an action of our masculine energy. Receiving is an action of our feminine energy.

Every one of us has access to all of it. The most whole version of you isn’t the one who lives permanently on one side of that list. It’s the one who can recognize what a moment is actually asking for, and move there on purpose.

Women have been living in the pointed finger, giving, for decades. We just gave it softer names, like nurturing, caretaking, being a good mom, a good wife, a good employee. Cooking, cleaning, the grocery run, organizing the trip, the traditions, the birthday everyone will remember for years. All of that is giving. It serves the people we love, and it matters. It’s just not the same thing as receiving, and we stopped being able to tell the difference.

We called it femininity. It was constant output, and it never once asked us to receive anything.

That’s an aha, seeing it from this perspective. Don’t you agree?

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I think about the good girl a lot. The one who got told to calm down, sit still, stop being so much. The one who learned that compassionate, soft-spoken and easy to be around were the adjectives that kept her safe. Compliance got rewarded. Feeling too much did not.

Have you met her? Most of us were her at some point.

We went from freedom to structure, feeling to thinking, receiving to giving, vulnerable to protective, heart centered to mind driven, being to doing, and somewhere in there we lost our intuition to our minds.

She’s not gone. She just got very good at giving before anyone needed to ask her to.

And here’s the part that’s hard to see from inside it. The giving doesn’t feel like giving anymore once you’ve named it something else. It feels like being a great mom. It feels like what love requires. High-achieving women especially, those of us who are good at almost everything, don’t usually notice the imbalance, because the output has a beautiful name attached to it. Nobody questions a name like that. Not even the woman living inside it.

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I was talking to one of my best girlfriends recently, and we landed on something neither of us said out loud before.

We are both givers. It’s not something we ever needed to work at. Our capacity is enormous, and giving genuinely feels good to us, so for most of our lives we didn’t question it. We just kept doing it, more for our kids, more for our partners, more for our clients and friends, the people who needed something and knew we’d say yes.

What we noticed, sitting with it together, was what all of that giving actually built around us. Relationships that mirrored it back. Friendships that took far more than they gave. Business relationships where we were the ones over-delivering and rarely the ones being poured into. We told ourselves that’s what being a good friend looked like. The more you give, the more you serve, the more comes back to you eventually.

And also, we teach people how to treat us. Some of those friendships quietly became almost entirely about our giving, without much room left for us to receive anything back.

If I want more abundance in my life, in my business, in my friendships, in my partnership, it requires me to actually be willing to receive it. And that’s the part nobody warns you about. Receiving is deeply uncomfortable if you’ve spent your whole life being the one who gives.

Do you find it harder to give or receive? I bet I know the answer. It feels easier to give than receive.

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Here’s why.

When you’re giving, you’re in control. You’re deciding what gets given, how much, and when. Receiving asks you to give that up.

Think about the last time someone complimented you. You’re so pretty. And how quickly did you say no, or hand it right back to them? No, you are. Have you ever noticed that? How rare it is for a woman to just sit inside a compliment and say thank you, without deflecting it somewhere else?

I can think of so many moments, arms full of grocery bags, diaper bag sliding off one shoulder, a baby on my hip, using my foot to prop open a door, and someone says, hey, let me help you with that. And what comes out of my mouth before I even think about it. No, I’ve got it.

I did have it. That was never the question. And if I’m asking for more support in my life, more help, more ease, and I keep denying the small moments someone offers it to me, I’m telling the world, quietly and constantly, that I’m not actually available to receive. That’s such a masculine posture, and most of us don’t even realize we’re standing in it.

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his is where women, mothers especially, get so good at doing it all that we stop even pausing long enough to receive.

We keep going. And going. And underneath the going, we’re silently pleading for help, praying for support, asking God or the universe to bring us some relief. And then it shows up, small and ordinary, right in front of us, and we wave it away. No, it’s okay. I’ve got it.

If we actually want more feminine energy in our lives, it doesn’t start with a retreat or a big decision. It starts absurdly small. It starts with letting yourself be helped with the things you were already capable of doing yourself.

I push a step stool up to the cabinet to reach the garlic powder on the top shelf. My son walks into the kitchen. Instead of climbing up there myself, I ask him. Or if he offers before I even ask, mom, let me get that for you, I don’t say I’ve got it. I say yes, please. Thank you.

I see this same reflex in almost every high-achieving woman I coach. The capability isn’t the problem. It never was. She has plenty to give. It’s the automatic no that fires before the help even finishes being offered.

It sounds too small to matter but it isn’t.

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I think about that willingness to receive because I’ve also been the one who fixes.

A woman in one of my mentorships is living through an example of this in real time.

Her business has finally become what she always wanted it to be, not just successful but satisfying, the kind of success that took years. Now that it’s here, something in her is ready to slow down, to soften, to live a little more embodied and a little more present.

At the same time, her husband is in his own unraveling. What some might call a spiritual awakening. He’s leaning into his emotional body in a way he never has before, and it’s opening him, and it’s also costing him. His business has started to struggle.

She felt the pull to jump back into the doing. She knows exactly how to fix it. She’s done it before. She could get back out there, hustle the way she used to, bring the income in fast.

Here’s what I told her. Hold the pose. Don’t rescue him, and don’t slide back into the giving and the fixing just because you know how and he needs it. Love him, be a soft place for him to land, and know that this unraveling is his to move through, and if you fix it for him, you take it from him.

It is such a masculine impulse, the fixing. It looks like love. It even feels like love while you’re doing it. And underneath it is usually control, and underneath the control is usually fear. What actually helps someone through their own becoming is rarely someone rescuing them out of it.

I don’t know how her story ends yet. Neither does she. She’s still in it, feeling the old pull every day, and choosing, every day, not to and it’s hard because we can feel like love is giving a person relief when life gets hard.

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The pendulum can swing too far in the other direction too. A client of mine felt an enormous clarity that her real gift lived somewhere outside her accounting job, so she quit, closed the door on the career she spent over a decade building, and stepped fully into her purpose with no financial runway and no plan for the slow, unglamorous months every new business has to survive before it becomes anything.

Within the year, it collapsed. A gift isn’t a business model, and clarity isn’t a cash flow plan.

The clarity that shows up in a single moment still needs time to become something sturdy enough to stand on. This time she kept her day job, and underneath it, quietly, started building the structure first. It’s still standing.

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I often think about calendar.

Everything that matters to me goes on it. Including lunch with one of my kids. Someone asked me once, half joking, does your daughter have to schedule an appointment with you? And the honest answer is no. She doesn’t have to. And if it’s on my calendar, it’s going to happen, and it’s going to have my full attention when it does. A coach told me years ago, if it’s not on your calendar, it’s not a priority. I’ve never forgotten it.

So when I sit down across from her for the two hours I blocked off, I’m not half there, running a list in my head of everything else I should be doing. I already made that decision before I sat down.

And that’s when I get to actually receive her. Her face. What she’s telling me about her day. The way she laughs at her own joke before she even finishes it.

The calendar didn’t take anything away from that lunch. It’s the reason the lunch existed at all.

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I love structure, my calendar, knowing where I’m going, and building systems that hold a lot of moving pieces without dropping any of them. It helps me feel safe. It allows me to feel organized and clears chaos.

I start meetings by asking people how they feel, and where they feel it in their body. We don’t catch up or talk about what they’ve been doing. I want to know where their heart is. I invite them to soften into the version they’d not typically show to anyone. I want the the real one.

We still set the goals. I still hold the timeline. I just don’t believe anymore that leading well or being a good coach means removing my heart from how I get there.

I’ve coached enough women through this to say it plainly. You don’t have to become more masculine to lead. You get to lead differently.

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Structure gets to decide where we’re going. The feminine gets to allow the process to unfold. We get clarity on the what and let go of them how. I can know exactly what I’m building without believing I have to control how every piece unfolds. I didn’t understand that for a long time.

Here’s what I know for sure, after years of watching this play out in my own life and in nearly every woman I’ve worked with. I don’t love the word balance. It suggests something even, a scale sitting perfectly still, and that’s not what any of this actually looks like.

Some moments are asking for masculine energy. Building a business. Making the decision nobody else wants to make. Holding a family together through a hard season. Other moments are asking for feminine energy entirely. A date night with the person you love, where you let him plan it, choose the restaurant, drive the car, and you show up soft and open instead of running the evening the way you’d run a Tuesday.

It’s not about matching the two energies, fifty-fifty, every single day. It’s about noticing what a moment is actually asking for, and choosing, on purpose, which one you’re going to bring into it. That’s the skill: discernment, not balance.

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I talk a lot about the difference between routine and ritual.

Routine is the alarm you set for 2:22pm every day to show up for the practice, the reminder to breathe, to practice SNAP, whether you feel like it or not. It’s the twenty minutes you commit to walking every day. When something is brand new, routine is what gets you there. The rigidity isn’t the enemy in that season. It’s how we create new habits and behaviors when we want to improve our lives.

And then, at some point, without announcing itself, it starts to become something else.

Instead of I’m going on a walk for twenty minutes, it becomes I’m going to move my body however it wants to move today. I am going to ask my body what feels good and what it needs today, not what I did yesterday. Some days that’s still a walk. Some days it’s stretching on the floor. Some days it’s turning on music in my kitchen and dancing until I forget what I was thinking about.

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Think of a river. The banks hold the water in. Without them, the water just spreads out into the ground and disappears. There is no river without the banks.

The banks aren’t there to restrict the water. They are to give structure.

A river isn’t the same width every season either. Some months it runs high and fast. Some months it’s barely a trickle over the rocks. The banks hold it either way, and the river is still a river the whole time.

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I still don’t know what will happen with my friend and her husband. I don’t know if he comes through this season steadier, or if the business doesn’t make it, or if some version of both things is true at once.

That’s what those women were really asking underneath the question about feminine energy. Most of them didn’t start in their masculine. They started in the good girl, meek and quiet and agreeable, a disempowered version of the feminine. Then the pendulum swung, hard, into the masculine, to take our power back, to prove to ourselves that we could too, and that’s where most of us have been living since. The question underneath all of it is how to find real feminine energy, the kind with the power still in it, while staying exactly as capable in our masculine as we already are.

You already know what both ends of that pendulum feel like. This season might be asking you to hold both, on purpose, instead of swinging between them.

The routine built the container. The ritual gets to move inside it.

Stay close.

The invitation came for a Ziggy Marley concert on one of the nights I had my kids. As a single mom, I count those days. They’re precious to me. Add in the fact that I work from home, where work is never really done, and there’s always another client, another email, another article, another idea waiting.

My first thought was exactly what you’d expect.

I should probably stay home.

Then I caught myself.

Then I asked myself the same question I’ve been asking my clients for years.

What do you need, sweetheart?

It’s the question I come back to over and over in my work — with women in the Embodied Feminine Collective, in medicine spaces, in coaching sessions. I’ve said it a thousand times. And that night, standing in my own kitchen, I finally gave myself the same medicine.

The answer came immediately. I need to go play.

I almost laughed when I heard it. Play? Really? Somehow that felt less responsible than staying home, finishing work, doing one more thing around the house. Even saying yes on a night I had my kids brought up a little guilt. And I know that guilt. I’ve felt it my whole life as a mother. When my kids were little I felt guilty for going to the gym before they woke up — guilty that I wasn’t there when they opened their eyes. Guilty if I went to dinner with my girlfriends and missed the bedtime story, missed tucking them in, missed being the last voice they heard before they fell asleep. Somehow I had absorbed this belief that a good mom is one who loses herself in motherhood — all her time, all her energy, all her presence — and that doing anything for myself was taking something away from them.

Have you ever felt that? Like doing something for yourself was selfish and somehow taking away from everyone else?

Call me selfish. I said yes anyway.

If you’ve ever been to my house or one of my retreats, you already know I don’t really do things halfway. I’m an all the way in kind of girl. I packed a charcuterie board — different cheeses, meats, crackers, jams, fruit, nuts. I even brought my own cheese board and special charcuterie utensils. All the little details that make an experience feel special. I love watching people discover a combination they never would have put together themselves. What I call a best bite. That’s one of the ways I love people. I create experiences.

The concert was outside on one of those perfect summer evenings where the sky keeps changing colors while the music plays. When we first got there, one of my girlfriends found us a spot off to the side. It was fine but I’ve learned something about myself over the years — I almost always believe there’s something better. So I wandered a little closer, and found a spot about ten or twelve rows back, right in the middle. It felt perfect.

The night kept unfolding.

We started talking to the people around us. We shared our charcuterie. We shared drinks. At one point we spotted a man dressed as reggae Jesus, and naturally we decided he needed bread and red wine. It seemed like the obvious thing to do.

At some point I just started moving closer to the stage. Weaving through the crowd, not asking permission, just following the pull. There was something about it that felt young. Free. Like the version of me who doesn’t stop to wonder what people will think or whether it’s rude to move forward or whether someone might mind. That version just goes. She assumes she’ll be welcomed. She assumes it’s going to be fun. She doesn’t move in fear — she moves in love. She’s living her best life.

Can you remember the last time you moved through something like that? Without asking permission. Without worrying about what anyone thought. Just following what felt alive.

By the end of the night I was standing front row, dead center. And at one point Ziggy looked right at me. We made eye contact. For a moment it felt like we were dancing together. I felt the grass under my bare feet and the music moving through my whole body. Eyes closed. Fully in it. Fully there. Not managing anything or anyone. Not thinking about tomorrow. Not making a list in my head. Just alive in the most complete sense of that word — vibrant, beautiful, free, like that twenty-one year old who used to dance like nobody was watching because she genuinely didn’t care if they were.

I want to live in that feeling. Not just visit it.

The next morning one of my girlfriends texted: “I needed a night like last night so bad! 🥰”

I’ve thought about that text all week. Because I think she spoke for all of us. We needed it. And I’ve been sitting with a question ever since — why do we wait so long to give ourselves something we need this much?

I’ve spent years talking about healing — understanding ourselves, the nervous system, relationships, patterns, the Clarity Code™. I believe deeply in that work. But this week reminded me of something I don’t say enough.

Pleasure is medicine.

Not guilty pleasure. Just pleasure. We’ve literally put the word guilty in front of one of the most natural human experiences there is — feeling alive, feeling joy, feeling turned on by your own life — and in doing so we’ve made it something to apologize for. Something to earn. Something to sneak. But pleasure isn’t an indulgence. It’s not a reward waiting at the end of the hard work. It’s not something you get to have once everyone else has been taken care of.

It’s medicine. And we need it now, not later.

When we play — really play, the kind where we’re barefoot in the grass with the music in our chest, dancing with our eyes closed — our nervous system shifts. The part of our brain that’s been managing and planning and holding everything together gets to put it down for a little while. Cortisol drops. Oxytocin rises. The body remembers what it feels like to be safe and connected and alive. That’s not a small thing. That’s regulation. That’s integration. And the more we deprive ourselves of it, the more we start to dim. The vibrancy fades. The energy drops. We start going through the motions of a life instead of actually living one.

You are the creator of this. That’s the part I want you to hear. Pleasure doesn’t come from outside of you — not from the concert, not from the right relationship, not from finally hitting the benchmark. It comes from saying yes to the things that light you up and make you feel alive and trusting that you don’t need a reason to say yes to them.

But here’s what I watch happen instead. So many people — women especially — have built their entire life around a version of “when”. When I hit this number. When the kids are older. When the business is more stable. When I’ve earned it. Then I’ll travel. Then I’ll slow down. Then I’ll play.

Does that sound familiar? How long have you been telling yourself “when”…

I was working with a client recently who has clear goals for herself — more travel, more spaciousness, more joy. She could describe exactly what she wanted her life to look like. But every time an opportunity showed up to actually live some of that now, she’d hesitated and pulled back. She hadn’t earned it yet. It didn’t feel responsible to enjoy herself. She done enough to deserve or earn it. And what I kept seeing was this: the energy she was working so hard to create wasn’t in her actual life. She was grinding toward a feeling she wasn’t letting herself feel. That’s not how this works. You don’t arrive at aliveness by postponing it. You have to be it. You have to get into the frequency of what you want in order to attract more of it. If the goal is a life that feels expansive and free and full of joy, you have to let some of that in now. Not later. Now.

A financial advisor I know told me something that has stayed with me. He said so many of the people who come into his office have spent decades saving and saving, not spending, not enjoying, telling themselves that retirement is when real life begins. When I get there, then I’ll travel. Then I’ll have fun. Then I’ll finally rest. But what he watches, over and over, is that by the time they get there, their bodies aren’t able to go. The years of grinding without joy, without play, without pleasure — it costs them. Not just their happiness along the way, but their actual physical health. And then it’s too late for the very thing they were saving themselves for.

We are not meant to defer our aliveness, our joy, our happiness and yes, our pleasure.

And I see the same thing in the young adults I work with — the ones graduating high school and college, stepping into what everyone tells them is real life now. So many of them arrive already anxious. Already dreading it. And when I sit with them, what I hear underneath the anxiety is this: adulthood looks terrible. It looks like sacrifice. It looks like you stop living for yourself. You stop playing. You stop dancing. You just work and carry responsibility and wait. Because that’s what they watched. That’s what was modeled to them. And now they’re about to walk into it themselves and something in them is already grieving what they haven’t even lost yet.

What are we teaching them?

I think about my own kids. I think about the gym guilt and the missed bedtime stories and all the years I believed that a good mother was one who lost herself in motherhood. And I understand that impulse completely. Mom guilt doesn’t go away. I don’t think it ever fully does. But I’ve stopped believing that my sacrifice is the greatest gift I can give them.

Last week my Sadie girl and I were in the bathroom together getting ready. We were talking about boys — about kissing and being asked out and dates and all of it — and what struck me was that the conversation had nothing to do with him. It was entirely about her. What makes her feel beautiful. What makes her feel alive and vibrant and the most like herself. She told me that one of her favorite things is getting ready for the thing — the date, prom, a night out — because she’s creating her own fun before she even walks out the door. She’s listening to music, trying on clothes, feeling good in her body. The joy isn’t waiting for her somewhere out there. She’s already in it. And then she turned to me and said, “Hey mom, want me do your makeup?” So I sat there while my daughter did my makeup, and when she finished she looked at me and said, okay queen. Look at you. You look so beautiful, mom.

I don’t have words for what that moment felt like. Seeing myself reflected back through her eyes. Feeling how much she’s absorbed — not from anything I’ve told her, but from what she’s watched. The music we turn on and dance to in the bathroom. The way we get dressed together. The way we talk about feeling good in our bodies, feeling alive, feeling like ourselves. She learned that somewhere. And I think she learned it from watching me choose it.

That’s the everyday version of the medicine. Not just the concert. Not just the front row. It’s a Tuesday, in the bathroom with your daughter, talking about boys and doing each other’s makeup and laughing. It’s turning on a song that makes everyone in the house move. It’s making life fun. It’s refusing to be so serious all the time. The energy I bring into my home, the way I move through my own life — that’s what my kids know. Not because I told them. Because they watched me.

But I want to be clear about something. I didn’t go to that concert for my kids. I went for me. The modeling is a beautiful byproduct. But pleasure doesn’t need a justification. It doesn’t need to serve a purpose beyond the fact that it makes you feel alive. You don’t do it so your kids will learn something. You do it because you deserve to feel the grass under her feet and the music in her chest and the joy of being fully, completely, unapologetically alive in your own life.

And I’m curious — when is the last time you did something just because it made you feel alive? Not because it was productive. Not because it served a purpose. Not because someone else needed something from you. Just because it lit you up from the inside.

That’s the invitation. Not someday. Not after. Now.

Ask yourself the question. What do you need, sweetheart? And then actually listen.

Maybe the answer is rest. Maybe it’s a walk. Maybe it’s dinner with the people who make you laugh until your stomach hurts. Maybe it’s turning on a song and dancing in your kitchen or in your car. Maybe it’s sitting in the bathroom with someone you love and letting her do your makeup. Maybe it’s weaving through the crowd instead of staying politely in your spot.

You are the creator of your own aliveness. Nobody is going to give you permission. The life that feels like pleasure, like freedom, like joy — it’s not waiting somewhere in the future.

It’s already here. It’s been here. It’s knocking.

Say yes!

Stay close

And as she was talking, I kept thinking — she’s not just describing herself. She’s describing most of us.

Because people don’t usually walk around saying “I think I’m broken.” It doesn’t come out that directly. It sounds more like: Why can’t I be more disciplined? Why can’t I stick to anything? Why do I keep repeating the same patterns? Why does it seem like everyone else has figured it out except for me? And underneath all of those questions is this quiet assumption that something must be wrong with us.

I’ve felt that way. For a long time, actually.

And then there’s the other version of this, which I see just as often in my work. Someone comes to me and from the outside, everything looks like they’ve made it. The car. The house. The perfect family, traveling all over the world and their business is thriving. They look like they’ve made it in life. Every benchmark most of us have been taught to measure success by — they’ve hit it. And yet they’re sitting across from me saying they feel like something is missing. They thought getting there would feel different, and every time they reached the next rung on the ladder, they expected to feel something different, and then they didn’t. So they kept reaching for something else. And something else. And something else.

What they’re looking for is a feeling of satisfaction. Fulfillment. They’ve been measuring themselves based on something outside of them — what the world says success looks like, what they thought they were supposed to want — and they keep coming up feeling a void, something still feels empty.

And here’s why, because it’s not theirs. It was never theirs.

Both of those people are exhausted for the same reasons, it’s just from different directions.

Have you ever felt that? Like no matter which direction you’re coming from — not enough or everything you thought you wanted — something still feels off?

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After my divorce, I “had to go back to work,” in the words of my ex. As though it was a punishment for divorcing him, but that’s another story. I was either going back to college to get my masters or jump into a startup and learn as much as I could. I chose the latter. When I got into the world of business and entrepreneurship, I felt like I was constantly trying to figure out the right way to do it. I hired coaches and mentors, went to workshops, joined programs, hired marketing professionals. I spent thousands and thousands of dollars trying to learn how to build a business, how to market myself, how to create content, and how to become a leader.

I was asking everyone outside of me. What should I do? How should I do it? What am I missing?

And everyone had an answer. Pick a niche, pick one lane, become known for one thing, start something and finish it, be more disciplined, be more consistent, get to the point faster, hook people sooner.

I started creating content on social media and just telling stories, because that’s how I naturally communicate. I like stories. I like context. I like helping people understand how I got somewhere, not just handing them the conclusion. But I kept hearing “you are doing it wrong” and that people are dropping off because I wasn’t getting to the point fast enough and that I needed a better hook. So I’d try to do it differently. Then I’d lose interest, or it wouldn’t feel like me, or I’d start sounding like someone else.

One woman in my DMs said, “Kate, I’m so confused. I don’t even know what you do.” And honestly, it was a fair reflection. Was I teaching yoga? Was I hosting retreats? Was I doing sound baths? Was I working with women to embody their feminine? Was I talking about plant medicine? Was I coaching?

I remember feeling like she had confirmed what I already suspected. Maybe I was doing it wrong. Maybe everyone else was right. Maybe I needed to pick a lane and stay there.

So I tried. But every time I picked one thing, I got bored. I’d start off feeling so excited and lit up and then the excitement would disappear and the energy would fade. I’d become interested in something else and then feel guilty about it. I spent years thinking that meant I lacked discipline and that I wasn’t focused enough. That I wasn’t committed enough and that I couldn’t stay with something long enough to actually be successful.

Have you ever felt that? The guilt of moving on, like there’s something wrong with you for not being able to stay? The feeling of being a failure because you quit?

One of the ways someone described it was that I could never seem to get to Z. I could start the alphabet just fine — A, B, C, D, E, F. But then, without fail, I’d jump over to J, then M, then back to G and then back to L and then I’d quit and be on to the next thing. It felt like everybody else was moving in a straight line and I was all over the place.

For a long time, I thought that was the thing that needed fixing.

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So I got curious and went down the rabbit hole. I became fascinated by understanding people, and mostly myself. Why could one person do something all day long and have energy left over, while someone else would be completely depleted? Why did one person thrive with structure and routines while someone else felt trapped by them? Why did some people seem to know exactly who they were, while others spent years trying to figure it out?

I started studying Human Design and CliftonStrengths and the Enneagram, and eventually built what became the Clarity Code. I was trying to understand people, but honestly I was also trying to understand myself.

Human Design told me I’m a Manifesting Generator, 1/3, with sacral authority. And when I learned what that actually meant, something clicked. A Manifesting Generator is wired to light up, go fast, follow what’s alive — and then move on when the energy shifts. The 1/3 profile means I learn by going deep into something, building a real foundation, and then discovering what actually works through lived experience, through trial and error, through doing it myself. My sacral authority means my gut, my body, is my decision-making system — not my head. When something is a yes, I feel it. When it’s not, my energy just drops. It explained so much. I wasn’t scattered. I was following my design. The problem was I kept trying to override it.

CliftonStrengths showed me my number one strength is Maximizer. I am naturally good at looking at something and seeing how to make it better, deeper, richer, more impactful. It’s one of the strengths I was born with and how I am wired. It’s what comes as easy to me as breathing. I also have Woo, Communication, Positivity, and Activator in my top five. I’m good at starting things, at getting energy moving, at bringing people in and lighting something up. And then Predictable Success gave me another piece — I’m a Synergist, which means I’m a people person at my core. I want to be with people, engage with people, build with people. This explained why I love collaboration. My Operator and Processor scores are really low, which means the doing, the executing, the processing — that’s not where I live. I can do it. I learned over time that if I try hard enough, I can figure it out. But it never lit me up and felt hard and frustrating, and that’s the place I often found myself stuck.

So of course I got bored. Of course I wanted to move on. I wasn’t broken. I was just in the wrong part of the alphabet. My job has always been A through F. Hand it off at G. I spent years feeling guilty for that instead of understanding it.

I’d never felt more seen and understood. It was the biggest exhale of my life.

And then the Enneagram showed me why I kept jumping ship the moment things got uncomfortable. I’m a 7, wing 8, sexual subtype — which means I’m wired for aliveness, expansion, intensity, possibility. I move toward what feels meaningful and alive. I don’t want a small life. And I really don’t want to sit in frustration. In Human Design, frustration is actually my not-self theme — it’s the signal that I’m out of alignment. But instead of getting curious about that signal, I’d just leave. Quit. Move to the next thing. I thought that was a character flaw. It wasn’t. It was just misdirection — I was working harder instead of realigning.

The more I understood myself, the harder it became to see myself as broken. I started seeing patterns instead. And I started questioning what I’d been told. Maybe my curiosity wasn’t a problem. Maybe going deep and then moving on wasn’t a problem. Maybe loving yoga and soundbaths and retreats and medicine work and conversations and writing wasn’t random at all. Maybe I was the common thread running through all of it. And the more I understood how I naturally moved through the world, the less interested I became in outsourcing myself or listening to what the world was telling me I should be.

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There was a psychologist in the 1950s named Don Clifton who asked a completely different question than most people in his field. He said, “What if instead of studying what’s wrong with people, we studied what’s right with people?” That one reframe became the foundation of an entire body of work that changed how millions of people understand themselves.

He also believed something I think about a lot — we’ve been taught that hard work equals success. He believed smart work equals success. There’s a difference. Hard work says push through, do more, be more disciplined. Smart work says know yourself well enough to put your energy where it actually belongs.

He used the example of kids bringing home their report cards. They come home with all A’s and one D. What do the parents focus on? Which grade gets all the attention? The D. The whole conversation becomes about how to improve it, how to work harder. And I understand that — there are things in life we all need to learn. But what if the D is just information? What if it’s showing us that the energy and attention and natural ability live somewhere else entirely? What if instead of working harder in that one subject, we worked smarter by focusing on the thing that comes easy to us?

Most of us spend so much time staring at the D that we stop paying attention to the A. We stop noticing what comes naturally. What energizes us. What makes us feel most like ourselves. And I think that’s the thing people don’t talk about enough — we’ve been so busy trying to fix what’s wrong that we’ve forgotten to pay attention to what’s already right. We devalue the things that come easy to us because we’ve been taught that if it doesn’t feel hard, it doesn’t count.

But what if the things that feel easy are easy because they’re actually your superpowers?

________

The answer isn’t more self-improvement. It’s more self-knowledge. Because when you actually understand yourself — how you’re wired, what energizes you, where your natural strengths live, and what your body is trying to tell you — you stop needing everyone else to tell you who to be. You stop outsourcing your decisions to the loudest voice in the room and start trusting the one that’s been inside you the whole time. You start taking your own advice.

That’s what all of this — Human Design, CliftonStrengths, the Enneagram, Predictable Success, the Clarity Code — is actually for. Not to give you a new identity, but to help you recognize the one you already have.

The alphabet was never the problem. I was never going to get to Z that way. I am always going to end up at J and M and back to G, and now that I know that’s just who I am, how I am wired, and the signal to hand it over to the operator who can take it all the way to Z, I no longer feel like I am doing it wrong or that I am broken.

Maybe you don’t either.

Stay close.

I’ve hosted the Creative Woman Retreat for ten years now. Every year I take what I’ve learned — from this retreat, from medicine work, from life — and refine it. As a maximizer, I see the potential in something good and find ways to make it more intentional, deeper, more alive.

When everyone arrives, we sit in a circle and look at each other. We introduce ourselves. We say why we’re there, what we’re hoping to release, what we’re hoping to reclaim. We create an agreement together — that this is a place where it’s safe to be fully who you are.

The whole weekend is built around that. Releasing the ancestral trauma, the inherited beliefs, the patterns women have carried and passed down for generations — and then reclaiming what’s underneath all of that. You have to release something first. Make space for it to leave. Before you can call in what’s meant to take its place.

At some point during the weekend, we go around the circle and each woman hears, from everyone else, “What I see in you is…” Someone she’s only known for two days, looking into her eyes and telling her what they see. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever witnessed. By the time we end the retreat, it feels like family. Like home.

But this retreat isn’t just the weekend.

I do prep work with every woman before she arrives. After the retreat ends, we do integration calls — because I know what’s waiting for her at home. The same people. The same situations. The same things that were triggering her before this weekend will still be there. We expect that. We plan for it, and we have tools to navigate what comes up.

The weekend itself is so safe and so loving that it’s almost effortless to believe the clarity you receive there. Last weekend, one of the women said something simple during that circle.

“I just need to believe in myself.”

And in that room — surrounded by women who saw her, who reflected her gifts back to her, who loved her exactly as she arrived — it felt completely true. Of course it did. She was being held by a room full of women who already believed in her.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. I know what Tuesday morning looks like. I’ve lived it. I’ve watched hundreds of people live it. I know how quickly the feeling fades when the room is gone, the candles are out, and you’re back in your life again, trying to remember who you were in that circle.

This is the article I’ve been circling for months. Maybe longer. The one that required me to stop writing about what I’ve observed and start writing about what I’ve lived.

For twelve years, I’ve watched people have profound experiences. I’ve watched people leave marriages, religions, careers, identities, old versions of themselves. I’ve watched people sit in ceremonies and receive insights that changed everything — and watched those same insights disappear a month later.

What I’ve come to understand is that transformation doesn’t happen in the moment of realization. It happens in what comes after.

Everything I do today was built from that realization.

This is the story of how I learned that the insight is not the transformation.

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Twelve years ago, my life cracked open.

I left my marriage, and I left the Mormon church. At the time, I thought those were the two big things happening. Looking back, there was something else happening too — I was losing my community, and I don’t think I fully understood that right away.

When people talk about leaving religion, they usually talk about the beliefs, the doctrine, the rules they no longer agree with. What I wasn’t prepared for was what came after.

The people who were my neighbors were also my church community. We raised kids together. We celebrated birthdays together. We brought meals to each other after babies were born and family members died. We sat next to each other on Sundays. We knew each other’s families, each other’s stories. I thought we were friends.

And then I left.

I wasn’t expecting everyone to agree with my decision, and I wasn’t expecting anyone to leave with me. What surprised me was how quickly I became someone they no longer knew.

The silence was loud. Nobody came over. Nobody checked in. The women I’d spent years of my life with stopped calling. The community that shaped most of my life was moving on without me, and I didn’t know where I fit anymore.

There was freedom in that season. A lot of it. I wasn’t rushing to get kids ready for church, arriving with contention and frustration over the pressure to be on time. I wasn’t sitting through meetings questioning what was being said. I wasn’t trying to make myself fit inside something that no longer felt true for me.

And there was grief too. The kind that doesn’t show up all at once. The kind that sneaks up on you when you realize the people you thought would always be there aren’t.

I didn’t have language for it then. I just knew I was searching for something that felt like belonging.

Not long after, I was invited to an ayahuasca ceremony. The medicine gave me something specific — something for me, for what I needed in that exact moment, not some big universal download about the world or other people’s lives.

It showed me my ex-husband as a person carrying his own trauma, his own pain, his own hurt — showing up in all of that, the way all of us do. It wasn’t just an idea in my mind. Something in how I felt about him actually shifted. My heart softened toward him in a way it hadn’t in a long time.

And. Also. The next time I saw him, he showed up the same way he always had, and I felt triggered, activated, same as before. The softening didn’t erase that. It just meant that for a moment, I had a different perspective. A tender heart. A truer picture of who he was underneath everything I’d built him into in my mind. Both things were real.

Then came the part of the ceremony I think about just as often as the medicine itself. Afterward, we sat in a circle and shared what we’d experienced — looking into each other’s eyes, listening, paying attention. Strangers being more honest with each other than I’d ever been with people I’d known my whole life.

It felt tender. It felt sweet. It felt like the most honest version of community I’d known since leaving my church — and it felt, unexpectedly, like home.

I hadn’t felt that since I left. And I wanted more.

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Sometimes I went back to medicine journeys for more information, more clarity, even healing. I went back for the feeling — the compassion that flooded in when the walls came down, the certainty, the connection, the relief of being around people who spoke the same language and understood things I couldn’t explain to anyone else. The feeling of being close to God. The feeling of finally understanding myself.

That feeling is real. Not manufactured, not imagined. One of the most profound things a human being can experience. And then ordinary life returned. The dishes. The parenting. The bills. The relationships that still needed work. The triggers that still fired the same way. The self-doubt that crept back in, sometimes within days, waiting patiently for the medicine to wear off.

And the medicine was right there, offering that feeling again.

Have you ever felt that? Something opens you up, shows you something true, and then life closes back around you exactly the way it was before?

Of course I went back. Would you if you were me?

People go back for the clarity and the healing and the insight, and they also go back because they want to feel that way again — not just the feeling inside the medicine itself, but the belonging that comes with the community around it. Both things are true at the same time. Sometimes that pull toward community is something people feel clearly. Sometimes it’s quieter, underneath the surface, something they’re not even aware is part of why they keep coming back. I don’t want to talk about it like it’s either/or, because it never was for me.

What I didn’t understand yet was that the insight, the feeling, and the belonging were all real, and all of them were pointing me somewhere. The medicine showed me something true. Life was asking me to practice it — slower, less beautiful, happening in moments nobody witnesses. And the medicine, all of it, was so much easier than that.

⸻

I started hosting ceremonies in my own home.

The candles. The blankets. The home prepared carefully before anyone arrived. The way people would walk through the door and their whole body would exhale before they’d even said a word. I loved building that container. I loved being the person who created it.

Service was part of it. There was more there too.

It felt good to be asked. It felt good to be the one who knew things. My ego settled into the role the way you settle into a warm chair. I’d just left a community that organized my entire identity, and here was a new one forming around me. I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be important. I wanted to belong.

I thought I was saving people.

There’s something else I started to understand, and it took me a long time to name. What happens in those circles is a kind of accelerated intimacy. It’s real — people aren’t imagining the closeness they feel. The container, the vulnerability, the medicine itself, all of it strips away layers that normally take years to get through with another person. You can feel closer to someone after one weekend than to people you’ve known for a decade. That feeling is intoxicating. It’s part of why people keep coming back — for that depth of connection, that fast, as much as for any insight.

Accelerated isn’t the same as earned. The intimacy is real in the moment, and it doesn’t come with the history, the slowly built trust, the proof over time that this person shows up the way they say they will. I watched people mistake that accelerated closeness for something it wasn’t — soul connections, instant understanding, a sense of having known someone forever after two days. I understood it, because I felt it too. It’s one of the most seductive parts of this work. The belonging arrives so fast that it’s easy to forget it hasn’t held up under pressure yet.

Over time, hundreds of people moved through those spaces. People kept coming back. The same faces. The same stories, told with more sophisticated language. The same breakthroughs, sometimes years apart. The insights got deeper, the awareness sharper — and often the life stayed remarkably similar.

I would watch someone arrive radiant from a recent experience, full of clarity about what needed to change, full of certainty about who they were becoming. Six months later, the relationship they were going to have the conversation with — they hadn’t had it. The job they were going to leave — they were still there. The thing they’d seen so clearly — still running their life.

How can someone have that much awareness and still be stuck?

Can you think of someone like that? Maybe even yourself? Someone who can describe exactly what’s going on with so much insight, and yet it just keeps happening anyway.

That question became the foundation of my life’s work.

At first I thought they needed more medicine. Eventually I realized they needed somewhere to take what the medicine already showed them. The insight wasn’t the problem. What happened after — or didn’t — was the problem.

So I started hosting integration calls on Zoom. Simple. Unglamorous. No candles, no blankets. People would check in and tell me what was happening in their lives — usually relationships, usually the same struggle: how do I actually live what I saw?

That question kept leading us back to the Enneagram. What motivates someone. How they learned to perceive the world based on their childhood. From there into parts work — Internal Family Systems — learning to notice a trigger the moment it happened. A heart rate climbing. A body bracing. We’d catch it in real time, talk about it, practice something different, go back and forth until it landed. Not a concept anymore. An action, happening live, on a screen, in the middle of an ordinary week.

On those same calls, I was doing my own version of it. I’m a Manifesting Generator, a 1/3 in Human Design — I learn by doing, by trying things and course-correcting in real time, not by theorizing. So that’s what I did, on myself, before it ever became something I offered anyone else.

People started noticing. They could see it. Friends would say, your life looks so different — what are you doing? Strangers would comment on how well I seemed to be doing, given everything I’d been through. I wasn’t explaining the change. They were watching it.

This was the beginning of what would eventually become Everyday Medicine and the Clarity Code, although I certainly didn’t know that at the time.

What I knew was that I’d become fascinated with a question.

Why do some people have an insight and change their lives, while others have the same insight and stay exactly where they are?

I started paying attention everywhere. Reading books. Listening to teachers. Trying things in my own life and watching what happened. Every time I learned something, I brought it into my relationships, my parenting, my healing, and eventually into the medicine spaces I was creating and supporting.

Some things worked beautifully. Some things sounded beautiful and fell apart completely in real life.

The people who changed weren’t always the people with the most awareness, the biggest breakthroughs, the deepest experiences. They were the people willing to practice.

I wasn’t studying medicine. I was studying transformation.

Most of what I do today grew from that curiosity. I’m still asking the same question.

⸻

For years I thought transformation happened in ceremony.

I really believed that. I thought if people could see clearly enough, everything would change. I thought the breakthrough was the thing. I thought the insight was the thing.

I was wrong.

Transformation wasn’t happening in ceremony. It was happening six weeks later. At the dinner table. In the marriage. In the boundary that finally got held. In the conversation that almost didn’t happen. In the ordinary Tuesday morning nobody posts about.

The ceremony was the invitation. Life became the ceremony.

And I started noticing something else, something that took looking at myself honestly to see. The people who transformed most deeply weren’t the ones with the most experiences. They were the ones who took one insight and practiced it long enough for it to become who they were. One thing. Practiced in real life. Over time. Until it wasn’t an insight anymore. Until it was just how they lived.

That’s embodiment. And it looks nothing like a breakthrough. It looks like what you do in your daily life.

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There’s a part nobody talks about honestly.

Coming out of ceremony with that feeling of clarity and certainty can create something that looks like wisdom but is actually something else. I’ve watched people come home wanting to blow their entire life up. Get divorced that week. Cut off family members. Burn it all up. And I’ve watched myself do it — the conversation that came too soon, the decision delivered without tenderness, the relationship ended from a place of I can see clearly now, I know what needs to happen.

I have done this. I’ve had conversations before people were ready to receive them. I’ve delivered clarity without tenderness. I’ve mistaken certainty for wisdom. I’ve wanted people to see what I could see. I’ve wanted to save people.

I had a client once who came out of a journey completely certain her marriage was over. Not unsure, not weighing it — certain. She wanted to call her husband that night. I asked her to wait. I’ve seen this enough times to know the difference between clarity and the adrenaline of clarity, and they can feel identical in the moment.

She waited. Two weeks later, she still saw the same things she’d seen in the ceremony. But what she wanted to do with them was completely different. The marriage didn’t end. The conversation that needed to happen, happened — just not the one she would have had that night.

It can spill into something harder to name, too. A profound experience can make ordinary conversations feel unbearable. Expansion can quietly become distance. Waking up can become a reason to leave rather than a reason to stay and love better.

Over the years, I started noticing something else. The people who seemed to be changing most deeply became softer. More patient. More willing to stay in conversations they would have left before. More interested in understanding than convincing. More comfortable holding complexity without needing immediate answers.

If the medicine made you more tender, that’s worth paying attention to. If it made you certain you have something everyone else urgently needs, that’s worth sitting with honestly.

Have you noticed which one it’s been for you?

Wisdom doesn’t need to convince. It just lives.

⸻

For years, I thought I was in the medicine business. I wasn’t. I was in the transformation business — I just didn’t know it yet. The medicine is one tool. The retreat is one tool. The Clarity Code is one tool. Coaching, preparation, integration — all tools. They serve the same purpose: helping someone become what they already know.

A spiritual insight can happen in a single evening. But the body still holds its old habits the next morning. The nervous system still reacts the same way. The mind still tells the same stories. Relationships still require new conversations, practiced over time, not announced in a single moment of clarity. The spirit moves fast. Everything else moves slowly. If we don’t understand that — if we keep going back to ceremony hoping the medicine will do what only living can do — we stay stuck in a particular kind of pain. Seeing clearly. Living the same life anyway.

The work expanded beyond the ceremony. Preparation became part of the medicine. Integration became part of the medicine. The daily practice of becoming the person the medicine showed you that you already were — that became part of the medicine too. The hard conversation, the trigger, the ordinary moments with no one watching. All of it.

You are the medicine. The plants can support the process. Ceremony can support it. A facilitator, a breakthrough — all of it can support the process. At some point, though, you’re the one who has to live it. Practice it. Become it.

It happens in the way you show up when the feeling is gone and ordinary life is waiting and nobody is holding space and you choose, quietly, to live what you learned.

That’s the work. That’s always been the work.

⸻

The woman from the retreat is home now.

During one of the meditations I guided at the end of the retreat, she connected to her higher self, something deeper than her mind. I asked her a simple question. “What do you need to know?” The answer came back just as simple. “You need to believe in yourself.”

It was a real moment and I watched it happen. And here’s the thing I’ve learned after twelve years of watching moments like that.

It’s just another aha moment.

That’s what every ceremony, every retreat, every breathwork session, every meditation actually gives you — an aha. A flash of clarity, a download, a moment where something true lands so clearly you feel it in your core. It’s a knowing you accessed that was already there, you just didn’t see it before. And it’s real. It matters. But on its own, it’s just one more piece of insight added to all the insight a person has already collected over a lifetime of ceremonies, retreats, podcast, meditations and breakthroughs.

What makes the difference is what you do with it.

This week, she took the meeting. The opportunity to build something bigger, to put herself out there, to bet on the version of herself she’d been circling around without quite stepping into. The group text from the retreat is still going — the women checking in, sharing how it’s landing in their daily lives, and asking how it’s going, what’s coming up in real time. We’re still meeting. We’ll keep coming back to what’s in each person’s unique Clarity Code, the patterns they’re working with, the things they’re practicing.

That’s the part that took me twelve years to build. Not the aha. The aha was never the hard part — I’ve watched hundreds of people have one. The hard part is knowing your own patterns well enough, your own blind spots and triggers, the way you show up when things get vulnerable, that you can actually take what the aha showed you and live inside it. That’s what the Clarity Code is for. That’s what preparation and integration and community are for. Not to create more aha moments. We’ve had plenty of those. It’s to make sure the ones you’ve already had don’t just become another beautiful thing that happened once.

Life becomes the ceremony.

Stay close.

I had four kids, two, five, seven, and nine, and by the time everyone else was fed and the plates were cleared and the cups were refilled and the arguments about who had more apple juice were settled, there was usually a nugget or two left on someone’s plate and I would just eat that. Standing up. While the kids were still at the table.

I never sat down and made myself something I actually wanted. Something warm. Something that sounded good to me. I just ate what was left. What was available. What didn’t require me to ask for more time or more space. I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone.

And at the time, I didn’t think anything of it. That’s just what you do when you have little kids. You eat fast and you eat whatever and you keep moving.

Have you ever done that? Not necessarily with food. But found yourself taking whatever was available because stopping to ask for what you actually wanted felt like too much?

It wasn’t until much later that I started wondering whether I was doing the same thing in other parts of my life. Not eating leftovers exactly. Something quieter. Something that looked a lot like hunger I stopped noticing because I got so good at managing it.

⸻

The pattern doesn’t stay in the kitchen.

It shows up in how we let people love us. In what we decide is enough. In how long we wait to take a seat at the table while we keep filling other people’s plates first.

I’ve been watching it show up in my life lately, not just in one place, but in several at the same time. And when the same thing shows up in that many places at once, I’ve learned that’s worth paying attention to.

In dating, I noticed I was accepting inconsistency and telling myself it was fine. I have a full life. I don’t need someone texting me every single day. I’m busy too. But a check-in? A simple “long day, going to bed, let’s talk tomorrow”? Something on the calendar to look forward to? That’s not asking for a lot. That’s the minimum that lets your nervous system know someone is actually there. And I was telling myself I didn’t need even that.

There are stretches in a relationship I’m in where it gets quiet. A few days go by without much contact, and I find myself filling the silence with reasons that make sense. He’s busy. So am I. This is fine. I don’t need constant communication. And then he texts. And I feel this rush of excitement, genuinely excited, and then almost immediately I start wondering about the excitement itself. Am I excited because I like him? Or am I excited because I’ve been quietly hungry and the message arrived at the right moment?

Have you ever noticed that? The way relief can feel like connection if you’ve been waiting long enough?

That question, the uncertainty underneath the warmth, is the part I’ve been sitting with. Because there’s a physical difference between consistency and breadcrumbs. Between someone who is genuinely there and someone who shows up just enough. The body usually knows even when the mind is busy making explanations for why it’s fine.

There’s something else I’ve been getting more honest about underneath all of this. I have a beautiful, full life. Good work. People I love. Things that matter to me. And inside of that life, there is still loneliness. Not dramatic loneliness. Not the kind that means something is wrong. Just the particular kind that comes from missing physical connection. Missing intimacy. Missing being reached for without having to ask first. Missing knowing someone is in your corner in a steady, consistent way. That’s a real thing, and I’ve spent a long time being very capable around it, which is another way of saying I’ve gotten good at managing a hunger I haven’t named out loud.

⸻

I remembered something while I was thinking about all of this.

In high school, I used to tell myself I wasn’t going to eat cookies. I decided it was a healthy thing to do. I would do fine for a while, in fact it almost felt easy, until I wasn’t, and then I would eat three. Not because I wanted three cookies. It was because deprivation became an obsession. The more I told myself I didn’t need it, the louder the wanting got. And eventually the thing I was denying myself carried so much charge that when it was finally available, I couldn’t stop at one.

That’s not a story about cookies or willpower. That’s a story about what happens when you spend long enough telling yourself you don’t need something you actually do. The wanting doesn’t go away. It just goes underground. And it resurfaces in ways that feel like being out of control, like a starving animal who hasn’t eaten in a week. And this is how you know the hunger has been there longer than you realized.

Can you relate to that? The way you can get so good at not needing things that you lose the thread of what you actually want?

Maybe the problem isn’t the breadcrumbs. Maybe I’ve been hungry for so long that breadcrumbs started feeling meaningful.

⸻

What’s interesting is that I noticed this pattern returning and felt genuinely surprised by it. I thought I worked through this. And in many ways, I have. I no longer eat cold chicken nuggets at the kitchen counter. I sit down now. I ask myself what sounds delicious, something warm or fresh, and find pleasure in eating. I’ve learned, over years of real work, how to nourish myself in ways I couldn’t when my kids were small and my own needs were last on the list.

So when I felt it again, this particular kind of hunger, I got curious rather than frustrated. Because this isn’t the same lesson returning. It’s the next layer.

And I know what this layer is. I’ve done enough of this work to recognize it. This is my nervous system. This is my emotional body. These are old patterns that live in the body, not just the mind, and they don’t release simply because you understand them intellectually. They resurface because they need to be witnessed. They need to be felt all the way through, not managed or rushed past or resolved on a timeline that feels more comfortable. The part of me that learned to take what was available, to not ask for too much, to make herself easy. That part is still in there. She keeps coming up. And instead of trying to fix her or fast-forward her, I’m choosing to sit with her. To let her be seen. That’s what this process actually is.

The chicken nuggets were about settling. About taking what was left because asking for more felt high maintenance. But what I’m navigating now isn’t poor quality. When he’s present, the connection is real. The experiences are meaningful. Rich, even. The issue isn’t what’s on the table. The issue is how long the table stays empty between meals.

I’m not eating cold nuggets anymore. What I’m doing is closer to waiting for something extraordinary and tolerating long stretches of hunger in between because when it arrives, it feels worth it.

And I’ve been sitting with a question I don’t have an answer to yet. Have I become so accustomed to intensity that consistency feels less interesting by comparison? Or have I been accepting the inconsistency because the moments of connection were so good they made the silence feel worth enduring?

I genuinely don’t know. But I’m asking the question now in a way I wasn’t before.

⸻

In a friendship I care about, I noticed the same thing. When she’s in a hard season, she’s incredibly present, calling, checking in, making plans, showing up. And when life is good for her, it gets quiet. Really quiet. I kept making that okay, telling myself that’s just how some friendships work. And then I said something. I told her what I noticed, and she said she was sorry and that she wanted to show up differently.

And I want to believe her. I do. But I’ve also been paying more attention to the difference between what people say and what people do. The words are often genuinely meant. People rarely say they want to be better and not mean it in that moment. And then old patterns come back, and the behavior stays the same even when the intention was real.

Have you ever been in that place? Where you want to believe someone, and you’re also just watching to see what they actually do?

So I’m not watching words right now. I’m watching what happens next. Show me, don’t tell me is my current mantra.

⸻

The business piece is quieter but it’s there. Earlier this year I guided seven medicine clients in ten weeks. That’s a significant amount of holding. Right now I have only a handful of clients booked for the foreseeable future. I’ve spent years operating from enough, enough clients, enough income, enough support, and I’ve been sitting with a question I don’t have a full answer to yet. Whether gratitude and settling have started to blur together somewhere along the way. Whether I’ve been calling something nourishing simply because it was available and I was grateful for it.

That’s not a conclusion. It’s just something I’m noticing and not looking away from. I am leaning into this growth edge, knowing the clarity will come.

⸻

Have I confused enough with nourishment? Have I been hungry for so long that leftovers started feeling like a meal?

There’s a particular low-grade tension that lives in the background when you’re waiting for someone to show up the way they said they would. A subtle bracing, checking of the phone. And when the message finally comes through, a warmth that’s slightly larger than what was actually offered.

That warmth is information.

If it were actually enough, there would be nothing notable about the moment. It would just feel normal. Like a normal Tuesday.

⸻

Consistency is a value of mine. It’s something I know about myself. I need to be able to count on people. I need to know someone is there even when I can’t see them. I function better, love better, work better when the foundation underneath me is steady.

And if I light up when someone finally reaches out after days of silence, if I let that warmth override what I know I actually need, then I’m not holding my own standard. I’m just standing at the kitchen counter eating cold chicken nuggets and calling it dinner.

I’m starting to get honest about the fact that I can’t build toward what I actually want while I’m still making room for something else.

⸻

I’ve been wanting to replace the couch in my medicine room for a while now.

The cushions slide. It’s not as comfortable as I want it to be for the work I do in that space. And the reason I haven’t done it yet is simple. The old couch is still there. Someone has to come and physically remove it. The space has to be cleared before anything new can come in.

You cannot bring in what you actually want while something else is still occupying the space.

The patterns of accepting just enough are taking up space. The version of me that says I’m easy before she checks whether she actually means it. The version of me that adapts before she asks herself what she wants. The version of me that feels grateful for what arrives before she notices whether it actually nourishes her. Those things are taking up space too. And familiar patterns have a way of filling a room and making it feel occupied even when it isn’t. Not really.

⸻

You already know what this feels like.

You’ve felt the particular exhaustion of being someone’s priority only when it’s convenient for them. You’ve felt the low hum of waiting. Not panicked waiting, just the quiet background awareness that you’re not quite sure where you stand. You’ve talked yourself out of needing more because asking for more felt like too much. You’ve eaten the cold nuggets and told yourself you weren’t that hungry anyway.

And somewhere underneath all of that, your body has known.

It knows the difference between a meal and leftovers. Between someone who is genuinely present and someone who shows up just enough. Between nourishment and survival.

I’m still sitting with parts of this, still noticing where I’ve been calling something enough when what I actually needed was more than that. And I’m asking the question now in a way I wasn’t before. That feels like something.

Where have you been surviving on leftovers and calling it nourishment?

Where have you been so grateful for what arrived that you stopped noticing you were still hungry?

⸻

The couch has to go.

And here’s what I know about how that actually works. You don’t just remove the old one and leave the room empty and wonder what comes next. You get still. You stand in the space and you feel into it. You let yourself imagine what belongs there, what would make the room feel right, what would support the work, what you’d love to walk in and see every day. The vision comes from the clearing. You can’t feel into what’s next while the old thing is still taking up the space.

The first step isn’t finding the new thing. The first step is making room for it. And I know how to do that. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again here.

Stay close.

Not even the graduation itself. It was everything underneath it.

We were getting ready to go take her pictures, and I found myself thinking about all the little moments that quietly became part of our life together. The afternoons she sits on the bathroom counter while I get ready. The music playing in the background. The conversations that start with one thing and somehow end up somewhere completely different.

Those moments don’t seem particularly significant while they’re happening. They’re so woven into everyday life that it’s easy to assume they’ll keep unfolding exactly as they always have.

Then one day you realize they’ve become part of the rhythm of your life, and that rhythm is starting to change.

That’s what got me. Not the graduation itself, but the realization that an entire season of motherhood was shifting right in front of me — not her, not us, not the relationship, but this. The bathroom counter. The particular rhythm of an ordinary afternoon together.

I cried that afternoon. I let myself feel it, and afterward I walked away believing I had moved through it.

Have you ever done that? Felt something deeply, cried about it, understood why it hurt, and assumed it was complete?

⸻

A few days later I was on a call doing a nervous system exercise. The practice was simple. Start with the words “I allow…” and notice what comes up.

I stood in my office and began saying whatever surfaced.

I allow strength.

I could feel my feet pressing into the floor beneath me. My legs felt strong and grounded, my whole body solid and present in a way I hadn’t noticed until that moment.

Then I laughed because I could still smell myself from hot yoga earlier that morning.

I allow stink.

A few moments later I heard the front door close. One of my kids leaving. I don’t even remember which one. Just the sound of the door and the awareness that one more ordinary moment of motherhood was happening around me while I stood there in my office doing this exercise.

I allow mom.

⸻

The second those words came out of my mouth, something moved through my body so fast it caught me completely off guard. It started in my belly and moved into my chest before landing in my throat like a lump I couldn’t swallow. I wasn’t thinking about graduation. I wasn’t looking at pictures. I wasn’t trying to access an emotion. I was simply standing there noticing what was happening in my body.

And suddenly I was crying. The kind of tears that arrive before your mind has a chance to explain them.

I stood there for a moment feeling genuinely surprised by how quickly it happened. Part of me thought I was done with it. I already cried a few days earlier. I already felt the sadness. I thought I moved through it.

And yet there I was again.

So instead of trying to stop it or understand it, I stayed with it.

I allow the lump in my throat.

I allow tears.

I allow sadness.

Standing there in my office, I realized my body was still having its own experience with something my mind already made sense of. And that surprised me more than the tears did.

⸻

A lot of self-aware people become incredibly skilled at understanding themselves. We can identify the pattern, explain where it came from, connect the dots, and tell the story. And sometimes we mistake that understanding for completion. But understanding something and embodying it are not the same thing. The mind can make sense of an experience long before the body finishes moving through it, and standing there in my office, I could feel that happening in real time.

A few days earlier I cried while looking at graduation pictures. I let myself feel the sadness. I talked about it and wrote about it. Part of me assumed that meant I was done. Then I heard a door close, said the words “I allow mom,” and found myself right back inside a feeling I thought I already felt.

Not because I missed something or did something wrong. My body just wasn’t finished.

And that felt important. Because a lot of us assume that once we’ve understood something, we should be done with it. Once we’ve had the insight, we should be over it. Once we’ve cried and processed it and made sense of it, the feeling should disappear. That hasn’t been my experience. Sometimes understanding arrives first and the body catches up later.

⸻

And then today, while I was getting ready to publish this article, I kept reading it over and over again. The stories were there. The point was there. And yet every time I got to the end, I found myself lingering. Something felt unfinished.

I could feel the part of me that wanted to force it, publish it, check the box, and move on with the rest of the day. Do what I said I would do. Be my word.

And I could feel something quieter underneath that. So I asked myself the same question I ask my clients all the time.

“What do you need, sweetheart?”

The answer came immediately. Yoga. There was a 4:30 class starting, so I closed my computer, grabbed my mat, and left.

⸻

At the beginning of class, the instructor invited us to set an intention. The first thing that came up was strength. As soon as I chose it, I could feel it in my body. My legs felt strong. My spine felt aligned. I felt rooted into the floor beneath me, and there was a steadiness to it that felt familiar.

Then I realized I didn’t actually want strength.

Strength is usually easy for me to find. I’ve spent a lot of my life being strong — strong enough to build a business, strong enough to raise four kids, strong enough to navigate seasons I never would have chosen, strong enough to support people through some of the most meaningful moments of their lives. Strength wasn’t the stretch. What I wanted was ease.

So I changed my intention, and for a few moments that felt right too. Then I remembered the practice that had been following me all week.

I allow.

And that’s where something shifted. Instead of deciding what I wanted to feel, I stopped deciding altogether. I started paying attention.

⸻

Throughout class I noticed how quickly the experience kept changing. One moment I felt completely steady. A few poses later I was wobbling all over the place. Sometimes I felt strong and sometimes I felt discomfort and sometimes I felt myself resisting a pose I didn’t want to stay in. What surprised me was how much of my attention was still looking for grief. After everything that surfaced earlier in the week, I walked into class assuming there was another layer waiting for me — more tears, more sadness, more of the same feeling asking for my attention because that had been the story of the week so far.

And it never came. I kept waiting for it, too. Every few poses I’d notice myself looking for it again, expecting another wave of sadness to move through me. Instead I kept finding other things — strength and ease, steadiness and wobbling, resistance and surrender and support and discomfort — the experience kept shifting, one thing giving way to the next.

⸻

Somewhere in the middle of class, I realized the grief wasn’t gone. It just wasn’t asking for my attention anymore.

Earlier in the week, grief was what was true. It was what moved through my body when I looked at senior pictures and when I heard the front door close and said the words “I allow mom.” On my mat that afternoon, something else was true. The grief hadn’t disappeared. It just wasn’t the only thing there anymore.

⸻

Driving home, I found myself thinking about how much energy we spend trying to decide what we should be feeling. We want the feeling to be finished because we’ve understood it. We want the grief to be over because we’ve cried about it. We want the lesson to be complete because we’ve already learned it.

The body seems to move on its own timeline. It feels what it feels, asks for what it needs, and when we stop trying to rush it or explain it or manage it, it usually shows us exactly where we are.

That’s what the practice of allowing gave me this week. Not a breakthrough or a profound realization. Just a reminder that the body moves on its own timeline, and the feeling isn’t finished because the mind says it is. When it is finished, the body usually lets you know that too.

⸻

You already know what it feels like to think you’re done with something and then feel it come up again. You’ve cried about something, talked about it, understood it and then heard a song or caught a smell or watched your child walk out the door and felt the whole thing rise back up. You’ve had the insight and made sense of it and still felt your body respond the same way it has before.

That’s not because you did something wrong or because the work didn’t work. It’s because the mind and the body do not finish at the same time. The mind moves fast — it finds the pattern, names it, and tries to move on to the next thing. The body takes more time. It moves more slowly. It needs space and time.

⸻

Driving home from yoga, I realized the goal was never to get to a place where the feeling couldn’t find me anymore.

The goal was to stop being surprised when it did.

Because life keeps moving. Seasons change. Kids grow up. Doors close. The bathroom counter is still there but the conversations are different, and one day they’ll be different again, and there will be a version of me standing somewhere unexpected saying two words and feeling something move through my body before I have a chance to explain it.

And when that happens, I’ll know what to do.

I won’t try to understand it before I feel it. I won’t decide it’s finished before my body says so. I won’t rush it or manage it or talk myself out of it because I already cried about it once.

I’ll just stay with it.

I allow.

Stay close.

When we wake up in the morning, it’s usually quiet for a few minutes. We haven’t had a lot of input yet. We haven’t checked our phones or started responding to texts or mentally carrying everyone else’s needs for the day.

And because of that, we usually feel more clear and more grounded and more connected to ourselves.

Then the day starts.

A text message comes in from a friend asking if you want to get together this weekend, and suddenly part of your brain is trying to figure out calendars and plans and whether you can make it work.

Then I’ll remember I have a client later that afternoon, so now I’m mentally reviewing notes and thinking about what space they’re in emotionally and making sure I’m prepared to hold space for them well.

Then maybe during that call they share something really heavy, and even after we hang up, I can still feel the weight of what they shared sitting in my body while I’m trying to move into the next thing.

The afternoon rolls around and my kids come through the front door talking all at once about practice and friends and snacks and rides and who needs what from me tonight, and now I’m mentally making a grocery list while also realizing the house needs to be picked up before teenagers show up later.

And all day long this happens.

It’s not like something terrible is happening. It’s just because life is happening.

Laundry and grocery shopping and appointments and responding to texts and trying to remember who needs to be where and at what time and mentally keeping track of all the little things that need our attention throughout the day.

I don’t know if you do this too, but sometimes I’ll notice I’m unloading the dishwasher while replaying a conversation from three hours earlier, and then one of my kids asks me a question and halfway through their sentence I realize I didn’t hear a single thing they said because mentally I’m already trying to solve tomorrow.

Or I’ll sit down to answer one text and twenty minutes later I’m scrolling Instagram and my nervous system has shifted and I feel different than it did before I picked up my phone.

And the interesting thing is, most of the time I don’t even realize it’s happening.

I think our nervous systems get so used to being scattered that it starts feeling normal.

Comfortable even.

If we slow down long enough or pause to check in with ourselves, we can usually feel it.

You might feel frustrated or agitated or impatient or like you are off. There might even be a little bit of overwhelm, even though nothing particularly big or stressful has happened.

You just don’t fully feel like yourself anymore.

Does this sound familiar? Can you relate?

That feeling where your attention has been pulled in so many different directions all day long that you can’t fully land anywhere?

What usually happens next

Most people try to think their way out of this feeling.

We tell ourselves we need to calm down or stop overthinking or be more present, while our nervous system is quietly asking us to slow down and come back.

The more I do this work, the more I realize how disconnected most people are from their own bodies throughout the day.

We override ourselves constantly.

We ignore the tension in our shoulders and the tightness in our chest or the clinching in our jaw. We ignore how short we’re becoming with people we love. We ignore the fact that we’ve picked up our phone fifteen times in the last hour without even realizing it.

We just keep moving from one thing to the next because we think we have to.

And after a while, our body starts responding as though we’re unsafe, not necessarily because something terrible happened, but because we’ve been mentally and emotionally pulled in a hundred different directions all day long.

You spill milk on the counter and suddenly you want to cry even though it has nothing to do with the milk. Maybe this is where the term, crying over spilled milk comes from.

Someone asks you a simple question and your response comes out sharper than you intended because your nervous system has been holding tension all day.

You finally sit down at night and realize your jaw has been clenched for the last six hours.

Have you ever had that happen?

Where nothing is technically wrong, and yet your nervous system feels like it can’t fully settle?

What I noticed on a client call

Today before we even started talking on a call, I guided one of my medicine clients through something I use constantly in my own life.

I asked him to close his eyes and call all parts of himself back.

The part of him still replaying the conversation from earlier that morning.
The part of him already anticipating next week.
The part of him still carrying old stories about himself.
The part of him that learned a long time ago to leave his body when things didn’t feel safe.

And within seconds, I watched his whole body soften.

His breathing slowed down. His shoulders dropped. He stopped trying to mentally manage everything all at once and he was suddenly back in the room again.

Not because his problems disappeared but because he came back into himself again.

That’s what so much of this work actually is. Not fixing ourselves or becoming someone new. Instead, learning how to come back to ourselves again after spending the whole day mentally and emotionally everywhere else.

What this work actually is

The more I do this work, the more I realize healing is often a lot less dramatic than people expect it to be.

Sometimes it looks like sitting in my car for two minutes before I walk into the house and taking a few deep breaths so I can actually be present with my kids instead of still mentally carrying the entire day with me.

Sometimes it looks like noticing my short temper and that my nervous system feels crowded and overstimulated before it turns into overwhelm.

Sometimes it looks like stepping into the bathroom for a minute alone and remembering, oh yeah, here I am.

I think people struggle with simple practices because they don’t trust that something this small could actually make a difference.

But the truth is, our nervous systems respond to really simple things.

Taking a deep breath and slowing down long enough to notice ourselves again. Sitting quietly for a minute instead of immediately reaching for our phone. Letting our body settle before jumping into the next thing.

Sometimes the shift is a lot smaller and quieter than people expect it to be.

The practice I use

I especially love doing this practice in the afternoon because if you think about it, when we wake up in the morning, maybe we’re at 100%.

We feel whole and clear and more present with ourselves.

And then the day slowly starts pulling pieces of our attention away from us.

Conversations and responsibilities and stressful texts and grocery lists and all the little things throughout the day slowly pull our attention away from ourselves without us even realizing it.

And by afternoon, maybe I’m at 20 or 30% of myself actually here.

That’s usually when I notice I need to come back home to myself again.

For me, I usually do this in my car after I pull into the garage and before I walk into the house because I want to actually be present for my kids when I walk through that door.

I don’t want to still be mentally carrying the entire day with me. I want to be present and at capacity to hear what they have to say. After all, they are the most important people in my life.

And honestly, the car and the bathroom are probably the two places I feel like I can actually be alone without someone interrupting me.

There was a season of motherhood where I would sit in the bathroom and still see little fingers underneath the door while someone yelled “Mommm…” through the crack because there really wasn’t alone time with little kids.

Now with teenagers, there actually is.

So sometimes I’ll sit in the front seat of my car for a minute before going inside, take in a big inhale and say out loud, “I call all parts of myself back to me.”

And then I feel a whoosh. I can physically feel myself coming back. It is kind of an interesting thing to describe because I think it’s probably different for everyone.

For me, it feels like my attention has been pulled in ten different directions all day long and then suddenly everything settles back into one place again.

My breathing slows down a little. My mind gets quieter. I feel more focused and more grounded, like I can actually hear myself again underneath all the noise.

The meditation

I shared a quick meditation at the beginning of this article. This meditation is called Coming Back Home to Yourself.

For me, this is a daily practice, not something I only use when life feels overwhelming or hard because this happens every single day.

Not just during big stressful moments or trauma or crisis.

It happens in the everyday maintenance of life.

The emotional labor and the constant thinking and the planning and the doing.

That’s why I recommend practicing this at least once a day, ideally twice if you can. Afternoon and evening feel especially supportive for me.

And of course we’re human, so we’re going to forget sometimes.

That’s okay too.

The practice is just returning. Coming back home to yourself as often as you remember.

Because I know it isn’t a matter of IF I forget but WHEN I forget, I like to set reminders: an alarm on my phone, pulling into your garage, stepping into the bathroom for a minute alone.

I actually have an alarm set at 2:22pm that says, “Call all parts of yourself back.”

Not because I’m doing something wrong if I forget.

Just because most of us don’t realize we’ve left ourselves until we intentionally stop long enough to notice it.

This is a quick practice that only takes seconds to do.

You already know

You already know what it feels like to be scattered.

You’ve felt it when your body is technically in one place but mentally you’re somewhere else entirely.

You’ve felt it when you’re trying to watch a movie but you keep reaching for your phone every few minutes because your nervous system can’t fully settle.

You’ve felt it when someone you love is talking to you and halfway through you realize you weren’t fully listening because part of your brain is already planning tomorrow.

And you also already know what it feels like to come back.

You step outside and feel the fresh air. You take a deep breath and suddenly your nervous system softens a little. You hear a song or look at the sunset or hold your child and for a moment you are fully here again.

That feeling is not accidental.

This practice just helps you return to it intentionally.

Why this matters for integration

After ceremony, people are open.

Their nervous systems are softer. Their hearts are more available. The noise quiets enough for them to actually hear themselves again.

And then they come back to everyday life.

Phones and schedules and responsibilities and relationships and other people’s emotions and expectations.

And without realizing it, they start scattering again.

Then they think the insight disappeared.

But most of the time, the insight is still there.

They just haven’t returned to themselves long enough to hear it.

The work is not staying perfectly present all the time.

The work is noticing when you’ve wandered and knowing how to come back home to yourself again.

That is the practice.

Check out the meditation above. I recorded it to give you a guide for how to come back home to yourself. After you do it a couple times, you won’t need me anymore. You will know exactly how this works best for you.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the body knows things before the mind is ready to admit them.

You can usually feel it first. That tightness in your stomach before you say yes to something you don’t actually want to do. The heaviness in your chest when you keep telling yourself you’re fine but you’re not. The exhaustion that shows up in your body long before you finally let yourself say, I can’t keep doing this like this.

And then almost immediately, the mind jumps in and starts trying to talk you out of what your body already knows.

You’re overreacting. You should be grateful. It’s not that bad. Don’t disappoint people.

A lot of us learned to override ourselves so early that it started to feel normal.

A question worth asking

Someone messaged me after I posted about the Creative Woman Retreat and asked if womb work would still be beneficial for her because she no longer physically has a womb.

I loved the question because a lot of people hear womb work and immediately assume we are only talking about the physical body.

We’re not.

To me, this work has always felt much bigger than that. It’s emotional. Energetic. Somatic. It’s about the place inside of us that creates. Not just babies, but relationships, homes, businesses, conversations, art, connection, identity, all of it.

A lot of women are creating from pressure and survival without even realizing it.

What the body carries

Years ago my mom had a sixteen-pound tumor removed from her body.

Sixteen pounds.

I remember trying to wrap my head around how a body could carry something that heavy for that long before it finally demanded attention. Women do this emotionally all the time.

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