What building Casa Motherful is teaching me about leadership, resourcing women, community, the Divine Mother, and creating the world we say we want.

There is a big difference between having a vision for community and actually living in one.

I am learning that every day.

When Motherful Colombia began taking shape, I knew I wanted to create something that centered mothers and women. I wanted to create spaces for healing, connection and belonging. I wanted to provide direct support to mothers who needed it, bring women together, reconnect us with the Earth, and eventually acquire land where we could build something much bigger: a regenerative village.

I have spent years thinking about intentional community, ecovillages, spirituality, healing, permaculture and regenerative culture. I have studied these things. Visited communities. Sat in ceremonies. Participated in trainings. Filled notebooks with visions of what another way of living could look like.

But there comes a point when life asks you to stop studying the village and start building one.

Motherful Colombia has become that initiation for me.

From an Idea to a House

The seeds of this chapter really began growing in 2025 through my relationship with Motherful and the deeper question at the center of its work:

What happens when we actually resource mothers?

Not another workshop teaching women how to survive without enough.

Not another demand for exhausted women to become more resilient.

Resources.

Real Mother-loving Resources!!! (Que background music: Gimme the loot) 🤣

Money. Housing. Food. Community. Support. Opportunity. Rest.

In November 2025, I traveled & met Motherful co-founders Heidi and Lisa and a group of women at Nashira, a women-centered community here in Colombia. Then, in January, I traveled to southern Colombia for an ecovillage gathering, continuing a journey I had already been on for years around intentional community, Ubuntu, regenerative culture and what it means to organize life differently.

The House Came Before the Plan

Motherful Colombia didn’t begin with a perfectly mapped-out strategic plan.

It began with a relationship, a possibility, and then a very big leap of faith.

Since Heidi and I first met, we had been in conversation about how our work might come together. Motherful had been exploring the possibility of opening chapters in other places, and over time we began talking about what it could look like for Colombia to become one of them.

But at that point, it was still a conversation. An idea we were exploring together.

Then I needed to find somewhere new to live.

In March, I came to look at what I thought was an apartment here in Palomino. When I arrived, the owner explained that instead of renting the property as three separate spaces, she wanted to rent the entire place to one person.

Suddenly, I was standing there faced with a decision I hadn’t planned for.

The rent was almost three times what I would normally pay. I hadn’t arrived that day intending to rent an entire property or launch a new project. There was no carefully prepared Motherful Colombia budget sitting in my bag.

I had to make a decision.

So I did what I have learned to do at some of the biggest crossroads in my life: I checked in with my own internal compass.

And I got a very clear yes.

It didn’t necessarily make logical sense. Financially, it was a huge stretch. But something in me knew that this place was bigger than an apartment.

So I took the leap.

I said yes, and the next day I had the keys.

A few days later, Heidi was already scheduled to come to Colombia for a working retreat with me and several other women from Motherful. I told her what had happened and showed her the space.

And that was when the possibility we had been talking about started becoming real.

What if this was the beginning of Motherful Colombia?

We decided to say yes to that question.

Then we sat down together and started putting structure around what had begun intuitively. We outlined our goals for Motherful Colombia: establishing the chapter, creating consistent women’s circles and gatherings, building relationships with local mothers and community partners, providing direct support to mothers and families, creating safe spaces for healing and connection, developing community programming and eventually a garden, bringing in collaborators and facilitators, and building the systems necessary for the project to grow.

We also created a budget and fundraising plan to support the work.

In other words, the vision didn’t begin with the spreadsheet.

First came the yes.

Then came the responsibility of building the structure capable of holding that yes.

And looking back, I think that moment says a lot about what these first months of Motherful Colombia have taught me about conscious creation and leadership.

Intuition can show you the door.

Faith can give you the courage to walk through it.

But once you walk through the door, leadership requires you to build the structure that can sustain what you’ve called into being.

That has been my real initiation with Motherful Colombia.

The initial yes was intuitive. Building what came after it has required something entirely different from me: planning, fundraising, budgeting, communication, delegation, accountability, relationship-building, adaptability and learning how to lead something that is no longer only mine.

And on Earth Day, April 22, 2026, we officially opened the doors of what had now become Casa Motherful Colombia.

Suddenly the vision had walls.

It had bedrooms and kitchens and floors that needed sweeping. It had bills. It had people coming and going. It had personalities and needs and schedules and misunderstandings.

It became real.

And reality has been one of my greatest teachers.

Support the vision & donate here.

You Cannot Build a Village With a Volunteer Mindset

One of the biggest things I have had to confront is my own understanding of leadership.

Initially, I brought women into Casa Motherful as volunteers. They would contribute several hours to the project and, in exchange, receive housing. It seemed like a reasonable arrangement.

But then I started paying attention to what was actually happening.

They would finish their hours here and then leave to find other work because they still needed money for food and their other basic needs.

And I began asking myself:

How am I supposed to build a team with women who are still in survival mode?

How can I ask someone to invest herself deeply in a collective vision when her nervous system is still asking, How am I going to eat? How am I going to make money? What happens next month?

That realization challenged me.

Because if Motherful is about resourcing women, then that principle cannot only apply to the mothers we serve.

It has to apply to the women building Motherful too.

So we are changing the model.

Right now, two women are living here and becoming part of the Motherful Colombia team. We are providing housing, food and a safe place to live, and we are working to create pathways for them to support themselves. We are also providing a monthly stipend so that their contribution to this project can become something deeper than volunteer labor.

I want them to have the capacity to actually invest themselves in what we are building.

To dream with me.

To take responsibility.

To create.

To lead.

To belong.

And that requires me to take responsibility for building an ecosystem capable of resourcing the people who are giving their life energy to it.

That is a very different kind of leadership that is reflected in how Motherful is organized and governed and also reflected in my relationship and with Heidi. I have already learned so much from her leadership and love.

Thank you Heidi.

Leadership Is Asking More of Me

This project has forced me to look at where I have been trying to do too much myself.

Visionary leadership can easily become: I see it, so I will carry it.

But that isn’t community.

And it certainly isn’t a village.

I am learning that my job isn’t to personally perform every function of Motherful Colombia. My job is increasingly to hold the vision clearly enough that other people can find themselves inside of it.

That means creating structure.

Communicating expectations.

Managing resources.

Fundraising.

Documenting what we are doing.

Building partnerships.

Learning how to delegate.

Having difficult conversations.

Creating accountability without recreating the oppressive systems we say we want to leave behind. And learning when the vision itself needs to change. That last part has been huge.

Motherful Colombia today is not exactly what I imagined when I started. And I think that is a good thing because I don’t want to impose a fixed vision onto a living community.

I want to listen. What do the women here actually need?

What does Palomino need? What are we learning from the people who come through the doors? What isn’t working? Where are we forcing something?

Where is there energy? What wants to emerge?

The vision is becoming clearer because we are doing the work.

Motherful Is Becoming an Ecosystem

And already, with more support around me, things are beginning to move.

We are opening registration for free English classes for local youth. We are beginning Kogui language and culture classes, creating an opportunity to to honor and learn from the ancestral culture and knowledge of this region.

We are creating a regular Sunday women’s circle, where women can gather, eat, practice, connect and build relationships.

We are developing more community classes, events and collaborations and inviting people who have something meaningful to share to come create with us.

We are also beginning to explore micro-businesses that can help generate resources within the ecosystem itself: mushrooms, worm composting, kombucha and fermented foods, a plant nursery, and eventually the return of our community garden.

Because ultimately, I don’t want to build a project that depends forever on someone outside of it sending money.

I want to build an ecosystem capable of generating resources and circulating them.

The Healing Sanctuary is part of that. Women can come stay with us for retreats and residencies, rest, reconnect, practice and experience what we are creating here. Our classes and educational work are part of it. The businesses we build will be part of it.

The question underneath all of it is:

How do we resource women so that women can resource community?

Meeting Today’s Needs While Building Tomorrow

At the same time, regenerative vision doesn’t mean ignoring the needs directly in front of us. One of our goals for September is to provide food baskets for at least 25 local families.

Food.

Basic, tangible support.

Sometimes transformation looks like meditation and healing work. Sometimes it looks like creating new economic systems. And sometimes it looks like making sure there is food in someone’s kitchen this week.

I believe our work has to hold all of those realities.

We have to meet immediate needs while simultaneously asking why those needs exist and what we can build together that changes the conditions underneath them.

That is part of what your donations make possible.

37 People Believed in This

Our fundraising goal for Motherful Colombia this year is $55,000.

So far, 37 people have helped us raise $7,766. Become one of our supporters today.

I cannot talk about the evolution of this project without talking about those 37 people.

Those donations have paid for real things.

They help keep Casa Motherful operating. They help pay for food and supplies. They help us provide support to mothers and families. They help us house and resource the women helping build this project. They make community programming possible.

They bought us something else that is harder to quantify: time to learn.

Time to try something.

Time to discover what didn’t work.

Time for the vision to mature.

Time for me to become more capable of leading it.

And now we still have $47,234 to raise toward our goal.

I am asking for continued support not because I want Motherful Colombia to remain donation-dependent, but because we are in the stage where we are building the infrastructure that can eventually make this ecosystem increasingly regenerative and self-sustaining.

Your donations are helping us build the bridge.

And if you cannot donate, you can still help build that bridge. Share this story. Share our fundraiser. Tell someone why this work matters. Connect us with people, organizations, facilitators, funders or collaborators who may want to become part of what we are creating.

Community has never only been about money.

It is about the circulation of resources, relationships, knowledge, labor, love and opportunity.

The Temple Is Revealing Itself

Underneath all of this practical work, something much deeper has been revealing itself to me.

I have started understanding Casa Motherful as a living temple.

Not a temple because we have declared ourselves holy. A temple because of what we are practicing here.

For me, the Divine Mother represents an intelligence that nurtures life, restores relationship, receives, creates, protects, feeds and regenerates.

And when I look at the world around us, I see how desperately that intelligence is needed.

We have built cultures around extraction.

Extraction from the Earth.

Extraction from women’s bodies.

Extraction from mothers.

Extraction from workers.

Extraction from communities.

Extraction from ourselves.

So what does it mean to create a place organized around another frequency?

A place where we practice care without losing accountability. Where we resource rather than extract. Where spiritual practice is connected to how we eat, work, relate, resolve conflict, use money and care for the Earth.

That is what I mean when I call Casa Motherful a temple.

We are trying to embody something here.

From the Heart of the World

There is another layer to all of this that feels deeply personal.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is known by its Indigenous peoples as the Heart of the World.

And somehow I find myself here, trying to build a project whose entire evolution keeps bringing me back to the heart.

In the Cards of Destiny system, my birth card is the Seven of Hearts.

The Seven of Hearts has become an important mirror for my own life. I understand its path as an initiation into spiritual love: learning through relationships, releasing attachment and fear, and continually being asked to move toward a higher expression of love.

And lately I have been seeing Motherful through that lens too.

Maybe my work isn’t simply to teach people about love, consciousness, spirituality or healing.

Maybe my work is to create conditions where we can practice them in relationship. Because it is easy to be spiritual alone. Community will show you where your spirituality actually lives.

Can I remain in my heart when there is conflict?

Can I love and still have boundaries?

Can I give without martyring myself?

Can I receive?

Can I lead without controlling?

Can we hold individual needs while still tending to the whole?

Can we build systems where care and responsibility coexist?

These are spiritual questions to me.

And Motherful Colombia is becoming the place where I am being asked to live the answers.

Practicing the Village Now

For years, the bigger dream has included land.

A village.

Gardens.

Homes.

Children running around.

Women building businesses.

Food growing.

Healing spaces.

People learning together.

A community designed around life.

I still want that.

But Motherful Colombia has taught me that we don’t need to wait for the land before we begin becoming the people capable of living there.

We can practice the village now.

Around a kitchen table.

During morning practice.

While making sure another woman has food.

While teaching a child.

While learning an Indigenous language.

While growing mushrooms.

While sitting in circle.

While figuring out how to share money and responsibility.

While having the uncomfortable conversation instead of walking away.

While asking what I have that can resource someone else and what someone else has that can resource me.

Maybe that is how the new world actually begins.

Not when somebody finally gives us enough land or money to build the perfect community. But when we begin practicing another way of relating with whatever we have, wherever we are.

That is what Motherful Colombia is becoming.

The vision is still evolving. I expect it to continue evolving because we are listening, learning and allowing the work itself to teach us what is needed.

But I can see it more clearly now.

A sanctuary.

A school.

A temple.

A community hub.

A place for women to be resourced.

A place for mothers and families to receive tangible support.

A place for spiritual practice and ancestral remembering.

A place for ecological regeneration and livelihood creation.

And eventually, I hope, the seed of a much larger village.

To the 37 people who have already donated, thank you for believing in something that was still becoming. You helped give this vision a home and the opportunity to reveal itself.

And to everyone reading this who feels something in your heart as you read these words:

Come build with us.

Donate here and share this link with your people: https://motherful.networkforgood.com/projects/297306-motherful-colombia-seed-funding

Donate. Share the fundraiser. Become a monthly supporter. Come stay at the sanctuary. Teach something. Collaborate with us. Connect us with resources. Tell someone about what is happening here.

There are many ways to participate in a village.

We are still at the beginning.

But the seed is in the ground.

The roots are growing.

And here, in the Heart of the World, we are learning how to practice the village now.

With love,
Shanika

Founder, Motherful Colombia
Casa Motherful, Palomino, Colombia

We live in a culture obsessed with immediacy.

Same-day delivery. Thirty-second videos. Instant downloads. Before-and-after transformations compressed into fifteen seconds. “Manifest this overnight.” “Change your life in seven days.” “Do this one thing and watch what happens.”

We are constantly being sold the moment of arrival while rarely being shown the long, repetitive, sometimes boring road it took to get there.

And I think it has distorted our relationship with change.

We want the new body.

The peaceful nervous system.

The successful business.

The healthy relationship.

The spiritual awakening.

The disciplined morning routine.

The healed version of ourselves.

But we want it now.

And when it doesn’t happen quickly enough, we start wondering if something is wrong. Maybe this isn’t working. Maybe I chose the wrong thing. Maybe I’m not capable of changing. Maybe I need another method, another teacher, another program, another burst of inspiration.

But what if nothing is wrong?

What if change simply takes time?

Join the 30-Day Meditation Challenge → https://www.shanikaheals.com/333

It took time to become who you are

Think about it. You did not develop your current habits overnight.

You didn’t develop your relationship with food, exercise, money, love, conflict, your body, your phone, productivity or rest in a weekend.

Your emotional patterns were repeated.

Your coping mechanisms were repeated.

Your beliefs were repeated.

Your reactions were repeated.

Some of them have been rehearsed for years. Others for decades.

Eventually, repetition becomes familiarity.

Familiarity becomes automatic.

And automatic begins to feel like you.

So why would we expect to reverse years of conditioning in three enthusiastic days?

There is a popular idea that it takes 21 days to form a habit. The truth is more interesting.

The 21-day idea can be traced back to observations made by plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in the 1960s about how long people seemed to take to adjust to changes. Later research on actual habit formation found that there isn’t one magical number. One widely cited study found that participants took an average of around 66 days for a new behavior to become more automatic, with considerable variation between people and behaviors.

Which actually makes the point even stronger:

Real change requires repetition.

Twenty-one days isn’t a magical finish line.

Thirty days isn’t either.

But something powerful begins to happen when you stop treating change as an event and start treating it as a practice & process.

Motivation will abandon you

I love motivation. There is something beautiful about that moment when you decide:

Enough.

I’m going to change.

I’m going to start working out.

I’m going to meditate every morning.

I’m going to write the book.

I’m going to stop drinking.

I’m going to start the business.

I’m finally going to do the thing I’ve been saying I want to do.

That energy is real.

But it is also temporary.

We see it every January.

The gyms fill up.

People buy new planners.

Everyone has goals.

Everyone is becoming a new person.

And then February arrives.

Motivation was never designed to carry the entire journey.

Motivation can start the fire. Discipline keeps it burning.

There will be days when you feel inspired.

And there will be days when you absolutely do not.

There will be days when your practice feels beautiful and expansive and you feel connected to God and life and yourself.

And there will be days when you are tired, irritated, distracted and would rather scroll on your phone.

Your future cannot depend entirely upon which version of you wakes up that morning.

This is where discipline becomes sacred.

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Discipline is remembering your sacred why

I don’t think discipline has to mean punishment. I don’t think it means bullying yourself into submission.

To me, discipline becomes something entirely different when it is connected to a sacred why.

Why are you doing this?

Why does your health matter?

Why does your healing matter?

Why does building this business matter?

Why does becoming more emotionally regulated matter?

Why does breaking this generational pattern matter?

Why does your spiritual practice matter?

Your why has to become bigger than the discomfort of the moment.

Because the moment will test you. There will be days when you fall off.

Fine.

Come back.

Missing one day does not have to become missing ten. A difficult week doesn’t have to become abandoning yourself for another year.

The practice isn’t perfection. The practice is returning.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I had to practice this today

I’ve been thinking about discipline a lot lately.

In the Cardology system that I utilize, I’m in the middle of my Saturn period, and I have felt this increased call toward structure, responsibility, discipline and taking my physical health more seriously.

I’ve been recommitting to my health goals and wanting to lose a few pounds, get stronger, move my body consistently and become more disciplined about the promises I make to myself.

And today?

I did not want to work out.

At all.

My energy felt low. I felt a little off. I delayed starting.

I could have picked up my phone.

I could have scrolled.

I could have found something that gave me a quick hit of stimulation and temporarily distracted me from how I was feeling.

And nobody would have known.

Except me.

Eventually I told myself:

No. We’re doing it anyway.

So I started.

That’s it.

I didn’t wait to magically become motivated.

I got up and began.

And something shifted.

I finished my workout.

Then I went for a run.

And by the time I was finished, I felt completely different from how I felt when I started.

Not because exercise magically solved everything in my life, but because I had taken uncomfortable energy and moved it somewhere constructive.

And underneath the physical benefits was something even more important:

I had kept a promise to myself.

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from that. Confidence because you have evidence that when things get uncomfortable, you can still show up.

Dopamine isn’t the enemy

We hear a lot about “dopamine culture” now, and sometimes dopamine gets talked about as though it’s a bad chemical we need to detox from.

It isn’t.

Dopamine is essential. It plays important roles in motivation, learning, movement and our brain’s reward systems.

The problem isn’t dopamine. The problem is the environment we’ve created around ourselves. Our phones offer us novelty on demand.

Scroll.

Reward.

Scroll.

Something new.

Scroll.

Another notification.

Another video.

Another outrage.

Another beautiful person.

Another thing to buy.

Another little possibility of reward.

We can become accustomed to reaching for the fastest available relief whenever discomfort appears.

But many of the most meaningful rewards in life are delayed.

Building strength requires repeatedly exercising before you see the body change.

Building a business requires working before you know whether the idea will succeed.

Deep intimacy requires having difficult conversations instead of escaping them.

Learning requires being bad at something before becoming good.

Healing requires sitting with things we’d sometimes rather avoid.

Meditation requires meeting the mind exactly as it is.

A meaningful life requires developing the capacity to remain present during the space between effort and reward.

That space is where character is built.

Doing difficult things changes your relationship with yourself

Every time you meet appropriate difficulty instead of automatically escaping it, you give yourself new information.

I can tolerate discomfort.

I can finish something.

I can feel an emotion without immediately reacting to it.

I can be tired and still keep a commitment.

I can fail and begin again.

I can do hard things.

The brain learns through experience and repetition. The patterns we repeatedly practice become easier to access.

This is one reason I believe intentionally doing challenging things can be so powerful. Not suffering for suffering’s sake. Not overriding your body’s genuine need for rest. But developing the discernment to know the difference between:

I need rest and I don’t feel like it.

Those are not always the same thing.

Meditation taught me how to return

This is one of the greatest gifts meditation has given me. I’ve practiced meditation for more than 20 years across different practices, traditions and techniques.

And meditation has changed far more than what happens when I sit down and close my eyes. It has changed the way I meet life.

Meditation is fundamentally a practice of returning. Your mind wanders. Return.

A thought appears.

Notice it.

Return.

An emotion moves through you.

Feel it.

Return.

You get distracted.

Return.

You miss your practice.

Come back tomorrow.

Return. Return. Return.

Eventually you realize this is not only meditation.

This is life.

You don’t have to “stop thinking” to meditate

One of the biggest misconceptions I hear from people is:

“I can’t meditate because I can’t quiet my mind.”

Of course your mind isn’t quiet. That’s what minds do. They think.

Trying to violently force your thoughts away can become another form of struggle.

What I’ve learned over two decades of practice is that we can instead create the conditions that allow meditation to arise more naturally.

We work with the breath. We work with the body. We regulate and settle the nervous system. We give the mind somewhere to place its attention.

We learn to witness thoughts without automatically becoming every thought. And gradually, moments of stillness begin appearing on their own.

This is what I teach.

This is why I created the 30-Day Meditation Challenge

I didn’t create a 30-day practice because I think thirty days will magically fix your life. I created it because transformation needs somewhere to begin. And thirty days gives us enough time to move beyond the honeymoon phase.

Beyond the initial excitement.

Beyond I’m going to change my whole life now!

Into: I can show up today.

Imagine what happens when, for thirty days, you deliberately practice returning to yourself.

You breathe.

You sit.

You observe.

You regulate.

You move.

You listen.

You begin again.

Day after day.

You aren’t only practicing meditation. You’re practicing becoming someone who shows up for herself. And that identity can ripple into everything.

Your health.

Your relationships.

Your emotional regulation.

Your work.

Your creativity.

Your boundaries.

Your spiritual practice.

Your ability to stay grounded when life doesn’t go according to plan.

Meditation has helped me cultivate greater clarity, presence, emotional awareness, nervous-system regulation and the ability to create space between what happens to me and how I respond.

And after more than 20 years of exploring different approaches, I’ve brought together the practices I’ve found most useful into this journey.

We work with breathwork.

Meditation.

Mindfulness.

Gentle movement.

Concentration.

Self-observation.

Reflection.

And practices you can actually take with you into your everyday life. You don’t have to be “good” at meditation. You don’t have to have a quiet mind. You don’t have to already be disciplined.

You just have to be willing to return.

And if you miss a day?

Return.

This is the practice.

You’ll receive access to the recordings, so you can move through the entire journey and return to the practices whenever you need support.

The challenge is $33.

Thirty days of deliberately practicing the thing our culture makes increasingly difficult: being present.

Not chasing the next hit. Not waiting for motivation. Not demanding an overnight transformation.

Showing up.

Breathing.

Doing the work.

Keeping the promise. And becoming, little by little, the person capable of creating the life you say you want.

Change rarely happens overnight.

It happens in the seemingly insignificant choices you make over and over again until one day you look back and realize you are no longer the person who started.

Join the 30-Day Meditation Challenge → https://www.shanikaheals.com/333

On Monday I broke my front tooth after opening a coconut I was using to make coconut milk for meal prep.

I was in the kitchen preparing food, then ran downstairs to bust open the coconut. I came back upstairs, bit into a piece of the coconut meat and then it happened. My front tooth broke.

It was definitely a WTF moment. Like, did I really just break my front tooth on coconut meat? The coconut meat was very hard, but damn, I just wasn’t expecting this to happen.

I didn’t actually have much time to process what had just happened.

I had arranged a hike and a Shaolin Kung Fu session for my friend Gerald, who was visiting, so he could have some adventures while I had more time to rest and cook. He went on the hike, did Kung Fu, and I went on with the day with a broken front tooth.

It was really over the next couple of days that the feelings started catching up with me.

Yesterday I went into Santa Marta to see the dentist, and that is when something really opened.

I was already going into the city with Gerald because he was leaving that day. He had been visiting me since Saturday and it had been such a lovely visit. Gerald first came to see me last year after connecting with me through my friend Sarah, a vegan chef and the owner of Nourish in Philadelphia, and this was his second time coming to Colombia to visit.

So there I was saying goodbye to another person I care about and then going to sit in a dentist’s chair and deal with this tooth.

And I cried.

Not because I was in some unbearable physical pain. It was more like the whole thing had finally slowed me down enough to feel everything it was bringing up.

I started thinking about why my teeth had gotten to this point in the first place, and I had to be honest with myself that there had been neglect from just putting things off. But when I really sat with that word, neglect, I realized how much story was underneath it.

For many years in the United States, my children had health insurance because they were U.S. citizens, but because of my immigration status, I couldn’t qualify for the same care. I got dental work done when I could afford it, but money was tight for many of those years.

There was always something.

Food, housing, clothes, bills, whatever the girls needed at the time. I learned how to stretch money and how to go without things. And when something with my own body wasn’t an emergency, it could wait.

Until sometimes it couldn’t.

It made me think about how expensive poverty actually is.

When you don’t have the resources to deal with something when it’s small, it doesn’t mean the problem goes away. You just postpone it. A relatively simple dental problem can eventually become a major dental problem. The thing you couldn’t afford then becomes something even more expensive later.

But sitting there yesterday, I realized there is another cost too. You can get used to postponing yourself.

So many other emotions and thoughts surfaced in order to be witnessed, acknowledged and let go of.

In the process of going from the dentist to another office to get the X-rays, more came to the surface for me to feel and face. I did some shopping afterward for some things I needed at the house and eventually got back on the bus home.

Instead of denying my emotions, I allowed them to move through me and be alchemized. And what began to arise was this wave of compassion.

I know what my life was like then. I know what I was carrying, the choices I had available to me and the ones I didn’t. I know how many times I had to figure things out with very little.

So instead of only looking at my tooth and thinking, How could you let this happen?, I found myself feeling tenderness for the woman who did the best she could for a very long time.

And that tenderness started spreading into other areas of my life.

In a weird way I can’t fully put into words, I felt a small death, or maybe more of an unraveling or undoing. Layers of identity falling away, and me somewhere in this in-between, liminal space.

So Much Has Been Changing

The truth is, a lot has happened over the last month.

My children have been gone for a few weeks now, which is a huge transition in itself. My life has been organized around motherhood and caring for children for so long. It feels good to have this time and space to myself, yet this time is also filled with more responsibility and work because the vision I’ve been slowly building here at the house is becoming much more real.

There is a temple here now. I have two women living here who are volunteering and helping me with the space. I’m holding gatherings, teaching, building programs and slowly creating the community space and sanctuary I’ve been envisioning.

It is really beautiful to look around and realize that something that existed as an idea, a prayer, a vision, is now something people are actually living inside of.

But I don’t want to romanticize it either.

It has taken a lot of work to get here and it takes work to maintain it. There is the spiritual vision and then there is cleaning the kitchen. There are schedules, repairs, food, money, communication, organizing events, creating programs and figuring out how different people live together.

And when you start inviting other human beings into a vision, you also have to deal with the reality that we are all human.

Things arise.

Living with volunteers has been teaching me a lot about that. I want this to be a safe space, particularly for women who may be in periods of transition and need somewhere stable to land, but creating safety doesn’t mean everything is always peaceful or that nobody gets triggered or has difficult patterns.

We all come with our histories and we all have things we’re working through.

Something about sitting with my own history through this experience with my tooth has made me feel even more compassionate about that.

Because it can be so easy to look at someone, notice something imperfect or visible, even something as simple as a few missing teeth, lol, and create a whole story about them.

We see the result and not the story that created it.

We see the behavior, the mess, the bad decision, the coping mechanism, the thing somebody should have handled years ago, and we judge from the outside.

I judge.

I even started judging myself about this tooth and all the things I’ve put off over the years. Then I realized the judgment wasn’t necessary. I can look honestly at myself, take responsibility and change my behavior so I can create better results without shaming the version of myself who got me here.

I felt more compassion for myself and for others.

I’ve been through enough in this life to know what it is to suffer. I also know what it is to come through things that at one point felt impossible.

That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in accountability or boundaries. If anything, leadership is teaching me more about boundaries because compassion without discernment can quickly turn into overextending yourself or enabling people.

But I don’t think accountability has to require us to stop loving someone.

I can understand why you are the way you are and still ask something different of you. I can love you and still have a boundary. I can provide a safe space without taking responsibility for your entire life. I can see where you are struggling without reducing you to your struggle.

I think this is part of what I actually mean when I talk about community. It’s not just gathering like-minded people together and having beautiful spiritual experiences.

It’s learning how to be human together.

Being Supported While Learning to Lead

Another big shift is that while I am carrying more responsibility, I am also experiencing more support.

Heidi Howes, one of the founders of Motherful, was here with me recently. She left on Thursday, and then Gerald arrived on Saturday.

Heidi’s visit was really special because it was reciprocal. She came here partly for her own healing and restoration, but she was also mentoring me, sharing her experience and helping me think through the leadership and development of what I am building here.

That kind of sisterhood and support means a lot to me right now.

For much of my life, my capacity was built through necessity. I became capable because I had to be capable. There were children to raise, money to figure out, circumstances to navigate and things that simply weren’t going to happen unless I made them happen.

Now I’m being asked to build a different kind of capacity.

I’m still a leader. I’m still the visionary. I’m still responsible for stewarding what I’m creating here. But I don’t want my leadership to be measured by how much I can carry before I collapse.

I want to learn how to hold a larger vision while also allowing myself to be supported. I want to build systems instead of making myself the system. I want to help people without rescuing them. I want to become more capable without becoming more burdened.

And I really want to continue living slowly.

That’s important to me.

I don’t want the success of this vision to create another version of the life I was trying to escape, where everything is urgent and I am constantly producing, managing and taking care of everybody else.

I want to build big and live slow.

I want the temple and the community and the service work, but I also want to walk to the river, cook my food, tend my plants, sit in silence, spend time in nature and have room in my life to actually experience my own life.

Maybe that’s part of what this next level of leadership is asking me to figure out.

The Things We Practice Become Capacity

There is another part of this that feels almost funny in its timing.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been leading a 30-Day Meditation Challenge.

Every morning I’ve been teaching and practicing some version of coming back to ourselves. Returning to the breath, relaxing the nervous system, becoming the witness, observing our thoughts, questioning the stories we tell ourselves, acceptance, and learning to respond instead of immediately reacting.

The day I went to the dentist was Day 12, and the teaching was literally Respond Instead of React.

The meditation was about resting in the pause.

Meanwhile, life was giving me plenty to practice with.

This experience reminded me of something I think I want to teach much more explicitly: our ability to sit with emotion and allow it to transmute.

I’ve been practicing meditation and spiritual disciplines for many years, and I think sometimes we imagine that the result of spiritual practice is that eventually we won’t be affected by things.

I don’t think that anymore.

I don’t think mastery means nothing hurts.

I think practice gives us a greater capacity to stay with ourselves when something does.

When my tooth broke, I didn’t immediately turn it into a spiritual lesson. I barely processed it at all. I said WTF and kept moving through my day.

The emotions came later.

And I think that’s important too.

Sitting with your emotions doesn’t always mean stopping everything the second something happens and processing it perfectly. Sometimes life is still happening. Sometimes your system gives you what you can hold in that moment, and the deeper feelings arrive when there is finally enough space for them.

Mine arrived over the next few days, and especially in that dentist’s chair.

And when they came, I let them.

I cried. I felt vulnerable. I thought about my past, poverty, my children, my body and all the times I put myself last.

I didn’t need to immediately fix the feeling or convince myself that everything happens for a reason.

I let myself feel it.

And slowly, without me trying to force anything, the feeling changed.

The sadness opened into compassion, and then the compassion opened into love.

A lot of love.

That’s what I mean by emotional transmutation.

It’s not taking a painful emotion and immediately trying to turn it into something “positive.” That’s just another way of avoiding what we actually feel.

Transmutation requires contact. You have to be willing to feel the thing first and give it space to move.

This is what meditation has given me.

Not immunity from being human, but more capacity to be human.

And I think this is also one of the most important capacities I can develop as a leader.

Because if I am going to hold community, I am going to be activated sometimes. People are going to disappoint me. Things are going to go wrong. Someone else’s wound might rub directly against one of mine. I will have feelings about it.

The question isn’t whether I can become so spiritually evolved that none of this touches me.

The question is whether I can feel what I feel without immediately making my feelings someone else’s punishment.

Can I sit with myself long enough to know what is mine? Can I come back to the situation after the first wave has moved and see the other person’s humanity too? Can I make a clear decision without having to harden my heart to make it?

That feels much closer to the kind of spiritual leadership I want to practice.

There are different ways to survive suffering.

Sometimes people come through difficult things and become harder. Nobody helped me. I figured it out. You should too.

I understand that response.

But I don’t want my suffering to make me less compassionate.

I’ve needed grace. I’ve needed help. I’ve made decisions from survival. I’ve stayed places too long. I’ve neglected things. I’ve had moments where I simply did not have the capacity, resources or knowledge I have now.

And I’ve also watched my life transform.

So when I look at someone who is somewhere in the middle of their own process, I want to remember that. Not to remove their responsibility, but to remember their humanity.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons this tooth affected me so deeply. It gave me something visible that I could easily judge in myself and then showed me how incomplete that judgment would be.

And if my own story deserves context, maybe I can offer other people that same generosity.

A Little Sweet Death

When I finally came home from Santa Marta, Gerald was gone and the house was quiet again.

I had spent the day feeling everything that had come up at the dentist, and I still felt tender, but something had shifted.

I smoked some green, put on Trevor Hall and started repotting my plants.

As I sat there with my hands in the soil, taking roots out of containers they had outgrown and giving them more room, I thought about how much my life feels like that right now.

My children are beginning another chapter of their lives and so am I. People are arriving and leaving. Women are living in this house. The temple exists. The vision is becoming tangible. I am being asked to lead in new ways, receive in new ways and create more capacity without losing myself in the process.

And somehow this broken front tooth feels like a little sweet death in the middle of all of it.

Something about the vulnerability of it, the history it touched and the emotions it brought forward cracked me open a little more.

And what I found underneath was love.

Love for the younger versions of myself who survived things I don’t have to survive anymore. Love for my children and all the years I poured myself into caring for them. Love for the women living here and figuring out their own lives. Love for Heidi and the sisterhood and mentorship I’m receiving. Love for Gerald and the sweetness of friendship. Love for this house and temple and vision that is slowly becoming real around me.

And a deeper love for people in general, because I know what it is to suffer and I know how much can exist underneath the part of someone’s life we can see.

Maybe the sweet death isn’t about the tooth at all.

Maybe something in the identity I’ve carried for years is dying.

The woman whose strength was measured by how much she could carry. The woman who automatically went to the back of the line. The woman who could make almost anything work through sheer capacity.

I love that woman. I don’t need to reject her to grow beyond her.

She got me here.

But I don’t think she has to build everything that comes next.

I’m interested in another kind of strength now. The capacity to feel without drowning in what I feel. To love without abandoning myself. To support without rescuing. To have boundaries without closing my heart. To lead without carrying everything. To receive. To let life touch me. To remain soft.

And to let myself have more support. More resources. More money. To stop acting like struggle itself is evidence of my strength.

This moment is not asking me to become stronger in the way I’ve always understood strength. Maybe it’s asking me to become spacious enough for more life, more responsibility, more support, more humanity and more love to move through me without losing my own rhythm.

There is still dental work to figure out, money to spend, responsibilities waiting at home and plenty about this next chapter that I don’t know yet.

In fact, I go back to the dentist tomorrow for another appointment and to see a specialist.

So, since apparently adulthood includes breaking your front tooth on coconut meat, I have officially established the Tooth Fairy Fund. 😂

But seriously, if you’ve been moved by my work, the community I’m building here, the meditation challenge, or anything I’ve shared over the years and you’d like to pour a little support back my way, I would genuinely appreciate a donation toward the dental costs. This has turned into an unexpected expense, and receiving support is clearly part of the lesson I’m being asked to practice too.

And maybe there is something beautifully humbling about actually asking.

Because after all these years of learning how to make things work, perhaps receiving is part of this sweet death too.

Last night I was sitting there with my hands in fresh soil, smoking some green, Trevor Hall playing, the house quiet again, and I felt so much love.

Not because everything was okay or because I had managed to turn the whole thing into some beautiful spiritual lesson.

I think I just finally let myself feel all of it.

And somewhere in there, something loosened.

Something died a little.

Something opened.

A little sweet death.

And somehow, more room for love.

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Seven years ago, I received a message that became the organizing principle of my life:

Planetary healing, love, and liberation.

It felt less like something I invented and more like something I was being given. A mission. A direction. A remembrance of why I was here. What I did not receive was the business plan. There was no ten-step strategy. No organizational chart.

No clear explanation of exactly what planetary healing, love, and liberation would look like expressed through my particular life. I received the what, but not necessarily the how.

And I am beginning to understand that this may be the nature of vision. Sometimes we are shown just enough to begin walking. Then we have to live and trust our way into the rest.

Learning to Trust What Is Revealed Along the Way

For years, I have had inklings of what I wanted to create.

Community.

Healing spaces.

Women gathering.

Regenerative culture.

Spiritual development.

Land.

An ecovillage.

New ways of sharing resources.

New economic models.

A return to village.

I could feel these things circling around me long before I understood how they belonged together. So much of my journey has been an experiment. Try something. Experience it. Listen. Receive feedback. Notice what feels alive and what doesn’t. Make adjustments. Try again.

Ultimately this is the process of living life, trail, error and improvement. I used to think that perhaps this meant I wasn’t clear enough. Now I think this is how clarity arrives.

Vision is not always something we figure out before we begin. Sometimes vision becomes clear because we begin.

Aligned action creates information. Experience creates wisdom. Relationships reveal possibilities we couldn’t see alone. And sometimes another person enters our life carrying a piece of the map.

When the Divine Mother Makes an Introduction

Right now, my friend and mentor Heidi is visiting me in Colombia from Columbus, Ohio. Heidi is one of the two founders of Motherful, an organization devoted to creating resources, community and economic support for mothers.

Her visit has a beautiful dual purpose. She is here to receive healing and restoration at Casa Motherful, the sanctuary we building here in Colombia.

And she is also here pouring into me. Mentoring me. Helping me expand my understanding of leadership and the scale at which I am capable of serving.

Heidi is ten years my senior and has spent years doing matriarchal leadership and community-building work. I deeply trust her experience, but even more than that, I trust the love underneath the work she does.

Motherful carries a simple but radical recognition:

Mothers need resources.

Not more praise for being resilient while carrying impossible loads. Not another celebration of how much women can endure.

Actual resources.

Money.

Housing.

Community.

Rest.

Childcare.

Opportunity.

Support.

And one of the things I deeply admire about Heidi’s vision is her commitment to gathering resources and redistributing them toward the places where they are most needed.

To single mothers.

Our relationship itself feels divinely orchestrated.

We were connected through one of Heidi’s friends, who discovered me through my appearance on Naked and Afraid. Heidi eventually reached out to me, and when I learned about Motherful, the resonance was immediate.

It felt like the Divine Mother herself had made an introduction.

Motherful gave language and structure to something I already knew intimately through my own life.

You Cannot Pour From Survival Forever

I know what it means to have a vision while simultaneously trying to survive. I know what it means to be a single mother carrying responsibility for children while also carrying an enormous sense of purpose.

I know what it feels like to have gifts, ideas and a deep desire to serve humanity while so much of your energy is consumed by simply keeping life together. And this is one of the contradictions we rarely talk about when we tell people to “follow their purpose.”

Purpose requires resources.

Creativity requires space.

Leadership requires nourishment.

Vision requires enough safety to lift your eyes beyond today’s emergency and imagine what could exist tomorrow.

For many women, and especially mothers, there is incredible intelligence, creativity, leadership and medicine that the world may never fully receive because those women are exhausted.

They are trying to create from depletion.

They are trying to serve from survival.

They are trying to build while simultaneously holding everything else together.

I know because I have lived it. And I am increasingly convinced that supporting women isn’t simply a women’s issue.

It is a planetary issue.

What becomes possible when a woman is deeply supported?

What happens when she has housing, food, community, childcare, mentorship, money, rest and room to dream?

What happens when she doesn’t have to use all of her life force surviving?

What might she create?

What might she heal?

Who might she become?

And how many lives might be changed because she finally had enough support to bring her gifts fully into the world?

Casa Motherful Is Teaching Me

This is part of what I am beginning to understand through Casa Motherful here in Colombia.

I have carried an ecovillage vision for nearly two decades. Over the years, I have studied and explored so many things that seemed, at times, like separate interests.

Yoga.

Meditation.

Permaculture.

Plant medicine.

Somatics.

Women’s healing.

Community building.

Spiritual development.

Regenerative culture.

Social enterprise.

Alternative economics.

Ecovillages.

Conscious leadership.

For a long time, I couldn’t necessarily see the architecture connecting all of it. Now I can. Casa Motherful is becoming a small laboratory for the larger vision.

A place where women can come to rest.

A place where healing can happen.

A place where people can contribute their gifts.

A place where we can experiment with community, reciprocity and small social enterprises.

A place where we can ask:

What would life look like if our systems were actually organized around supporting life?

Not maximizing extraction. Not endless productivity. Not accumulating as much as possible while others go without.

Life.

People.

Children.

Mothers.

Community.

Earth.

And the more I live into this experiment, the more I realize that the ecovillage I have dreamed about was never simply about acquiring land and building beautiful natural houses. It is about creating another way of organizing life.

The Vision Is Getting Bigger

During Heidi’s visit, she has also been encouraging me to think much bigger about my own leadership. We were talking about some of the workshops I have taught organizations and what I have charged for them.

She essentially looked at me and said: You are thinking too small and definitely not charging enough.

She shared that the knowledge, experience and perspective I have spent decades cultivating can be brought into much larger rooms.

Organizations.

Institutions.

Leadership teams.

Conferences.

Companies.

Philanthropic spaces.

Places where decisions are being made that affect thousands, sometimes millions, of lives. And something clicked.

What if all of these things I have been studying and practicing aren’t separate from my work in the world?

What if regenerative culture, matriarchal leadership, social enterprise, spirituality, nervous-system awareness, community building and ecological stewardship actually belong in the same conversation?

What if organizations themselves need to learn how to become more life-giving?

And what if part of my work is helping bring these conversations into places where resources and power already exist?

Because if we are serious about planetary healing, love and liberation, we cannot only create healing spaces at the margins. We also have to engage the places where culture, capital and systems are being shaped.

Who Is Missing From the Room?

One of the things I keep thinking about is how many of our current systems are attempting to solve problems using the same consciousness that created them.

The same voices.

The same leadership structures.

The same definitions of success.

The same relationship with money.

The same relationship with Earth.

The same relationship with power.

What changes when other forms of intelligence are welcomed into the room?

Women.

Mothers.

Indigenous wisdom keepers.

Grassroots organizers.

Regenerative farmers.

Healers.

Artists.

Community builders.

Young people.

People who understand that the health of a system cannot be measured only by how much profit it produces. There are solutions available to us that cannot emerge until different people are allowed to participate in imagining them.

Perhaps leadership itself needs to evolve from being primarily about directing and controlling toward something closer to stewardship.

Stewardship of people.

Stewardship of resources.

Stewardship of community.

Stewardship of Earth.

From Extraction to Circulation

Another idea has been emerging through these conversations.

What if part of this work eventually includes helping organizations move resources directly toward regenerative grassroots projects?

I have been imagining something like an Earth Regeneration Fund.

Companies and institutions already spend enormous amounts of money attempting to address sustainability, social responsibility and ecological impact.

What if more of those resources could move toward people already doing the work?

Toward communities restoring ecosystems.

Women building villages.

Regenerative agriculture.

Grassroots organizers.

Local healing initiatives.

Indigenous communities.

Social enterprises.

People creating real alternatives on the ground.

We already allocate so much money for war and other destructive activities, why not redirect those resources where they are needed most and can be in service to life.

There might already be other organizations doing this work already that I don’t know about. Motherful is already doing this work. And if you want to be a part of this, I encourage you to donate to Motherful Colombia. We are currently housing 3 women at Casa Motherful, giving them a safe place to live while they contribute to the work being done at Motherful Colombia.

The Village Has Been the Thread All Along

When I look backward, I can see something I couldn’t see while I was living it. The pieces were never random.

My experiences as a mother.

My struggles.

My spiritual practice.

My fascination with ecovillages.

My study of permaculture.

My healing work.

My relationship with the feminine.

My desire to create community.

My questions about economics.

My belief in social enterprise.

My longing for land.

My work with women.

My commitment to planetary healing.

They are beginning to reveal themselves as different expressions of the same thing.

Regeneration.

Personal regeneration.

Relational regeneration.

Economic regeneration.

Community regeneration.

Cultural regeneration.

Ecological regeneration.

And perhaps this is what planetary healing, love and liberation has been asking of me all along.

Not one program.

Not one business.

Not one organization.

But participation in building an ecosystem where life can flourish.

Women at the Center

And increasingly, I see women at the center of this transition. Not because women need to replace men at the top of the same broken hierarchy. That would simply reproduce the structure with different people occupying the positions.

I’m interested in something deeper. A return to values that have historically been pushed aside by extractive culture:

Care.

Relationship.

Reciprocity.

Interdependence.

Nourishment.

Intuition.

Stewardship.

Community.

Responsibility to future generations.

The village cannot be rebuilt without these values. And mothers understand something profound about this because motherhood itself is an education in interdependence. A child cannot survive through individualism. Life begins in relationship. Maybe our economies and communities should remember that too.

From Survival to Stewardship

This is personal for me because I am still living this transition myself. From survival into greater support. From doing everything alone into allowing myself to be held. From constantly figuring out the next way to make money into asking larger questions about resources, leadership and impact. From trying to prove that I can carry everything into recognizing the power of women pouring into one another.

Heidi coming here to receive from Casa Motherful while simultaneously mentoring and pouring into me feels like a living example of the world I want to help create.

There is no hierarchy of giver and receiver. We move between the roles.

I nourish you. You nourish me.

We nourish the community. The community nourishes us.

Resources circulate. Wisdom circulates.

Care circulates. Money circulates. Love circulates.

This is reciprocity.

And when people are deeply nourished, they have something genuine to give. I don’t want women empowered simply so they can become more productive participants in an exhausted system.

I want women supported enough to live passionate, purposeful and prosperous lives. Prosperous not only in money, but in time, relationships, health, creativity, belonging and meaning. A deeply nourished woman can give from overflow instead of depletion.

And I believe the world desperately needs what becomes possible from that place.

Walking Without the Entire Map

Seven years after receiving the words planetary healing, love and liberation, I still cannot tell you exactly what their ultimate expression through my life will be.

But I can see more of the landscape now.

Motherful.

Motherland.

Casa Motherful.

The ecovillage.

My teaching.

My writing.

Regenerative leadership.

Social enterprise.

Redistribution of resources.

Women gathering.

Healing.

Community.

Earth regeneration.

The pieces are speaking to one another. And maybe that is enough. We are so often told that before we begin something, we need the perfect plan. I am learning something different.

Sometimes Spirit gives you a direction rather than a destination. You receive what you can hold. You take the next aligned action.

Life responds.

You listen.

You adjust.

You meet someone carrying another piece.

Your capacity expands.

The vision expands with you.

And eventually you look backward and realize that what once appeared to be a collection of disconnected experiences was actually a path. I don’t know exactly where this path ends. But I know what it is asking of me now:

Think bigger.

Gather the women.

Build the village.

Move resources toward life.

Create from nourishment instead of survival. Trust the relationships Spirit brings. And continue becoming capable of stewarding the vision I was given.

Maybe we don’t need the whole map. Maybe we just need enough courage to honor what we have been shown and take the next aligned step. The rest of the vision may be waiting to meet us along the way.

Burnout was simply the doorway. The deeper question has always been this:

How do…

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Yesterday I ended with a question that has stayed with me ever since I walked home from the river.

If we know human beings were designed for belonging...

If we know caregivers have always been the invisible foundation of society...

If we know our nervous systems flourish in environments of care...

Why have we built an economy that rewards almost everything except the work that sustains life?

That question led me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. It began with the word economy. The word economy comes from the ancient Greek word oikonomia, meaning the management of the household.

Oikos means house, home, or dwelling place. Nemein means to manage, distribute, or steward. What fascinated me even more was discovering that ecology shares the same root.

Both words begin with the home. Not only the house we live inside. But our greater home. The Earth.

The ecosystems that feed us.

The communities that raise us.

The relationships that sustain us.

And suddenly something clicked. Perhaps the purpose of an economy was never simply to create wealth. Perhaps it was always meant to help us care for the home.

The home of our families.

The home of our communities.

The home of our rivers.

The home of our forests.

The home we all share.

Somewhere along the way, economy became separated from ecology. Money became goal, instead of a means to an end. Productivity became the focus. Success became separated from stewardship.

And maybe this is why so many of us feel like something is deeply off. Because somewhere along the way we forgot the meaning of life. We forgot that we are here to be good stewards of it.

To live well.

To care well.

To leave the world healthier than we found it.

To create conditions where life can flourish.

Simple.

So much of this junk has been learned. The endless striving. The obsession with infinite growth. The belief (unconscious/conscious) that our worth is measured by productivity. The pressure to monetize every gift. The idea that success means accumulating more than we need while others struggle to meet their basic needs.

History shows us where that path leads.

War.

Colonization.

Genocide.

Ecological collapse.

Communities fractured.

Families isolated.

Mothers exhausted.

Children disconnected from nature, elders, and often from themselves.

These are not signs of good household management. They are signs of a civilization that has forgotten its purpose.

Who has historically managed the household? Who has stretched resources to feed a family when there wasn’t enough? Who has quietly noticed what was running low before anyone else did? Who has held together the emotional climate of the home?

Who has remembered birthdays, appointments, school schedules, groceries, medicines, relationships, and all the invisible details that make daily life possible?

Historically mainly Women.

Not because women are somehow destined to carry this work. That is one of the distortions we are trying to heal. But because through generations of tending life itself, women developed a profound intelligence.

We know how to notice.

We know how to nurture.

We know how to distribute.

We know how to adapt.

We know how to create abundance from very little.

We are portals of life. We are also stewards of life. And yet much of this wisdom has been dismissed precisely when the world needs it most.

There is a saying that has stayed with me ever since I became involved with Motherful.

Give Moms Money.

At first, it sounds almost too simple. Then you really sit with it.

Giving mothers money isn’t charity. It is recognition. It is recognizing that mothers are already producing extraordinary value.

We raise children. We maintain homes. We regulate nervous systems. We preserve culture. We hold families together.

Every economy depends upon this work.

It simply refuses to account for it.

There have even been studies estimating what mothers would earn if all of their labor were financially compensated. The number reaches well into six figures each year.

Again, the exact amount isn’t the point. The point is that our economy quietly depends upon care while pretending care has little economic value.

This creates one of the greatest paradoxes of our time.

The people doing some of the most important work in society are often among the least economically supported.

How did we arrive here?

How did we build a civilization where those who care for life are expected to sacrifice their own security while those extracting from life accumulate unimaginable wealth?

As I sat with these questions, I remembered a dream I had two weeks ago.

In the dream I was talking to executives, CEOs & other men that have accumulated obscene amounts of wealth. I was telling them my vision of redirecting resources from industries and activities that are causing harm to people and planet and investing those funds into the regeneration of the planet.

I seen how we can start the Earth Regeneration Fund which redistributes money to grassroots organization, projects and communities that are already doing this important work or new projects and ideas.

It wasn’t another charity. It wasn’t people giving scraps after the damage had already been done. It was a completely different way of thinking. Resources naturally flowed toward the people and projects regenerating life.

When I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because the truth is, humanity has never had a resource problem. We’ve had a priority problem. We always seem to find money for war.

Money for bombs.

Money for weapons.

Money for extraction.

Money for industries that pollute rivers, destroy forests, and displace entire communities.

Billions of dollars appear almost overnight when governments decide something matters. Imagine directing that same level of commitment toward regeneration.

Imagine investing in healthy soil instead of depleted land. In clean rivers instead of polluted ones.

In mothers instead of missiles. In communities instead of conflict. In restoration instead of extraction. Imagine funding the people already doing this work.

The Indigenous communities protecting forests. The farmers restoring soil. The women creating food sovereignty.

The teachers.

The healers.

The community organizers.

The mothers quietly rebuilding culture one relationship at a time.

Wouldn’t that be a wiser investment? Wouldn’t that be a better return?

After all, what greater return could there be than healthy children, thriving ecosystems, connected communities, and a future worth inheriting?

Perhaps this is what stewardship really looks like. Not simply protecting what we have. Investing in what allows life to flourish.

This is also why I cried when Motherful announced they had officially closed on the property that will become an affordable co-housing community for mother-led households. It wasn’t simply about purchasing land.

It was the manifestation of a seed. A vision planted years ago by Heidi, Lisa, and so many other women who believed another way of living was possible.

Like every seed, it needed more than hope. It needed people willing to water it.

People willing to redirect resources toward something that could nourish generations to come. Creating anything meaningful requires resources.

A family.

A community.

A village.

An ecovillage.

A movement.

A healthier future.

Vision alone is rarely enough. It must eventually be met with land, time, money, labor, relationships, and collective commitment. Which leads me to another question.

What is wealth actually for?

We have been taught that wealth means accumulation. The more we have, the more successful we are. The more we keep, the more secure we become.

Yet many Indigenous cultures have held a profoundly different understanding. Wealth was measured not only by what you possessed, but by your capacity to care for the community.

By your ability to give.

To share.

To ensure no one was left behind.

In Sacred Instructions, Sherri Mitchell describes this Indigenous understanding of abundance as one rooted in relationship and responsibility. Resources are meant to circulate through the community, nourishing life, rather than remaining trapped in endless accumulation.

It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

If you harvested more food than your family could eat, would you store it away while your neighbors went hungry? Eventually it would spoil. Its purpose was never to sit untouched.

Its purpose was to nourish life.

Somewhere along the way, colonization reshaped not only our economies, but our imaginations. It fabricated a society/economy based on scarcity.

That competition is more natural than cooperation. That success means accumulating more than we need while others struggle to meet their basic needs.

These stories became so deeply woven into our worldview that many of us mistake them for human nature.

I don’t believe they are. I believe they are inherited beliefs. Beliefs that have justified conquest, extraction, and staggering inequality. Beliefs that have allowed unimaginable wealth to accumulate in the hands of a few while so many communities struggle to meet their most basic needs.

If we are serious about cultural repair, then we must also be willing to repair our relationship with resources. To ask ourselves what happens when money begins flowing toward regeneration instead of extraction.

Toward mothers instead of missiles.

Toward healthy soil instead of poisoned land.

Toward communities instead of endless consumption.

Toward life itself.

When resources are placed in the hands of people committed to nurturing life, they rarely remain stagnant. They become meals shared with neighbors.

Children cared for.

Forests restored.

Communities strengthened.

Dreams brought into reality.

This is the economy our hearts have always recognized. An economy where care is infrastructure. Where mothers are supported because society understands that supporting caregivers strengthens everyone.

Where wealth is measured not only by what we accumulate, but by what flourishes because we were here.

I don’t believe this is about replacing patriarchy with a system where women dominate men. That would simply repeat the same pattern with different people holding power.

I believe we are being invited into something much deeper.

A return to life-centered values. Values that have always existed within Indigenous cultures, village cultures, and matrifocal communities throughout history.

Care.

Reciprocity.

Stewardship.

Interdependence.

Belonging.

Responsibility to future generations.

These are not women’s values.

They are life values.

The feminine has simply carried many of them through centuries when the culture forgot. As I finished writing all of this, another realization emerged.

Understanding these ideas changes very little on its own. Reading about another economy won’t build one. Talking about community won’t create one.

Culture changes when people begin living differently together.

Toward circles.

Toward community.

Toward women gathering.

Toward creating spaces where these values are no longer ideas we admire, but practices we embody. For too long, we have waited for institutions, governments, markets, and leaders to create the changes we long to see.

They have shown us the limits of what they can imagine. It is time we stop waiting.

The future has always belonged to ordinary people willing to gather around extraordinary values. Women have carried so much of life already.

What might become possible if we also carried the vision for what comes next?

That is where this journey leads. And that is where I’ll begin tomorrow.

Part III: Motherland: Building the Matrifocal Future.

Last week was one of the most emotionally intense weeks I have experienced in a long time.

My daughter ran away just days before she was supposed to return to the United States. There were hours of uncertainty, difficult conversations,…

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“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God; for like is known by like.”
— Hermetica

For years I believed healing meant becoming someone new.

More disciplined. More spiritual. More enlightened.

I was constantly searching for the next teacher, the next ceremony, the next book, the next breakthrough that would finally make me into the person I thought I was meant to be.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

I began to wonder...

What if healing isn’t becoming someone else?

What if healing is remembering who we’ve always been?

That question has changed everything.

The Ancient Invitation to Remember

Thousands of years before modern psychology, before neuroscience, before self-help books, human beings were asking the same fundamental question:

Who am I?

Across cultures and centuries, wisdom traditions have offered different answers.

In the Hermetica, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, we are told that “like is known by like.” The passage suggests that we do not come to know the Divine simply by believing in it. We come to know the Divine by awakening what is already divine within ourselves.

The Upanishads describe the deepest Self (Atman) as inseparable from ultimate reality (Brahman).

Jesus tells his listeners, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

Carl Jung spoke of individuation, the lifelong process of becoming who we truly are beneath the masks, roles, and identities we have inherited.

These traditions are not identical. They emerge from different cultures, histories, and worldviews. Yet many of them point toward a similar human possibility: beneath our conditioning, there is a deeper self waiting to be remembered.

Perhaps the spiritual journey is not about becoming worthy.

Perhaps it is about remembering what has never truly been lost…

At least this is what has been revealed to me on my journey & I’m grateful to share these insights with you in the various ways that I do.

The Great Forgetting

If remembering is the journey, then forgetting is where it begins.

The moment we enter the world, we inherit stories.

Stories about who we should be.

What success looks like.

What love looks like.

What is beautiful.

What is valuable.

What is masculine.

What is feminine.

Most of these stories arrive long before we are old enough to question them.

We mistake them for ourselves.

This is not a failure. It is part of being human.

Our personality is shaped by family, culture, religion, education, trauma, and survival. These influences help us navigate the world, but they can also become the very thing that obscures our deeper nature.

The journey of remembering begins when we gently ask:

Which parts of me are truly mine, and which parts were inherited?

It was these same questions I began asking many years ago in my late teen and these are the same questions I continue to ask on this spiral journey.

What Patriarchy Asked Women to Forget

When I speak about patriarchy, I am not simply speaking about men. I am speaking about a cultural system that has shaped all of us. I pointing to this system that have negatively impacted both men and women (but we must also acknowledge advantage and power it has given men.)

One of its deepest consequences has been teaching women to distrust their own knowing.

For generations, women were taught that our bodies were something to control rather than listen to.

That intuition was irrational.

That emotion was weakness.

That pleasure was dangerous.

That softness was inferior.

That leadership belonged elsewhere.

Women’s wisdom became something to suppress rather than cultivate.

Many of us learned to seek permission before trusting ourselves.

To perform instead of embody.

To achieve instead of receive.

To prove instead of simply be.

The greatest loss was not power alone.

It was relationship.

A relationship with our own bodies.

Our own intuition.

Our own cycles.

Our own inner authority.

In many ways, women were taught to forget themselves.

And the time for that is done!

My Own Remembering

For much of my life, I searched outside myself.

I studied spiritual traditions.

Practiced yoga and meditation.

Sat in ceremonies.

Read books.

Traveled.

Lived with Indigenous communities.

Learned from teachers across many paths.

Every one of those experiences gave me something valuable.

But eventually I realized something unexpected.

The deepest healing did not come from collecting more knowledge.

It came from becoming quiet enough to trust what my body had been trying to tell me all along.

Healing wasn’t just changing my thoughts.

It was helping my nervous system feel safe.

It was allowing grief to move.

It was learning to rest without guilt.

It was dancing.

Walking barefoot.

Swimming in rivers.

Feeling the sun on my skin.

Listening more deeply than I spoke.

The body became less of an obstacle to transcend and more of a doorway into presence.

I stopped trying to escape being human.

I began learning how to fully inhabit it.

Remembering Through the Body

So much of modern spirituality celebrates awakening while quietly overlooking embodiment.

But consciousness does not float somewhere above life.

It expresses itself through life.

Through breath.

Through relationship.

Through movement.

Through touch.

Through the choices we make every day.

If trauma lives in the body, then healing must also pass through the body.

If fear can shape our posture, our breath, and our nervous system, then love must become something we can feel, not merely something we can think about.

For me, remembering has become deeply practical.

It looks like creating safety in my nervous system.

Strengthening my body.

Walking in nature.

Speaking honestly.

Receiving support.

Creating community.

Choosing relationships that nourish life rather than diminish it.

The sacred is no longer somewhere else.

It is here.

Remembering Is Not Only Personal

This is why I no longer see healing as a private pursuit.

When we remember ourselves, we parent differently.

We build different communities.

We redefine success.

We consume differently.

We relate differently to the Earth.

We create different economies.

We become less interested in domination and more interested in stewardship.

Individual healing becomes cultural repair.

The way we live begins to ripple outward.

Perhaps this is what the world needs now.

Not more people trying to become extraordinary.

But more people remembering how to become fully human.

An Invitation

I don’t believe the Goddess needs to return.

I don’t believe she ever truly left.

Perhaps she has simply been waiting beneath centuries of fear, shame, separation, and forgetting.

Waiting patiently beneath the stories we inherited.

Waiting beneath survival.

Waiting beneath performance.

Waiting beneath perfection.

And perhaps every act of healing...

Every boundary.

Every honest conversation.

Every moment of embodied presence.

Every deep breath.

Every courageous act of self-trust.

Is another step in remembering.

Not becoming someone new.

But coming home to who we have always been.

An Invitation to Embodied Remembering

If there is one thing I have come to believe, it is this:

We cannot build a world rooted in love while living in bodies organized around survival.

For generations, women have been asked to hold families, communities, and movements together while carrying the invisible weight of trauma, hypervigilance, and nervous systems that rarely experience true safety.

No amount of positive thinking can heal what the body still believes is dangerous.

This is why I believe embodiment is not separate from cultural repair, it is one of its foundations.

When a woman begins to experience safety within her own body, something profound changes.

She trusts her intuition more deeply.

She accesses greater creativity.

She sets healthier boundaries.

She parents from presence rather than reactivity.

She leads without abandoning herself.

She becomes a source of co-regulation, helping others remember safety simply through the quality of her presence.

This is how cultures have always been transformed, not only through ideas, but through nervous systems that learn a different way of being together.

For me, this is one of the deepest expressions of matriarchal principles.

Not domination.

Not hierarchy.

But creating the conditions where life can flourish.

Where children feel safe enough to explore.

Where communities feel safe enough to collaborate.

Where the Earth is treated as kin rather than a resource.

Where relationships are built on trust rather than control.

A matriarchal culture is not simply led by women.

It is rooted in the qualities that make life possible: safety, care, reciprocity, belonging, and reverence for all living beings.

This is why I am so passionate about the Triple Vagal Method.

From January 7–22, 2027, I will be co-hosting a TVM Training Retreat in Palomino, Colombia, with my dear friend and teacher, Crystal Rainbow.

TVM is a body-based modality that helps build what is call the architecture of safety.

Using gentle, body-centered touch and deep listening to the body’s own intelligence, practitioners learn to support the nervous system in moving out of survival patterns and into greater regulation, resilience, and connection. Rather than forcing healing, TVM creates the conditions in which the body can recognize that the danger of the past has passed, allowing new patterns of safety to emerge.

Whether you come for your own healing or to become a practitioner who supports others, this training is ultimately about far more than learning a modality.

It is about becoming someone whose presence helps other people remember what safety feels like.

I believe that is one of the greatest gifts we can offer the world today.

Because every regulated nervous system becomes another seed of cultural repair.

Every woman who comes home to herself becomes another living example of what is possible.

And perhaps this is how we remember the Goddess, not as an idea from the past, but as a way of being that we embody together, one safe nervous system, one family, one community at a time.

Triple Vagal Method Training Retreat
January 7–22, 2027
Palomino, Colombia

If this speaks to something deep within you, I would love to welcome you.

Learn more and apply: https://www.tvmseattle.com/training

Last week, I made one of those journeys.

Alongside three friends who share a similar calling, I traveled deep into the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to spend time with a Wiwa family and their community. Each of us had arrived in this region by different paths, yet all of us felt the same quiet pull. a sense that we were meant to learn, to listen, and to serve in whatever way we could.

Our guide, David, met us in the small town of Campana, La Guajira, the last village before the mountain trail begins. David is Wiwa through his father and Kogui through his mother. He speaks both Indigenous languages as well as Spanish, moving gracefully between worlds. More than a guide, he has become an emissary for his people, dedicating his life to building bridges between Indigenous communities and those willing to support their vision.

Before we began climbing, we loaded supplies onto three mules.

I smiled with gratitude when I learned that us women would be riding the mules for part of the journey. The trail stretched for hours, ascending steep mountainsides, descending into valleys, crossing rivers, and winding through forests. It was beautiful, but it demanded something from us.

As we climbed, I found myself overcome with emotion.

A year earlier I had traveled to Cabo de la Vela, where, standing in the vast silence of the desert, I experienced something difficult to explain. During that pilgrimage I felt an unmistakable vision: that somehow my path would become intertwined with the Indigenous peoples of this land and with helping protect both their traditions and the Earth itself.

At the time it felt almost impossible as I really didn’t know how it would happened but I trusted it would unfold in divine time.

Now, climbing these mountains, I realized that we were walking into and fulfilling that vision.

It felt like life had come full circle.

As we walked, we talked about our families and ancestors, I became deeply aware of my own.

I thought about the little Jamaican girl who left her homeland at six years old, never knowing where life would carry her. I reflected on every unexpected turn, every hardship, every country, every teacher, every heartbreak, every awakening.

None of it had been random.

Each step had been leading here.

I could feel my ancestors walking beside me, cheering me forward, reminding me that their dreams continue through us.

We arrived just around sunset.

The community welcomed us with warmth, food, and generosity.

The Mamo, the spiritual elder, received us with the steady presence that seemed to quiet everything around him. He played his drum while several of the women sang and danced. As darkness settled over the valley, we climbed into hammocks and fell asleep beneath a sky untouched by city lights, surrounded only by the sounds of insects, birds, and the forest itself.

I felt such a deep sense peace.

The next morning we bathed in the river that winds through the valley.

Towering trees surrounded us, their roots reaching deep into the mountains while clear water flowed over ancient stones.

Yet what moved me even more than the landscape was the people.

Children played freely.

Women worked together.

Men carried out their responsibilities with quiet purpose.

There was a natural rhythm, a unity that seemed to arise from remembering that every person’s wellbeing is tied to everyone else’s.

Watching them, I couldn’t help but reflect on what so many of us have lost.

Modern society often teaches us that success means independence, that happiness comes through accumulating more, consuming more, and needing fewer people.

Yet standing in that valley, I saw something very different.

I saw interdependence.

I saw community.

I saw belonging.

I saw what becomes possible when people remain deeply connected to one another and to the Earth.

The primary purpose of our visit was to spend time with David’s father, the Mamo, and to listen to the vision he carries for his people.

Throughout our stay, we participated in several pagamentos, sacred offerings made in reciprocity with the land. The Mamo also performed blessings, prayers, and spiritual cleansings for us, asking that our paths remain clear and that the work we are each called to do unfold in harmony.

These ceremonies were not performances.

They were reminders.

Reminders that we do not stand above nature.

We belong to it.

David shared the community’s vision.

They hope to build two ceremonial temples and an Indigenous knowledge school where their children can continue learning the wisdom their ancestors have safeguarded for thousands of years.

Today, many Indigenous youth attend government schools where they receive a Western education but little opportunity to learn their own languages, cosmology, ceremonies, or ancestral responsibilities.

Like so many Indigenous peoples across the world, they face the constant pressure to assimilate.

When a culture loses its language, it often loses an entire way of understanding reality.

Protecting Indigenous knowledge is not only about preserving the past.

It is about protecting humanity’s future.

The communities also hope to strengthen their agricultural systems.

Higher in the Sierra Nevada, where temperatures are colder, growing food becomes increasingly difficult. By expanding food production in the lower communities, they hope to support families living higher in the mountains.

This is what true community looks like.

Those who have more help those who have less.

Not because they are forced to.

Because they understand they belong to one another.

David himself embodies this bridge between worlds.

As a teenager he attended a conventional school, where he learned Spanish and gained insight into Western society. Rather than abandoning his culture, he chose to return and dedicate his life to serving his people.

Watching him, I saw something rare.

A man completely at peace with his purpose.

His leadership was rooted not in ego or status, but in humility, service, and love.

Donate here to support this mission.

Among the Kogui, Wiwa, Arhuaco, and Kankuamo peoples of the Sierra Nevada, they often refer to themselves as the Elder Brothers.

The rest of us are the Younger Brothers.

This isn’t a claim of superiority.

It is a description of responsibility.

For thousands of years they have maintained ceremonies, ecological knowledge, and spiritual practices intended to keep balance between humanity and the natural world.

Many remained intentionally isolated for generations.

Only in recent decades have some elders chosen to share aspects of their teachings more openly, not to convert anyone, but because they believe humanity has reached a critical moment.

Their message is remarkably simple.

Everything is connected.

What we do to the rivers, we do to ourselves.

What we do to the forests, we do to ourselves.

What we do to the Earth, we ultimately do to our own children.

Long before this journey, I felt that same call.

Years ago, nature began speaking to me.

Not with words, but with presence.

The rivers.

The mountains.

The forests.

Again and again they reminded me that we are not separate from this living world.

Eventually I realized that part of my purpose is to become a voice for Mother Nature.

To help others hear what the Earth has been saying all along.

I believe many people are hearing that same call today.

Mother Earth is calling her children home.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

Of course, beautiful visions alone do not build schools.

Hopes and wishes alone do not purchase seeds, tools, or construction materials.

We live within an economic system that requires financial resources, and if we truly believe another future is possible, then we must begin redirecting our resources toward it.

The women of the community weave magnificent mochilas by hand.

These bags are not merely beautiful handicrafts.

They carry stories, symbols, and teachings.

They represent the sacred weaving together of masculine and feminine energies, of humanity and nature, of past and future.

I watched women spin cotton grown within their own community, it into thread and patiently weave each bag by hand.

It is extraordinary work.

David explained that one of the greatest limitations is access to colored thread. Producing every strand by hand takes enormous time, limiting how many bags the women can create.

Immediately an idea arose.

What if we purchased large quantities of thread in Barranquilla so the women could weave more mochilas?

More bags would mean more income.

More income would help fund the Indigenous knowledge school, agricultural projects, and ceremonial spaces.

Sometimes service begins with something beautifully simple.

Not grand gestures.

Just listening closely enough to hear what is actually needed.

We spent only two nights in the mountains.

Yet I returned carrying something I cannot easily describe.

Greater faith.

Greater clarity.

Greater purpose.

For years I have spoken about my dream of helping build an ecovillage.

I don’t imagine or desire an ecovillage rooted solely in Western sustainability practices.

I imagine a place where ancestral Indigenous wisdom and appropriate modern knowledge meet with humility.

A place where we remember how to live in reciprocity with the Earth.

Where children grow up connected to nature.

Where elders are honored.

Where community replaces isolation.

Where giving and receiving return to balance.

David shared the initiative called Alma Indígena—Indigenous Soul.

Its purpose is to build bridges between Indigenous communities and those who sincerely wish to support the preservation of their knowledge, traditions, and ways of life.

Because perhaps being Indigenous is not only about where we were born.

Perhaps there is an Indigenous soul within every human being.

The part of us that remembers we belong to the Earth.

The part that knows rivers are sacred.

The part that understands enough is enough.

The part that still believes life can be organized around relationship instead of extraction.

Maybe that is what is awakening in so many people right now.

And maybe that is why so many of us feel the mountains calling us home.

If this story resonates with you and you’d like to support this work, I’m currently raising funds to purchase bulk cotton thread for the Wiwa women so they can weave more mochilas, generate sustainable income, and help fund their vision of building an Indigenous knowledge school and ceremonial spaces for future generations.

Sometimes changing the world begins with something as simple as a thread.

One thread, woven together with many others, becomes something strong enough to carry a future.

Donate here to support this mission.

“Everything is connected. These rivers, these waters, these places are speaking to us. They are reminding us that we are connected, and that we must unite to defend them.” — Sirley Cely

Last November, I climbed onto a bus in my tiny beach town on Colombia’s Caribbean coast and began a journey that would take me more than twenty-four hours across the country.

One tuk-tuk.

Four buses.

One Uber.

Hundreds of miles of winding roads.

I wasn’t traveling for vacation.

I was following something much older than a travel itinerary.

A longing.

For years I’ve been searching, not for the perfect place, but for the people who are quietly building another way of living.

I’ve often said that I believe our greatest crisis isn’t climate change, poverty, loneliness, or even war.

It’s disconnection.

Disconnection from ourselves.

Disconnection from one another.

Disconnection from the Earth.

Every symptom seems to trace itself back to that same root.

That longing has carried me from Jamaica, where I was born, to Philadelphia, where I grew up. It led me to leave the United States almost five years ago, first to Mexico and now Colombia. Along the way I’ve sought out ecovillages, intentional communities, Indigenous teachers, spiritual traditions, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Not because I believe any one community has all the answers.

But because I believe humanity remembers itself in fragments.

Each place carries a piece of the story.

And if we listen carefully enough, perhaps we can begin weaving those pieces back together.

Last November, that journey brought me to Nashira Ecovillage.

If you’ve been following my writing for a while, you may remember the essays I wrote during my month there.

I wrote about learning the history of patriarchy and matriarchal societies.

About discovering the maternal gift economy.

About Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects and what she called The Great Turning, our collective transition from an industrial growth society toward a life-sustaining civilization.

I wrote about how so much of what we’ve accepted as “normal” is actually incredibly new in human history.

Competition.

Domination.

Isolation.

Endless extraction.

Many of us have been taught that this is simply human nature.

Yet history tells another story.

One rooted in reciprocity.

Relationship.

Community.

Care.

During that month I met women from Colombia, Kenya, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and beyond.

Some were creating shelters for women escaping domestic violence.

Others were building homes with earth alongside other women so families could own homes without lifelong debt.

Some were preserving Indigenous languages and traditions.

Some were regenerating forests.

Some were creating local economies rooted in cooperation rather than competition.

Some were protecting rivers.

Others were simply trying to keep hope alive.

What united them wasn’t ideology.

It wasn’t politics.

It wasn’t even that they all agreed on everything.

It was love.

A deep love for life.

A willingness to devote themselves to protecting it.

Looking back now, I realize Nashira wasn’t simply an educational immersion.

It was an introduction.

An introduction to women who are already living inside what Joanna Macy called The Great Turning.

Not talking about it.

Living it.

One of those women was Sirley Cely.

This is Sirley which we lovingly call La Presidenta

At the time, I knew very little about her.

Like many of us gathered there, she shared pieces of her story during our circles. I knew she came from Putumayo in southern Colombia. I knew she spoke passionately about protecting her territory. I knew she carried a quiet strength that didn’t need to announce itself.

But I didn’t yet understand the magnitude of what she and so many others were carrying.

Last week, Heidi & I had the opportunity to sit down with Sirley over a video call.

As she spoke, I found myself remembering those circles at Nashira.

The conversations about ecology.

About matriarchy.

About community.

About healing.

About remembering.

Suddenly, those weren’t simply beautiful ideas anymore.

They had become flesh and blood.

Where the Andes Kiss the Amazon

Early in our conversation, Sirley described where she lives.

She didn’t begin with statistics.

Or politics.

Or maps.

She smiled gently and said,

“I come from the place where the Andes give a kiss to the Amazon.”

I’ve thought about that sentence ever since.

Not where the Andes end.

Not where one ecosystem gives way to another.

Where they kiss.

A meeting place.

A relationship.

An embrace.

That single sentence says everything about how Indigenous and traditional communities often understand the world.

Not as separate things.

Not as resources.

Not as property.

But as living relationships.

Putumayo sits at one of the most extraordinary ecological crossroads in South America.

Here, the Andes descend toward the Amazon Basin. Rivers are born in these mountains before flowing eastward, eventually nourishing the Amazon itself. The region is also where the Andes, Amazon, and Orinoquía meet, making it one of Colombia’s richest landscapes for biodiversity and one of its most important water-producing regions.

Sirley reminded us that water doesn’t recognize political borders.

Air doesn’t stop at customs.

Forests don’t care which flag flies above them.

The rivers born in her territory eventually become everyone else’s rivers.

Protecting this place isn’t simply about protecting Colombia.

It’s about protecting one of the living systems that makes life possible far beyond Colombia’s borders.

When we speak about saving the Amazon, many of us picture an endless rainforest stretching across the horizon.

What we often forget is that every great river has a beginning.

Every mighty current starts somewhere.

The Amazon begins with countless small streams born high in these mountains.

Long before the river becomes legendary, it is simply water finding its way downhill.

Sirley understands this.

Which is why she says their struggle is local and global.

Women Carrying Peace

Putumayo has known violence.

Like much of Colombia, generations have lived through armed conflict that left deep wounds across the territory.

When Sirley spoke about this history, one thing struck me deeply.

She explained that many of those who died in the conflict were men.

Those who remained were often women.

Women raising children.

Women tending farms.

Women carrying memory.

Women keeping communities alive while waiting for peace.

She told us something I have never forgotten.

That today, the resistance in her region is largely carried on the shoulders of women.

Not because someone assigned them the role.

Because life itself did.

After years of violence, communities began imagining another future.

One rooted not in war but in regeneration.

Just as that future began to emerge another threat arrived.

Not with guns but with multi-national contracts & promises of development.

It came looking beneath the mountains.

Searching for copper.

A New Gold Rush

Beneath the mountains of Putumayo lies one of the largest known copper deposits in Latin America.

To mining companies and investors, this represents opportunity.

To governments, it represents economic growth.

To much of the world, copper has become one of the most valuable minerals of the twenty-first century.

It powers electric vehicles.

Wind turbines.

Solar panels.

Electrical grids.

The batteries and technologies that promise to move us away from fossil fuels.

Demand for copper is expected to increase dramatically over the coming decades as countries race toward what has been called the “green transition.”
On the surface, this sounds like progress.

And in many ways, transitioning away from fossil fuels is essential.

But sitting with Sirley, I found myself asking a question I don’t hear often enough.

Can we solve one ecological crisis by creating another?

If clean energy depends on sacrificing sacred ecosystems...

If electric cars require poisoning rivers...

If renewable infrastructure comes at the expense of Indigenous territories...

Then perhaps what needs transforming isn’t only our energy systems.

Perhaps it’s our relationship with endless consumption itself.

This isn’t an argument against renewable energy.

It’s an invitation to think more deeply about what sustainability really means.

Because if we continue approaching the Earth through the same logic of extraction, only changing what we extract, we haven’t actually changed the story.

We’ve only changed the resource.

An Ancient Place

The region where Sirley lives is not simply rich in minerals.

It is rich in life.

It is where cloud forests descend toward the Amazon.

Where countless rivers and streams are born.

Where Indigenous peoples have lived for generations in relationship with the land.

Where the páramos, the high-altitude ecosystems often called the “water factories” of the Andes, help regulate the flow of water that nourishes entire regions downstream.

This landscape is home to extraordinary biodiversity and to Indigenous nations including the Inga, Kamëntsá, Cofán, Siona, Murui, Coreguaje, Emberá, Páez, and many others, alongside campesino and Afro-Colombian communities who have long depended on these waters and forests for their livelihoods.

For these communities, the mountains are not simply terrain.

The rivers are not simply water.

The forest is not simply timber.

Everything is relationship.

Everything belongs.

Everything has spirit.

During one interview I read while researching this article, an Indigenous elder said something that stopped me in my tracks.

Speaking about the minerals beneath the mountains, she said:

“They are there for a reason. Gold, copper, molybdenum, they nourish the Earth. They help give us food, clean water, and clean air.”

How different this worldview is from the one many of us inherited.

Instead of asking,

“What can we take?”

The question becomes,

“Why is it here?”

That shift changes everything.

More Than an Environmental Fight

When people hear the words environmental activism, they often imagine people hugging trees or protesting pipelines.

But as Sirley spoke, I realized this isn’t simply an environmental struggle.

It’s a struggle over worldview.

One worldview sees the Earth primarily as a collection of resources waiting to be extracted.

The other understands the Earth as a living community to which we belong.

These are fundamentally different ways of being human.

During our conversation, Sirley reminded us that what is happening in Putumayo is not isolated.

The water flowing through her territory eventually becomes part of the Amazon Basin.

The air connects us all.

The health of one ecosystem influences countless others.

When an ecosystem this significant is threatened, she said, it is no longer merely a local concern.

It becomes everyone’s concern.

I couldn’t help thinking about something Joanna Macy often taught.

There is no such thing as “the environment.”

There is only relationship.

The illusion that we are separate from nature is perhaps the deepest wound of modern civilization.

The First Thing Extraction Destroys

One moment from my conversation with Sirley has stayed with me more than any other.

I expected her to speak first about polluted rivers.

About forests.

About biodiversity.

Instead, she spoke about her people.

She said the greatest damage so far has not been environmental.

It has been social.

The proposed mining project has divided neighbors.

Created suspicion.

Broken trust.

Fragmented relationships.

People who once worked together now find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict they never asked for.

Then she said something that broke my heart.

“We have lost our smiles.”

I sat with those words for a long time.

Because they reveal something profound.

Extraction rarely begins by removing mountains.

It begins by fracturing community.

Before forests disappear...

Relationships weaken.

Before rivers are contaminated...

Trust erodes.

Before landscapes are transformed...

People become divided.

Colonization has always understood this.

Communities are much easier to extract from once they have first been separated from one another.

Perhaps that is why the deepest form of resistance has never been violence.

Perhaps it has always been relationship.

Five Hundred Years Later

As I continued researching the struggle in Putumayo, I was struck by how familiar the story felt.

First they came for gold.

Then oil.

Now copper.

The language changes.

The technologies evolve.

The promises become more sophisticated.

But beneath it all, the pattern remains remarkably similar.

Resources leave the Global South.

Profits accumulate elsewhere.

The communities living with the consequences are asked to carry the burden in the name of progress.

One Indigenous leader interviewed about the project said something that echoes across centuries.

“For more than five hundred years they have robbed us, and today they continue.”

Those words are difficult to ignore.

They invite us to ask uncomfortable questions.

Who benefits?

Who pays the price?

Who decides what counts as development?

Who gets consulted?

And perhaps most importantly...

Whose definition of wealth are we using?

What Is Wealth?

This may be the question that stayed with me most.

Because everything depends on how we answer it.

If wealth is measured only by what can be sold, then mountains become deposits.

Forests become timber.

Rivers become resources.

People become labor.

But if wealth is measured by clean water...

Healthy forests...

Birdsong...

Community...

Culture...

Children who can drink safely from the rivers their grandparents drank from...

Then everything changes.

One Indigenous woman interviewed for the story said that outsiders often think wealth means cars, money, and industry.

She disagrees.

For her, wealth is being able to live in relationship with clean water, healthy forests, medicinal plants, animals, and the knowledge passed down through generations.

As I read those words, I smiled.

Because they sounded so familiar.

They sounded like the conversations we had every day at Nashira.

They sounded like Motherful.

They sounded like the reason I left behind one way of living in search of another.

Maybe we’ve been measuring wealth all wrong.

Maybe the richest places on Earth aren’t the ones with the most minerals beneath them.

Maybe they’re the ones where life still flourishes above them.

The Women Who Stay

One thing I’ve noticed throughout my years of traveling is this:

When the world is hurting, there are always women quietly stitching it back together.

Not because women are inherently better than men.

But because for thousands of years women have remained deeply connected to the work of sustaining life.

We carry children.

We gather around food.

We tend to the sick.

We remember names, stories, births, deaths, seeds, recipes, songs, and rivers.

When communities fracture, it is often women who begin weaving them back together.

That is exactly what I witnessed at Nashira.

It is what I witness every day through Motherful.

And it is what I see in Sirley and the women of Putumayo.

During our conversation, Sirley shared that nearly ninety percent of the people actively defending their territory are women.

Not because they were chosen.

Because they chose.

They chose to stand for water.

They chose to stand for their children.

They chose to stand for generations they will never meet.

They chose to stand for life.

A House Worth More Than a House

One of the most beautiful parts of our conversation wasn’t about law, politics, or mining.

It was about a small house.

If you looked at it from the outside, you probably wouldn’t think much of it.

It isn’t grand.

It isn’t famous.

It isn’t historic in the way history books define history.

But to the people of Mocoa, this little house has become sacred.

It sits just outside the entrance to the proposed mining area.

Long before anyone imagined buying it, the community had already begun using it.

It became the place where neighbors gathered.

Where meetings were held.

Where strategies were imagined.

Where visiting scientists, lawyers, organizers, Indigenous leaders, and local families could come together.

Where people could sit in circle and remember why they were fighting in the first place.

Over time, it became known as the heart of the resistance.

As the mining project created division throughout the community, this little house became one of the few places where people could continue gathering, learning, organizing, grieving, dreaming, and rebuilding trust.

It became a place where the social fabric, so damaged by years of conflict and now threatened again by extraction, could slowly be rewoven.

Then something happened.

The owner decided to sell it.

Someone else was interested in buying it.

For the community, this wasn’t simply the possible sale of a house.

It was the possible loss of the physical home of their resistance.

Imagine fighting to protect your territory while losing the very place where your movement gathers.

Imagine watching the doors close on the one space where people have continued showing up for one another.

That is why their fundraising campaign exists because they understand that movements need places.

Places where people can return.

Places where children can learn why these rivers matter.

Places where elders can tell stories.

Places where strategy and ceremony can exist side by side.

Places where people remember they are not alone.

By purchasing this house, they are ensuring that the community can continue occupying this space, continue watching over the entrance to the proposed mine, and continue saying with their presence:

We are still here.

There is something deeply symbolic about that.

Because colonization has always depended on removing people from place.

Resistance often begins by refusing to leave.

I See Motherful in This Story

As Sirley spoke about the house, I couldn’t stop thinking about Motherful.

The healing space we’re building here in Colombia isn’t just about offering retreats.

It isn’t simply about yoga, womb healing, or nervous system healing.

Those are beautiful tools.

But they are not the destination.

The deeper purpose is to create a place where people remember what community feels like.

A place where women can rest.

Where mothers are supported instead of isolated.

Where children are welcomed.

Where grief has somewhere to land.

Where joy has somewhere to grow.

Where people leave more connected to themselves, to one another, and to the Earth than when they arrived.

That is what this house represents in Putumayo.

Different purpose.

Same medicine.

Because healing always needs somewhere to happen.

Community needs somewhere to gather.

Love needs somewhere to live.

Whether it’s an ecovillage...

A temple...

A community garden...

Or a modest wooden house beside a threatened mountain...

Places matter.

The Great Turning Is Already Here

When I first encountered Joanna Macy’s work, one idea stayed with me above all the others.

She said that humanity is living through what she called The Great Turning, the transition from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

At first, that sounded enormous.

Almost impossible.

But the more I travel, the more I realize the Great Turning isn’t some future event.

It isn’t waiting for the next election.

Or the next technological breakthrough.

It is already happening.

It looks like women in Argentina building homes from earth together.

It looks like women in Kenya creating safe places for survivors of violence.

It looks like single mothers creating new models of community.

It looks like Indigenous elders teaching young people how to care for rivers.

It looks like ecovillages experimenting with new ways of living.

It looks like Sirley and hundreds of women standing between one of the most important ecosystems on Earth and a model of development that asks us to sacrifice living systems in the name of progress.

These women aren’t simply resisting something.

They are remembering something.

A way of belonging.

A way of relating.

A way of living that many cultures carried long before colonization taught us to measure wealth only by what could be extracted.

An Invitation

People often ask me what gives me hope.

This.

Women like Sirley give me hope.

Communities like Nashira give me hope.

Motherful gives me hope.

Not because any of us have everything figured out.

But because we have chosen not to surrender our imagination.

We are choosing to believe another world is possible.

And more importantly...

We are beginning to build it.

If this story moved you, I invite you to stand beside these women.

Not out of charity.

Out of relationship.

Learn about their struggle.

Share their story.

Offer your skills.

If you’re a communicator, help amplify their message.

If you’re a lawyer, perhaps your knowledge could serve.

If you work in fundraising, organizing, or media, your gifts may be exactly what this movement needs.

And if you’re able, please consider contributing to their campaign to purchase the resistance house and continue defending this sacred territory.

You can learn more and support their work here:

Instagram

@guardianesandinoamazonia

@resistencia_mocoa_

@lamingakiweamd

The crowdfunding campaign is helping them purchase the resistance house, strengthen legal and communications efforts, expand community education, and continue protecting this extraordinary region.

When I left Nashira last November, I wrote that I believed the Ecovillage Revolution offered one of the most hopeful responses to the crises of our time.

I still believe that.

But today I would say something even bigger.

This isn’t just an ecovillage revolution.

It is a remembering.

A remembering that we belong to one another.

A remembering that rivers are not resources but relatives.

A remembering that the Earth is not a warehouse of commodities but a living community of which we are a part.

And perhaps that is why Sirley’s first words have stayed with me.

She didn’t begin by talking about a mine.

Or politics.

Or conflict.

She began with a kiss.

The place where the Andes kiss the Amazon.

Maybe that is where our future begins too.

Not with domination.

Not with extraction.

But with relationship.

May we learn to kiss the Earth more gently than we have.

And may we have the courage to stand beside those who already do.

This is a video from the experince we lived together at Nashira in November 2025. This is Sirley speaking. She was sharing about her peoples fight and that they are Shamans, that they have powerful medicine that they use to heal not for war. They can use their medicine ways to defend themselves if there is war but they prefer peace and using the medicine to heal. You can hear the emotion in her voice towards the end of the video.

Here is another article from the Guardian

Please share this story and donate so that Sirley & her community can secure the community resistance house.

As I reflect on the last twenty years of my life, I can see a thread running through every experience.

Leaving Jamaica as a child.

Growing up undocumented.

Becoming a teen mother.

Losing my daughter.

Traveling the world.

Living close to nature.

Practicing yoga, meditation, ceremony, and plant medicine.

Building community.

Leaving the United States.

Finding my way to Colombia.

Every relationship.

Every heartbreak.

Every initiation.

Each one has brought me back to myself.

There was a time when I believed healing was primarily about understanding.

Reading more books.

Learning more philosophies.

Finding better teachers.

Exploring deeper spiritual concepts.

And while those things have all served me, I’ve come to realize that wisdom cannot remain in the mind.

It has to descend into the body.

Into the heart.

Into the womb.

Into the voice.

Into the way we live, relate, and move through the world.

You can read every spiritual book.

Listen to every podcast.

Do every ceremony.

Learn every philosophy.

But if it never leaves your head and lands in your body, nothing really changes.

There is so much religion & philosophy available but has it made us better people? More loving and compassionate to ourselves and each other?

This is something I have been learning deeply.

Not just as an idea.

As a lived experience.

One of the deepest lessons I’ve learned is that embodiment requires both an open heart and healthy boundaries.

As women, we are often taught that love means endless giving.

We are taught to be understanding.

To be patient.

To be forgiving.

To see the best in people.

To make space.

To nurture.

To hold.

And those are beautiful things.

But I’ve learned that love without discernment can become a doorway to exploitation.

Discernment is not judgement.

It is what protects the heart.

It is what allows love to remain rooted in truth instead of becoming something that can be manipulated.

Developing my own inner masculine has become just as important as reclaiming my feminine.

Not the masculine of domination or control.

Not the masculine that tries to overpower, analyze, judge, or make itself superior.

But the masculine that creates safety.

The masculine that holds boundaries.

The masculine that honors my intuition instead of overriding it.

The masculine that allows my feminine to remain open without becoming vulnerable to exploitation.

This has become one of the greatest gifts of my healing journey.

Not becoming harder.

Becoming wiser.

Not closing my heart.

Learning how to protect it.

Recently, I had an experience that brought so much of this into focus.

I opened my heart to someone.

And what I began to realize is how easy it can be to confuse spiritual language and esthetics with spiritual embodiment.

Someone can know all the right words.

They can speak about healing.

They can speak about psychology.

They can speak about consciousness.

They can speak about love.

They can carry an archetype or title or spiritual identity that appears powerful from the outside.

But potential is not embodiment.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Charisma is not integrity.

Psychological insight is not emotional maturity.

Using spiritual language and actually practicing spiritual living are two different things.

And this is where women have to become deeply discerning.

Because there is so much wolf in sheep clothing types in the healing and spiritual space.

Self-reflection is important.

And so is trusting your body.

So is trusting the part of you that feels when something is off.

So is trusting the part of you that knows when something is off even when you can’t name it.

One of the biggest things this experience taught me is that no one knows me better than I know myself & I am the final authority when it comes to me.

No guru.

No teacher.

No therapist.

No man.

No spiritual person.

No one.

The moment I start trusting someone else’s interpretation of me more than what my own body is telling me, I have handed away something sacred.

And this is not just personal.

This is cultural.

For generations, patriarchal systems have taught women to distrust their own knowing.

To disconnect from the body.

To silence the voice.

To suppress intuition.

To override discomfort.

To doubt what we feel.

To seek validation from authority outside of ourselves.

And this suppression of the feminine has not only harmed women.

It has harmed the whole world.

Because the feminine is not just women.

The feminine is relationship.

Embodiment.

Receptivity.

Intuition.

Care.

The ability to listen.

The ability to nurture life.

The ability to feel.

The ability to be in relationship with the Earth, with Spirit, with community, with our own bodies.

And when men are cut off from their own inner feminine, from their own heart, from their own capacity to feel and be vulnerable, they often try to dominate what they do not understand.

They try to control what they cannot access within themselves.

They judge what they secretly fear.

They analyze what they cannot feel.

They attempt to overpower the very thing that could help bring them back into wholeness.

This is why I don’t even know if “toxic masculinity” is always the right phrase.

Because so much of what we call toxic masculinity is actually the absence of true masculine presence.

True masculine presence does not dominate the feminine.

It protects life.

It creates safety.

It listens.

It serves.

It holds accountability.

It walks beside, not above.

The masculine without the heart becomes control.

The masculine without humility becomes ego.

The masculine without the feminine becomes disconnected from life.

And this is part of what I see happening in our world.

A culture that has elevated the mind over the body.

Logic over intuition.

Domination over relationship.

Extraction over care.

Hierarchy over community.

Force over love.

And we are all living inside the consequences of that imbalance.

This is why I believe the womb is so powerful.

Not only as an organ.

But as a symbol.

As a consciousness.

As a way of knowing.

The womb creates life.

The womb holds.

The womb listens.

The womb knows cycles.

The womb knows timing.

The womb knows surrender.

The womb knows how to nourish what is becoming.

When I speak about the womb, I am not only speaking about biology.

I am speaking about an ancient intelligence.

A way of relating to life that we have been taught to forget.

And this is where the chakra system becomes more than just an energetic map for personal healing.

It becomes a multidimensional map of consciousness.

The womb teaches us creation and inner knowing.

The heart teaches us love.

The throat teaches us voice.

The third eye, or what I sometimes feel is really the first eye, teaches us discernment.

The womb says, “I know.”

The heart says, “I love.”

The throat says, “I speak.”

The first eye says, “I see.”

And when these centers are disconnected, women become easier to manipulate.

If we are disconnected from the womb, we forget our creative power.

If we are disconnected from the heart, we either close down or overgive.

If we are disconnected from the throat, we silence ourselves.

If we are disconnected from discernment, we ignore what we know.

This is why returning to the body is not optional.

It is the path.

It is how we remember.

Looking back, I realize that every experience, including the painful ones, has expanded my capacity for compassion, discernment, and understanding.

Not because suffering is inherently noble.

I don’t believe women need to suffer in order to become wise.

We’ve done enough of that.

But I do believe we can choose to let our experiences become teachers instead of destinations.

And so much of what I have lived has taught me how to come back home to myself.

Back to my body.

Back to my heart.

Back to my womb.

Back to my voice.

Back to the wisdom that has always been within me.

As I write this, I can feel another chapter beginning.

Last year I created a program called Shedding the Patriarchy.

At the time, I knew it was important.

And now I’m being called back to it and to bring it back into the world to women.

This work isn’t about fighting men.

It isn’t about replacing one hierarchy with another.

It isn’t about women becoming the new version of domination.

It is about remembering another way of being.

A way rooted in embodiment.

Relationship.

Reciprocity.

Community.

Care.

The opposite of patriarchy is not chaos.

It is relationship.

The opposite of domination is not weakness.

It is love with boundaries.

The opposite of hierarchy is not disorder.

It is the circle.

A matrifocal, circular way of being teaches us that no one person belongs on a pedestal.

Not a guru.

Not a teacher.

Not a leader.

Not a partner.

Not even me.

Wisdom belongs in the circle.

Accountability belongs in the circle.

Care belongs in the circle.

Power belongs in the circle.

This is also why I feel called to bring more somatic practices into my work.

Healing doesn’t happen only through insight.

It happens through breath.

Movement.

Presence.

Feeling.

Safety.

Relationship with our bodies.

Because we cannot think our way into embodiment.

We must live it.

And as I continue to integrate my own experiences, I feel Spirit, what I experience as the Divine Mother, calling me more clearly than ever.

To gather women.

To resource women.

To create spaces where women can remember themselves.

To help women trust the wisdom already living within them.

For a long time, I thought my work was about empowering women.

But lately I’ve realized something.

Women don’t need me to give them power.

We need spaces where we can remember it.

Because that is what these systems have done so well.

They have not destroyed the feminine (patriarchy is too weak).

They have encouraged us to forget.

Forget the wisdom of our bodies.

Forget the intelligence of our wombs.

Forget our intuition.

Forget our voice.

Forget that we were never meant to do this alone.

Forget that we belong to one another.

Forget that our greatest strength has never been domination.

It has always been relationship.

It has always been community.

It has always been love.

When women begin remembering who they are, everything changes.

We move differently.

We choose differently.

We love differently.

We mother differently.

We lead differently.

We stop settling for relationships that require us to abandon ourselves.

We stop confusing someone’s potential with their embodiment.

We stop waiting for someone else to tell us who we are.

We stop tolerating abuse, manipulation, and badly behaved men.

Not because we hate men.

But because we love ourselves.

Because once a woman remembers her power, she no longer organizes her life around being chosen.

She chooses.

She discerns.

She walks away when something dishonors her spirit.

She trusts what her body knows.

She stops shrinking to make someone else comfortable.

And then something even more beautiful happens.

We gather.

We tell the truth.

We share our stories.

Our grief.

Our wisdom.

Our medicine.

Our laughter.

Our love.

Our passion.

We remind one another of what these systems taught us to forget.

This is how real change comes.

Not through domination.

Not through force.

Not by replacing one hierarchy with another.

But through love.

Through presence.

Through vulnerability.

Through real connection.

Through healing.

Through women remembering themselves together.

This is the feminine embodiment that is necessary on the planet right now.

And I deeply believe women carry an extraordinary capacity to help heal our communities and reshape our cultures.

That doesn’t mean men cannot grow or contribute.

They absolutely can.

And many do.

But I am not waiting for that transformation before acting (in other words, I’m not holding my fucking breath).

We not waiting for men to remember the feminine before We gather.

We are not waiting for the world to become safe before We begin building spaces of safety.

We are not waiting for permission.

My calling is to begin building now.

And this is why Motherful Colombia exists.

It isn’t just a place.

It isn’t just another nonprofit.

It is my attempt to embody everything I am writing here.

A healing space for women.

A community center.

A sanctuary.

A place where women can slow down.

Reconnect with their bodies.

Remember who they are.

Rest.

Create.

Heal.

Laugh.

Cry.

Dance.

Be witnessed.

Be held by community instead of carrying everything alone.

A place where our children can experience another way of living.

Where community isn’t just something we talk about.

It is something we practice.

Where care becomes culture.

Where women, mothers, children, and allies can gather to remember another way of living.

A way rooted in reciprocity, embodiment, and care.

This is also why I say, “Give Moms Money.”

For some people, it might sound like just a slogan.

For me, it is a philosophy.

If you want to understand what a society truly values, follow where its resources flow.

When mothers are under-resourced, overworked, isolated, and left to carry the work of nurturing life alone, something is deeply out of balance.

When women are expected to raise children, hold families together, nourish communities, heal generations of trauma, and still survive inside systems that do not resource them, we have to ask what kind of world we are really participating in.

When we resource mothers, we are not practicing charity.

We are investing in life itself.

We are investing in children.

We are investing in community.

We are investing in healing.

We are investing in the future.

We are investing in the very conditions that allow life to flourish.

This is the world I am no longer waiting for someone else to create.

I am building it.

Brick by brick.

Relationship by relationship.

Woman by woman.

Mother by mother.

I am remembering.

I am reclaiming.

I am gathering.

I am reweaving.

And if this vision resonates with you, I invite you to be part of it.

Motherful Colombia is growing into a healing sanctuary, community space, and future ecovillage where women, mothers, children, and allies can gather to practice another way of living.

If you feel called to support this vision, every contribution helps us build this space one step at a time.

Give Moms Money, Donate here

And if you are a woman reading this and something in your body feels stirred, maybe it is not because you are learning something new.

Maybe it is because you are remembering something ancient.

Something that has been living inside you all along.

Welcome home.

Reflection

Where in your life have you forgotten your own knowing in order to belong?

Embodiment Practice

Place one hand on your heart and one hand on your womb or heart.

Take a few slow breaths.

Ask yourself:

What part of me is asking to be remembered?

Don’t answer from the mind.

Listen with the body.

Invitation

If this piece spoke to something within you, I invite you to walk this path with us.

Support Motherful Colombia as we build a healing sanctuary and future ecovillage rooted in care, reciprocity, and community.

Click here

Join Revive for online community, spiritual practice, embodiment, and remembrance.

Join here

After I published my piece, “Too Many Boys and Not Enough Men,” I expected disagreement.

What I didn’t expect was to be reminded of one of the biggest obstacles to creating change.

Not disagreement.

Deflection.

Some men responded thoughtfully. They reflected on their own experiences, acknowledged the issues I raised, and contributed to the conversation in good faith.

But others did something I’ve seen over and over again.

Instead of asking, “Is there truth in what she’s saying?” they immediately responded with, “Well, women do it too.”

Women lie too.

Women cheat too.

Women can be manipulative too.

And yes, all of that is true.

But none of it actually addresses the issue being raised.

If I point out that our rivers are polluted and your response is, “Well, the air is polluted too,” you’ve changed the subject rather than engaged with it.

One of the greatest signs of emotional maturity is the ability to stay with discomfort long enough to examine it.

The same is true on a societal level.

If we want to heal our relationships, our communities, and our culture, we have to be willing to honestly look at the patterns that brought us here.

That requires accountability.

Not shame.

Not guilt.

Not blaming every individual man for the actions of every other man.

Accountability.

The lived experiences of women matter.

The statistics around domestic violence, sexual violence, coercive control, and femicide matter.

The reality that many women move through the world calculating risk in ways many men never have to matters.

Acknowledging those truths is not an attack on men.

It’s an invitation to build something better.

Ironically, one of the qualities I most admire in mature masculinity is the willingness to take responsibility without immediately becoming defensive.

To pause and ask, “What can I learn from this? Where have I contributed? How can I become part of the solution?”

That’s strength.

And here’s something else I’ve come to believe.

There is a manufactured war between men and women.

We see it everywhere.

Algorithms amplify outrage.

Media profits from conflict.

Politics exploits division.

And while we’re busy blaming one another, we often fail to see the deeper patterns shaping all of us.

Because the truth is, we are stronger together.

I don’t see men as my enemy.

Despite being let down, despite heartbreak, despite painful experiences, I refuse to reduce half of humanity to a stereotype.

Hurt people hurt people.

Many of us unconsciously pass on the very wounds we inherited.

So many men were never taught emotional literacy. They were conditioned to suppress vulnerability, equate dominance with worth, and seek validation through power, control, conquest, or extraction. Those patterns don’t arise in a vacuum. They are learned, rewarded, and repeated.

Likewise, many women have internalized patterns of self-abandonment, silence, people-pleasing, or competition with one another because those strategies once helped them survive.

This is how systems perpetuate themselves.

The tragedy is that we often become tools of those systems without even realizing it.

Every time we dehumanize someone.

Every time we try to make another person feel small so we can feel powerful.

Every time we choose domination over dialogue, extraction over reciprocity, or fear over love, we reinforce the very dynamics we claim to oppose.

For me, the deeper issue isn’t men versus women.

It’s life-serving values versus domination.

It’s whether we choose healing or harm.

Whether we organize our families, our institutions, and our economies around care, or around control.

That doesn’t mean we ignore the realities of violence or inequality. Quite the opposite. It means we face them honestly, because honesty is the beginning of transformation.

And it means refusing to stay silent when anyone, man or woman, is perpetuating harm.

If these conversations interest you, I encourage you to read widely and with curiosity.

For women and men alike, I recommend bell hooks’ The Will to Change, which explores masculinity, love, and patriarchy with extraordinary compassion.

I also recommend bell hooks’ All About Love, a book that challenges many of our assumptions about intimacy and care.

For understanding trauma and its lasting effects, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score offers invaluable insights into how our experiences shape our behavior and relationships.

And for anyone wanting to cultivate more conscious relationships, I believe the work begins not with finding the perfect partner, but with becoming a more whole person.

That’s one of the reasons I wrote my recent workbook, Hieros Gamos. Get your copy here.

The title refers to the sacred union, the integration of the masculine and feminine within ourselves. Because healed relationships don’t begin when we meet the right person.

They begin when we become someone committed to our own healing, self-awareness, and growth.

The world doesn’t need more finger-pointing.

It needs more people willing to pause, reflect, take responsibility, and do the inner work.

Awareness.

Then accountability.

Then transformation.

That’s how cultures change.

That’s how relationships change.

And perhaps that’s how we finally move beyond the tired battle of men versus women and remember something much more important:

We were never meant to be enemies.

We were meant to become partners in the shared work of protecting life.

From Ideas to Action

These conversations aren’t just theoretical for me.

I’m not interested in endlessly critiquing the world as it is. I’m interested in helping build the world I know is possible.

That’s why I’m building Motherful Colombia on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, a healing sanctuary and emerging community where women can come to rest, reconnect with themselves, heal in relationship with nature, build genuine sisterhood, and remember who they are beneath the noise of modern life.

Donate here today!

My hope is that this becomes more than a place. I see it as a seed for a different way of living, one rooted in care over competition, collaboration over domination, and healing over extraction.

Because if we want healthier relationships, we need healthier people.

If we want healthier communities, we need spaces where people can actually do the work of becoming whole.

And if we want a different future, we have to invest in building it.

The truth is, this vision cannot be carried by one person alone. Like so many grassroots projects around the world, it depends on people who believe in regeneration enough to support it with their time, their energy, and their resources.

If this article resonated with you, I invite you to become part of that vision.

By becoming a monthly donor to Motherful Colombia, you’re not just supporting a healing sanctuary, you’re helping nurture a living experiment in community, women’s leadership, and a culture that serves life.

And if you’re a woman longing to step away from the busyness of everyday life, reconnect with nature, and immerse yourself in healing, community, and purpose, we’d love to welcome you here.

I believe healed relationships begin with individuals committed to their own healing and growth.

That’s true in our homes.

It’s true in our partnerships.

And it’s true for the future of humanity itself.

Thank you for walking this path with us.

It’s a question I never imagined asking, but lately I can’t stop thinking about it.

Do women need space away from men, not because men are inherently bad but lets be honest, looking over the span of human history…actions speak for themselves. So many of us have never experienced relationships free from domination, extraction, or fear?

Across history, countless women have lived with the quiet understanding that they must manage male egos, soften themselves to avoid conflict, or accept imbalance as the price of companionship. Even today, many women admit they don’t feel completely safe, not walking alone at night, not speaking too boldly at work, and heartbreakingly, not even in their own homes.

One of the most painful realities is that intimate partner violence remains one of the leading forms of violence against women globally. For too many women, the greatest threat is not a stranger but someone they know and trust. That reality should force us to ask difficult questions, not only about individual relationships, but about the cultural patterns that shape them.

I keep returning to another question:

What if one of the greatest crises of our time isn’t masculinity itself, but the absence of mature (or even real) masculinity?

Again and again I see boys inhabiting adult bodies, seeking admiration without accountability, intimacy without reciprocity, leadership without self-mastery. (And this could be said for some women too, but we are talking about men now, so sit down & keep reading). They wear the clothes of kings before undergoing the inner transformation that true leadership requires.

And women often become collateral damage.

We pour into relationships hoping for partnership, only to discover we’ve become emotional caretakers. We mistake attention for devotion, control for protection, and dependency for love.

Many women eventually become exhausted.

Some choose singleness.

Some choose community with other women.

Some quietly wonder whether life might actually be easier without men at all.

It’s also worth noting that women creating spaces apart from men is not a new idea.

Across history and into the present day, women have intentionally formed communities where they can live, lead, heal, and organize together on their own terms. Some contemporary women’s lands are entirely women-only, while others welcome men in limited capacities, such as for visits, family connections, or specific events. The extent of male participation varies according to the values and agreements of each community.

Examples include the Womyn’s Lands movement that emerged in the United States during the 1970s, as well as women-centered villages and collective traditions documented in places such as Kenya, Egypt, and Syria.

While each arose from different historical and cultural contexts, they point toward a shared impulse: creating environments where women can flourish, collaborate, and shape community life according to their own priorities.

I find myself wondering whether these communities are exceptions or glimpses of something many women have quietly been longing for all along.

This question sits at the heart of what I’m building through Motherful Colombia.

Motherful Ohio, is close to securing the funding needed to close on a property that will become the first Motherful Village, a place where mother-led households can experience affordable, community-oriented living rooted in mutual aid, ecological stewardship, and shared care. Learn more here & contribute.

And here in Colombia, Motherful has already taken root as a healing ministry and wellness center, supporting local mothers and women while welcoming visitors from around the world to rest, reconnect, learn, and heal in community.

Our long-term vision is to acquire land and co-create a Motherful eco-village and healing sanctuary on the Caribbean coast, a place where regenerative living, intergenerational wisdom, holistic education, and collective care become everyday practice rather than distant ideals.

If this vision resonates with you, I invite you to learn more, contribute, or become part of bringing it to life.

Because building the future requires more than ideas.

It requires places where those ideas can take root.

A quick pause before we continue.

If what you’ve read so far resonates with you and you’d like to support this work, I’m calling in 99 people who believe in this vision to become recurring monthly contributors.

I’m inviting each person to commit to at least $15 a month. Not because $15 changes the world on its own, but because a community of people investing consistently can help build something extraordinary. You can also make a one-time donation & donate what you can as well. Give moms money. We take care of people.

Your support helps me continue writing, teaching, organizing, and laying the foundations for Motherful Colombia, Revibe, and the broader movement toward regenerative, community-centered living.

If you believe that resourcing mothers is one of the most revolutionary investments we can make, I’d be honored to have you walk alongside me.

History offers fascinating examples of women creating autonomous spaces. Women’s monasteries and religious communities often provided opportunities for education, leadership, economic cooperation, and collective life outside male-dominated institutions. Kristen R. Ghodsee, in Everyday Utopia, a book that explores community and highlights more equitable societies have also explored women-led communities as places where care, mutual responsibility, and shared purpose could flourish.

These examples don’t necessarily argue that men should be excluded. They do, however, suggest that women have long sought environments where they could develop their gifts without constantly navigating unequal power dynamics.

This is something else we must also address….

As mothers, we also have work to do.

Too often we pedestal our sons instead of preparing them. We rescue instead of requiring accountability. We confuse unconditional love with the absence of boundaries.

But boundaries don’t diminish boys.

They help them become men.

Because real masculinity isn’t domination.

It isn’t louder opinions or greater control.

It isn’t convincing women that men know best.

Real masculinity is responsibility. It is steadiness. It is humility. It is service. It is using strength to protect rather than possess.

In the Cards of Destiny tradition, men are symbolically represented by the Jack card (of their birth card suit) before embodying the fuller qualities of the King. Whether understood literally or metaphorically, I find the symbolism compelling. Biological age does not guarantee psychological maturity. Titles do not create wisdom. Kingship is earned through character.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting men who embody this deeper expression.

They don’t compete with women’s power; they cultivate it.

They don’t extract from the feminine; they invest in it.

They don’t fear emotionally intelligent women; they feel strengthened by them.

Their presence creates safety instead of vigilance.

Those men remind me that perhaps the problem isn’t just men.

Perhaps the problem is a culture (largely dominated by men lol) that has normalized arrested development while rewarding domination and calling it leadership.

Women have healing to do as well.

Many of us have been conditioned to tolerate imbalance because we believed male attention equaled worth or that self-sacrifice was the price of belonging. Untangling those beliefs is part of reclaiming our own sovereignty. And also reclaiming our sexuality, sensuality, and creative energy for ourselves, not just giving it to men who are not deserving & in service to the patriarchy. Pleasure politics & pussy power. I can say more, but let’s stay on track…

So where does that leave us?

Where does it leave me? lol

I’m an embodied mystic & tantrica that loves the masculine.

Should women separate from men in order to thrive?

Should we build more women-led villages, businesses, learning spaces, and communities where the feminine can heal without interruption?

Or is the deeper invitation to create relationships where mature women and mature men stand side by side, not in hierarchy, but in true reciprocity?

Are there enough men on this planet who truly want that? Who have done, or are willing to do, the inner work required to make it possible?

Or is that hope itself a kind of cultural conditioning, a modern fairy tale reinforced by Disney princess stories and generations of narratives promising that one day Mr. Right will arrive and everything will finally fall into place?

And yet…

There is another possibility I can’t shake.

A deeper intuition. A quiet knowing that this balance is possible. That there are men who have moved beyond domination and into devotion. Men who are no longer extracting from the feminine but are in sacred relationship with HER. Men who are wholeheartedly devoted to the Divine Mother in all her expressions and who understand that their strength exists not to control life, but to protect and nurture it.

I don’t claim to have the answer.

I’m simply asking the question.

But I do know this:

The future cannot be built on extraction.

Not between humans and the Earth.

Not between governments and We the people.

And not between men and women.

And truth be told…

Anything you give a woman, she multiplies.

We are just magical like that!

Give her trust, and she expands trust. Give here ingredient she make a nourishing meal. Planting a seed in the fertile black soil brings forth life. We grow people from our bodies!

Give her your hopes and dreams and she weaves whole new realities.

Give her partnership, and she builds thriving families and communities.

Give us resources and real support and we create real change.

But generations of domination, dismissal, and violence that we have subject to, are multiplied too, becoming inherited fear, grief, and rage.

Perhaps women’s exhaustion is not a rejection of love.

Perhaps it is a refusal to continue mothering grown boys while longing for true partners.

The revolution I long for is not one where women defeat men.

It is one where boys become men, women no longer have to shrink to survive, and both remember that power without reverence is empty.

Until then, the question remains:

If women flourish most where they feel deeply safe, deeply respected, and deeply supported, and so many still do not experience that in relationships with men, what kind of transformation is now being asked of us all?

The Earth keeps calling me closer.

The mission is planetary liberation.
The vision is the manifestation of Heaven on Earth.
And one of the ways I believe we get there is by rebuilding community from the ground up.

Let’s co-create the eco-village revolution.

Give Moms Money.

Goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth

Because when you resource mothers, you resource families. When you resource families, you strengthen communities. And when communities thrive, the future changes. Now.

If this vision resonates with you, I invite you to support my work and help fund the matriarchal revolution I am building through Motherful and my ministry here in Colombia.

I’m calling forth true devotees of the Divine Mother, women and men who understand that caring for life is among the highest forms of service.

If you feel called to co-create, invest, collaborate, or financially support this mission, I would love to hear from you.

The future will not be built by domination.

It will be built by those willing to nurture and invest in what comes next.

One of the founders of Motherful, Heidi, is here visiting me from Ohio right now. I’m proud and honored to call her a comrade, friend and soul sister. She brought a tote bag that says:

GIVE MOMS MONEY.

I chuckled when I saw it.

Partly because it’s funny but also dead serious, and partly because it cuts through all the complexity and gets straight to the point.

As a Capricorn, I appreciate a good spiritual vision, but I also appreciate practical realities. We can talk about healing the world, shifting consciousness, building community, and creating a more beautiful future, but at some point somebody still has to pay for the childcare, the food, the land, the programming, the infrastructure, and the support systems that actually allow people to thrive.

The more I sit with that simple phrase, the more I realize how much wisdom it contains.

For the past few days Heidi and I have been spending time together here on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. We’ve been walking by the sea, sharing meals, dreaming, laughing, resting, envisioning, and talking about what we’re collectively building, Motherful, but also the larger cultural shift that so many of us can feel happening.

And honestly, one of the biggest realizations I’ve had is that what we’re doing together right now is part of the medicine.

We’re slowing down.

We’re spending time in nature.

We’re sharing ideas.

We’re supporting one another.

We’re allowing ourselves space to dream.

We’re creating room for Spirit to speak.

And it has reminded me how hungry so many women are for exactly this.

Sisterhood.

Connection.

Community.

Time to hear themselves think.

Time to remember who they are beneath the endless demands of modern life.

As mothers, women, caregivers, and visionaries, many of us have spent years pouring from cups that were never refilled. We’ve been taught to prioritize everyone else’s needs before our own. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our worth is tied to how much we produce, how much we sacrifice, how much we give, and how little we need in return.

And then we wonder why we’re exhausted.

The truth is that women were never meant to do this alone.

And if you feel & believe this, send some support our way via a tax deductable donation here.

Mothers were never meant to do this alone.

The village wasn’t some romantic fantasy.

The village was infrastructure.

The village was support.

The village was how human beings lived for most of our history.

And I believe many of us are feeling the consequences of its absence.

My own journey has been a search for that village.

As a young mother, I knew there had to be another way. That search led me through grief, healing, spirituality, community living, home birth, unschooling, plant medicines, ceremony, travel, and years of following my intuition, often without any map except the one in my heart.

Along the way, I began to realize that the healing I was seeking wasn’t just personal.

It was cultural.

Many of the struggles we face are not individual failures. They are symptoms of systems that have disconnected us from ourselves, from one another, from the Earth, and from the wisdom that has always lived within us.

Over generations, many women inherited messages that taught us to distrust our bodies, suppress our intuition, disconnect from our desires, and seek authority outside ourselves. Whether through religion, culture, institutions, family systems, or social expectations, many of us learned to care for everyone else while abandoning ourselves.

One of the things that has fascinated me over the years is how often women gathering together has been viewed as dangerous.

Not women shopping together.

Not women performing expected roles together.

Women gathering to share wisdom.

Women gathering to heal.

Women gathering to dream.

Women gathering without needing permission.

There is something profoundly powerful that happens when women come together and remember who they are.

We remind one another of our gifts.

We reflect back possibilities that have been forgotten.

We amplify each other’s courage.

We stop feeling crazy for wanting a different life.

We begin to trust our own knowing.

Perhaps this is why so many women resonate with Women Who Run With the Wolves. We recognize something in those stories. Something wild. Something ancient. Something that was never truly lost, only buried beneath layers of conditioning, responsibility, and survival.

The wild woman is not reckless.

She is alive.

She is connected to her instincts, her creativity, her intuition, her sensuality, her relationship with nature, and her own inner authority.

And I think that’s part of what we’re witnessing right now.

Women are returning to themselves.

Women are reconnecting with their bodies.

Women are healing their relationship with pleasure, sensuality, and sexuality.

Women are reconnecting with their wombs, not simply as organs of reproduction, but as centers of creation.

Women are questioning inherited stories about who they should be and what they should want.

Women are choosing themselves.

Women are remembering their medicine.

Many are decentering men, not because they hate men, but because they are finally learning how to center their own lives, their own healing, their own visions, and their own relationship with Spirit.

And I don’t believe this reclamation is separate from what is happening with the Earth.

The same mindset that has treated the Earth as something to be extracted from has often treated women the same way.

Produce more.

Give more.

Need less.

Rest later.

Keep going.

Many of us are realizing that story is no longer sustainable.

What is emerging now is reciprocity.

Relationship.

Remembrance.

A return to values that sustain life.

And this is where Motherful Colombia and Revibe come together for me.

I’ve been talking about Revibe and the vision of regenerating the village through intention and building ecology. I’ve spoken about healing, emotional mastery, spirituality, community, regenerative culture, and creating a more beautiful future.

For a while, those things felt like separate projects.

Lately, I’ve realized they are all expressions of the same vision.

Revibe is the movement.

The remembering.

The larger vision of cultural regeneration.

Motherful is one physical expression of that vision.

A living laboratory.

A place where these ideas become practices.

A place where mothers are supported.

A place where women can heal, create, rest, and reconnect.

A place where children belong.

A place where community is intentionally cultivated.

A place where we can experiment with alternative economies, collective projects, regenerative businesses, artist residencies, healing spaces, and new ways of living together.

Here in the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, we are beginning to build what I call the Motherful Temple and Healing Space.

Not simply a building.

A field.

A place devoted to healing, creativity, ritual, sisterhood, embodiment, nature connection, and remembering.

We’re creating an Artist, Creative, and Healing Residency for women who feel called to step away from the noise and reconnect with what matters. Women who want to write, create, heal, dream, collaborate, and spend time with other women who are building meaningful lives and meaningful work.

I don’t see this as a retreat from life.

I see it as a return to life.

A return to ourselves.

A return to community.

A return to what becomes possible when women are truly supported.

And this is where that tote bag comes back in.

Give Moms Money.

Simple.

Funny.

Profoundly practical.

Because if we are serious about creating a different future, then mothers must be resourced.

Not someday.

Now.

If this vision speaks to you, I invite you to support it.

Motherful is a nonprofit, which means we can receive donations that directly support the development of this work. Donations help us create programming, support mothers, develop the physical space, host gatherings and residencies, and continue building a living example of what becomes possible when care is placed at the center.

Every contribution helps us take another step toward making this vision tangible.

A place where women can gather.

A place where mothers can thrive.

A place where community can be practiced.

A place where the village can be remembered.

A place where another future is not just imagined, but lived.

If you’ve ever longed for that future, I’d love to invite you to help us build it.

Donate here

Thank you.

Putting this picture here again, just incase you needed a reminder ; )

I sometimes jokingly describe myself as a “hodgepodge spiritualist.”

Over the years, I’ve explored many different teachings, traditions, tools, and practices. Some people see this as confusion. I see it as devotion to Truth.

The reality is that we are all unique beings.

We come into this world with different karmas, different gifts, different wounds, different lessons, and different purposes. Why would we expect one spiritual path, one teacher, one book, or one belief system to serve every soul equally?

Many people today are feeling the pull away from one-size-fits-all religion and toward a more direct and personal relationship with God, Spirit, Source, Creator, whatever name resonates with them.

I felt that pull many years ago.

I grew up in a Christian family, but something never quite clicked for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in God. Quite the opposite. I’ve always felt deeply connected to God.

What I struggled with was the idea of a vengeful God. A God who would condemn people to eternal hellfire. A God who demanded fear more than love.

Something inside me always questioned those teachings.

Many people never allow themselves to ask those questions. Not because they’re incapable of it, but because questioning can feel like death.

When your beliefs are woven into your family, community, identity, and understanding of reality, questioning them can feel terrifying.

Who are you if those beliefs are no longer true?

Who are you if the story you’ve been living by begins to unravel?

This is why so many people stay where they are.

Not because they have found Truth, but because they maybe subconsciously fear the death required to discover more of it.

Die Before You Die

There is a spiritual teaching that appears across many traditions:

“Die before you die.”

I first heard this saying from a Sufi friend.

It doesn’t refer to physical death.

It refers to the death of the false self.

The death of outdated identities.

The death of limiting beliefs.

The death of attachments.

The death of who we thought we were.

Every major transformation in my life has required a death.

The death of old versions of myself.

The death of stories.

The death of expectations.

The death of certainty.

And every death has been followed by a rebirth.

Astrologically, I have Pluto in Scorpio in my 7th house, and transformation seems to be one of the central themes of my life. Again and again, life invites me into the underworld, asks me to release what no longer serves me, and emerge as someone new.

I’ve come to understand that this process isn’t punishment.

It’s evolution.

It’s how consciousness grows.

Spirituality as a Journey of Expansion

Many people begin their search through religion.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

For many, religion provides comfort, guidance, structure, and community.

But sometimes what helped us at one stage of life cannot take us where our soul is trying to go next.

Life has increasingly felt to me like a giant game of consciousness.

As we grow, we level up.

And the tools that got us to one level may not be the same tools that help us reach the next.

A hammer is useful.

But you can’t build everything with a hammer.

Sometimes you need a different tool.

Sometimes you need a bigger perspective.

Sometimes you need new teachings.

Sometimes you need direct experience.

The mistake many people make is assuming that because one tool helped them once, it must be the only tool they’ll ever need.

Growth requires flexibility.

Curiosity.

Humility.

A willingness to continue learning.

The Cards of Destiny: A Tool That Found Me

One of the tools that has profoundly impacted my life is the Cards of Destiny system.

I first discovered it many years ago.

When I learned that my Birth Card was the Seven of Hearts and my Planetary Ruling Card was the Nine of Spades, something inside me immediately resonated.

In the Cards of Destiny system, the Seven of Hearts is often associated with spiritual growth through matters of the heart, learning to move beyond emotional attachments and seek deeper truth.

The Nine of Spades is considered one of the most transformative cards, representing endings, release, wisdom, and profound spiritual evolution through letting go of what no longer serves.

It felt less like learning something new and more like remembering something I already knew.

The more I studied the cards, the more confirmation I received.

The more clarity I gained.

The more direction I found.

The cards helped me understand my gifts, challenges, cycles, lessons, and purpose in ways that felt both practical and deeply spiritual.

They didn’t tell me what to do.

They helped me understand the energies I was working with.

And that’s a huge difference.

Today I use the system daily.

Toward the end of last year, I received a strong inner guidance to begin tracking my Daily Cards and observing how the energies showed up in my life.

Since then I’ve watched synchronicity after synchronicity unfold.

Certain themes arise exactly as the cards suggest.

Specific lessons become highlighted.

Relationships, opportunities, challenges, and insights often mirror the energies of the day in astonishing ways.

The cards have become a living dialogue between my soul and the universe.

A Brief History of the Cards of Destiny

The Cards of Destiny system is an ancient spiritual and mathematical system connected to the standard 52-card deck.

While most people see playing cards as a game, many esoteric traditions have viewed them as a symbolic map of life.

The system was popularized in modern times through the work of Robert Lee Camp, who demonstrated how birth dates correspond to specific cards and how those cards reveal personality traits, life themes, relationship dynamics, timing cycles, and spiritual lessons.

The 52 cards correspond to the 52 weeks of the year.

The system also incorporates planetary cycles, yearly spreads, life spreads, and daily influences.

What fascinates me most is not simply the information itself, but how consistently it reflects lived experience.

For me, it has become one of many powerful tools for self-awareness, growth, and spiritual evolution.

Not the only tool.

But an incredibly valuable one.

The Great Work of Our Time

The deeper I go into spirituality, the more I realize that personal transformation and planetary transformation are inseparable.

The Earth is changing.

Human consciousness is changing.

Many people can feel it.

The old systems are struggling because they were never built for long-term harmony with life.

For generations we have projected our unhealed wounds outward.

Into conflict.

Into division.

Into exploitation.

Into pollution.

Into war.

Into destruction.

The invitation now is different.

We are being called inward.

To heal.

To integrate our shadows.

To take responsibility for our own consciousness.

To become aware of how our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and actions shape the world around us.

This is the work of our time.

Not escaping the world.

Transforming ourselves so we can help transform it.

We cannot wait for politicians, corporations, governments, or institutions to create the future we want.

That future begins within us.

Within our hearts.

Within our communities.

Within our choices.

Within our willingness to become conscious creators.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

An Invitation

This vision is at the heart of the community I’m building called Revibe.

Revibe stands for Regenerating the Village through Intention and Building Ecology.

We explore both inner ecology and outer ecology.

The ecology of the mind.

The heart.

The spirit.

The body.

The relationships we cultivate.

The communities we create.

And the relationship we have with the Earth itself.

Inside Revibe, we explore tools for healing, self-awareness, spiritual growth, community building, and conscious living, including the Cards of Destiny system that has become such a meaningful part of my own journey.

If you’re someone who feels called to grow, heal, question, remember, and co-create a more beautiful future, I invite you to join us.

The journey home begins within.

And none of us have to walk it alone.

Join us here

There is a kind of spirituality that disconnects people from the body.

A spirituality that treats transcendence as more holy than embodiment.
That praises detachment over feeling.
That fears pleasure.
That pathologizes desire.
That speaks endlessly about “higher frequencies” while remaining deeply uncomfortable with sensuality, intimacy, eros, and the sacred intelligence of the body itself.

And honestly?
I think this is a very masculine expression of spirituality.

Not masculine in a negative sense, but masculine in the way it often prioritizes control, discipline, transcendence, and ascension upward… while neglecting the feminine path of descending deeper into the body, the Earth, sensation, beauty, receptivity, and feeling.

For many women especially, healing is not found in leaving the body.
It is found in returning to it.

Returning to pleasure.
Returning to softness.
Returning to sensuality.
Returning to life force.

This Taurus New Moon revealed that to me in a profound way.

Taurus rules the body.
The senses.
Pleasure.
Beauty.
Touch.
Food.
Rest.
Safety.
Money.
Love.
Venus.

It asks:
How are you tending to your foundation?
Not just your business or finances…
…but your nervous system, your body, your capacity to receive, your relationship with pleasure and aliveness.

And during this portal, I had a beautiful experience with someone I recently met — a connection filled with chemistry, polarity, affection, playfulness, sensuality, and presence.

What struck me most was not simply the attraction itself.
It was the remembrance.

I realized how easy it is, especially as women carrying responsibility, motherhood, healing work, and vision-holding, to become disconnected from sensuality and pleasure. To live almost entirely in survival mode, productivity mode, healing mode, or “service” mode.

And yet sensuality is healing too.

Not reckless indulgence.
Not unconscious sex.
Not abandoning discernment.

But openness.
Presence.
Receiving.
Allowing ourselves to feel.

We have become so uptight around sexuality in many spiritual spaces that people are either repressing their life force entirely or expressing it unconsciously without reverence.

But there is another way.

There are feminine spiritual traditions that understand sexual energy as sacred creative energy.
As life force.
As healing energy.
As manifestation energy.

This is why Tantra, in its deeper essence, is not merely about sex, it is about consciousness through embodiment. Through breath. Through energy. Through polarity. Through presence. Through learning to inhabit the body fully instead of escaping it.

Pleasure can be prayer.
Touch can be medicine.
Desire can awaken creativity.
Sensuality can reconnect us to God through the body instead of away from it.

And perhaps part of healing the collective is learning how to become safe enough, in ourselves, to experience sweetness again.

To stop treating every connection as something to possess, control, fear, or suppress.

To allow moments of beauty.
Moments of attraction.
Moments of intimacy.
Moments of tenderness.
Moments of aliveness.

Not everything sacred is permanent.
Some things arrive as portals.
As initiations.
As reminders that we are still alive beneath the armor.

Maybe spirituality was never meant to disconnect us from being human.

Maybe it was meant to help us inhabit our humanity more fully.

A few practices that have helped me reconnect to embodied spirituality:

— slowing down enough to actually feel my body
— dance and intuitive movement
— breathwork
— sensual self-care rituals
— eye contact and conscious touch
— meditation focused on embodiment rather than escape
— nervous system healing
— nature connection
— learning to receive pleasure without guilt
— allowing desire to move creatively instead of suppressing it

This is also a big reason I created my new workbook, Hieros Gamos, which means Sacred Union.

The workbook explores emotional healing, embodiment, polarity, masculine and feminine energy, sensuality, nervous system awareness, spiritual integration, and the path of returning to wholeness within ourselves.

Because healing is not just about transcending the human experience.

It is also about learning how to fully inhabit it.

Hieros Gamos is available now for those ready to deepen into embodied healing, sacred union, and emotional liberation.

There is a quiet disconnection that lives in so many women. A disconnection from the body, from the womb, from pleasure, from trust. And it didn’t happen by accident.

For many women, the body has not been a place of safety. It has been a place of confusion, pressure, violation, or abandonment. Sexual energy(spiritual energy), something that is meant to be creative, life-giving, and deeply intelligent, has been misunderstood, misused, or taken (without consent).

So the body does what it knows how to do. It protects.

The womb tightens. The yoni closes. The heart builds walls.

The body is intelligent, and these survival patterns exist for a reason. They help us do exactly that, survive. This is not something wrong with the body. It is the body’s natural wisdom responding to perceived danger and an unsafe environment, protecting itself the best way it knows how.

Over time, this becomes the baseline. A woman can move through life appearing open, expressive, even confident, but beneath that, there is a subtle holding. A guardedness. A disconnection from deep, organic pleasure. A hesitation to fully trust love, life, or the masculine.

Many women have never fully experienced pleasure in their own bodies, not because something is wrong with them, but because their body has never felt safe enough to truly open and receive. When safety is absent, the body protects. And when the feminine has been conditioned to give, perform, or endure rather than receive, she loses touch with one of her most natural gifts. The feminine is naturally receptive. She is made to receive first, and from that nourished, full place, she gives to the world abundantly. A woman who is truly nourished, who knows how to receive love fully, including in her body, becomes a gift to everyone around her. Her healing is not selfish. It is sacred service.

And what many don’t realize is that the heart and the womb (and throat, self-expression) are deeply connected. When the heart closes from betrayal, heartbreak, or disappointment, the womb feels it. When trust is broken, the body remembers.

So this work, this path of healing, is not just emotional. It is somatic. It is relational. It is deeply energetic.

This is where tantra and sacred sexuality were originally meant to guide us. Not as performance. Not as technique. But as a return. A return to presence in the body. A return to feeling. A return to the intelligence of life moving through us.

True tantra is not about doing more. It is about removing what blocks the natural flow of life force. And when that flow begins to return, everything changes. The breath deepens. Sensation awakens. The body softens. Pleasure is no longer something chased or forced, it becomes something that arises naturally, from within.

But this kind of opening requires something many women have not consistently experienced, safety. Not just physical safety, but emotional and energetic safety.

And this is where the masculine becomes part of the healing.

A grounded, present, heart-led masculine energy creates a container where the feminine can finally soften. Not because she has to, but because she feels safe enough to. In that space, the body begins to unwind what it has held for years. The nervous system shifts. The womb softens. The heart opens again.

But for this to be real, not just an idea, the masculine must do his own work. Not to fix. Not to perform. But to genuinely become a safe place.

And that requires depth. Because the distortion of the masculine did not only harm the feminine, it disconnected men from themselves, their inner feminine. From their hearts. From their capacity to feel. From their ability to love without control. When a man lacks direction, understanding, and purpose, he can feel lost and empty, and unconsciously seek to fill that void through the sexual energy of women rather than from his own wholeness. This is not love. It is a dangerous hunger dressed as masculinity.

The masculine path of healing asks for real transformation. A return to presence, to integrity, to emotional honesty. And a willingness to reclaim the part of themselves that has been suppressed for generations, their own feminine nature. The part that knows how to feel, to listen, to nurture, to care. Because without that integration, they cannot truly meet the feminine.

And when a man does this work, when he becomes integrated, he becomes steady. Not rigid, but grounded. Not controlling, but clear. Not closed, but present. And that presence is what creates safety. Not words. Not intention alone. Embodiment. And our nervous system can pick up on this.

It is that embodiment that allows a woman to open again. Not blindly, not all at once, but slowly, as her body begins to trust what it is feeling.

And when that trust returns, something sacred begins to happen. The heart opens. The womb softens. The body remembers pleasure, not as something external, but as something that has always lived within her. It’s all within us but we can serve as catalyst and mirrors.

Women deserve to be fully loved, on every level. That is not too much to ask. It is the most natural thing in the world.

As i was writing and contemplating this, I kept thinking about the phrase “a well loved/fu#ked woman” , because there are so many dimensions and levels to this one phrase and the way my mind works and make connections. And I see one of the solutions to healing thus planet is a well loved/fu#ked woman, deeply in her body, open to pleasure, not even as an external happening but as her baseline. She is tuned in, turned on and tapped in, in the deepest ways.

When I look back at my own path, the healing, the curiosity, the deep dives into so many different modalities, it’s easy to see how, at one point, it all felt scattered. I used to question it. Wondering why I couldn’t just focus on one thing. Why my interests were so wide. Why I was being pulled in so many directions.

But what I see now is that none of it was random. Each area I explored, whether it was the body, emotional healing, spirituality, relationships, or community, was adding a layer of understanding and expanding my capacity to see the whole.

And this is something I’ve come to recognize not just in my own journey, but in the larger movement toward cultural repair and regeneration. Real community, real regeneration, real healing, it doesn’t happen in isolated categories. It happens in relationship. In the weaving together of body, land, emotion, spirit, and how we live with one another.

What once felt like scattered learning now reveals itself as something intentional. A gathering of threads. And now, those threads are weaving themselves into something whole, not just in theory, but in practice. In how we live. In how we love. In how we build.

So instead of seeing this path as unfocused, I’ve come to see it as preparation.

This is why this work matters, because it is not just personal. It is cultural.

The disconnection between the masculine and feminine has shaped how we relate, how we love, how we build, and how we live. And what is being asked of us now is not to bypass that, but to heal it. Through the body. Through awareness. Through relationship. Through conscious choice. And even through sexuality.

This is cultural repair. And it doesn’t happen in theory. It happens in how we show up, in how we hold ourselves, in how we meet each other, in how we create safety, truth, and connection again.

Because a woman who feels safe, who is connected to her body, who trusts life, who can open her heart without losing herself, she becomes a force of creation. Her love becomes generative. Her presence becomes medicine. Her pleasure becomes power.

And a man who has done the work to meet her there becomes the ground that allows that power to rise.

Together, they create something far beyond themselves. Not dependency. Not control. But coherence. And from that coherence, new ways of living, loving, and being begin to emerge.

This is the work I find myself returning to. Not as something new. But as something remembered.

If something in this piece moved you, if you recognized yourself somewhere in these words, you’re not here by accident.

This is the work I’m devoted to. Not just as theory, but as lived practice.

✦ Soul Vital Energy Reading — understand your energetic design, your patterns, and your gifts. Essential ($111 written report) or Expansion ($222 report + 45 min call). DM me BLUEPRINT or visit the link here

✦ ReVibe — community, practice, and a space to actually live this work. The village is growing. Join us here

✦ Hierós Gámos Workbook — the deeper inner work of sacred union is coming. Stay close.

With love, Shanika 🌿

I just moved through a wave that honestly felt like a kind of death. Not physically, but emotionally and energetically. Like something in me was being stripped, softened, let go of. And when I really sat with it, it made sense. We’ve been in this Scorpio full moon energy, and I could feel my cycle approaching, and then it arrived right in that same window, so my body, my emotions, everything aligned for this process. And I felt it deeply.

And it also reminded me of how important it is to be in tune with the natural cycles within and around us. As women, our bodies already move through these phases of letting go, cleansing, and renewal. Instead of honoring that, we’ve been conditioned to ignore it or pathologize it.

And when I really sit with that, it’s not random. There are systems that benefit from our disconnection. Patriarchy, capitalism… they don’t thrive when we are deeply connected to our bodies, our wombs, our intuition, and our natural rhythms. They thrive when we override our bodies, when we see them as inconvenient, as problems to fix, instead of sacred systems to listen to and work with.

When a woman is deeply connected to her body, to her cycle, to her creative life force, she becomes harder to control and a Goddess to be reconned with. She becomes more intuitive, more grounded in herself, more in tune with what is and isn’t aligned. And that kind of embodiment shifts everything.

So this work isn’t just personal, it’s also collective. It’s about deconditioning the ways we’ve been taught to relate to our bodies through disconnection, extraction, and even subtle forms of self-abandonment. And instead, rebuilding that relationship through love, care, and reciprocity.

Not seeing the body as something to push through or dominate, but as something to listen to, to honor, to partner with.

Our bodies are not problems. They are sacred. And when we begin to reconnect in that way, we start to transform not just pain, but our relationship to it. It becomes something we can move, something we can work with, something that can even open into power and pleasure.

And this is also where spirituality and social justice meet. They’re not separate. The deeper I go into this work, the more I see that. The more I come into alignment, into truth, into embodiment, the more it naturally calls me into service. It’s not something I have to force. It’s something that arises from within.

When you begin to experience more love, more clarity, more freedom within yourself, you can’t help but want others to experience that too. You start to see what’s possible, for yourself, for others, for the collective. And that changes how you move through the world.

And even for men, while the cycle is different, there are still rhythms. I feel like it’s important for men to also understand women’s cycles, so there can be more awareness, more honor, and more support, instead of misunderstanding or judgment.

If you want to know more about the lunar cycle as a powerful natural cleansing portal for women and how to work with it, I shared more in another transmission here.

There was an intensity to what I moved through, but also something really tender. It was bittersweet, because there is a kind of suffering in that process, but not the kind we’re taught to avoid. It’s more like the friction of holding on while something is trying to move through you. And when you stop resisting, when you actually allow yourself to feel what’s there and breathe through it, something shifts. That’s where surrender comes in.

And in that space, I had this realization that I’ve touched before but really felt this time: that life, this reality is all a kind of play. Not in a dismissive way, but in a deeply sacred way, higher, much higher perspective kind of way. There’s this concept in Hindu philosophy called Lila, the idea that life is a divine play of consciousness. When you remember that, something relaxes inside of you. You start to see that everything matters, and at the same time, nothing really matters in the way we think it does.

I was also listening to Alan Watts speak about this, and it landed even deeper. The suffering wasn’t coming from what I was feeling, it was coming from the resistance to it.

That made something really clear for me. Desire is not the problem. Desire is natural, it’s life moving through us. But the moment desire meets fear, fear of not getting it, fear of losing it, fear of the unknown, that’s when the body tightens. That’s when we start trying to control, to figure things out, to make things go a certain way. And that’s where suffering begins.

This connects directly to what’s taught in A Return to Love, based on A Course in Miracles. At the root of everything, there are really only two ways we move through life: from fear or from love. Fear contracts, it controls, it resists. Love opens, it allows, it trusts. So every moment becomes a quiet choice, whether we’re aware of it or not, am I meeting this from fear, or from love?

And this is actually something I’ve been exploring more deeply in my own life and in community. If you feel called to go deeper into this work and really practice returning to love in a grounded, embodied way, I created a 30-day Return to Love portal that you can step into here: [link]

And love here isn’t just a feeling. It’s a state of openness. It’s the ability to stay present, even when things feel uncertain or intense, instead of immediately trying to control or escape what’s happening. That’s what surrender really is.

And it points to a deeper truth and acceptance, as one returns more and more to the natural self, the sahaja self. From that space of deep trust, there is a kind of spontaneity and flow that arises naturally. You’re no longer forcing, no longer trying to figure everything out, you’re responding, moving with life, allowing it to unfold through you.

And this is where the mind comes in, because we’ve been taught to live so much of our experience there. We’re very mentally dominated as a society. The mind is always trying to label, analyze, predict, and control, and that’s why ten people can go through the exact same experience and walk away with completely different stories. It’s not the experience itself, it’s the interpretation.

Overthinking, trying to figure everything out, needing certainty, that’s the rigidity. And it pulls us away from the natural self, the part of us that is more spontaneous, more fluid, more in flow with life. So this shift from fear to love is also a shift from living in the mind to living in the body, from control to trust.

But this isn’t something you just think your way into. This is where the body becomes essential. Emotions aren’t just thoughts, they’re energy moving through us. And when we don’t feel them, when we suppress or avoid them, they don’t just disappear. They stay in the system.

Different traditions have always understood this. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, there are relationships between emotions and different organs. Practices rooted in Shamanism work directly with these emotional and energetic layers.

It’s all pointing to the same thing. What we feel moves through us, and when it doesn’t get processed, it lingers. So the real work is learning how to process in real time. Not just talking about emotions, but actually being with them.

For me, that looks like feeling where something lives in my body, breathing into it, staying present instead of contracting. It’s choosing to keep expanding, even when it would be easier to shut down.

And there are simple ways to support this daily. Even something like square breathing, inhaling for four, holding for four, exhaling for four, holding for four, or alternate nostril(Nadi Shodhana) breathing can help bring the system back into balance. These are simple, but powerful when practiced consistently.

Movement helps too. Letting energy move through the body instead of holding it. That’s why practices like Tai Chi, Yoga, and Capoeira have been so supportive for me.

And even tools like astrology can be used in a practical way. You can look up your natal chart and even your astrocartography chart, take screenshots, and drop them into tools like Claude or ChatGPT to get insights and reflections, and use them as tool, but as a mirror to better understand your patterns, your personality, and what you’re working with.

Used consciously, these tools can support awareness. And awareness is what allows you to move through life more intentionally instead of unconsciously reacting.

Even when you look at Scorpio energy on a deeper level, it’s also connected to sexual energy, which is really life force energy. That energy can either become chaotic when it’s unconscious, or powerful when it’s embodied and directed. And as women especially, we feel these layers deeply, so the work isn’t to suppress anything, but to learn how to hold it and work with it consciously.

I also had this simple realization through the metaphor of wishing on a star. In that moment, there’s no resistance. You’re not overthinking, you’re not doubting, you’re not trying to control how it will happen. You’re just open. And I started to see that this is actually how we’re meant to move through life more often. And when resistance shows up, as it will, the practice is to soften and let go again.

It really is like dying a thousand little deaths in one lifetime, but each time something falls away, you open more.

And in these times, we can’t just be plain old spiritual, spiritual. We have to be spiritual gangsters, lol. Keep them boundaries strong. I’m all peace and love, but I will also drop kick you!

Because this path isn’t passive. It’s not about bypassing what’s happening in the world or staying in some detached state. It’s about being deeply embodied, deeply aware, and willing to stand in truth, in love, and in alignment, even when it’s uncomfortable.

A spiritual gangster is someone who is open, but also grounded. Loving, but also clear. Flowing, but also has boundaries. Someone who is doing the inner work and allowing that to shape how they show up in the world.

So yes, I flow. Yes, I surrender. But I also speak up. I also set boundaries. I also say no when something isn’t aligned. Because going with the flow doesn’t mean everything gets access to you.

It’s revolutionary in every sense of the word.

And there’s a song I love called “Revolutionary Love” that really captures this energy. If you feel called, give it a listen.

This brings me to the fact that consistent & daily practice matter. Because without something to anchor you, the mind will take over and you forget that you’re even in this divine play, and instead of playing your party well, you get played. That’s why in the Bhagavad Gita, it’s said that the yogi is the only truly sane person, because they’ve developed mastery over the mind.

And what’s interesting is that in this time, we even have modern tools like AI that can help us see patterns and reflect things back to us, if we use it consciously.

But no matter what tools you use, it always comes back to this: the level of consciousness using the tool and the intention and actions taken.

Life is moving through us as desire.
Suffering is created through resistance.
Transformation happens through surrender.

So for me right now, the practice is simple.

Let it flow. Let it go.
Let it flow. Let it go.

(Thank you Elsa & Anna).

Because when you really see that nothing is yours to hold onto, you stop having so many fucks to give. You can become more intentional and selective about what fucks you do give. If you know what I mean….

Fun fact: I earned my open water scuba diving certification in 2021 in Tulum Mexico. It’s been a while since I dived and i would love to go diving soon.

I haven’t been writing as much lately. To be honest, the “writing” never really stops, because when I’m not writing, I’m channeling and expressing that creative energy in other ways.

So yeah… life has been full, rich, and stretching me in many directions at once. But this week, something moved through me that I feel ready to share again, so I’m back.

This feels like the beginning of a new rhythm for me, simply sharing what I’m living, what I’m learning, and what I’m remembering in real time.

So get some water, or tea, or better yet some warm cacao… and let this medicine story open your heart.

The Living Goddess (and What I Actually Mean by That)

I’ve been affirming to myself that I am the embodiment of a living goddess cuz that’s how I’ve been feeling. Deeply present, heat open and blissful. And the more I sit with that, I’m just grateful.

So when I say “living goddess,” this is what I mean.

As I do the inner work, as I release conditioning, illusion, and attachment, and as I allow myself to feel and move through what has been stored in my body, something begins to lift. There is less heaviness, less emotional density, and less weight from the past.

In that space, clarity comes, peace comes, and even a kind of quiet bliss begins to emerge. Not because I’m chasing it or trying to feel good, but because this is what’s natural when I’m no longer carrying so much.

There are moments now where I feel deeply at peace, grounded, open, and present. And I can also see how unfamiliar or boring even that level of stability & trust can feel, to some, at times.

When your nervous system has been wired through intensity, emotional highs and lows, or constant stimulation, peace can feel boring, stillness can feel empty, and safety can feel unfamiliar.

But it’s not that something is missing. It’s that we are recalibrating. We are learning that this grounded, steady, present state is actually a higher level of being. It’s available to all of us, but many of us don’t know how good we can feel because we’ve normalized carrying so much.

The Lesson That Keeps Finding Me: Non-Attachment

If I’m honest, non-attachment has been a theme throughout my life, and it came back around again this week during this Scorpio Full Moon…no dang surprise…cycles and patterns…

I met someone, and for a moment it felt like something real, like a destiny point moment. (Note to self: I want to write more about that concept later.)

There were glimpses of what could be, and I could feel my mind wanting to go there, to project, define, and attach.

This could very well be an aligned union, (I do hope it is), but like that story of the old man and the horse… maybe. I’ll wait and see.

What I’m really seeing is that when I live in this way…non-attachment, it frees me and it frees the other person too. There’s no holding, no pressure, and no trying to make something be what I want it to be. There is just allowing.

At the same time, I’m human. There is still a part of me that wants that “special relationship,” that deep, intimate, chosen connection. I don’t deny that.

I’m a lover. That’s who I am, and that’s what my Seven of Hearts birth card points to.

But I can also feel that I’m being called to elevate how I love into something higher and purer, into spiritual love.

A love that isn’t something I’m trying to get, hold, or create through effort, but something that simply is. I’m realizing more and more that love is not something I do. It’s who I am.

And when I’m in that, that is the embodiment. That is the “living goddess.” And that is not a joke, and it’s not ego. It’s something real that I’m learning how to live.

What Loss Taught Me About Love

This lesson didn’t start this week. It was deepened in one of the hardest moments of my life, losing my daughter. That experience showed me something I couldn’t unsee: we don’t own anyone.

Not our children, not our partners, not anyone.

Our children come through us, but they have their own path, their own journey, and their own soul agreements. SO non-attachment has been coming up with my 3 daughters as well….

So, Love isn’t possession.

For me, non-attachment is not about closing my heart. It’s about loving fully without trying to hold, or more like grasp.

Patterns, Purpose, and the Blueprint I’m Learning to Live

I’m also seeing more clearly that this theme in my life is not random. It’s patterned.

When I look at my birth card through the Cards of Destiny system, it’s right there. I am a Seven of Hearts, the Spiritual Love card.

This path is about learning the truth about love and relationships and reaching the highest level of that… or else. In other words, this is the work.

This card speaks to letting go of attachment, giving without expectation, and loving without possession. I can see how this has played out in my life over and over again.

This is why I’ve been diving so deeply into this system. I’m starting to see it as a tool for self-mastery, a mirror that reflects our tendencies, gifts, and challenges.

It reminds me of astrology and human design, different systems rooted in pattern and observation, all pointing to the same truth: there is a structure to who we are, and awareness of it helps us move more consciously.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to look up your birth card and sit with it. Ask yourself if it feels true, because what I’m finding is that these systems don’t tell you something new, they reflect what your soul already knows and can offer much insight, and remembering.

The Edge of Trust

Another layer of this week has been around my children. They need to return to the United States for a time, and I can feel how much I’ve kept them close, not just out of love, but also maybe out of fear and a little wisdom too (reading the signs of the time).

The idea of them not being near me has always brought something up in me.

But I can feel that I’m being called into deeper trust again, trust in life, trust in them, and also the truth that I need space right now because they are working my nerves. And some days I feel “insane” because I keep repeating myself & setting boundaries with them, without much change reflected in my house.

Being a single parent and holding everything is a lot, and I can feel that something needs to shift for all of us. I need a break and they need a shift in perspective.

The Pain of Awareness

Another realization this week is what I would call the pain of awareness.

I can see things now in real time, my thoughts, emotions, reactions, and the dynamics between people. That awareness is powerful, but it also comes with responsibility.

Because once you see, you can’t unsee. You can’t move unconsciously without feeling it. It calls me into integrity and into being more intentional about how I show up.

The Practices That Keep Me Here

Through all of this, what has grounded me the most is simple: singing and dancing.

These are ancestral technologies. Before all the language, there was movement, sound, rhythm, and connection. Returning to these practices brings me out of my mind and back into my body and into presence as a lived practice and has helped with my level of embodiment.

I’ve also been feeling a strong pull to return more fully to teaching meditation and practices again. It’s one of the reasons I created the Motherful Temple and community space, to have a place not just to gather, but to practice, ground, and reconnect.

I want to bring more structure to that in a way that feels smooth, sustainable for me, and regenerative for everyone involved. I don’t have it fully figured out yet, but I can feel that it’s the next step.

Two years ago, when I was living in Ecuador, I went live every morning for 30 days straight (except for when rain and power outage caused delays), guiding meditation and practices. Everyone who participated shared how deeply impactful it was, not just the practices, but the consistency of showing up every day.

Holding that space and being the channel for that container was deeply impactful for me as well.

That entire 30-day meditation challenge still lives on my YouTube channel, and it’s inspiring me to return to that space more intentionally, to share more, go deeper, and create more long-form exchanges. If you feel called, you can subscribe there and follow along as I build that back up.

Writing as a Living Practice

This piece, and others I wrote, have honestly felt like a whole journey in themselves, almost like a mushroom experience, but without the medicine.

The level of reflection and awareness that this writing calls out of me stretches me.

It’s not just sharing. It’s processing in real time.

I’m meeting my thoughts and emotions as they arise and allowing clarity to emerge through the writing itself. And in that process, something shifts. Things connect, truth lands, and old stories loosen.

I’m starting to see this as something deeper, not just writing, but a kind of transformational writing and I spent my most of my afternoon and now almost night, in this process.

A Quick (and Slightly Funny) Disclaimer

Everything I’ve shared here comes from my own lived experience. These are things I’m moving through, realizing, and feeling called to share from my heart.

I’m not here to persuade you or tell you what’s true for you. My intention is simply to share in a way that might inspire you or bring you back home to yourself.

That being said, this is not medical advice or any kind of official advice. So if you read this and go out into the world and somehow trip and break your leg, I am not liable in any way.

However, if something I’ve shared leads to you winning the lottery or receiving unexpected abundance, I would love my cut. Thank you.

A Living Invitation

This week has been a journey, and this writing is part of that.

If you’re reading this, I invite you to reflect on what you are being asked to release let go of, what you are learning to trust, and what you are becoming aware of.

If this resonates and you want to go deeper into this space with me, you can join Revibe, the community I’m building. Revibe is calling in the resources to steward land and create a template of community for a regenerative future, now.

You can step into the 30 Day Return to Love journey. (First live call next wednesday, still time to learn more & register)

You can support the work I’m doing with Motherful Colombia.

And if you feel called to support me directly, you can do that as well.

This is not separate from my life. This is my life.

And I’m grateful to share it.

If you’re here and supportive of me, thank you. Stay with me.

A Story to Sit With

There’s a story I’ve been thinking about this week.

An old man’s horse ran away, and the villagers said, “What bad luck.” He replied, “Maybe.”

The horse returned with more horses, and they said, “What good luck.” He replied, “Maybe.”

His son broke his leg, and they said, “What bad luck.” He replied, “Maybe.”

War came, and the son was spared because of his injury, and they said, “What good luck.” He replied, “Maybe.”

I’ve been sitting with that this week.

On grief, remembrance, and the collapse of the distance between who we think we are and what we’ve always been

There was a time when my spiritual language felt natural, true, and necessary.

“I’m being guided.”
“My higher self is leading me.”
“Spirit is speaking through me.”

And at that stage, it was real.

In 2020, I experienced a profound shift in consciousness, one that wasn’t just intellectual, but deeply embodied. It felt like something opened, or dropped away. The world softened. My perception expanded. There was more presence, more love, more clarity.

In that space, guidance came through strongly.

And the message was clear:
I was operating at “Love or above”, on the Map of Consciousness described by David R. Hawkins.

At the time, that framework gave me language for something I could feel but not fully explain. It helped me orient. It helped me trust what was happening.

But now, looking back, I can see something deeper.

Even in that realization… there was still subtle separation.

There was still “me”…
and “something guiding me.”

Over the years, the journey didn’t stop.

It simply refined.

And more recently, twice this year, in February and again in March, I felt another shift in consciousness.

Less like something happening to me…
and more like a dissolving of sorts that left me with deeper levels of presence and clarity.

And this level of clarity made me realize that the ap of Consciousness can also be referred to levels of clarity.

That shift is what brought me back to studying the Map of Consciousness again… and also deeper into non-dual teachings, including Vedanta, and the work of Ramaji in his book 1000.

And this is where something subtle but powerful started to become undeniable.

That language itself… was still holding separation in place.

Even spiritual language.

When we say: “My higher self”
“Spirit is guiding me”, there is an assumption embedded in the structure of the sentence.

There is me here and something higher over there.

But what I’ve come to see is that this also reflects a deeper division we’ve been taught to perceive within ourselves.

The idea that there is a “human self” or ego (which fundamentally on the normal level of reality there is the human self/ego) and then a “higher self” we are trying to become.

What we call the ego is not separate from it,
it is a layer of perception.

A kind of forgetting.

And this forgetting is part of the human journey.

We enter into identity, into conditioning, into duality and then we remember.

Not by becoming something new, but by dissolving what we are not.

That’s why the earlier stages of the path are so relational.

There is the beloved and the lover.
The seeker and the divine.

And this stage is necessary.

Because the ego needs orientation.
It needs something to cling to.

So devotion becomes the bridge.
Relationship becomes the doorway.

And this is something I’ve come to see more clearly over time.

All those moments throughout my journey, when I felt guided by spirit…
when clarity came through, when I experienced deep connection, those were real.

But what I now recognize is that those moments were not something outside of me.

They were the natural Self… breaking through. And I could finally hear myself.

What I called “guidance” was my capacity to access that deeper knowing.

What I called “spirit” was my own being… revealing itself.

They were glimpses.
Openings.
Moments where the veil thinned enough for what is always here, to be recognized.

And these moments often arise in very specific conditions.

In deep relaxation, being in nature, in awe, in gratitude, where the mind quiets.

Or through intensity, grief, loss, shock.

I experienced this most profoundly through the death of my first daughter, Shania.

In that moment, the shock and depth of grief brought everything to a standstill.

The mind stopped. There was no analysis. No story.
No attempt to make sense of anything. There was only presence.

Raw. Immediate. Unfiltered.

And in that stillness, there was a clarity that is difficult to put into words.

A direct knowing. Not coming from the mind, but from something deeper.

And what followed that experience became just as important.

Very soon after her passing, I found myself going to Bikram yoga every single day.

Not from force, but from something deeper pulling me there.

And looking back, I can see how essential that was.

That moment of openness, was met with practice.

With discipline.
With movement.
With breath.

It gave me a way to anchor what had been revealed.

To begin dissolving the layers of the ego, the trauma, the limiting beliefs, the conditioning, the patterns rooted in separation.

This process took any years and is ongoing.

And through that combination, life opening me, and practice stabilizing that opening, something began to integrate.

It didn’t just remain a moment. It became a path.

And as I write this now, under this Scorpio full moon, I can feel how all of this is connected.

Death.
Transformation.
Dissolution.
Rebirth.

The shedding of what is false, to reveal what is true.

This has been the rhythm of my life & ultimately the journey we are all on.

This is why spiritual practice has been so essential.

Because while life can open us, practice helps us remain open.

And I’ve also come to see that there are different levels of consciousness, and different levels of teachings.

At one stage, certain teachings guide us. At another, they fall away. As deeper truth becomes visible.

And I want to say this clearly:

What I’m sharing here is my lived experience. Not something to take as absolute truth.

But something to feel into. Because the deepest guidance doesn’t come from outside, it comes from within. As a quiet knowing.

And this is also why I feel so strongly that we are in a time of rebalancing.

The integration of the masculine and feminine.

The mind and the heart. Clarity and intuition.

Because it is through this union, that we move beyond duality.

Into non-duality. Into the realization of the Self.

And I also want to name something that can arise here.

The idea of the “spiritual ego.”

Because as I share this, it can be perceived as claiming something.

But what I’ve come to see is this: The “spiritual ego” is not the recognition of truth,

it is the identification with it. And there is a difference.

Because there is also a way of honoring the Self, that is not ego.

After practicing meditation in the rising, I also read. A line from the Ashtavakra Gita has stayed with me:

Aho aham namo mahyam.

“I bow to myself.”

Not the ego. But the Self. A recognition. A reverence.

After reading this line, I went on a whole side quest on google to research more. In that search, I found this mantra and now its on my playlist.

—

And I can feel that this is where I am now.

Not claiming, but recognizing.

Honoring in love & gratitude for the levels of grace in my life.

—

Anandamayi Ma

And this is what has inspired me to create Revibe.

Because my own journey has shown me something clearly:

The world we see, experince & create is a reflection of our consciousness.

And if we want to change the world, we must begin there. Within.

—

So if something in you resonates with any of this.

If you feel that quiet knowing, you’re invited to step into this work.

To explore. To remember. You can join me inside Revibe.

This is where we come together in community, in practice, in presence, to realize what has always been here.

All of these concepts and maps are simply frameworks created to understand the Infinite through the perception of the small self. They are brought forward by individuals embodying different levels of consciousness, not to be used as something to cling to, or seen as the ultimate truth, but as bridges guiding us from one level of understanding to another.

And eventually, we are led back to the natural self, what some traditions refer to as Sahaja, the state that needs no systems, no frameworks, no explanations. A state that is not bound by how we think we should be, but is instead spontaneous, fluid, and effortlessly expressed.

Where there is less forcing, less performing, less trying to get it right… and more allowing, more presence, more being. The self where Consciousness itself is simply expressing and experiencing itself.