what started as reading “the 7 habits of highly effective people” in college ultimately led to an obsession with psychology, spirituality, self-help, personal growth of all shapes and forms. i wanted to be the best version of myself. mostly because some part of me secretly hoped and believed that finally reaching that elusive pinnacle would mean i’d be free of the shame-fueled anxiety that powered my entire existence.

so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that for most of that decade, my “healing” didn’t actually bring that much relief. how could it, when it was driven by insecurity and a profound fear of unworthiness?

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share this publication far and wide!

And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

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i’d write a dozen affirmations about self-love every morning, then shame myself for not having the love of a partner.

i’d preach about caring for your body, then hustle to fit in my second or third workout of the day that i had no energy for, all in the name of self-discipline.

i’d say a prayer about trusting the timing of my life, then anxiously lament the feeling of being so utterly behind in my career.

it seemed like my entire life revolved around healing and self-care practices, yet i didn’t actually feel all that well cared for. which of course only perpetuated the feelings of shame and brokenness. it’s a pattern i see in almost every woman that comes to work with me these days.

so what finally shifted things for me? identity.

it wasn’t until i began to explore identity work and parts work that things finally lightened up for me.

i realized that i’d organized my entire identity around healing, which only reinforced the belief that there would always be something to “fix”. i never felt like i was making real progress because i’d always find another problem to solve within the healing-to-prove-myself identity.

our identity is largely shaped in our early years by our family of origin, our culture, the media, our peers, and the society we seek to belong to. we adopt stories like:

“my worth is tied to my productivity, “i’m just bad at relationships”, “i’m too sensitive”, “it’s my job to be responsible for everyone else”, “money is hard to come by”, “i’m just an anxious person”, “i’m too much”, “i’m not enough”.

we move into adulthood largely unaware that most of it was inherited rather than chosen. and to choose a new identity would involve some massively uncomfortable ego deaths that our brain would prefer to avoid at all costs (i’ve plunged into a few dozen of them so far and they never get more palatable, sorry), so most don’t question deep identity-level beliefs in the first place.

most of us will only do the squirmy work of deep transformation when the pain of staying the same suddenly outweighs the pain of change. i hit that point. after playing by the inherited rules along enough to know they really weren’t working for me, i started to ask some new questions.

it turns out, healing is really just a deep spring clean, the process of opening every dusty closet in your inner world and asking:

until everything is sifted and sorted and you’ve cleared out the piles and determined what stays and taken responsibility for what’s yours.

and then you light a candle, open the windows, let some fresh air in, and bask in the space you’ve created.

when i could clearly see what was mine, what was my mom and dad’s, what was the patriarchy’s, i no longer had to carry what didn’t belong to me. and even more beautiful was that i could learn to embrace the parts that actually were mine:

i could name my own grief and wrap it tight in my softest blanket and ask what that part of me needs me to know.

i could witness the intensity of my rage and give her somewhere to scream and kick and throw the punches she was never allowed to before.

i could breathe life into the part of me holding gigantic dreams, and encourage her in all the ways she always craved.

i could validate the fears of the little one who just wants everyone to be okay, and i could let her know she’s not alone in the enormity of her feelings.

it’s a process of unlearning the belief that you’re unlovable in the first place. it’s a letting go of everything that isn’t yours so that you have more space and life force energy and love to devote to the parts that are yours. it’s the brave work of remembering who you really are and choosing who you want to be, without carrying out the limitations of others.

and it may take you ten years, or five, or fifty, to become someone you finally recognize. to be able to look in the mirror or down at your body or at your journal full of thoughts and say, “yep, there she is. hi old friend, i’ve been waiting for you.”

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into embodiment work, my Feminine Range method for aliveness — keep reading and come find me.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What is one identity you’re ready to let go of? What’s one part you’re ready to embrace?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

In fact, constantly monitoring your body, scanning for symptoms, and trying to optimize everything about yourself actually leads to WORSE health outcomes. This kind of body vigilance keeps your nervous system in a constant state of stress that actually amplifies pain, increases anxiety, and leads to worse health over time. Not to mention the mental exhaustion and decreased quality of life.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share this publication far and wide!

And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

I know, because I’m sharing this from the humble perspective of someone who has tried it all. I turned every minor and major symptom, every emotion, every perceived fault into a quest for wellness perfection.

All in the name of health?

There comes a time in every wellness-obsessed person’s life where we have to ask if we’ve gone too far. Even Byran Johnson, infamous biohacker and longevity freak, recently posted a query into the void about taking his quest for immortality too far.

Like yeah dude, there’s a certain point where trying to extend your future life actually robs you of the one you have available to you here and now.

Because if your day revolves around 27-step routines that you need in order to function, are you really functioning all that well?

If you have to check your wearable to see if you got enough sleep or moved enough today, rather than listening to your body, do you really know your body all that well?

If you have to excuse yourself to do box breathing every time a work email stresses you out, are you just managing stress or actually learning to expand your tolerance of it?

If you can’t go out to eat with friends without checking the menu to see if it fits your macros, are you controlling your diet or is your diet controlling you?

My point being, our wellness tools and healing practices shouldn’t be the things preventing us from actually living.

Somewhere along the way, the wellness industry took the term “nervous system regulation” and used it as another marketing strategy to tell you everything you’re doing wrong, and all the ways your body is failing you. And here’s the secret to whipping it back into shape (insert advertisement for a “calm” supplement, a red light mask, a fancy subscription that will tame the wild beast of your body).

The common denominator in wellness-industrial-complex marketing is that your body is a problem to solve. And unruly terror to regulate, lest you live in perpetual shame of it. They tell you that the goal is to get rid of all your big emotions. Stuff it down and get calm. Change yourself to be more likable. Regulate yourself out of all your big desires.

Well guess what, friend? They’re lying to you.

Surprise, surprise. The industry that profits of you feeling broken is selling you temporary solutions to a problem they made up, preying on your vulnerabilities and pain points to do so.

Because if they were honest with you, here’s what they’d really say:

• Calm was never meant to be the end goal of healing…aliveness is.

• Regulation is a fancy way of saying “we want you to think there’s something wrong with you so that you’ll pay us to fix it.”

• What you really need to learn is how to take up more space, not less. How to actually feel and express your emotions, not calm-wash them. How to embrace and accept all parts of you, even the ones society has taught you to judge. How to prioritize rest and pleasure and play as the main goals of healing, not just peace and calm and regulation.

• As long as you’re treating it like a problem to solve, your body will continue to express symptoms and feel difficult to manage. Your body was never meant to be controlled or managed in the first place…it’s meant to be felt and participated with.

That’s what you’d hear if the industry was actually interested in your healing.

Ask me how I know…

I’ve been in the wellness industry as both a consumer and a practitioner for twenty years. What started as a yoga practice led to a fascination with all things fitness and nutrition, then down the rabbit hole I went into becoming my own best science experiment.

As someone who lived for many years with chronic illness and pain, along with an extensive trauma history, I had no shortage of things to “work on.”

My entire life was a revolving door between the self-help section, the gym, therapist couches, alternative healers, and supplement shops. If there was a new fad diet, I tried it. If there was a new morning routine promising ultimate productivity, I implemented it. If there was a secret manifestation hack for how to create your dream life, I was doing it. Optimizing every nook and cranny of my life in the hopes that it would eventually be perfect, and I’d be happy, and all would be well. I became a master at intellectualizing and maximizing my growth and healing.

Don’t get me wrong, I uncovered a lot of wisdom along the way. I am quite literally certified as a Nervous System Regulation Practitioner, among a dozen other modalities that I’ve found benefit in and still teach to my clients. But what I learned to finally let go of was the pursuit of “healing” as an indicator of my worthiness; calm-maxxing as a subtle means of emotional suppression; and looking for answers outside of myself rather than within.

Because the only place that got me was burnt out and even more chronically ill.

With a side of shame for feeling like I must’ve been deeply and uniquely flawed, because I was doing everything right and nothing was really working. Thank god I had the insight to eventually question the system itself.

And when I did, I faced the same resistance that so many of my clients do: sheer terror that if I actually give up all my striving, everything will fall apart and I’ll let myself go and my whole life will come crashing down. The parts of our ego that learned to source validation through performance and hard work do not want to let go of those jobs without a fight. They’re convinced that if we stop trying, stop optimizing, we’ll surely be exiled.

But what happened instead was relief.

A giant exhale from all the parts that were beyond exhausted from spinning in circles trying to hold it all together.

When I no longer had to mentally hold space for taking 42 supplements per day, and check every step of my extensive morning and evening routines, and shame myself for not being calm all the time…it freed up a tremendous amount of life force energy, creativity, and latent joy.

There was a recalibration period where I had to figure out what to fill my time with again…

Which habits did I want to maintain because they actually make me feel great, and which ones was I doing out of obligation?

How did I actually want to move my body?

What made my mornings feel full of joy rather than full of strict regimens? (answer: happy music and dancing my way to the kitchen to make my morning tea, followed by stepping outside for some fresh air. simple, profound, inexpensive joy).

Eventually, I settled into a rhythm of intuitive eating, intuitive movement, intuitive living. I took all the healing knowledge I’d crammed into my brain and I translated it into embodied wisdom, using what I needed when it was relevant and dropping the rest.

And guess what?

My body fucking rejoiced.

My sleep improved. My skin cleared up. My hair started growing like crazy. I effortlessly lost the weight and inflammation I’d spent so many years fighting. Chronic symptoms resolved. My energy returned. My creativity made a comeback. My relationships became healthier. Joy became my default setting.

Not because I was doing everything perfectly. But because I finally learned to feel the discomfort of being imperfect without needing to jump to fix myself.

That’s real regulation.

Being able to sit with big, hairy human emotions without letting them collapse you into old patterns. Strengthening your identity to the point where the old fears and insecurities no longer have the same power over you. Teaching your nervous system that life, with all its imperfections, is safe to participate in. Expanding your capacity not just to heal, but to actually LIVE.

If I were sitting in front of my twenty-year-old self right now, on the precipice of attempting to regulate her entire existence, what I’d tell her is this:

you can spend the next ten years, and an exorbitant amount of money, treating yourself like a problem that needs solving, and exhaust yourself in the process.

Or, you can do the much harder but much more permanent work of deconstructing the beliefs that taught you you needed ”regulating” in the first place.

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into embodiment work, my Feminine Range method for aliveness — keep reading and come find me.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What do you think your symptoms are trying to tell you?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

you’d think that after 15 years of inner work I would’ve learned by now that big goals always require new versions of me, which inconveniently always means a void season.

the void season is that murky, uncomfortable place where you haven’t landed at your target yet, but you’re no longer resting in the cozy confines of your former comfort zone.

it can be spurred by the end of a relationship, or a career shift, or just waking up one day and realizing the life you’ve been living doesn’t quite fit anymore and you don’t know what fits instead. you’re kind of just ambling in the dark, hoping that everything you’re doing is working, with no guarantee that it actually is. you could be going backwards for all you know (you’re not, btw).

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share this publication far and wide!

And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

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our ego’s hate the void because it feels like death.

it feels like we’re doing everything wrong. it feels like we’re behind. it feels like we’re the only unmoored lunatic in the world who dared to believe in a vision no one else can see. it will test you, to say the least.

and at some point, I think the naive and recklessly hopeful part of me believed that once I’d mastered enough void seasons, I simply wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore. that eventually, I could snap my fingers and reality would simply bend to my will with no discomfort required. like becoming a doctor without medical school, or having a baby without enduring 9 long months of actually growing a human inside your body and unceremoniously pushing it out.

i know, i know…it sounds quite silly and maybe a little entitled that I ever would’ve believed I could get to the good things without doing the work of becoming the version of me capable of holding them. but hey, I’m human and we all have our blindspots.

the answer is to lean in

so, once I realized that I was not in fact immune to the void, I figured I’d learn how to lean in. if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?

i’m the kind of person who, if I can find purpose in pain or discomfort, I will juice it for all it’s worth. I’m willing to tolerate the friction of the unknown if I can assure myself that it’s happening for my benefit. dare I say I’ve actually learned to find some pleasure in it?

I want to tell you how I did that, because that’s part of the whole purpose thing for me. I use all of my life experiences as fodder for my work, because if I can teach someone else to save a little time or heartache then my own toils and troubles feel a little more worth it.

the instinct when you’re thrown into the deep end of uncertainty (every single time) is to fill it. to hustle out of it. to download the apps, start the new project, make the plan, do SOMETHING because the emptiness feels unbearable and our culture has absolutely no framework for sitting in it.

but here’s what I’ve come to understand: the void is not a problem to solve. it’s a passage. and how you move through it determines everything about who you become on the other side.

so these are my tried and true five ways to actually navigate it... without rushing it (crazy concept, I know).

1: slow down enough to find pleasure in the ordinary

this one sounds simple and it is genuinely one of the hardest things to do because we are so wired for stimulation and productivity and forward momentum that slowing down can actually feel like failure.

but here’s what I want you to consider:

your nervous system has probably been running on stress hormones for a while. the relationship that wasn’t working, the identity that made you self-abandon, the version of your life that stopped working... all of that was creating chronic activation. and the void season is actually your body’s invitation to come down from that.

and when you slow down enough, something interesting happens. you start noticing pleasure in places you stopped looking. the specific quality of light in the afternoon. the way a really good cup of coffee tastes when you’re not rushing through it. the feeling of a walk that has no destination. savoring your post-shower lotion ritual rather than just slapping it on and calling it good.

this matters because desire (and I mean desire broadly, not just romantic desire) is how you navigate toward your next chapter. it’s your internal compass. and desire requires PRESENCE.

you cannot feel what you want when you’re moving too fast to feel anything at all.

think of this like tuning the instrument of your body. slowing down is how you start to actually hear yourself again.

get in the practice of doing one thing per day that is purely pleasurable, not productive or optimized. and notice what you feel when you allow yourself to have it without justifying it.

2: become a student again

there is something that happens to a lot of high-achieving women in the void season specifically: their vision gets narrowed and they start white-knuckling life. quite literally, when we’re in a stress response our nervous system will fix our gaze and make our movements more rigid.

and what I’ve found (both personally and with the women I work with) is that curiosity is the antidote to this rigidity and stagnation.

becoming a student again is one of the most nourishing things you can do in a void season. not as a way to fix yourself or find the answer, but as a way to stay in relationship with ideas and growth and the feeling of your mind opening up to new possibilities beyond what you can currently see.

read the books that have nothing to do with your problem. read the books that have everything to do with your problem. listen to teachers who make you feel like the world is bigger than your current situation. take the class you’ve been meaning to take but keep saving for a better time. learn something completely unrelated to your work or your healing (a language, a recipe, a new way to move your body).

this quietly expands your sense of what’s possible for you. because the void season is actually a period of massive identity restructuring (whether it feels like it or not) and you want to be feeding yourself well during that process just like you’d feed anybody going through a growth spurt.

ou’re nourishing a self that is in the process of being rebuilt. what you take in during this period becomes part of the foundation.

3: remember your evidence

okay so this one is really important and I don’t think people talk about it enough.

when you’re in a void season, your sweet little brain (bless her) will try to convince you that this time is different. that things have worked out before but this situation is uniquely hopeless. that you don’t know how this resolves and therefore it might not.

and I want you to do something really intentional as a counterweight to that: go back through your own history and find the evidence.

think about the hardest thing you’ve been through before this. the moment where you couldn’t see the path forward. the situation that felt completely unresolvable. and then remember...it resolved. not always the way you expected. not always on the timeline you wanted. but something shifted. something opened. you got through it. you found more of yourself along the way.

that’s your evidence. that’s the data your nervous system actually needs.

now if this is genuinely your first major void season (hi friend! you’re going to be more than okay, I promise!!)...you’re gathering evidence for the first time. and that is its own kind of gift because you’re building the foundation of trust with yourself that will carry you through every hard season after this.

the practice here is literal: write it down. a list of hard things you survived, pivots you didn’t see coming that turned out to be redirections, doors that closed and eventually revealed why. keep it somewhere you can return to when the void feels permanent. because it isn’t. it never has been. and you have proof.

4: decide who you want to be and practice being her now

I love this one because it reframes the void season from a waiting room into a dressing room.

most people treat the in-between as a pause. like they’re just waiting for the next chapter to begin so they can start showing up as the person they want to be. waiting until they’re in the relationship. waiting until they have the job. waiting until they feel ready.

but the version of you that’s coming is not going to appear when the circumstances change. she’s going to appear because YOU changed. and you can start practicing being her right now, in the ordinary moments of your current life, without any of the external circumstances needing to shift first.

a couple examples: when I was changing my career path in my early twenties but wasn't totally sure about the direction, I started interviewing people whose work I found interesting and imagined myself “trying on” their lives for myself. or when I thought I wanted to move to New York but was totally terrified about the unknown, I sublet my LA apartment and spent 6 weeks trying New York on before pulling the trigger.

so the big question is…who do you want to be?

not what do you want to ‘have’. who do you want to BE. how does she carry herself? what does she say yes to? what does she no longer tolerate? what does her morning look like? how does she feel in her body? what does she wear? how does she talk to herself?

and then (drum roll please): practice it now.

practice like you’re trying things on in a dressing room. some of it feels like you, some of it doesn’t, you set aside what’s not working and you do a little twirl in what feels good. but you’re actively inhabiting the identity instead of waiting for it to be handed to you.

this is what I mean when I talk about identity-level change. it’s not a mindset shift. it’s a daily somatic practice of choosing to be her before the evidence shows up.

5: give yourself the gift of having this experience fully

this is the one I feel most strongly about and it’s the hardest sell because everything in our culture is telling you to rush it.

but I want to offer you this: you will never be this exact age, in this exact moment, in this particular in-between, again. ever. this specific version of the void, with everything it’s teaching you and everything it’s clearing out and everything it’s making room for...this is happening once.

and you can spend it white-knuckling toward the next thing. or you can actually be here for it.

I think about this with the example of being single specifically because so many of the women I work with treat singleness like a problem to be solved as quickly as possible. and I get it. our culture is loud about this. the apps are right there. the pressure (internal and external) is real.

but being single is also...freedom that you will not always have. the ability to make completely sovereign decisions about your own life. to reorganize your whole world around what YOU want without negotiating it with anyone. to develop a relationship with yourself that becomes the foundation of every relationship that comes after.

the women who rush through this season are the same women who arrive in the next relationship still not knowing what they want, still not trusting themselves, still looking outside for what they didn’t build inside. maybe they’re the ones who wake up ten or twenty years into the relationship realizing it was never quite right for them at all.

the women who stay present in it? they move through life as someone who feels whole on their own, regardless of when love shows up.

so the invitation is this: what would it look like to actually have this experience, fully, instead of trying to get through it? what would you do differently today? what would you stop treating as temporary and start treating as your actual life?

because it is. it’s your actual life. happening right now.

and only you get to decide what you do with it.

do it with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into embodiment work, my Feminine Range method for aliveness — keep reading and come find me.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

Which liminal space practice are you going to lean into?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

Sitting on the floor of my East Village apartment, at a time when I should’ve felt on top of the world running two successful businesses and a nonprofit at age 30, and instead I felt like I was dying. I couldn’t take a breath that made it past my upper chest, my stomach felt like it was actively rejecting every bite of food I ate, my skin itchy and on fire from massive eczema flare ups, and my joints felt like that of a horribly arthritic 90-year-old.

I was thirty, and definitely not flirty nor thriving at all. I was distraught.

“What the fuck is happening to me?? I’ve done everything right, and nothing is working. Why is my body failing me?”

I sobbed at the injustice of it all.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share this publication far and wide!

And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

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Nearly fifteen years as a devotee of the wellness industry at this point, and almost a decade working as a professional in the space. I knew everything there was to know about healing, diet, fitness, gut health, herbalism, name another trend and I knew that intimately too. I spent all my time and money being the perfect wellness girlie (even before that’s what we called them), and this was my repayment?? It simply didn’t make sense.

For years I’d circle chronic symptoms and find the next protocol to quell them like I was playing a never-ending game of wellness whack-a-mole. And the next time a new set of symptoms would pop up, I’d assume there must be something else wrong with my body that needed fixing.

That was my (unbeknownst to me) kink: find something wrong with me, seek an elusive external solution, work really hard to get better, and gain some twisted satisfaction when I finally conquered the problem.

And that was just the beginning. Child’s play, compared to what came later.

In all that time searching for solutions, it never once occurred to me that the system itself might be the problem. It wasn’t until I finally hit that rock bottom of chronic illness, debilitated on the floor of my New York City apartment, that I finally started to question how I got here. Years of doctor’s appointments and diagnostic tests and blood draws and treatments that barely moved the needle, and no one could give me a straight answer.

When I finally found an angel of a doctor who truly listened to me, took my symptoms seriously, and was interested in finding the root cause, I was met with a diagnosis list a mile long. Everything from chronic Lyme disease to mold toxicity to MCAS to autoimmunity to IBS. Which for a brief moment, felt like relief and validation and vindication.

Quickly followed though by the humbling reality of her treatment plan.

And bless her, she helped me heal more than any other medical professional ever had. In her care, I finally began to have hope and slowly started to feel better. But I was still left asking that same question: how did I get here???

Why do some people get sick and not others?

Some part of me knew that it couldn’t be as simple as a tick bite or a moldy apartment that led to, gestures broadly, *all of this*.

I’d had symptoms since childhood. And I had the awareness that there were plenty of people out there in the world who got bit by ticks or exposed to mold and never faced a single symptom.

So, what made me (and the millions of other women struggling with mystery chronic illness) different?

My inquiry unironically led me deeper down the path of my chosen profession as a somatic therapist (I seem to have a knack for learning the exact lessons I want to teach other people, as it usually goes for people in this line of work).

The questions I was asking about my body of course had answers that could only be found in MY body. Not in a textbook, or a lab report, or yet another google search. Answers that could, of course, only be found by placing my hands on my own skin, moving and breathing and letting the tissues speak for themselves for once (this is obvious to me now, but felt like such an impossibly simplistic solution back then).

…it’s the culture

And what I found, the further in I traveled, was a whole lot of conditioning. Repressed emotions. Unspoken boundaries. Yes’s where I meant HELL NO. Generational trauma. Patriarchy.

And at the root of most of it, the deeply internalized need to be a Good Girl. To do everything right, to be perfect, to be lovable and worthy.

It’s not funny at all, is it, that our quest to be the perfect good girl only ends in pain and self-destruction? That the better we get at playing by their rules, the more our own body suffers.

• prioritizing others’ emotional needs over their own

• rigidly identifying with duty and role rather than self-needs

• repressing healthy anger

• believing they are responsible for how others feel

When you look at that list, what do you see?

I see the exact cultural blueprint that the majority of girls and women in modern western society inherit from a very young age.

We’re taught early on to manage the emotions of others, to avoid saying no, to absorb the stress of the family, and take it all with a smile lest we be called difficult or selfish. We learn that our value comes from our ability to selflessly serve and perform for others. We essentially learn to disappear our authenticity, especially if it’s inconvenient for those around us.

And a body that can’t say no, can’t set boundaries, must always be available for others, isn’t allowed to feel or express, and isn’t safe to rest…that’s a body that is a ticking time bomb for chronic symptoms. Because the body can’t stay silent forever. It’s simply not designed to.

Our bodies literally speak in sensation, sound, breath, movement, and outward expression.

When we stifle and suppress all of that, of course it’s going to create internal imbalance. Of course the body is going to begin to speak louder and louder so that you eventually hear it.

Our work is to learn to finally listen.

When I finally began to listen to the truth of my own system, what I heard was both profound and inconvenient. I had to make a decision at the moment of my diagnosis that I wasn’t going to succumb to a lifetime of being sick in the name of perpetuating patterns and systems just to make others around me comfortable while I suffer.

My body taught me that the rules I’d been playing by my whole life weren’t actually mine at all, and they were only making me sicker.

My body told me that there were relationships I needed to let go of.

Roles I needed to stop playing.

Fears I needed to face.

Things I needed to scream at the top of my lungs.

Punches that needed to be thrown.

Loud, exuberant, unapologetic play that needed to be taken seriously.

And most importantly, rest that needed to be prioritized, even if it meant being seen as selfish.

I healed my laundry list of chronic conditions not by finding the perfect protocol and being the best at healing. I healed when I stopped viewing healing as a scorecard for my worth, and started setting the Good Girl in me free.

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into embodiment work, my Feminine Range method for aliveness — keep reading and come find me.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What do you think your symptoms are trying to tell you?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

A check mark for the things you were excelling at. A dash for the things that needed a little improvement. A dot for every area you were losing the plot entirely. Dots were the first grade equivalent of failure.

My card was full of mostly checks, a dash or two, and…one dot. Next to the dot was my diagnosis: “talks too much in class.”

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share this publication far and wide!

And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

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It was being passed around a table of adults in my backyard, when finally it landed in the hands of my notoriously strict and stern grandfather. A man I rarely saw, who conveniently happened to be visiting just in time to perceive my first-grade failure.

Everyone got eerily quiet as he looked me in the eyes and solemnly asked, “so why do you talk so much?”

“Because I have a lot to say”,

I replied as if this man didn’t scare me one bit (in fact, he didn’t…and as the only granddaughter among 10 grandsons, I think I actually might’ve scared him a bit). My parents stifle their laughter as he processes my response.

I must’ve tamed this tendency temporarily, because I didn’t get reprimanded for talking too much again until middle school, when I frequently got caught passing notes and whispering with my best friend in science class. And then too, I viscerally remember the feeling of having something so important to say that it simply couldn’t wait until the bell rang. I had to get it out.

But somewhere between the fresh hell that is middle school and the heightened self-consciousness of high school, I lost it. My voice, that is. I stopped having so much to say, because suddenly every thought was filtered through the internal threat-detector of: is this too much? Will I get made fun of? Do I even know what I’m talking about? Am I going to get in trouble for this? I should just be quiet.

I became the shy girl.

So shy that my voice would tremble anytime I had to speak up.

I recently recounted the story of the time I broke down crying on my first day of college because my public speaking professor expected us all to give an impromptu speak AND sing karaoke, and I couldn’t imagine a worse fate. I sat in my seat unsuccessfully choking back tears until he mercifully ended class early without making me take a turn.

As I was telling this story to a friend the other day, she couldn’t quite believe it.

I mean, I talk for a living now. I put videos of myself talking on the internet, I get on stages and talk to hundreds of strangers at a time, I sing and dance and act like an absolute freak as I lead groups of women on my retreats. And I do it without a trembling bone in my body.

How is that possible?

Many years of intentionally shedding the good girl conditioning that I inherited. Remembering the tenacity of my first-grade self and giving her permission to have a voice every single day. Remembering that I do in fact have a lot to say. And that anyone who has a problem with that is probably not a person whose opinion should matter in my life.

And what’s more than that, I learned that there are plenty of people out there who are interested in what I have to say.

My second year in college, something happened that I still think about 16 years later. I was asked by some friends to teach a yoga class in the basement of our study abroad campus. Although I was qualified (with 6 years of practice and a mini teacher training under my belt at that point), I was also terrified.

I said yes before I could talk myself out of it, and then spent the next several days in a low-grade panic trying to figure out what exactly I had agreed to.

I remember standing at the front of the fluorescent room right before it started, looking out at actual human beings who had shown up and were lying on mats waiting for me to say something, to teach them something. My heart thought we were running a marathon. I had my notes. I had a playlist. I had absolutely no idea if any of this was going to work. And then I opened my mouth.

I have no clue what I said. I just remember that by the end of class, something in me...settled. After I guided them through savasana, their final resting pose, a few of my friends got up and excitedly asked me to give them more guidance on how to get into specific poses. We playfully workshopped crow pose and headstand, and I got to see them try things outside of their comfort zone while I was venturing out of mine. And I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

I had something to say. And people actually wanted to hear it.

Because here’s the thing, love:

anyone you had to silence yourself in order to appease only preferred you quiet because it made you easier to control.

And well, newsflash: we’re not here to be controlled. Not by ourselves and certainly not by others. We’re here to be free.

The inevitable pushback I get at this point in the argument is that we should be conscientious of how we impact others, we should be kind, we should be self-aware. And yep, I agree. But none of those things are mutually exclusive with being outspoken.

You can be kind, self-aware and thoughtful while still speaking your mind, advocating for your needs, and having an identity of your very own. Like yes, talking over the teacher probably wasn’t the best way to express myself. But waiting to be called on in real life didn’t get me very far either.

Unhinged doesn’t mean unkind. Authentic doesn’t mean inconsiderate. And loud doesn’t mean bad.

Something I wholeheartedly believe is that we’ve lost touch with our range as women.

So much of our conditioning teaches us to play by the rules. And at the moment, the mainstream “rules” of healing and personal growth are telling us that we need to be calm. Regulated. Un-triggerable. We replaced the childhood report card with the 27-step morning routine. Bio-hack your way into ultra-optimized peace and quiet or you’re doing it wrong.

I keep saying this because I don’t think we’re really hearing it yet: the point of healing isn’t just to get calm.

It’s to reclaim the full RANGE of your ability to be an expressed, vibrant, feeling human being. And that includes self-care, yes. But it also includes wildness, primal movement, sensuality, rage, desire, and intuition. Things that don’t fit into neat little boxes. Things that we’ve been taught will get us judged, rejected, ostracized. Because we don’t want to be labeled the loud one, the crazy one, the weird one, the cringe one.

But I’m here to tell you my friend, those labels are your liberation.

The moment you can be willing to be misunderstood, willing to be outcast, willing to be name-called, is the moment you become free. I didn’t get my voice back by saying what I thought others wanted to hear (well actually, I tried it that way for a while…it didn’t work). I got my voice back by becoming willing to get in trouble. To stand out.

That’s the superpower, really. Expanding your nervous system capacity to take up more space and meet challenges without losing your sense of self. Coaching your inner child into the awareness that you’re an adult who is capable of saying what you need to say, withstanding the consequences, and finding belonging where it counts rather than where it’s conditional.

And whatever you say, I hope you learn to say it straight from your heart, with love.

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into embodiment work, my full Feminine Range method — keep reading and come find me. This is just the beginning of what’s possible for you.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What’s one thing you wish you could say out loud but have been holding back?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

The story goes like this: if you are good enough, healed enough, desirable enough, patient enough — voila, love will find you. It will arrive when you are ready (aka perfected). When you have done the work. When you have made yourself into something worth choosing.

And so women wait. We wait to be seen. We wait to be asked. We wait for someone to confirm that we are, in fact, worth the pursuit.

We have been waiting for a very long time.

I want to talk about what that waiting actually does to a woman’s body. Because this isn’t just an emotional pattern — it’s a physiological one that is keeping you from the life you want most. And once you understand it at that level, it becomes very hard to keep doing it.

The biology of waiting

Here’s something that most stress research didn’t bother to figure out until the year 2000: women don’t primarily respond to stress the way men do.

The fight-or-flight response (the one we all learned about in biology class, the one that’s been studied for nearly a century) was built almost entirely on research conducted on male subjects. Up until 1995, females constituted only 17% of participants in fight-or-flight research. Which is hilarious (read: devastating) when you consider that women experience anxiety and stress disorders at nearly twice the rate of men.

In 2000, UCLA psychologist Dr. Shelley Taylor and her colleagues published a landmark paper that reframed everything. They proposed that female stress responses are more accurately characterized not by fight-or-flight, but by a pattern they called “tend-and-befriend” — tending to the self and others, and seeking social connection as a biological stress regulation strategy. And at the center of this response? Oxytocin. A chemical released in the female body in response to stress as a catalyst toward connection, warmth, and social bonding.

What this means, practically, is that the female nervous system is wired to regulate through connection, expression, and pleasure. Not through discipline and self-containment. Not through patience and performance. Through actual ALIVENESS — through reaching toward, moving toward, feeling toward.

And here is what nobody tells you about waiting to be chosen: it is the biological opposite of that.

Waiting is a posture of contraction.

Of presenting rather than pursuing.

Of managing your desirability rather than embodying your desire.

Over months and years, it shapes your nervous system around receptivity disguised as passivity, and around the question am I enough? rather than the declaration here is what I actually want.

There’s another piece of neuroscience worth naming here. Research distinguishes between two components of motivation: “wanting” (the dopamine-driven pursuit of something) VS “liking,” (the pleasure of having it). These two systems are neurologically distinct, and what this means is that the act of moving toward what you desire — of choosing, of pursuing, of leaning in — has its own neurological reward, separate from whether you ever get the thing. The pursuit itself is regulating.

The aliveness of desire, expressed and acted upon, is its own form of nourishment. Being a woman who lives fully in the expression of her embodied longing, rather than suppressing it, is medicine.

Waiting starves that system entirely.

What I did instead

I spent a significant portion of my twenties in some version of the waiting posture — and I want to be clear about what that actually looked like, because it didn’t (always) look like sitting by the phone like a sad girl in a rom-com. It looked like a life that was subtly organized around the question of when.

When I meet someone. When I’m in a relationship. When I have a partner to do this with. A certain low-grade holding pattern that I dressed up as contentment but that was really just...deferral. Adventures I’d save for later. Trips I’d take with a partner someday.

A version of my life I was keeping in reserve for when I’d been chosen.

I was 30 when I stopped doing that. Not because I gave up on wanting partnership — I still want it, genuinely, deeply, in a way I no longer feel I need to apologize for. But because I got tired of my own life feeling like a waiting room.

So I got a little unhinged about it.

I went after the dream apartment (and a few years later, the dream home). I booked the summers in Europe — alone, joyfully, without waiting for a person to make it make sense. I said yes to things that scared me. I started treating my desire (for experiences, for beauty, for connection, for pleasure, for all of it) as information worth acting on rather than something to manage until the right person arrived to validate it.

And something shifted. Not just emotionally, but in my body. In the way I moved through the world. In the energy I brought into rooms. In the way my face glowed. I’m 35 and I feel more me, more alive, more full of authentic desire and expression than ever before.

Because here is what I’ve watched happen — in myself and in the women I’ve worked with for over a decade: when a woman stops waiting to be chosen and starts actively choosing her own life, she doesn’t just feel better. She becomes genuinely, visibly different. Something in her nervous system reorganizes. Her posture changes. Her eyes change. Her voice changes. There’s a quality of presence that arrives when a woman is actually living the life that’s available to her now instead of preparing to live a hypothetical one in the future.

It is magnetic in the most literal, non-woo sense of the word. People around her FEEL it before they can name it.

It’s the energy that gets me asked out almost every time I go out in public. It’s the energy that has strangers smiling at me like they recognize some secret behind my eyes. It’s the energy that magnetizes cool opportunities and experiences to me all the time now, because I’m standing ten-toes-down on living a beautiful life regardless of the timing of the things outside of my control.

The difference that matters

I want to make a distinction here, because this can get misread.

Moving toward what you want is not the same as chasing. It is not urgency or desperation or performing enthusiasm you don’t actually feel. It is not forcing or fixing or manufacturing momentum.

The difference is where it comes from.

Pursuing from lack feels like grasping. Like you are trying to fill something. Like your aliveness is contingent on the outcome and you can’t be happy unless the specific things you want show up right when you want them. That energy is detectable, and it pushes things away. (and hi, hello it’s so human and I’ve been in that energy a thousand times myself, so no judgment here babe).

Pursuing from aliveness feels like something else entirely. It feels like a woman who is already full, who already belongs to herself, and who is simply moving in the direction of more. More beauty. More connection. More full-bodied YES’s. The desire doesn’t come from emptiness or scarcity or lack. It comes from a nervous system that is so regulated, so alive, that it naturally reaches outward.

That is flirting with your life. And it is the most attractive thing a human being can do.

What I’ve watched happen in 10+ years of this work

I am careful not to make specific promises in this space, because every woman’s path is her own. I can’t tell you exactly when you’ll meet the love of your life, or how long it will take to fall in love with yourself. But I will tell you what I’ve witnessed, over and over, in the women who do this work seriously.

It wasn’t that they became more conventionally desirable or attractive. It wasn’t that they changed what they looked like or said the right things or finally cracked some dating algorithm. What changed is that they stopped accepting LESS than what they actually wanted — from relationships, from work, from their own lives. And that shift, that refusal to keep settling at the level of their nervous system and identity, made them different. Genuinely, visibly, energetically different.

And when you get to that place, it doesn’t matter when the things show up anymore, because you’re no longer waiting for them in order to truly live.

An invitation

If this landed somewhere in your body, I want to tell you about something I’ve been building.

Unhinged Magnetism is my new program, and it starts August 10 — which means now is the time.

Here’s what it is and who it’s for: it’s for the woman who has done the healing work, who knows herself reasonably well, who is not confused about what she wants — and who is still somehow living at a fraction of her actual capacity. Who is still waiting, in some subtle way, for permission to go fully after her life. Who wants to stop performing desirability and start embodying desire.

In Unhinged Magnetism, we work at the level of the nervous system and identity — not just the mindset. Because you can know all of this intellectually and still be organized, somatically, around waiting. The work is to change that at the body level, where it actually lives.

We cover the neuroscience, the somatic practices, the flirtatious dares, and the practical tools for becoming a woman who moves through the world like she belongs to herself.

August 10. Limited spots. See you inside.

[Join Unhinged Magnetism here → ]

UNHINGED

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into the embodiment work, the retreats, the full Feminine Range method — keep reading and come find me. This is just the beginning of what’s possible.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK:

What’s one desire you’ve never named out loud that you’re ready to finally claim?

Leave a comment

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

(Mumford & Sons, Hozier, and Ireland, respectively).

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

We arrived to the venue early enough to grab some food and get a spot right in front of the stage. After a few hours of standing in the scorching Irish sun (weird sentence I know, but trust me it was unusually sweltering) and watching three opening acts, all I could think about was how much my feet & hips hurt (how old am I again??) and how uncomfortable I was from head to toe. I even caught myself toying with the idea of going home early.

And then suddenly it hit me: this was the whole point.

From the moment those words left her lips, they’ve never left my mind.

I think about that statement almost daily. Because that’s it, isn’t it? If you believe that our souls came down here for a reason (and I do), then part of that reason MUST include the fact that we don’t get to experience being human when we’re not in this 3D form. This dense, messy, aching, awkward, sometimes-gross, often-yearning, inconvenient 3D form.

Personally, I believe a big part of the reason that we came here is love specifically. To experience the pain and beauty of separation and then to practice remembering every chance we get that love is who we are at our core. And that’s messy business in and of itself. But what comes with it is the day-to-day reality of being human. And my god, we’re fickle things.

if we sleep wrong, we can’t look left for the entire day.

if we sit too long, our hips ache.

but if we move too much, we’re a different kind of sore.

go without water too long, you’ll get a headache.

spend too long in the sun, you’ll pay for it with skin that can’t be touched for days.

let yourself love and get heartbroken, and BAM you’ve been hit by a ton of bricks.

these bodies are so strange and high maintenance. But they’re also so beautiful…

they also let us hug the people we love, feeling heart on heart.

they let us taste food that makes our shoulders shimmy in joy.

they let us float in the sea and listen to the breeze and smell the nostalgia of our childhoods.

they let us feel the bass vibrating our bones as we scream sing the lyrics to a song that feels like it was written for us specifically.

And the more we resist the weird stuff, the harder it is to let in the good stuff. And maybe it’s actually all good stuff. Because if our bodies really are our soul’s chance to be here, then it’s safe to assume our souls knew exactly what we were signing up for, warts and all. (who invented warts, btw? another totally weird thing that bodies do).

So, I reminded myself in that moment that my achy feet and throbby hips and scorched skin and woozy head weren’t just the price of admission to see my favorite artist, they were part of this whole shtick.

So my work (and yours) is to BE HERE FOR IT.

Not to desperately try to escape the discomfort, to constantly wonder when I can get home to my cozy bed. But to bring my full soul right down into the center of that fully-feeling body.

Because when I’m no longer in a body, I won’t get to have feet that ache. I will long for the days when my hips were screaming from the intensity of a day well-lived. I will nostalgically revisit memories of hot summer days with sweat dripping down my back and crave the sensation of hair stuck to my neck. When I’m no longer in a body, I’ll long for the days when I could reach out and awkwardly bump teeth with my crush as we press our faces together because we just can’t contain the intensity of our feelings any longer. And I’ll wish that I didn’t wish all the crunchiness away.

And wouldn’t you know it, the moment I embraced the discomfort, it shifted.

Mumford & Sons came on, my body was filled with fresh adrenaline and endorphins (how cool is our internal pharmacy), and I had the time of my life. Truly, as an avid concert-goer, this was a top 3 experience for sure. The concert ended with literal fireworks, and I let my hands rest on my pounding heart just to imprint the thrill of it all.

No one can promise you a life free of discomfort. And anyone who tries is missing the point entirely. We need the friction in order to grow. We came here for it. That doesn’t mean I think you should willingly throw yourself into pain and suffering on a daily basis. Because you absolutely came here for joy, and rest, and play, and whimsy too. But in those moments when life inevitably puts pressure on your fickle little body, remember that some version of you wanted this.

And that maybe, just maybe, you’ll even miss it.

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into the embodiment work, the retreats, the full Feminine Range method — keep reading and come find me. This is just the beginning of what’s possible.

What’s your favorite thing about being a human in a fickle little body?

Leave a comment

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

HELD Mentorship

This is the year-long container that has taken my clients from $20k/month to $300k/month in business, gotten promotions, engagements, healed chronic issues, and unleveled identities. Basically we re-write your life with YOU as the author, and re-wire the beliefs and identity necessary for you to live as your most authentic self. Includes a full year of mentorship, somatic healing, and coaching plus a private 1:1 retreat in Malibu. Click here to apply.

And I’ve never felt more alive.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

When I was a girl, I thought womanhood was pretty much entirely devoted to being a self-sacrificing mother and hosting holiday parties and complaining about weight gain. And I actually had a mom who traveled the world as a flight attendant, and a dad who worked from home and cooked all our meals. It was a relatively progressive, feminist household.

And I still absorbed all of it. Which tells you something about how deep the conditioning runs — it doesn’t come in through the front door of your home. It seeps in through the television, through the magazines, through the way the boys at school talked about girls’ bodies like they were reviews on Yelp. It comes in through a thousand tiny messages that accumulate into a worldview before you’re old enough to question it.

The culture taught me again and again:

• the most important thing a girl can do is get a guy to like her

• girly things are embarrassing, silly, and unimportant

• men make more money and are taken more seriously

• women are objects to be admired, traded, owned, won

• women’s bodies are the most important things about them, and must adhere to a very narrow beauty standard

Among many other harmful narratives that being a child of the 90s and early 2000’s handed me.

And not one adult sat me (or my friends) down and said: something sacred is happening in your body. You are crossing a threshold. Here is what it means to become a woman.

Instead, we got a puberty packet in fifth grade health class. Maybe a box of pads slipped under the bathroom door. Maybe an uncomfortable conversation that was more clinical than ceremonial. And then we were expected to just...figure out the rest.

This is not a small thing.

Across cultures and throughout human history, the transition from girlhood to womanhood was marked by ceremony. By community. By elders who gathered around a girl and said: we see you. We know the importance of what you’re entering. We’ll help you carry it.

Female initiation rites, when done with intention, provide psychological preparation, a sense of belonging, and a moral framework for navigating adulthood. They aren’t just traditions for tradition’s sake — they send a message to the nervous system that something real has shifted, that the community recognizes you differently now, that you belong to a new chapter.

The absence of these sacred initiations has been linked to adolescent drug abuse, increased mental health disturbances, and a generation of young people who reach adulthood without the internal resources to handle what it asks of them.

So we stumbled into womanhood alone, mostly. With bodies that suddenly felt like public property, yet desires we were told to suppress, and with ambitions we weren’t sure we were allowed to have. And we did what girls who don’t get initiations do: we improvised. We looked to the culture to tell us who we were supposed to become.

And the culture had thoughts…

Because after the toxic beauty standards of the 90s and 00s, then came along the girlboss culture of the 2010’s, which felt like a breath of fresh air for the budding entrepreneur in me who wanted to carve out a path for myself but still fit in and be accepted. I could finally be the girl with big ambitions and goals without feeling like I was in someone else’s lane (even as a 2012 college grad, there were always more guys than girls in my upper level classes as a business major).

But even with the Sophia Amoruso’s and Whitney Wolfe’s of the world showing us that our dreams were closer than we realized, something still felt off. Painting co-working spaces pink and slapping a hashtag on everything felt condescending in a way, infantilizing. Like the culture was saying to us, “Ok fine, here girls, you can have your little success and it can be pink and pretty and you don’t have to act masculine to get there.” Except we did.

Girlboss culture was very quickly followed by a whiplash of a pivot to tradwife, soft girl era content and suddenly we’re all calling each other girlies (I do it too, but we’ll get to that). The girlboss and tradwife archetypes, despite appearing to be in direct opposition, share a fundamental similarity: they both commodify womanhood, reducing it to a rigid performance that aligns with broader political and economic ideologies. One performs in blazers and hustle. The other performs in aprons and aesthetic farmhouse serenity. Both are illusions of autonomy within a system that dictates the boundaries of female agency.

The tradwife trend peaked during the pandemic, when millions of women were forced back into domestic roles and discovered — as many do — that there was something genuinely nourishing about slowness, about home, about stepping off the hustle hamster wheel. That desire was real. But the tradwife aesthetic tends to glamorize a retro version of womanhood that erases the toilet scrubbing, the financial dependence, and the very real constraints of a life built entirely around someone else’s needs. The version being sold is a fantasy. And we’ve seen enough of those.

And we are exhausted, are we not?

75% of women report experiencing burnout, compared to 58% of men. Women are diagnosed with depression at nearly twice the rate of men, and nearly one in three teenage girls experiences a major depressive episode. We are not fine. We have not been fine. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this level of collective suffering is happening in a culture that still hasn’t figured out how to honor what it means to be a woman — other than to ask us to perform some version of it for consumption.

The Eras tour was a reclamation of girlhood.

The Barbie move was a reclamation of girlhood.

Hot girl summer. Girl dinner. Girl math.

“I’m just a girl”

And the real question remains, why are we constantly having to reclaim girlhood??

And maybe because we were never properly graduated from it. Because nobody threw us a ceremony, handed us our power, and said welcome to the next thing. So we keep returning to girlhood — not out of immaturity, but out of hunger. Trying to retrieve something we were never fully given before being asked to move on.

And maybe because we were never meant to actually graduate from girlhood, but to integrate it. The very things that we were shamed for (playfulness, giddiness, pink-ness, whimsy) are actually meant to continue to spark joy for us from age 0 to 99.

Here is what I know, and what I’ve watched happen in myself and in the women I work with: underneath the conditioning, underneath the performance, underneath the decade of trying on archetypes that were handed to us by the internet, by the patriarchy, and by feminism itself — there is something ancient and primal and probably still intact. Something that was never actually damaged, just buried:

The Divine Feminine.

A spiritual and cultural archetype embodying qualities such as intuition, creativity, receptivity, rage, wildness, expression, devotion, and interconnectedness. It’s not a trend. It’s not a brand. It is a remembering. It’s a reclamation of a way of being that precedes all of this noise, that was always ours to begin with. And it is rising, loudly and unmistakably, in the bodies of women who are tired of performing and ready to arrive.

Florence Welch knows it. She screams it. She whispers it. She exudes it.

We went to scream it along with her and as I said in the beginning (I wrote the rest of this post-concert), it’s the most alive I’ve ever felt. We sang, we cried, we laughed, we danced, and we had chills running down our spines as we watched her Witch Choir writhe on stage. When a group of women gather in an expression of deep emotion, you cannot deny what our bodies innately know.

We are not girl bosses. We are not tradwives. We are girls, and young women, and old women, and women in a billion different types of bodies with one thing in common: the divine feminine exists within all of us (it exists within people of all genders actually). But it’s time that we INTENTIONALLY reclaim it. Not just culturally, but individually.

And here’s what that looks like:

• practice feeling your feelings. not intellectualizing them, but actually feeling them and letting them move through your body.

• practice listening to your intuition and letting it guide your life choices, even when it makes no logical sense. especially then.

• prioritize pleasure, rest and joy. they are quite literally the master keys to regulating the female nervous system.

• regularly gather with your female friends, of all ages. we need community in order to thrive and to remember who we are. we were never meant to do this alone.

• remind yourself every day that women’s bodies are literally portals to another universe, and that you have more magic within you than our brains can even conceive of.

This is not self-improvement work. This is self-return.

We spent so long being told that the most dangerous (and unlovable) thing about us was how much we felt, how deeply we wanted, how wildly we loved.

And we believed it. We made ourselves quieter and smaller and more manageable in order to belong. We called it growing up.

But what if the feelings were never the problem? What if the wanting was never the problem? What if the wildness was never the problem? What if the femininity, the girlhood, the womanhood was never actually the problem?

What if the only problem was that nobody ever taught us how to hold it?

That’s what I’m here for. That’s what my entire body of work is for. Not to fix you — you were never broken. But to help you remember what you already are.

Welcome home friend.

with love,

Megs

ps…if you want to go deeper — into the embodiment work, the retreats, the full Feminine Range method — keep reading and come find me. This is just the beginning of what’s possible.

What did you feel in your body as you read this? What did it spark in you?

Leave a comment

Reclaimed Self Ireland Retreat - JULY 10-16, 2026

If you feel the pull to a week of whimsical, magical self-reclamation…this is for you. We’ll spend 7 days shedding all the layers of your old self and stepping into your authenticity through daily workshops, cliffs hikes, sea swims, fireside chats, belly laughter, probably some tears, and a whole lot of releasing your armor. Two rooms remain. Click here for info & enrollment.

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

I am not the same woman I was five years ago. Not even one year ago.

And I don’t mean that in the way people mean it when they’ve lost weight or found a new morning routine or finally left the relationship they knew they needed to leave. I don’t mean “I feel like a new person” because I changed my hair (although I did dye my hair red and I absolutely felt a seismic shift internally).

I mean it in the way that is almost impossible to explain without sounding either like a person who just went on a psychedelic trip, or like a before-and-after ad for something.

But I’m going to try anyway. Because there’s a chance you might be living where I was.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

Here’s the thing about being a woman in this world: we are trained, from a very early age, to be palatable. Not too loud, not too needy, not too much. Be warm but not overwhelming. Be ambitious but not threatening. Be vulnerable but keep it cute and digestible. Be pretty but don’t be full of yourself.

We get so good at this performance that eventually we can’t find the seam between who we actually are and who we learned to be. We just sort of…become the performance. And then we spend years in therapy trying to figure out why we feel so far away from ourselves.

I did that.

(big fan of calling myself out over here, in case you’re new to this page). I did an enormous amount of healing work — and I want to be clear here, because the work mattered, it was genuinely necessary — BUT, I was healing inside an identity that was never mine to begin with.

I was a woman who performed. (not on stage though, because I was literally terrified of being seen or heard). I performed in all my relationships, jobs, friendships. Even in my most “authentic” moments — in therapy, in my journal, in my most honest conversations with people I loved — there was a version of me anxiously managing how I was perceived. Curating just the right amount of vulnerability. Making sure what came out was the right kind of real. The relatable kind. The kind that didn’t make people uncomfortable.

I was also a woman who was constantly waiting. Waiting to feel ready. Waiting to feel certain. Waiting for some internal signal that it was finally okay to take up the space I’d been quietly wanting my whole life. Waiting for someone to give me permission to actually want what I want and go after it. Waiting for the green light to feel good.

And underneath all of it was this early, pre-verbal decision I had made about myself: that who I actually was (deeply feeling, goofy, excitable, passionate, whimsical, sometimes bossy, often awkward, occasionally hangry, always joyful) — was too much. Too wanting. Too wild. Too in your face, see through your soul in a way that made people squirmy.

So I made myself smaller. Quieter. More likable. More acceptable.

And I called it maturity. I called it professionalism. And often, honestly, I called it being a good person. Ugh, I tried sooo hard to make sure I was perceived as a good person. A nice person.

This is the part nobody tells you about being a woman: the conditioning doesn’t feel like conditioning while it’s happening. It feels like growth. It feels like learning to be appropriate, learning to be considerate, learning not to rock the boat. It feels like becoming someone people can be around without flinching. And that feels good, because we are wired to want to be loved. So we keep shrinking in the direction of acceptance, over and over, until we look up one day and realize we have no idea who we actually are underneath all of it.

The shift for me didn’t come from a new modality or a breakthrough therapy session (though I’ve had plenty of those). It came from something that felt more like…stopping.

Stopping the performance. Stopping the waiting. Stopping the constant internal negotiation between who I was and who I thought I was allowed to be. Stopping all the hustling to prove my worth, and finally coming home to my own innate truth and worthiness.

And what followed, well I actually still find it hard to talk about without sounding like I’m hawking a supplement or something, which is part of why I’ve been quiet about it for a long time.

But here’s what happened:

My body changed. My face changed. My confidence and self-expression skyrocketed. The chronic pain and illness I’d carried for years just...dissolved. The anxiety that had hummed underneath everything went quiet. My income restructured around work I actually love (aka no more burnout). My attachment patterns and relationships transformed. Pelvic pain I’d normalized for so long disappeared. I stopped choosing men who made me earn their presence. I started genuinely loving myself in a way I didn’t think was available to me.

I look at photos from a few years ago and the difference isn’t the weight or the glow or whatever the visible thing is. Those are cool side effects. But it’s that I’m finally here, present in my body, alive in my own life. Not because I improved and became the “best” version of myself, but simply because I stopped performing all the versions that weren’t really me. I started BEING me instead.

Here’s what I think we get wrong about becoming who we’re meant to be: we think it’s additive.

We think it’s about adding the right habits, the right healing, the right practices until we finally construct the version of ourselves we’ve been trying to become. But that’s not quite right. It’s subtractive.

It’s the slow and sometimes terrifying process of removing everything that was never you — all the armor, all the performances, all the identities you built to earn love — until what’s left is just...you. Stripping away the identity of the version of you who traded authenticity for belonging, and finding that under all those layers is someone that you actually really like.

The woman you were always meant to be isn’t somewhere ahead of you. She’s not on the other side of more healing or more work or more figuring it out. She’s underneath all of it. She’s been there the whole time.

You don’t have to manifest her. You just have to stop hiding her.

The past year of my life has been a series of identity shifts so profound that I’ve really struggled to find the words to explain how it feels. But I also feel more myself than I ever have, and it’s a feeling that I’m lucky enough to get to guide others into, so I am here trying to find the words.

This is what I teach. I call it the Feminine Range — the reclamation of everything that was trained out of you in the service of being more acceptable. WILD. Intuitive. Sensual. Devotional. Whole. Coming home to all parts of you.

Follow along as I share more moments from my own journey, and lessons for yours.

with so much love,

Megs

Reclaimed Self Ireland Retreat - JULY 10-16, 2026

If you feel the pull to a week of whimsical, magical self-reclamation…this is for you. We’ll spend 7 days shedding all the layers of your old self and stepping into your authenticity through daily workshops, cliffs hikes, sea swims, fireside chats, belly laughter, probably some tears, and a whole lot of releasing your armor. Two rooms remain. Click here for info & enrollment.

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

A: Let me start by naming what I’m hearing.

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is my little romantic, weird, silly, playful, sensual, embodied, brave, love-filled corner of the internet. Stick around for essays that hopefully make you feel something and see life a little differently. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

I’m hearing that you’ve built a relationship with yourself that feels so solid, that dating feels like an afterthought. Or maybe even a burden. You’ve learned to embrace and love your solitude to the point where it’s your first choice. And, I’m also hearing that underneath that truth there’s also this desire for partnership (whatever that looks like for you). So let’s just be with that tension for a moment. The here and now feels good, but you also have a long-term desire that is causing you to feel a little restless, perhaps like you’re behind in some way?

I get it. As a 35-year-old single woman who has built a life I’m utterly obsessed with, and still desires romantic partnership, I really get it.

But if I may, let’s push back on your question’s assumption for a moment. Who says you have to be excited about dating in the first place?

Oh right, society and probably your friends and your family and everyone else with an opinion about where your life should be headed.

Okay but besides them, who says you have to be excited about dating? What if that’s not actually the goal? Because (and this is my assumption), what you really want is a relationship, right? Dating is the vehicle to get there. But intimacy, partnership, truly being known…that is the destination. And what if you don’t have to LOVE every step of the process of getting there?

There will be days where all the stars align and you bump into a stranger in the grocery store who feels both familiar and attractive, and there’s flirting, and they ask you out, and you feel like a giddy teenager as you get ready for the first date.

There will also be days where you swear to god if you have to look at one more picture of a man holding a fish, or listen to one more boring story about someone’s mundane special interest, or sit through a dinner where your date asks zero questions - you’re going to lose your damn mind.

The dating world is full of connections that feel amazing yet inexplicably lead nowhere, and connections that feel lackluster yet somehow turn into a beautiful slow burn. And if I’m being honest, I think it’s frustrating as hell. Personally, I’m no longer excited at the prospect of dating. I’m excited at the prospect of building something deep and lasting, getting to the commitment stage, experiencing true intimacy.

Can dating be fun? Totally. Are the early stages of dating often unsettling, frustrating, tiring? Yup.

So maybe the problem isn’t that you’re so comfortable in yourself that you’re blocking love. Maybe your comfort is actually a prerequisite for the kind of healthy relationship I know you really want, not an obstacle that’s preventing it. Maybe the fact that you find your solitude to be so precious is the thing that’s going to help you choose a partner from authenticity rather than scarcity.

Discomfort doesn’t magnetize partnership. In fact, that kind of discomfort with self is often what manufactures unhealthy relationship dynamics and anxious-avoidant tendencies. You can be deeply settled in yourself and genuinely available — those aren’t opposites.

So the question to pause and ask yourself here is actually:

am I available for love right now?

And if you are, if you have a genuine desire for partnership and the willingness to create space in your life for it, then what if that could be enough for now? What if your readiness, your desire, and your self-assuredness are the perfect blend of energetic resonance that will have you collide with the right person for you in the right timing?

A lot of dating advice out there asks us to override our nervous systems.

Push through the boring dates because it’s a “numbers game.” Swipe endlessly until people start to feel more like commodities and less like humans. Scan every environment you walk into for anyone who could be “The One.” Perform your most enthusiastic self on first date after first date until eventually one of them sticks.

There’s a cost to all of that. This version of putting yourself out there requires you to leave yourself behind to do it. And if you can’t bring your authentic self to the party, it’s probably not the right party for you.

Meaning, give yourself permission to fully let go of the versions of dating that just don’t work for you. I personally loathe dating apps with a burning passion. No matter how many tries I gave them, I always came back to that conclusion. They’re just not for me. So I gave myself a big fat permission slip to NEVER download one again. And guess what? It made me feel a whole lot better about dating.

So, if whatever you’ve been doing hasn’t been working for you, maybe give yourself permission to set it down.

The follow-up question to that permission slip is probably, “but then how am I going to meet someone?”

Great question! Let me introduce you to the concept of energetic availability vs performative action.

When you’re just going through the motions because it’s what you’re supposed to do, that energy is broadcast into the dating field. It signals a loud “I don’t really want to be here!” vibe that is totally felt by the people you interact with. Performative action usually yields mixed results (and oftentimes avoidant partners), because we’re not fully aligned with the desire of true partnership.

But if you genuinely answered that question about availability earlier with an honest “yes”, then most of your work is actually done. Getting energetically available for a relationship is the biggest step. It naturally carries an energy of excitement because the focus is on the outcome: the type of love you’re cultivating within yourself and calling in with a partner. You’re energetically “putting yourself out there” in a way that will bring other open people into your field. Openness is an internal orientation, not a checklist of perfect answers to put on your dating profile.

Let me give you a quick example.

When I was deep in the throes of healing from chronic illness, or building a new business, or moving to a new state, I didn’t have the energetic bandwidth for dating. In some of those seasons, I took dating off the table entirely to focus on myself (the wise decision). In other seasons, I tried to power through and date anyways because I felt pressure to find someone. The people I met during those chapters? Not great. Not a match for what I really want. But definitely a match for the energy I was putting out at the time.

I didn’t shift into true availability until maybe a year ago. And during that time, I’ve met and dated a few incredible guys, completely organically. I’ve been set up by friends who’ve known me for years but suddenly felt like it was time to introduce me to someone they knew. I’ve met great men out in public. And it’s been such a stark contrast to being on the apps, because my energy has changed. And guess what?? I’m STILL not super excited about the idea of dating right now. It’s mostly just a means to the outcome of beautiful, living, breathing relationship I plan to cultivate.

That said, I’ll add one final reframe for you.

If some part of you wants to be excited about dating (so that you can enjoy the process instead of being miserable in it), let me ask you this:

what if this is your last single season?

What if the coming weeks or months are the very last time you’ll be going on dates and not knowing where they’ll lead? What if you’re about to go on your last first date? There’s something really special that’s worth being present for in that. Not to feign excitement, but to be fully present for the chapter you’re actually in right now.

If this is your last single season, you get to soak up every solo night on the sofa watching your favorite series and eating your favorite takeout or girl dinner. And if this is the last time you’re going to be in a “talking stage” with someone, what if you can find a way to find enjoyment in the romantic unknown? It becomes less about tolerating dating and more about letting life flirt with you a little bit. Because let’s be honest, the flirting part is pretty damn fun ;)

Ok and while we’re on the topic of flirting, I guess I do have one more piece of advice. Deepen your connection to your sensuality.

And what I mean by that is be in the practice of getting into your body and experiencing life through your senses. Let your body experience pleasure every day. In the form of movement, scents, touch, time in nature, mouth-watering foods, deep rest. Find ways to enjoy being in your body. Rediscover what turns you on. Read some romance novels, or put on an outfit that makes you feel sexy, do your hair and dance around your room by candlelight. Turn yourself on. Flirt with yourself a bit. Remember that it’s fun to be in a body and feel things and engage with your desire.

When you’re in an ongoing practice of sensual embodiment, every desire becomes an opportunity for play. So your desire for partnership gets to play out on the dating stage. And when you bring that playful energy to it (rather than the heavy “is he the one? Oh god I don’t have another one of these in me” type energy), it will likely feel a whole lot better in your system.

But at the end of the day, dating can feel so uncomfortable because it’s the active process of not having what you really want but doing the tender work of showing up for the desire anyway. And that’s brave shit, my friend.

So if I haven’t made it clear by now, let me repeat:

you do not actually have to get excited about dating. You just need to stay honest about what you want, what feels good, and to stop treating your comfort as a problem to fix. Go out there and engage with life in all the ways that feel good for you, and trust that life can deliver really wonderful people on your path as you live it.

with so much love,

Megs

Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

Let me ease your mind by starting with this: it gets better.

But not in the way you think. And not in the timing you’re hoping for.

I know that might feel scary, because you’re pretty certain that your way is the only way you can feel safe and happy and loved. But here’s the thing: your way is limited by your vantage point.

There are plot twists coming for you that you have no concept of right now. And you’d have no reason to even imagine them yet, because it wouldn’t make sense. You have to get a few steps ahead to a new vantage point to see the dots start to connect on all this.

I know, you mostly want answers, right?

You want to know when the soulmate shows up, and if I’m married already, and where I live, and how successful I am…you want to know that the bets you’re making pay off.

You want to know that it’s all worth it. And you think that knowing the precise when and how of it all will settle that burning anxiety deep in your belly. But it won’t.

Truthfully?

I think if I told you the specifics it would freak you out more. Again, not because you’re not strong and can’t handle it, or because what you’re wishing for doesn’t come true…but because you don’t yet have the perspective that will have you believe that everything that’s coming, even the challenging stuff, is good.

And yes, there are more challenges. But what I can guarantee you is that you learn to handle each one with more grace, wisdom, and grounded presence than the last. You gain tools along the way that help you reconnect to your center whenever you feel lost. And you finally learn that getting lost isn’t a character flaw, it’s actually a built-in feature in the game of being human. Which, by the way, you’re crushing. And I’m begging you to slow down and appreciate where you’re at more.

You won’t spend so much time worrying about how things will pan out because pretty soon, you’re going to start to accumulate a lot of evidence that the how doesn’t matter. You’ll have a lot of data in the form of lived experience that proves that things always work out, and that driving yourself crazy with the details only leads to your suffering.

And you don’t want to suffer if you don’t have to anymore.

Yep, that’s another thing…you finally learn to stop punishing yourself every step of the way. You learn to treat yourself with the love, kindness and respect you always searched for in others.

You become your very own best friend.

And as a result, you meet people who celebrate and love the real you, without the mask of people pleasing. In fact, you’re going to learn that your authenticity is the key to feeling seen and loved how you’ve always wanted.

So I could go on and on about the lessons you learn and how much better you’ll feel and how much you’ll love the life you end up building.

But I know that all you really want to know right now is whether your plan for your life is working.

So let me be radically honest with you in saying this:

it isn’t.

Your plans don’t pan out.

And there will come a time you thank god for that every day. It’s a good thing that your life isn’t limited by your current plans, because there’s something so much bigger in store for you than what you can currently see.

And all you really need to know is that from my vantage point, you are right on time, exactly where you need to be. And I have you to thank for the life I’m now living. So trust me when I say, it gets better, and I haven’t even seen how it all ends yet. Let’s keep going, together. I love you.

with so much love,

Your future self

Hi friend, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

This “letter to my younger self” is something I wrote just before my book tour in 2025. My first book was coming out, and I could feel my younger parts getting a little anxious about the whole thing. Letter writing is an important practice in my work (I’m a somatic therapist and do a lot of parts work with my clients…and myself!). I read the letter at the launch party and it quickly became a fan favorite. I promised I’d share it someday, and the 1 year anniversary of my book launch feels like the perfect day to share. So I hope it made some part of you feel better too!

You can grab a copy of the book below (or head over to IG where I am doing a giveaway for a free signed copy and audiobook!!). Thanks for your support, and I hope this book helps you as much as it helped the version of me who needed it most.

Choose Your Self

you have to be willing to let life break your heart.

I tried to negotiate my way out of that fact for such a long time. I thought if I just did more inner work, healed more wounds, made “perfect” decisions, found the exact right people, worked harder, set enough boundaries…then I could avoid getting my heart broken. I could avoid squirmy feelings like grief and anger and nostalgia and sadness and shame.

Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

Subscribe now

Basically, I tried to micromanage life.

I tried to use healing as a means to control every little thing that happened in my life so that I wouldn’t have to wade through murky emotions and intolerable uncertainty. And in a way, it worked for a bit. I created a perfectly safe little bubble where life didn’t touch my wounds as frequently. But to my surprise, the grief and heartbreak seeped its way in there too.

Because it turns out the pain of a contained and shrunken and half-lived life can break your heart too.

So I scrapped that plan, and decided to get my hands dirty again. I figured that if my sensitive little heart was going to hurt either way, I may as well be living the life I actually WANT, rather than the once that feels easier to control and predict.

And I can hear what you might be saying, because I’ve gotten this question from half a dozen clients this month alone:

“if I can’t control what happens, and I can’t avoid feeling big pain, then what’s the point of doing any of this inner work?”

Ah yes, the tender voice of the sweet little one inside who wants a guarantee of safety. This part has your very best interests in mind, and genuinely just wants to protect you. Control feels like a means to keep you safe. But it’s really just a coping mechanism that keeps you numb from the things that make life really good…and yes, that includes the achy sadness that we’d often prefer to avoid.

So here’s what I’d do, take it or leave it (but promise me you’ll try it at least once)…I’d grab that trembling little part inside by the shoulders, look her in the eyes with all the love I can muster and say:

And then I’d give her the biggest hug and let her feel the relief and grief and whatever else she feels while knowing that at she’s not alone in feeling it anymore.

That’s really the thing we’re most scared of, isn’t it?

That we’ll be heartbroken all alone and we won’t be able to tolerate it. But when you can be the loving witness to your own heartbroken parts, then you’re never really alone. You aren’t your feelings. You’re the one who can see them, name them, feel them, and tend to them.

That’s the liberation point.

The moment where we realize we can feel anything that shows up in our experience and not get lost in it, because it’s not the totality of who we are. Your emotions are the weather, you are the sky. Storms will come and go, sun will come and go, and the very best thing you can do is to love the season you’re in.

And if you can do that, then there is one thing that’s guaranteed…you will live a full and beautiful life. You still won’t be able to control all the how’s or when’s or where’s or who’s. But you’ll be able to feel the exquisite rush of enjoying the beauty in all of it.

It’s only when you’re willing to let life break your heart that you are free to truly live.

When you’re no longer optimizing around certainty or controlling for predictability to try to prevent getting hurt - that’s the moment your healing turns to living.

It’s the moment you say “even though my last breakup dragged me into the depths of hell, I’m willing to love again.” Or, “even though I’m terrified of being seen trying and failing, I’m going to put my dreams into motion because I can’t live a single moment longer in denial of them.” Or “I’m going to bring a baby into this world knowing full well that bad things happen and I can’t actually control what happens to the most important thing I’ll ever create.”

It’s all an act of pure bravery, vulnerability, surrender to the possibility of heartbreak (which is really just love expressing itself as grief for a while).

And it’s totally up to you which path you choose. But I think deep down you know there’s really only one way.

with love at the helm,

Megs

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Homecoming Protocol

If you’ve been finding it challenging to feel what it is you truly want, or to trust yourself in showing up for the path, I have something for you. Most of the women I work with come to me having done lots of healing, but not a lot of expansion or building capacity for aliveness (which includes feeling all the things). My new audio toolkit helps you do just that. With 5 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day return to self practice, The Homecoming Protocol helps you live your fullest life. Grab it here for just $33.

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I used to be perpetually haunted by the idea of the fig tree.

You know, Sylvia Plath’s gut-punch of a depiction of analysis paralysis from The Bell Jar? All the different lives we could possibly be living an how overwhelming fear of picking the wrong one leads us to waste them all.

Each fig is a dream. An identity. A story.

The version of me who lives in Europe and speaks French and travels every weekend.

The version who owns her own retreat center.

The version who’s a wife and a mom.

The one who has a garden and makes sourdough and tinkers around the house.

The one who lives in New York. In LA. In London. In the woods. By the sea. In any place I’ve ever visited that has my heart.

The bestselling author.

The cafe owner.

The one who plays piano and isn’t embarrassed to sing out loud.

The one with a big shiny life and the one who’s totally content with a small, quiet one.

The version of me who’s bold and bright. The one who’s soft and gentle.

And everything in between.

They used to haunt me. Each of the figs I wasn’t choosing. I wanted them all. I’d lament the sad reality that I had to choose between one big dream or another.

And what a cunning way to avoid your power and responsibility. If I’m so torn up about having to make the right choice, I’m absolved from the responsibility of showing up fully for any one of them. I can stay still and call it being rational, practical, smart. I can avoid decision altogether in the name of playing it safe.

But that’s the real nightmare.

Freezing in place and forgetting the one key to the whole thing: I am the fig tree.

The figs aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities. They’re all versions of me, and I can take a taste of as many as I’d like. I can reach for one and savor it, and then another and savor it. I can’t pick a hundred at one time but I can eat them one by one for as long as I’ve got.

Identity isn’t fixed.

I can write as many chapters of my life as I’d like. I can go deep and wide into one, or visit little vignettes of a dozen. Hell, if I count ‘em up I’ve eaten about thirteen juicy figs so far and I’m only 35. I’ve lived in seven different places and chosen to be a hundred different versions of myself up until this point and I know I have yet to inhabit my biggest adventures.

And the place I’ve gotten stuck is that in any singular chapter of my life, I’m grieving all the paths not chosen. If I’m living in one city, that means forsaking all the rest. If I’m loving single life, that means missing out on the beauty of deep partnership. If I’m pouring my heart and soul into writing a book, that means other pursuits are taking a back seat. And being the deeply feeling, nostalgic and sensitive woman that I am, the grief always knocks the wind out of me.

I have honed the brilliant ability to just be happy to be here. Wherever I am, I can find so much joy in it.

For example, I love the unbelievable peace that being in the PNW offers my nervous system. I feel safe and contained and cozy when I’m there. But living there means missing out on the excitement and stimulation of being plugged into my community of friends in Los Angeles. So then I go visit LA and am overjoyed at the buzz of my full schedule, only to miss the quiet sanctuary of my home in the trees of the northwest where the grass is literally 10x greener.

So what I finally realized is that I’m always going to be faced with a choice: focus on all the figs I’m not currently eating, or savor the one that I am. But the point is, I have to be willing to pick a fig in the first place. To say, “this one gets my attention for now, and I’m going to give it my full presence” rather than letting them all die on the vine.

The moment we let indecision win is the moment we give our life away to the alluring notion of “someday.”

Someday when I’m ready I’ll take that risk. Someday when I feel more confident I’ll go for it. Someday when I’m richer I’ll be able to do what I really want. Someday when I meet The One I’ll finally start living my life. Someday when I feel clear I’ll make the choice.

But guess what?

Someday keeps moving further away and you’ll never quite feel ready, and you’ll spend the meantime lamenting what you’re missing out on. You don’t need to know what you want to do with your entire life. You just need to pick one fig and savor it for now. If ever you’re feeling lost, repeat these words: I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but in the meantime, I’m living.

The meantime is the whole point.

The living here and now is the whole point. This moment, this fig, this season needs all of you. Not the half-in half-out version of you. Don’t allow the choices not made to haunt you. Make this choice the right one. Make it the best you possibly can. And when you’re done and ready for something new, give that your full self too.

Whoever you want to be right now, be her, with all you’ve got.

with all I’ve got,

Megs

A CNN article recently exposed an online “rape academy” and it’s more horrifying than you can imagine.

The website supposedly details explicit instructions on how men can drug and rape their sleeping wives, and then livestream the assaults for other men to watch. It received over 62 million visits in February alone.

Let’s start with the obviously horrifying acknowledgment that these cases of IPV (intimate partner violence) leave women vulnerable in the place where they’re meant to be safest. At home, in their own beds, with the person who literally vowed to love, honor and protect them.

Now add to that the staggering number of visits (62 million!!) and livestreams (20k) on this one website alone, and we’re faced with the disgusting reality that it really is all men.

Are all men doing the raping? No, but until all men are doing the work of holding each other accountable and bringing justice where it’s needed, then it’s all men.

And listen, I am a woman who has historically and repeatedly affirmed that I love men, I believe in the goodness of men, and I appreciate the wonderful men in my life. Not because I’m a pick-me, but because I really don’t see a gender war as a productive way forward and I don’t believe that hating men as a collective does us any good.

That said, it’s time to get angrier, to get louder, and to bring the hysteria that we’ve long been accused of. Not to project hatred onto men, but to channel our absolutely rightful rage.

Women have a right to be fucking livid.

And let’s be clear, if you’re a man who’s seeing what’s been revealed and you’re not sick to your stomach and seething with rage right alongside us, then there’s something seriously wrong with you and you are part of the problem.

Ten years into the MeToo movement and we’re in the midst of a reversal of our reproductive rights, a worldwide ring of pedophiles puppeteering our society and nothing being done about it, and millions of men going to online rape academies, and we’re just supposed to, what…continue with business as usual?

Nope, not this time.

This time I feel something rising in the collective that has been brewing for a while. Women are waking up en masse, and not in a polite “hashtag trend” kind of way. In a way that says “burn it all down to the ground.”

So this is for the women who are ready to throw out the muddied patriarchal water we’ve all been steeped in for about 10,000 years, and are ready to find their way back home to their power.

Because the shift we’re facing will not just require you to get mad for a few days, write a social media post, and move on. This shift will require you to expand your capacity. It will require you to teach your nervous system that it’s safe to get mad, to be outraged, and to be loud about it. It will require you to learn to drop the Good Girl conditioning and start to ruffle some feathers with the men in your life. It will require you to be FULLY in your body, your agency, and your inner authority.

So here’s what I’m gonna need you to do:

1. Make friends with your body, especially if you have a trauma history. Find a trauma-trained practitioner, preferably a somatic one, and unburden as much of the trauma as you’re able to, at a pace that feels safe to your nervous system. The more you’re able to access your bodily agency from a non-triggered place, the more empowered you will feel.
   

2. Build physical strength. If you’re able-bodied, find forms of movement that make you feel strong in your body to the extent that you can manage. When I was chronically ill, that meant gentle yoga and walks in nature. Once I got better, that meant strength training, boxing and krav maga (10/10 recommend this to women wanting to build a sense of physical agency…anger channeled physically = power).
   

3. Find your voice. Again, somatic therapy is great here, but so is singing, humming and even saying “no!” out loud. Practice owning your opinions, even when they upset those around you. Figure out what you believe, independent of the opinions of those around you (especially men and male sources of authority). Giving yourself permission to be loud and take up space is a superpower.
   

4. Decondition yourself from the patriarchy. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it and you’ll keep coming back home to your truth. Recommended reading: When God Was A Woman, The Chalice And The Blade, If Women Rose Rooted, The Wild Feminine, and anything written by bell hooks.
   

5. Set higher standards in your dating life. If a man you’re interested in or in relationship with can’t clearly and overtly articulate how he’s doing his own patriarchal deconditioning, or isn’t willing to start, that’s not a safe man for you to be in relationship with. Period. At bare minimum your standard should include: healthy communication, emotional maturity, compassion and kindness, respect towards all women, and accountability.

And yes, it’s going to take time. But the time will pass anyway.

There was a time in my life where on the surface, I believed I was a confident and empowered feminist who wouldn’t take shit from men. But the reality in my body was that my nervous system would still default to freeze and fawn around men, and I would frequently self-abandon to maintain peace, comfort or belonging (and of course, safety).

That wasn’t a personal fault. It’s how we’re biologically wired as women, and it’s also a cunning survival strategy in the face of millennia of oppression and violence. But what I later learned is that many of those patterns can be rewired to include our voice and our agency where it’s needed most.

I wasn’t able to truly honor my standards and boundaries and use my voice until I did the work to heal past traumas and feel safe in my body again.

It’s brave work, and it’s a big ask.

I know that what I’m inviting you into here requires a tremendous amount of courage and resourcing, and it’s okay if your system isn’t ready yet. But when you are, this moment is a call for you to rise back into yourself, rather than to shrink right back to where they want us, feeling powerless. If they’re literally getting off on our helplessness, the most powerful thing we can do is get back into our bodies and our voices.

For centuries, the patriarchy has told us that the worst thing a woman could be was hysterical, or angry, or loud. Now I’m telling you that’s exactly where your power lies. It’s time to reclaim it.

with love and rage and everything in between,

Megs

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Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self”! Click here to order.

p.s.

While I’ve been doing this work behind the scenes in my own life and with my clients for several years now, I’ve only started to get publicly vocal about it these past few months. That’s my work at the moment, using my voice and my platforms to amplify the messages, wake-up calls, and tools that I wish I’d had access to earlier. It might’ve prevented some of the violence I’ve experienced, or at the very least help me feel less shame about it and process it sooner. So if I can be that for another woman, I’m playing my part in creating change. All that to say…expect more of this kind of writing from me moving forward. This fire isn’t going out anytime soon.

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One of my favorite pieces of advice comes from the inimitable writer Anne Lamott. Whenever she’s asked what her best advice for aspiring authors would be, she simply says,

“Step 1: stop not writing.”

And that’s the thing, right?

In order to become the version of us we want to be, we have to stop being the one we are now. We have to untangle our identity from the version of us who benefits from staying the same.

The version of you who doesn’t “write” (or whatever your thing is), does so because she doesn’t feel ready yet. / Or because she’s scared that it won’t be good enough. / Or that people will judge her. / She’s too busy. / There isn’t enough time to write how she really wants to. / She’s not an author. / She doesn’t know how, or she’s scared, or she’s overwhelmed, or she’s judging herself, or all of the above all at once.

So, in order to be the version of you who has a finished book, you have to stop not writing. In order to be the version of you who feels amazing in her body, you have to stop not working out. In order to be the version of you who’s happily in love, you have to stop avoiding the inner work.

In order to be the version of you who’s living her dream life, you have to stop not showing up for yourself.

That’s it. That’s the work.

And in the midst of taking the action, you will inevitably come face to face with all the reasons you were avoiding it in the first place. And you’ll have to negotiate with those parts of you, and tend to your inner child, and embrace your shadow, in order to keep doing the thing.

I’m not saying it’s easy work, but it’s actually quite simple. Much more simple than we make it out to be. We only stay stuck because we’re so committed to being loyal to our past selves, that we’re scared to give our future self a real shot.

You’ll never be fully ready

I’m one of those people who can spend a lot of time in preparation mode.

I love researching, and planning, and brainstorming, and creating all of the strategy. And if you’re one of those people too, then you’re familiar with the feeling inside that tells you you’re not quite ready yet. There’s just a little more prep work to do. Another certification. Another google search. Another week or two to strategize.

And you never actually move into execution or embodiment.

It’s SO tempting to stay in preparation mode, because it feels so productive. We feel responsible and in control when we’re honing our skills and doing our research. But all we’re really doing is biding our time. Pushing the start date out further and further until we lose motivation entirely or convince ourselves that it’s not a good idea after all.

I can’t tell you how many good ideas I’ve lost to this cycle.

My success finally started showing up, not because I’d struck gold with the perfect idea and perfect timing, but because I committed to relentless action. I committed to taking small steps every single day, whether I felt like it or not.

I stopped not writing.

So, what is it for you?

What’s the thing you need to stop not doing? I know that it’s been calling you, tugging at your sleeves begging you to say yes. And what if you did? What if you just decided to become the person who does the thing?

You should know that the world would like to meet that version of you. We’re out here waiting for you to show up as your most authentic self. Create the thing. Write the book. Take the trip. Live the life that makes others light up with curiosity.

And most of all, make sure you do it with love.

with love for all versions of you,

Megs

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Closing The Gap

If you’ve been finding it challenging to step into the identity of your favorite, most open-hearted self, this is for you. Most of us have a big gap between who we’re showing up as and who we hope to be. And we keep “manifesting” from that not-there-yet version, then wondering why we feel stuck. The work is to use somatic and subconscious principles to close the gap. My new guide helps you do just that. With 4 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day emotional capacity challenge, you’ll begin to create your favorite self. Grab it here for just $37.

I'm ready to close the gap

You can’t do that anymore, ok?

Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self” - out now! Click here to order.

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Sorry, I thought I’d get straight to the point. Because I’ve spent a decade helping women choose themselves, raise their standards in love, and show up more fully in their own desire. And what those years have taught me is that the low effort guy will always take advantage of the lover girl’s big heart. He will benefit from her warmth and openness, without reciprocating the love she pours into the people in her life.

He’ll breadcrumb just enough to keep you around, but he will make you feel like you’re constantly auditioning for his love. There won’t be a moment where you feel like you can finally settle into the relationship, because he’s not building a foundation that you can trust. He’s half in at best, and your heart simply doesn’t work that way.

For a while you’ll try to convince yourself that this is enough. That maybe your sensitivity and longing is too much, and it’s your job to shrink it. That it’s just your anxious attachment that needs managing. And that the good moments with him are worth the crazy-making feeling of never knowing where you stand with him and if it’s really going anywhere.

But it’s not enough. And it never will be, not for someone like you.

A lover girl (or boy, this goes both ways) needs someone to match their freak. You need a love that sees the level of devotion that comes naturally to you and says “bet”.

Which you might be thinking doesn’t exist. Because if it did, surely you’d have seen it by now, right? So of course you’ve convinced yourself to settle if you can’t count on something better coming along.

But here’s the thing, you’ve been experiencing the world through a very specific filter.

Our entire sense of self, our identity, is built upon the experiences, beliefs and conditioning of our past. And if you have a big heart, I’m willing to bet big money that your sensitivity and intensity has gotten you hurt at some point. That people have told you to your face that you’re too much. Or that what you’re asking for is unrealistic. Or you went all in and they still didn’t choose you.

So, you’re left with the belief that you must be the problem. And then you go out into the world prepared to edit and shapeshift yourself in order to get love. You do whatever you were taught you must in order to belong. And one thing about our brains is that they’re predictive, meaning-making machines. We unconsciously seek out people who will confirm that narratives we hold about ourselves and the world around us.

So if you believe that juicy, open-hearted, playful, reciprocal love is non-existent, you simply won’t see it, even when it’s there. It won’t exist in your reality. And if you believe you have to shrink yourself to be loved, you’ll consistently attract people who require you to do so.

From a neuroscientific standpoint, you have to feed your brain new, emotionally charged information that reflects what you want to see more of. Meaning: you have to visualize, think and feel your way into the possibility that there are people out there who love as big as you love and are also seeking to be in relationship with someone like you.

But more than that, you have to take new action.

You can’t keep hanging on to the low effort situationship out of fear that that this is as good as it gets, or hope that they’ll change for you. Because each time they neglect to text you when they say they will, or they don’t make the effort to plan dates or remember your favorite flowers, or they shut down when you try to have an emotional conversation, little pieces of you will fade away. Until eventually, you’re left with a jaded version of you who is too scared to even hope that there’s something better out there.

I don’t want that for you. I’ve been there, and it’s excruciating and demoralizing.

What a want for you is a life full of love and possibility and joy…the kind you know you’re meant to live. I want you to have friends and lovers and whatever kind of romantic partner you dream of, all of whom remind you how needed your heart is in this world. I want you to have people you remind you that it’s healing to let yourself be fully seen. And I want you to have people who don’t ever make you question if you’re too much or not enough or anything but imperfectly lovable.

And in order for you to have all of that, I need you to actually claim it.

Your work is to fully own your lover girl nature, and to step into the identity of someone who knows that love is who you are. That you don’t have to perform for it or earn it. You simply exude it and it bounces right back to you from the most unexpected places.

Your work is to step into the awareness that your love is medicinal. It actually heals people. And we need more of that, so that means it’s your responsibility not to shrink yourself, ever. Not for the low effort people you’ve been hoping will choose you, not for anything.

Your love is your superpower. Thanks for sharing it with us…and don’t forget to let us pour back into you too.

with love,

Megs

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Closing The Gap

If you’ve been finding it challenging to step into the identity of your favorite, most open-hearted self, this is for you. Most of us have a big gap between who we’re showing up as and who we hope to be. And we keep “manifesting” from that not-there-yet version, then wondering why we feel stuck. The work is to use somatic and subconscious principles to close the gap. My new guide helps you do just that. With 4 guided audios, scripting practices, and a 7-day emotional capacity challenge, you’ll begin to create your favorite self. Grab it here for just $37.

Closing The Gap Guide

The kind that we’re told will swoop in, kiss all the places it hurts, and give us a happily ever after.

Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self” - out now! Click here to order.

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I wanted the same love story that was sold to every little girl in fairytales. Real original, I know.

The only problem? I kept choosing the wrong guys. I didn’t choose the Prince Charming’s, I chose the ones who made me feel insane for believing that love even existed in the first place. But I didn’t let the dream die. I read books like “Calling In The One” and did every manifestation ritual that promised me true love.

And I hate to admit it, but my entire sense of self worth was riding on whether or not some man showed up and chose me. The longer I spent single, the worse I felt about myself.

I remember when I was about twenty-four, I knew a woman who was thirty-eight at the time and single. She was a lovely woman, incredibly beautiful, smart, successful, and funny. But in my mind, she was failing. She must have done something wrong to still be alone at her big age. (subtle foreshadowing).

Whatever she messed up, I wanted to avoid it. I became more and more obsessed with being the “best” version of myself, all while continuing to waste my time on emotionally unavailable men, hoping I could turn one of them into The One and finally quench the growing anxiety in my chest.

“Don’t be a crazy cat lady”

When I was growing up, the standard media narrative was that if a woman was single past thirty, her life was over and it was entirely her fault. She must’ve been too much. Too loud. Too weird. Too big. Too many cats. Or she’s not enough. Not pretty enough. Not thin enough. Not funny enough. It seemed like such a precarious balancing act, being the exact right amount of enoughness that would attract a guy but then not scare him off once he got to know you.

So I learned, like many girls and young women do, to be a people pleasing chameleon shell of myself without any strong opinions of my own. I tried to make myself as likable as possible.

But it turns out, I didn’t actually like that version of me at all.

And thank god I realized it.

I went on a long quest to heal whatever it was inside me that screamed “I’ll do anything if you’ll just love me!” and I learned to finally be the one to choose myself first. I spent a few years healing my attachment wounds and rewiring my subconscious beliefs about love. And then I spent a few years intentionally single. (I wrote all about it in my book Choose Your Self).

Somewhere along that journey I discovered a well-kept secret that changed my life: women can actually be completely happy with rich and fulfilling lives while single.

Shocking! (no genuinely, this shocked me…we’re so conditioned to center men and romantic relationships that I didn’t know it was remotely possible to experience such bliss and fulfillment all on my own).

Now, here’s the thing…

In all of my soul searching, I actually did come to the decision that partnership, and hopefully motherhood, is something I want to experience for myself in this lifetime.

But I also decided that I’m not willing to sacrifice a single one of my values or authentic desires in order to make it happen. I believe that relationships can be some of the most healing, expansive, nourishing opportunities for growth that we have available to us as humans. I really do believe that love (of all kinds) is why we came down here. But what I’m no longer available for is a half-baked, re-traumatizing, almost-love of a relationship just for the sake of not being alone. It’s not worth it, not when I’ve cultivated this beautiful life all on my own.

So, what does that mean?

That means I am currently living out the cautionary tale that once kept me up at night. The horrible thing I agonized over (being single into my thirties), turns out to be the greatest gift of my life. Because what I know now to be true is that no matter who comes and goes, my relationship with my self will always be my greatest love story. And for me to be the kind of wife and mother I someday want to be, I had to meet this version of me first. I couldn’t be the codependent-hungry-ghost for love that I was before, or I would’ve ended up a martyr to my family. Instead, I got the gift of having to find my joy for myself, rather than making it someone else’s responsibility.

I had to take myself on the vacations, and grow my own career, and find my own dream house, and build amazing friendships full of love, and buy myself the damn flowers.

Because guess what? Now that’s my bare minimum standard. Now that I know how well I can be treated, I’m not willing to accept anything less. The refusal to settle is a fierce commitment to self that few are willing to forge through the fire to make.

But I think we’re turning a corner.

I see more and more stories every day of women making their own way, carving out their path and trusting the timing of their life. I see stories of women who “played by the rules” and got married early in life, only to be sharing about the liberation of their divorces in their forties and fifties.

We’re seeing, in real time, what happens when women finally get permission to choose themselves.

And I wonder how differently my experience of my love life might’ve been in my twenties if I’d had stories like these to give me hope. Because now the cautionary tales are coming from those women who DID rush to settle down and wish they hadn’t. They tell young women, “take your time, this is the most important decision you’ll ever make.” And they’re right.

Who you choose to partner with will impact every area of your life from your health to your finances to your home to how you spend your holidays. Make sure you know yourself and what you want for your future before hitching it to someone who may not have your best interests at heart.

I like to make it very clear that I am not anti-relationship or anti-love. I am anti-self-abandonment.

I am a stand for you getting the fullest, most love-filled, most beautiful and authentic version of your life imaginable. But in order for that to happen, you have to do the brave work of actually meeting your most authentic self, and filtering out all the people and places and situations that aren’t a match for you. You have to build an identity that is fully yours before you can become someone else’s.

And I believe in your ability to do that, no matter what’s happened so far or where you’re at right now.

Maybe you’re 25, and nervously reading this hoping that you’re not still single at my age. It’s okay, I once felt that way too.

Maybe you’re 35, and figuring out that you don’t actually know yourself all that well and feeling overwhelmed at where to start. It’s okay, I once felt that way too.

Or maybe you’re 45, and finally learning to choose yourself for the first time. Welcome to the club.

Or maybe you’re 55, 65, 75 and cheering us on because you wish you’d learned all this sooner. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.

May we all find the courage to live the fullest, most authentic version of OUR lives, regardless of what we’re told they should look like. Because the only cautionary tales we should care about are the ones that warn us how precious and temporary and fast life really is, so we might as well do our best to make it our own while we’re here.

with love,

Megs

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Embodying Her:

This is the in-depth mentorship your nervous system has been waiting for. You’ll get 4 months of identity upgrades with feminine embodiment, guided parts work, somatic healing, subconscious reprogramming, and coaching with like-minded women to support your BIGGEST desires. Click here to explore and join us by Feb 24th (group or 1:1 options available for this cohort).

Join Embodying Her

I don’t know any woman who has been chronically single that hasn’t at some point felt that desperation for someone to JUST TELL HER WHEN IT WILL BE HER TURN!! *alexa, play “the prophecy” by taylor swift*

Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self” - out now! Click here to order.

Share With Love by Megan Sherer

But here’s the cold, hard-to-swallow truth: no one can promise you a soulmate.

Not your dating coach, not your therapist, not your wise old auntie, not your favorite self-help guru or TikTok tarot reader or friendly neighborhood psychic. Even if they do their very best to assure you that someone is coming, they can’t guarantee you the when or the who or the how or the where.

And if you’re anything like twenty-five year old me, some part of you is kicking and screaming in revolt at that statement. I hated not knowing. And I hated being single in a world that told me my worth was a direct reflection of my relationship status. So if you told that sweet, yet deeply frustrated, barely brand new adult, that I am now thirty-five and single…she’d be pissed.

Because what she doesn’t yet know is that there is something even better than knowing when you’ll meet your soulmate: living a full life regardless. And what my deeply anxious younger self would eventually learn is that there’s also something much worse than never finding your soulmate: never finding yourself.

A journey I can almost certainly assure you I wouldn’t have undertaken if I’d had a partner to distract me during my most potent years of self-discovery. (and by the way, those years can happen anytime…like for my mom, who got to discover herself as single woman for the first time after losing her husband in her sixties, only to reluctantly find her next soulmate at 71).

For many years now I’ve focused my work as a somatic therapist on the realm of attachment wounds…basically, helping people understand the specific reasons why love has hurt so much in their lives and how to unravel those patterns so they can choose better and love better, starting with themselves. It’s beautiful work.

And I’d be silly to think that most of my clients don’t come in hoping that our time together will lead them directly (and quickly) to their soulmate. I know this, because I had the same secret intention when I first sought out this kind of healing for myself. I was motivated to do it because I thought it would bring me closer to my dream partner.

And in many ways, it did. Just not in the whole physical time & space sense. Doing this work helped me find my own edges. It helped me define my sense of self. My boundaries. My desires. My hopes and dreams and fears. The things that turn me on and bring me joy, unbiased by the input of a man I’m trying to impress. Discovering all of those parts of me helped me become infinitely clearer on the qualities I desire in a partner, and the kind of life I want to build with them.

In getting specific and owning these desires, I began to feel emotionally and energetically closer to my partner. The one I haven’t met yet. Because that specificity allowed me to move from “I hope someone loves and chooses me one day” to “I love and choose myself so fiercely, I can already feel the intimacy of being with someone who loves this version of me too.”

But beyond all that clarity about this future-partner, my journey of healing and self-discovery brought me to a version of my life I didn’t know was a possibility. It’s like a secret trap-door opened in the fabric of reality the moment I chose myself, and things started unfolding for me that I once believed I could only access in a relationship. The dream house, the adventures and vacations, the romantic little every day moments…my life started to fill with a kind of love I really believed only one special hypothetical person was supposed to give me.

This is what I know:

I could meet my person tomorrow at the grocery store.

Or next month at that concert I booked solo.

Or next year on a trip I have yet to schedule.

Or I could reconnect with someone I met years ago but forgot about, only now the timing is right.

I could meet him while I’m actively looking, or when I least expect it.

And sure, there’s always the possibility that I don’t meet someone (though this is the least likely of all).

And I have no way of knowing which it’ll be.

So with that guarantee in my back pocket, what can I do with what I know?

I can live the most beautiful freaking version of my life imaginable, because it’s not waiting for a soulmate to begin. It wasn’t on hold ten years ago and it’s not on hold now. the time will keep passing, and I want to make damn sure I lived it in a way that makes me proud.

And I might not know you, but I want you to do the same.

I want you to take this terrifyingly liberating knowledge - that no one can promise you a soulmate - and go out and decide how to fill your life with that kind of love anyway. Right now. I want you to know the joy of standing on the edge of a cliffside you always dreamt of visiting, wind in your hair and voice in the wind. (a practice I highly recommend btw, the ladies who attended my Ireland retreat last year all shared the world’s most cathartic and primal scream off the Cliffs of Moher…scared some tourists, but a phenomenal experience overall).

I want you to feel the bass rippling through your body as you favorite band plays your favorite song and tears stream down your face because you’re so grateful you decided to work through your social anxiety and go alone. I want you to experience the luxury of taking up the entire bed and creating life on your terms and still holding your tender desire for partnership because we’re humans and it’s totally normal to want love. It can all coexist, and you can hold it all, the beauty and the intensity.

No one can promise you a soulmate. But only you can promise yourself a beautiful life.

with love,

Megs

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Embodying Her:

This is the in-depth mentorship your nervous system has been waiting for. You’ll get 4 months of identity upgrades with feminine embodiment, guided parts work, somatic healing, subconscious reprogramming, and coaching with like-minded women to support your BIGGEST desires. Click here to explore and join us by Feb 24th (group or 1:1 options available for this cohort).

And do not misunderstand me when I say regulation - I do not mean becoming subdued, falling into line, becoming more manageable, or acceptable, or presentable.

Why? Because we don’t need to calm down, we need the CAPACITY for our justified rage, grief, sadness, indignation, horror. As well as yes, for our joy, connection, community, love, pleasure, and desire.

We need more of a capacity to feel without running or fixing or shutting down.

Hi, thanks for being here! With Love is a newsletter meant to inspire, uplift, and connect, all in the name of love. The very best ways to support my work right now are to subscribe and share! And even better, order a copy of my book “Choose Your Self” - out now! Click here to order.

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I’m a highly sensitive human. I feel things really deeply.

And that used to seem like a curse. Even that word “sensitive” was wielded at me like an insult. My sensitivity was often inconvenient for other people. It caused them to come face to face with uncomfortable truths that they weren’t ready to confront and to be accountable in ways they didn’t want to and be vulnerable to a degree they weren’t prepared for.

The most sensitive person in the room is often like the canary in the coal mine. They’re an oracle of sorts. They can see and sense and name things that the average person isn’t tuned into. And as a result, they’re often made to feel pretty crazy for it. And since no one wants to feel like the insane loner at the party, we learn to override or stuff down or cut off our ability to feel. Because, especially as kids or young adults, we’d rather belong than be authentic.

But at a certain point, we can’t keep outrunning what our bodies are trying to tell us. The bill comes due eventually. The feelings have to be felt.

For me, there was a time where all that sensitivity would either overwhelm or immobilize me. I didn’t know how to be with it let alone do anything productive with it or translate it into relational growth. And most of us fall into patterns of freeze & fawn when that’s the case. It feels safer to our nervous system to disconnect or appease, whichever allows for greater security and connection in the moment.

If you grew up in a household where having feelings was punishable or where speaking out was a threat to your belonging, your nervous system learned to keep you safe by telling you to ignore those feelings, that they must be wrong. It was a brilliant coping mechanism back then.

But now more than ever, we need more people to be able to feel their outrage and still take action from a clear and grounded place.

That’s the beauty of regulation. Not numbing or diminishing what you feel, but learning to inhabit it and do something with it. We need more people fully alive in their hearts and bodies, grief and rage and joy and all.

Somewhere along the way, wellness and healing culture were co-opted by an agenda to keep us small, and obedient, and numb. It was the perfect trojan horse. Because we had already been trained to be obsessed with our body image and dedicated to pursuing good health. So when we were told that “regulating” and “fixing” every problem or emotion that we have is the holy grail of wellness, we listened. It’s easier to control a subdued and submissive population.

But the real marker of wellbeing is our ability to fully inhabit our bodies, our emotions and our lives.

It’s our ability to feel massive feelings without allowing them to collapse us or interrupt our intuition.

It’s our ability to speak out and advocate for what we need rather than accepting the status quo.

The real wellness goal is to become someone who is led by the wisdom of her body rather than the fear-mongering of a social media guru or news outlet or “health” conglomerate.

And so, it’s time we return to the practice of being in our bodies, speaking their language, and translating it in a way that allows us to have a greater capacity to live a full life.

A life that sometimes demands our rage and indignation to correct systemic injustices.

A life that often demands our presence to enjoy the beauty and pleasure that is all around us.

And a life that always demands that we remember that at our very core, love is who we are and our bodies are how we feel, express, and know that.

with so much love for whatever is breaking your heart right now,

Megs

If something in this letter landed, you’ll know which one is for you.

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Embodying Her:

This is the in-depth mentorship your nervous system has been waiting for. You’ll get 4 months of identity upgrades with feminine embodiment, guided parts work, somatic healing, subconscious reprogramming, and coaching with like-minded women to support your BIGGEST desires. Click here to explore and join us by Feb 3rd (group or 1:1 options available for this new program).

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I am currently feeling super heartbroken! And clearly excited about it, so let me explain…

You see, I haven’t been properly heartbroken in at least six years, maybe more. Well, not counting the heartbreak that I feel 7-12 times per week just existing as a sensitive human in an overwhelming world with a lot of collective pain. So I guess I mean, I haven’t felt romantically heartbroken in six years.

And that is in large part due to the fact that I spent most of that time intentionally single. After being perpetually heartbroken throughout my twenties, I decided to take some solo time to finally break big patterns and heal my attachment wounds. Being a lover girl who perpetually yearned for aloof guys wasn’t working very well for me.

So, I went straight to the source of the reasons that I kept choosing those emotionally unavailable guys, and I worked every single day to build the life for myself I’d been waiting for a partner to give me. I sifted through some heavy wounds and confronted patterns in myself that were *uncomfy* to say the least. But I stayed committed to choosing myself. And it worked!

I loved not having my focus stolen by unrequited romances. I loved having so much of my own energy and power back. And most of all, I loved my single life so much, I became pretty reluctant to give it up. I wasn’t avoiding intimacy—I was finally building it with myself.

I traveled when and where I wanted, I danced in the kitchen while cooking meals I loved, I pursued my wildest dreams. I started trusting the timing of my life and saying yes to where it wanted to lead me.

And what do you know, it led me right into the middle of a meet cute moment straight from a rom-com. We locked eyes in a grocery store and both of us felt something we hadn’t in quite some time…something different, something special. We both quietly wondered if this could be it. And for 2.5 months, we gave it everything we had to see if we were right.

But it turns out, it wasn’t “it.” And that’s okay!

Why is it okay? Because the fact that I’m feeling this pain tells me that I’m fully living. I didn’t hold anything back out of fear of getting hurt. In fact, I doubled down on vulnerability even when I knew I was probably going to get hurt. I didn’t want to leave anything on the table, and I know that the risk of heartbreak is the price we pay for being able to love. For being able to care deeply.

Please don’t misunderstand me…I’m not trying to sugarcoat or bypass the pain or pretend that this aspect of the human experience doesn’t hurt like hell. It does!

I’ve spent the past week or two crying, grieving, and letting myself feel the disappointment of it not working out how I’d hoped. But I’ve also spent this time quietly appreciating the joy of being human, and celebrating how much I’ve grown.

You see, in the past, I would’ve handled this situation very differently. Without getting too deep into specifics, this heartbreak pretty much came down to bad timing and slightly different values that were ultimately deal breakers. Deal breakers that I’m only (keenly) aware of because of all the inner work I’ve done.

Younger me would’ve abandoned my values and needs in a heartbeat in order to make it work. I would’ve made myself smaller and hid my emotions and contorted myself into the belief that this was enough.

But I didn’t do that this time.

And that’s to be celebrated! This is all to be celebrated…

• I’m not telling myself the story that I wasn’t good enough.

• I’m not pressuring him to be someone he’s not.

• I’m not numbing my feelings and pretending it didn’t matter.

• I’m not collapsing into the pain and story of old wounds.

• I’m not changing myself in order to be chosen.

• And I’m not making this mean that love isn’t coming for me.

This relationship lasted exactly as long as it was meant to. For two and a half months, we both got to experience an incredible connection that taught us a lot. Just because it didn’t last longer than that, doesn’t mean it didn’t work out how it was meant to. We clearly came into each other’s lives for a reason.

We get so fixated on our plans sometimes that we lose perspective.

How do you know that the heartbreak you’re now feeling isn’t exactly what you needed to set you on a new path you’re meant to be on? What if “the one that got away” was actually just “the one before the one”…what if you were simply being expanded and prepared for what comes next?

We don’t get to know the why while it’s happening.

So, all we can do is feel the truth of the moment. That might mean crying to Bon Iver while you walk in the rain (ps, if you see me crying in public with headphones in, know that I am exactly where I want to be).

It might mean doing something brave and letting yourself be more vulnerable than you’ve ever been, or going after a big dream of yours.

And it might mean looking up from your phone at the grocery store long enough to bump into the next chapter of your love story.

The point is, today I’m sad and my heart is achy and I’m weirdly okay with that. I don’t need it to change (though it will eventually, because it always does). I just need to let myself feel it fully while it’s here. And what a cool fucking feeling it is!!

Seriously, I know that sounds a little crazy but stay with me for a moment…

I am only feeling this overwhelming mix of emotions because something mattered to me deeply enough to rattle me. I let myself fall. I let myself care. I let myself experience the way this person pressed on the wounds from my past, and the way he also held them with respect and tenderness. Our time together helped heal some things for me, and that is so damn beautiful. And yet, it still had to end…so of course that hurts!

Of course your heart aches when your expectations aren’t met. Of course you’re sad when someone can’t stay in your life, no matter how much you care for each other. Of course you’re frustrated that you can’t predict the future and how it’s all going to work out.

Welcome to being human!! Heartbreak is the price of admission. Uncertainty is guaranteed. And pain is inevitable.

You can choose to let your heart expand or contract as a result. It’s completely up to you. As for me, I will always choose more love, especially if the alternative is numbness.

Or as The Lumineers say, “it’s better to feel pain than nothing at all.”

with so much love for whatever is breaking your heart right now,

Megs

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If you’re moving through something tender too, you’re not alone. These moments stretch us in ways nothing else can — but they don’t have to collapse you. If you want support learning how to feel big emotions without abandoning yourself, I have a few ways to walk with you through that process.

For this week, I’m offering 40% off my Regulated Roots ebook with code FRIDAY, $333 off my 6-month 1:1 program, and $250 off the Somatic Yoga Teacher Training.

If something in this letter landed, you’ll know which one is for you.

Somatic Yoga Teacher Training

The Art & Science of Somatic Yoga is an advanced 300 hour teacher training for anyone ready to integrate nervous system science and embodied wisdom into their life and work. It’s for teachers, therapists, coaches, guides, and curious explorers who are ready for a more embodied and grounded way of being, and speciality certifications that can advance your career. We start January 8, 2026. Click here to explore (and use code Substack to get a $250 program discount).

Core Wound Alchemy:

This is the in-depth somatic deep dive your nervous system has been waiting for. You’ll get 6 months of 1:1 holistic therapy support with guided parts work, somatic healing, subconscious reprogramming, and coaching to support your growth. Click here to explore (and mention Substack to get a $333 program discount).