There is a place where love quietly becomes labor, and the body knows the moment, though the mind doesn’t yet get it.

We say things like “carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders” so casually we forget how literally the body takes it. Long before I had language for chakras or subconscious beliefs, my body kept the record of every burden I agreed to bear, whether consciously or otherwise. Sometimes the body speaks the pain in whispers that grow louder over time. Sometimes, as in this experience, the message comes in fast and loud. I didn’t know how much I’d begun to carry until the knot behind my left shoulder blade got so tight my husband had to drive his elbow into it at two in the morning before I could breathe again.

That was February of 2024. It would be ten weeks before I could sit or stand for more than ten minutes without my body shouting the message again.

Once a month, I’ve been writing a guest post for Teri Leigh’s Creator Retreat Substack publication, and this is the fourth in a series. Each month I highlight some of what I’ve learned about the chakra of the month and where in the body we hold the topics of life and the typical beliefs associated with it. I don’t always have a personal story to tell related to it, but this time I do. Before I share the story, let’s learn a little about the heart chakra.

The Territory of the Heart

The heart chakra governs the realm of love — relationships, giving, receiving, compassion — and it lives in the body at the chest, the ribs, the lungs, the shoulders, the arms, and the hands. The shoulders are the body’s attic, the place we store what we’ve taken in and haven’t yet figured out how to put down. The arms are how love gets physically enacted: we reach, we hug, we hold. With our hands, we give and receive.

As Teri Leigh writes in The Goldilocks Principle, becoming conscious of how you hold your shoulders and arms is becoming conscious of your capacity to take in life and to let go of what no longer serves you. And the middle back, she teaches, is what contains and protects the heart itself, the most genuine, sacred territory in your system. “In order to put your heart out there in the world,” she writes, “you must feel safe.”

I did not feel safe. But I hadn’t told anyone, because I didn’t yet know it myself.

The Middleman

In early 2023, our church was rocked by the news of sexual abuse by a regional leader and then by the much larger story underneath it: decades of other perpetrators, other incidents, suppressed at the expense of the victims. Leaders convened that summer. People hoped. Forums were organized. And through the fall, the community split along the fault line that will sound familiar to anyone who has watched an institution try to survive its own reckoning. Some felt nothing meaningful was being done. Others wanted to believe the leaders would eventually do right, and that the people should simply trust them.

In October, I heard a survivor say in an interview that anyone still attending the church was complicit in the harm being done. I felt that pronouncement land in my heart. I didn’t want to be complicit, and I didn’t want to leave the community, that was a foundation of generations of my family and my husband’s family, too.

In November, at a family gathering, I overheard people I love, some of them leaders in the church, talking dismissively and with condescension about those “causing trouble,” people who were simply saying out loud that what was being done wasn’t enough. I was dismayed by the lack of compassion in that conversation and no acknowledgment that the anger and hurt in the room had an earned source.

I also knew of instances where leaders were doing the right thing and still people judged something wrong about it, so that the leaders felt damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.

My Body Finally Declared, “Enough!”

I sat in the middle of it: the shock and grief and hurt of the wounded on one side; leaders absorbing anger they hadn’t personally earned on the other. And, I recognized the humanity in both.

I didn’t choose that role consciously. Nobody assigns you “moderate middleman”. You just find yourself standing in the gap, absorbing what belongs to everyone else because some part of you believes what someone else declared, that if you don’t personally fix it, you’re choosing harm by default.

By February, my body had had enough of the assignment. During those ten weeks on the couch, through 2 or 3 ThetaHealing® sessions a week, I finally understood what I’d been doing: taking on other people’s grief and anger and opinions as though it were all mine to carry, mine to solve.

The Jaws of It

Underneath our emotions, there are always specific, nameable beliefs, and mine often came in the paired shape I’ve learned to recognize: an obligation belief on one side, a sin or “it’s wrong” belief on the other, closing like a set of jaws around anything I might do. For example,

• I’m obligated to change the church in order to stay.

• It’s wrong for me to be complicit.

• I’m obligated to be complicit, if the church or leaders don’t change.

Stay and you’re complicit. Leave and you’ve abandoned your family, or they’ll abandon you. Try to fix it and you’ve taken on a burden, alone, on behalf of seventy years of institutional failure that was never yours to begin with. There was no move inside that trap, and others like it, that would bring me any peace or sense of safety. Ultimately, my belief systems were the real trap, the only real problem that was truly mine to deal with and within my reach to solve.

Awareness named the beliefs and employing ThetaHealing® techniques changed the beliefs for me, releasing me from those traps.

The Body Doesn’t Negotiate

Six weeks in, with the pain largely diminished, I decided I was ready to attend a special service being planned for our region. By the next morning, I was in as much pain as I’d ever been. My body was not interested in my optimism. There was more still asking to be sorted, and no amount of wanting to be done could substitute for actually being done.

Baptizing What I Couldn’t Untangle

As mentioned earlier, the heart chakra governs relationships, and if there are issues in relationships, it may show up as symptoms in the heart, lungs, arms and shoulders. Further work was needed to resolve the constraints of identifying too strongly with my family and church, being bound by the meanings attached to those relationships.

I created a visualization exercise using the Christian motif of baptism. To dissolve the threads of the entanglements stretching between myself and other individuals or groups, I visualized walking down into the water together, laying to rest the former relationships with all love and forgiveness and compassion, then seeing each relationship being raised up as new creations without strings attached between, each party free to choose when and how to relate: to be together or apart without the pulls to be or do something other than what each truly wishes.

For the first time, I could choose, instead of inheriting the terms by birthright or indoctrination. For the first time, I could find out who I was apart from what it had meant to be “a Young” (my mother’s family), “a Taplin” (my father’s family), “a Fisk” (my husband’s family), or a member of the church. Not against any of them; just, no longer defined by them. I could be simply me, the one God created me to be.

I want to be clear that ThetaHealing® wasn’t the whole story of my recovery. I also leaned on weekly chiropractic care and massage, I tried three sessions of acupuncture, and I used an over-the-door neck traction device that helped more than I expected. Even now, two years out, I still have some residual numbness in two fingers of my left hand — fully functional, just a little numb — an ongoing reminder of how literally the body holds what the heart hasn’t yet finished putting down.

The Hand Unheld

In the yogic tradition, the two sides of the body aren’t mirror images so much as representing two different purposes in relating to the world around us. The left receives from the world. The right gives outward to the world.

It was my left shoulder blade that seized up that February and my left hand where the numbness stayed. Looking back, the geography makes an uncomfortable kind of sense. Through those months, I’d been extending compassion in every direction: to the wounded on one side, to the defensive on the other, to the family caught in between. I was, if anything, generous with it. And, ultimately, I did not believe compassion was coming back to me from either end. I had quietly decided, without ever consciously deciding it, that understanding was something I exported, not something I could expect returned.

That belief effectively closed my receiving hand. I couldn’t perceive what I’d already decided wasn’t there, so even in whatever moments compassion may have been offered to me, quietly, imperfectly, in ways I wasn’t watching for, I had no way to receive it. You cannot catch what you no longer believe will be thrown. The body, with its unmatched literalism, put the whole problem on the side built for receiving and left it there until I was finally made aware of what I’d refused to take in. As I write, the tears come that signal the truth of it. And now, with awareness and the work that will follow, perhaps the last of the numbness will be released, too.

Inhale, Exhale: A Simple Exercise

The heart chakra’s element is air, a symbol of every invisible thing we carry: thoughts, feelings, spirit. Inhale and exhale are meant to balance across a day, inhale as receiving and exhale as giving.

Here’s a simple way to check your own balance. Breathe in fully, then let the breath go and notice which one came easier. Did your inhale come easier than your exhale? Or, was exhaling easier for you? Feeling depleted, resentful, or running on empty is usually a sign you’ve been exhaling, or giving, more than you’ve let yourself inhale, or receive.

For creators, this imbalance has a very specific, very common shape: pouring out content, energy, and generosity toward an audience while treating receiving — payment, credit, rest, help — as somehow optional, or even suspect. The beliefs that keep it in place tend to sound like: I’m obligated to earn everything I receive. I can’t charge for something less than perfect. Giving is virtuous; receiving is greedy. Notice that none of those beliefs describe an actual rule of the universe. They simply describe an exhale with no matching inhale.

Questions Worth Sitting With

Where are you trying to hold two opposing sides together, at your own expense?

What are you carrying right now that was never actually yours to carry?

Is there compassion, help, or love being offered to you right now that you can’t quite perceive, because some part of you already decided it wasn’t coming?

Does receiving ever feel like putting someone else out? Is there a belief underneath your giving that says you have to earn the right to receive?

All of these and more can be explored for root causes and beliefs, and resolved through the ThetaHealing® modality that helped me through my weeks on the couch, and that I employ in my healing practice at Wholeness Restored Healing, where we create healthy patterns from the roots up.

If you’d like to learn more about how I could help you individually, here’s a link to schedule a visit with me: Yes, I want to learn more

Free initial consult with Kyle

The chakra information and reflection questions in this post draw on Teri Leigh’s book The Goldilocks Principle: A Practical Guide to the Chakras*, as well as her Creator Retreat content.* This article was created as a guest post for The Creator Retreat🌳 where sensitive souls avoid hustle culture and focus on creative growth the organic and authentic way.

If you’re new here, this post is part of a series exploring the chakra system through the lens of subconscious belief work. You can find the other posts here: “Rooted, Rattled, and Restored,” “The Sweet Place,” and “Burning to Be Someone.”

Spiritual Inner Work

The Sacred Balance of Truth and Grace

You know that feeling when you have something important to say, but the words get stuck somewhere between your heart and your throat?

Or when you finally do speak your truth, but it comes out sideways - either too soft to be heard or too sharp to be received?

September is about finding that sacred middle ground. The place where your authentic voice lives - clear enough to be understood, gentle enough to be welcomed.

We're wired for connection through communication. Just like the breath that moves in and out of your lungs, healthy communication requires both speaking and listening, giving and receiving, truth-telling and grace-holding.

But for sensitive souls, this balance feels nearly impossible. We either shrink ourselves to avoid conflict, or we explode when the pressure gets too much. Neither feels good. Neither creates the connection we're craving.

This month's spiritual lesson guides you back to your natural communication rhythms through:

Where you swallow your truth (and why this creates more problems than it solves)

How proper alignment creates effortless expression - the surprising connection between your posture and your voice

The JALA Method - a simple practice for speaking from your heart instead of your head

Three sacred levels of listening that transform every conversation from performance to presence

Business Outer Action

Crafting an Honest & Pure Offer
Magickal monetization for sensitive souls

"An offer rings true when it is heard as pure."

Most monetization advice feels gross because it asks you to create offers based on scarcity, urgency, or manipulated desire. No wonder it makes our souls recoil.

This month's business lesson takes a completely different approach. We're going to explore what happens when you craft offers from a place of genuine passion, honest value, and pure generosity.

We'll look at the reality behind Substack monetization (spoiler: it's harder than they tell you), explore different ways sensitive souls can actually make money on the platform, and the one monetization strategy that works so beautifully for our nervous systems.

You'll learn:

• How to find the sweet spot between what excites you and what others need

• Why community-based offers work better for sensitive souls than traditional hustle for paid subscriptions.

• Real examples from Creator Retreat participants who've launched their own offerings

The goal is to create something so aligned and authentic that your right people feel it in their bones.

September's Yoga Nidra

Finding Your Voice in the Sacred Meadow

This month, we're exploring the delicate art of speaking and listening, addressing those moments when we feel unheard or caught in cycles of miscommunication. Our September yoga nidra practice invites you into a peaceful meadow filled with wildflowers, where nature itself becomes our teacher in authentic expression.

In this guided journey, you'll discover a sacred circle of light at the meadow's heart and connect with an ancient standing stone—a powerful symbol of grounded truth-telling that has witnessed countless seasons of honest expression. Through gentle visualization and breathwork, you'll explore the bridge between your heart and throat, learning to speak your truth with compassion while creating space for deep, receptive listening.

Whether you've been struggling to find your voice in challenging conversations or seeking to listen more fully to others, this practice offers a return to the natural rhythm of authentic communication. The standing stone becomes your anchor point—a sacred space you can revisit whenever you need to reconnect with your genuine voice or remember the wisdom that lives in mindful silence.

Join us in the meadow this month as we cultivate the courage to speak truthfully and the grace to listen with open hearts.

Guest Presenter: James Bailey

On Money & Meaning

James will lead cohort members through a conversation about their own money-stories and how those narratives can hold us back from realization of abundance, and how we can untangle those knots.

James Bailey

My name is James. My Substack - On Money and Meaning represents the intersection of my professional and personal life. I own a wealth management business where we empower meaningful lives for clients by aligning their finances with their dreams. When I’m not being a dad to my twin daughters and a loving spouse to my wife, I am a personal development practitioner – exploring how to become a better human being and become better at being human.

We've spent months grounding ourselves, releasing perfectionism, learning to receive support, and now is the time to craft authentic offers that share our gifts with the world.

If you've been struggling with visibility, promotion, or just finding your voice as a creator, September's lessons will give you practical tools wrapped in spiritual wisdom.

Inside the paid Creator Retreat archive, you'll find:

• Complete workshop replays from all sessions

• The full MOZI Method library

• Bonus materials and resources

Your voice matters. Your work matters. This month, we'll help you share both without losing your soul in the process.

Join the Creator Retreat

What feels most challenging about self-promotion in your creative work? We'd love to hear your honest thoughts in the comments.

1. Substack started as a platform for writers and writers are inherently more introspective, self-aware, and curious folx.

2. Substack doesn’t have any ads. Without the ads, the social media aspect of this platform is far more authentic and honest. Something we sensitive souls need.

But Substack is a social media platform, and as such, it is easy to get overwhelmed. As sensitive souls, even without, we still can't handle the hustle mentality of constant engagement that social media demands.

The good news is that Substack actually rewards the kind of gentle, intentional engagement that works for our tender and somewhat neurodivergent nervous systems.

If we choose to stay mindful about how we engage on Substack, it can be a very rewarding place, and our efforts to create deep and meaningful connections get rewarded in the algorithm. At least that’s been my experience.

Less is More

How Creator Retreat earns $3K per month with less than 750 subscribers.

I’ve tried all the monetization strategies. Paywalling my posts. Webinars. Paid chat community. Monthly community zoom meetings. Weekly community LIVES. Online Courses. Online Programs. Asynchronous Courses.

They all left me exhausted, tired, and not getting any decent return on my investment.

The one that has brought me the greatest ROI, both in terms of psychic income (the spiritual return) and monetary gain is a small group cohort.

Creator Retreat is a 10-Month weekly meeting cohort program that runs annually for 10-15 participants. By month three, we have a family of sensitive souls supporting each other as creators in ways they have never imagined could be possible. All of them at different levels of their creative process and journeys.

Those who went through last year’s cohort have stayed connected and continue to collaborate with each other in wonderful ways. Many of them achieved the subscriber levels of success they couldn’t reach on their own.

Kevin Kelly’s SuperFans method is the best way to approach promotion on digital media for creators. Aim to get a smaller following of superfans.

Slow and steady always wins the race…and building Creator Retreat since November 2024 has been the most rewarding and fulfilling program I have ever offered.

My 4 Substack Mindfulness Practices

Here's how I stay connected with my community without overwhelming myself with too much work or too much "peopling" (fellow introverts, you know what I mean). This has been my approach since the beginning and has consistently brought me loyal superfans who stay engaged and are interested in my offerings.

1. Fill the Empty Hearts (15-30 minutes daily)

I learned this phrase from , and it's become my favorite daily practice. Every weekday morning, I go to the "replies" section of my Substack activity and fill in all the empty hearts by "liking" every comment and reply left for me.

Then I comment back on as many as I can within my time limit. Some days that's three thoughtful responses. Some days it's fifteen quick "thank yous." Both are perfect.

The key is the time boundary. When my timer goes off, I stop. No guilt, no FOMO, no trying to get to everyone. I’m doing the best I can, and protecting myself for overwhelm, over-doing, over-feeling, and over-thinking.

Why this works for sensitive souls: You're giving appreciation without having to generate new content or ideas. You're responding from a full cup, not an empty one.

2. Honor New Subscribers with Breath and Voice

For every email announcing a new free subscriber, I take a moment to read whatever info is available about that person. I take a deep breath, and say their name out loud as a way of honoring them as an individual human being.

This practice turns subscriber notifications from anxiety-inducing numbers into sacred moments of connection. It’s my way of blowing a little 🧚pixie-dust✨ on the person who has honored me with their gift of connection. It reminds me that real people are choosing to listen to what I have to say.

I believe in 🧚pixie-dust✨ as magick. When this individual clicked “subscribe” they said to me “I want to hear more from you”, so when I say their name out loud I acknowledge their gift with a word-spell of gratitude. That vibration goes out into the universe and a sacred feedback loop is established.

I honestly believe this simple practice is why I have very few unsubscribes.
And, I’ve noticed that when I don’t do this, my new subscriber rate slows down.

Why this works for sensitive souls: It slows down the process and infuses it with gratitude instead of pressure. You're not trying to immediately convert or impress—just acknowledge.

3. Thank Paid Subscribers Personally (2-5 sentences max)

For paid subscribers, I do the breath-and-name practice AND hit "reply" to thank them personally for their monetary contribution. I try to personalize based on any info in their profile, but keep it short: 25-50 words maximum.

Something like: "Sarah, thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! I noticed you're a yoga teacher—I have such appreciation for fellow movement practitioners. Your support means I can keep creating from this heart-centered space."

Why this works for sensitive souls: It's genuine appreciation, not sales pressure. And the word limit keeps you from overthinking or over-giving in your response.

4. Cross-Pollinate with Heart

Some of my favorite stackers and include a list at the bottom of their articles featuring their favorite Substack reads from that week. This simple practice creates genuine cross-promotion that feels like sharing rather than selling.

Why this works for sensitive souls: You're lifting up others instead of constantly promoting yourself. It feels like gift-giving rather than networking.

Bonus Practice: Collaboration

After applying these mindfulness techniques to my Substacking for a few months, I stumbled upon a secret sauce to growing my publication authentically in a way that aligns perfectly with my integrity. (yes, I’m an INFJ and I cannot do anything without checking with my boss - Integrity - first).

That secret sauce is a beautiful sauté of my personality and passions with that of someone else here on Substack. It makes a tasty little sauce called: Collaboration.

I leaned entirely into collaboration when I launched The Creator Retreat. Through genuine connections with people I know and love and who know and love me, I was able to go from 5 subscribers in November 2024 to 429 subscribers by the end of January 2025. Through those collaborations that >1000 subscriber list, I got 40 people to apply for my 10-month cohort program. I am now earning ~$1,500 monthly from The Creator Retreat!

In comparison, I have made zero effort to collaborate with anyone on my other publications (which I personally think are better writing and content than any of my five publications).

The Gentle Path Forward

As sensitive souls, we don't need to choose between authentic connection and sustainable growth. We don't have to sacrifice our nervous systems on the altar of hustle culture or apologize for needing boundaries around our energy.

Substack rewards exactly what we're naturally good at: deep thinking, genuine relationship, and patient cultivation of trust. . . if we are mindful about how we approach our stacking practices. When we engage mindfully—filling hearts, honoring new subscribers as individual humans, lifting up and celebrating/sharing those we appreciate, and collaborating with mindful intention—we create something that can sustain us for decades, not just months.

What gentle engagement practice will you try first?

I'd love to hear about your experiments in the comments—when my energy allows for deeper conversation, these exchanges often become the highlight of my day.

And, if this post inspired you and you found it useful…consider upgrading to paid to gain access to the deeper wisdoms shared on the other side of the retreat garden gates.

Subscribe now

A business coach who actually gave a damn.

Tom Kuegler restored my hope in digital creating.

I was two-steps away from hanging up my creator bonnet and quitting it all, for good. Months deep in the Substack void, I thought maybe it was time to close up shop.

The last thing I wanted to do was get entangled with another “growth expert” business coach. I mean, let’s be real. I’d been burned before.

I had just surrendered $14K to a coaching (ahem—scam) program that promised me the moon and left me drowning in debt. I’d been burned by the endless echo chamber of business “gurus” preaching hustle like a religion. I didn’t have much hope left when I met .

I felt like I was on the edge of a cliff, by myself, with nowhere left to go.

When I sat down for his free webinar, I left my zoom camera off, and half-listened while I made myself lunch. I was skeptical. The tips? Good. Solid. But I’d heard them before.

But then, at the end of that call, Tom did something no other “growth expert” had ever done.

"I’ll stay here until all your questions are answered."

And he stayed. . . for over an hour!

Then he did something even better. When someone asked something he didn’t have an answer for?

"Hmm. I don’t know. What do you think?"

I nearly fell out of my chair. A business coach who doesn’t pretend to have all the answers? Who isn’t just handing out cookie-cutter strategies? Who actually wants people to think for themselves?

Witchcraft.

In that moment I felt like Tom sat down with me on the edge of the cliff and said, “I know it feels like there’s nowhere left to go, I’ve been there. And, I know that your path isn’t the same one I’ve walked. Yet, I think together we might be able to figure something out. May I walk with you?”

And the breath I had been holding in anticipation of quitting slowly let go.
I am gonna be okay.

That day, I messaged him:
"Do you do private coaching?"
And just like that, we started meeting 1-on-1 once a month.

I spilled my big, tangled dreams to Tom in jumbled confused messes. He listened, asked me questions, and helped me unravel the confusion. After a few months, The Creator Retreat was born! Tom helped me dig this idea out of myself!!

Tom was my first real friend on Substack.

The first person who believed in me when I wasn’t sure I believed in myself.

“Teri, I just want to see you succeed. If anyone here on Substack deserves it, you do.”

The Creator Who Knows Every Corner of the Internet

Tom isn’t just a writer. He’s a digital creator in every possible way.

• He built a 500,000-follower Facebook Page and deleted it because it stole his joy.

• He had a $100K/year Medium blog that collapsed when the platform changed.

• He ran a 160,000-subscriber YouTube channel, filming his life in the Philippines, and quit because he was burnt out.

• He’s written viral content across Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—racking up over 50 million views in eight years.

He knows what it’s like to go viral. To burn out. To rebuild. To start over again—this time, without selling your soul to an algorithm.

Why He’s Teaching at The Creator Retreat

When I launched The Creator Retreat, the first person I asked to present was Tom. He didn’t hesitate.

"I’d be honored," he said.

Then, he let me guest post on his publication, and his introduction of me made us both cry.

With tears in my eyes, I wonder how I can introduce this amazing human being in just a few short sentences? I met Teri 8 months ago, and it was friendship at first sight. We just instantly clicked. . . What I love most about Teri isn’t her writing, though. I love her spirit. Her soul. I love who she is. . . Ladies and gentlemen of Substack, this is a gem of a person we must cherish. This is a diamond in the rough. Please, please, SUPPORT THIS WOMAN!"

And, everything shifted.

That one post not only showed me how other people see me, but it brought exactly the right people into this retreat—people who weren’t here for shortcuts, but for depth.

Tom’s been through every stage of online creation—viral highs, crushing burnout, and rebuilding from scratch. And now, he’s here to help you grow in a way that feels good.

Join Us Inside the Creator Retreat

I was standing on the edge of that cliff, ready to turn back. Tom sat down beside me and said, ‘I’ll walk with you.’

Now, he’s here to walk with all of us.

Tom’s role this month on The Creator Retreat is to help you figure out what works for YOU—your pace, your process, your creative flow.

Tom’s been through the highs, the burnouts, and the rebuilds, and now he’s here to help you find your rhythm. When you enroll in the Creator Retreat Guest Archive, you get access to this workshop, plus all the guest presenters.

Join us. Create on your terms. Let’s build something real.

Creator Retreat Guest Archives

If you are hovering at 100 or 200 subscribers, or maybe you have more but you are still wondering why growth feels so… hard.

It’s not because your work isn’t good. We want you to know that your writing and your publication are valuable, and quite possibly the best kept secret on the ‘stack.

But the marketing advice of all the Substack Growth Hackers out there wasn’t designed for the sensitive soul.

Inside the paid Creator Retreat archive, you’ll find the missing piece: a way to grow that doesn’t require you to perform, hustle, or sell out.

Spiritual Inner Work

The Sacred Rhythm of Giving & Receiving

Sensitive souls are often beautifully good at giving. We are masters at it. We wrote the operations manual on how to give and give and give, and give some more, and the right and proper etiquette of always turning down a compliment.

We offer presence, encouragement, time, energy, holding, care.

And then we wonder—quietly, painfully—

Who’s taking care of me while I’m taking care of everyone else?

It’s so bad that when we get so depleted and exhausted that we do eventually ask for help, those around us don’t know how to help out of fear of offending, or just being completely dumbfounded because we never ask for help.

Here’s the truth: often, people are trying to be supportive. Generosity, kindness, and blessings are knocking, but we’ve gotten so used to being the strong one, the giver, the reliable one, that we don’t even hear the knock.

We turn down what’s offered. We deny what’s meant for us.

And then we feel like an over-giving, taken-for-granted, emotionally bankrupt disaster who just wants to lie down forever.

This month’s spiritual lesson gently interrupts that pattern by bringing you back to your own breath, your own body, your own innate balance that lives inside your heart and lungs, with a little help from a trampoline called your diaphragm.

We are wired for reciprocity.

This is evident in how our most vital human organs function: the heart and lungs. All day long, they give, and they receive, ultimately creating a reciprocal balance between your inner true self and the outer world in which you live.

Through somatic metaphor and gentle awareness practices, we’ll explore:

• Where you’re declining blessings out of habit or fear

• How the body self-balances over time (even when breath feels uneven)

• The sacred trinity of lungs, heart, and diaphragm—each one in conversation with the others

• Three very simple practices you can do in less than 3-minutes a day to bring better balance and reciprocity to your life and world.

And of course, we’ll return to the MOZI Method—our daily 30-second ritual—to restore trust in the steady rhythm of receiving and giving.

Business Outer Action

Growth Hacks Don’t Work for Gentle Hearts

A new approach to visibility for sensitive souls

If marketing and self-promotion makes your skin crawl, you’re not alone.

Let’s be honest. Most marketing advice and How to Grow Your Substack programming feels like sandpaper to us sensitive souls.

Just like this next paragraph (which was entirely written by AI), the marketing growth hacks of the experts makes us wince and cringe.

Hook them. Solve their pain point. Make yourself the expert.

Post daily. Brag shamelessly. Game the algorithm.

Be the sage on the stage. Own the room. Sell the transformation.

For those of us who lead with intuition, empathy, and heart, these tactics don’t just fail, they backfire, leaving us feeling raw, exposed, exhausted, fake, and losing our audience.

What works for growth hackers doesn’t work for gentle revolutionaries.

That’s why this month’s business lesson is different.

We’ll explore the kinds of creative collaboration that feel like home to sensitive souls—

real relationships, mutual uplift, organic invitations, and sacred reciprocity.

You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how The Creator Retreat grew without an ounce of hustle, but through friendships, generosity, and soul-aligned community.

For many sensitive souls, self-promotion feels unnatural—while lifting others up feels like second nature.

That’s where this month’s business lesson begins. We’ll explore the difference between algorithmic growth and energetic alignment—and how collaboration becomes the most honest, joyful way to market your work.

We’ll share real examples—from Creator Retreat friendships to profit-generating partnerships—and give you clear, easy steps to try this yourself (without burning out your nervous system).

Yoga Nidra

Held by the stillness of water

This month’s practice invites you into a deeply restorative journey across a calm, expansive lake. It is an inner landscape where the gentle rhythm of giving and receiving becomes a felt experience.

As you row to the lake’s center and rest in a small boat held by still waters, you’ll be guided to explore the tender edges of grief, loneliness, and disconnection—not to fix them, but to let them be held with compassion.

Through breath, visualization, and heart-centered awareness, this nidra becomes a quiet ritual of support and surrender. It is a practice for remembering that we are never truly alone. The same waters that cradle your sorrow also connect you to the vast, unseen web of care around you.

Guest Presenter: Tom Kuegler

August 13, 2026

Improve Your Relationships, Life, and Articles With AI

In 2025, Tom repaired a fractured relationship with his sister via a 100+ message, 50,000+ word conversation with AI. Somehow resentful bitterness gave way to empathy and love, and it completely changed Tom’s perspective on their relationship, leading to reconciliation. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use AI for personal reflection, idea generation, and perspective shifting. These conversations might become the foundation for a blog, article, or creative project that’s actually distinct, complex, and incredibly useful for others. In Tom’s creative life, he’s found that success often starts with new perspectives that not many people have thought of before. AI can help unlock that, and that’s what you’ll learn how to do in this workshop.

Tom Kuegler

Tom is a writer, video creator, husband, INFJ, and cat dad with 10 years of experience creating online. He wrote on Medium and LinkedIn for 5 years, and found Substack in 2023 and hasn’t looked back since. He lived in the Philippines and had a successful Youtube channel there for 2 years, and now he lives in Mexico City working primarily as a writer. He writes about life lessons, creativity, film, and anything that’s rocking his world at the moment.

The Writing Long Game

Learn how to grow your Substack holistically, without burnout! Master Notes, improve your storytelling, and enjoy the act of writing. No hustle. No posting on 48 platforms. Just great writing that grows your audience.

By Tom Kuegler

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The Center That Burns

There is a fire that lives in the middle of you. Both an actual, physiological one and a metaphorical one. Imbalances in either can manifest as discomfort in our lives.

Physiologically, your digestive system is, quite literally, an internal furnace: breaking things down, extracting what’s usable, releasing what isn’t. Smoke goes up. Ash goes down. Energy fuels action.

The core chakra, sometimes named Inner Fire, also sits right there, nestled in the torso and abdomen, held by the psoas and the diaphragm — the muscles that let your body move as one integrated whole and that control the rhythm of breath itself.

The core chakra holds the metaphorical furnace of personal power. The fire of drive, motivation, confidence, and individuality. And, like any fire, it can burn too hot, too low, or in extremes of hot and cold. But, like Goldilocks, we want that fire to burn just right!

Our sense of identity

Through The Creator Retreat Program, I’ve learned that the core chakra is also called the Precious Gem. How appropriate for that which holds our sense of identity! The container for the most basic question a person ever has to answer: Who am I, actually — underneath what everyone else needs me to be? Or, what I think everyone else needs me to be!

When this center is healthy, you know the answer. Not arrogantly. Not performatively. Just… quietly, steadily. You know who you are, and that knowing doesn’t depend on the last compliment you received or the last mistake you made.

When it’s imbalanced, something else happens. And if you’re a creator, you already know its name.

The Imposter

It shows up as attributing your success to luck, timing, or anyone else’s generosity rather than your own skill.

It shows up as an inability to simply receive a compliment on your work without deflecting it.

It shows up as perfectionism so total that you can’t release a piece until it’s flawless — which, conveniently, means you never release it at all.

It shows up as doubting an accomplishment the moment you achieve it, already scanning the horizon for the next mountain, because this one apparently didn’t count.

And underneath all of it sits the quiet, exhausting fear of being exposed: that someday, someone will realize you were never as competent as they thought.

Imposter syndrome isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a core chakra symptom, a very specific, very recognizable one. Here’s the part that’s easy to miss: none of this is really about your work. It’s about identity. The digestive system and the chakra system at your core, are both organized entirely around one distinction — this is me, this is not me. These are the choices we make, sorting through the information that comes in.

Imposter syndrome is what happens when that line gets blurry. When your sense of self is distorted by the underlying beliefs you’ve picked up along the way.

The Beliefs Running the Show

This is where the deeper healing work comes in, because underneath the feeling, there are always specific, nameable beliefs. And they tend to coincide in a particular kind of pair that creates an inescapable trap.

I think of it as two categories working together like a set of jaws. First, an obligation belief — an “I must” or “I’m obligated to” that removes your free-will choice entirely. Second, a sin or “it’s wrong” belief — an “it’s bad/selfish/arrogant if” that punishes you the moment you actually meet the obligation. Hold both at once, about the same thing, and there is no move you can make that lets you feel at peace.

For creators specifically, this shows up as beliefs like:

• I’m obligated to succeed — but success will separate me from the people I love.

• If I succeed, I only have to turn around and strive for the next thing. Nothing is ever enough.

• I must prove my worth through my work — but it’s arrogant to think I’ve actually done something praise-worthy.

• It’s impossible for me to succeed. I’m obligated to fail; nothing works out for me.

• If I get credit, someone else must be losing out. My success has to come at another person’s expense.

Notice what these beliefs are actually doing. They’re not describing reality. They’re old survival code, installed young, usually based on input from parents, teachers, or peers. And they’re still running quietly in the background of your life.

You can see why willpower alone can’t touch it. You cannot logic your way out of a belief system operating beneath conscious thought. You’re clicking “accept” at the keyboard while the code underneath keeps rejecting the file.

Why Awareness Isn’t Enough

Here’s what I’ve come to understand deeply in my healing work: naming these beliefs is necessary, but it is not sufficient. You can identify the exact obligation belief and the exact sin belief driving your imposter syndrome, write them both down, understand the mechanism perfectly — and still feel the same tightening in your chest the next time you hit publish, or pitch the idea, or ask for what your work is worth.

That’s because these beliefs aren’t stored as information. They’re stored as felt, subconscious, embodied programming — the same kind of programming that once taught a child’s body to hold in anger, or a grieving woman’s hips to lock against forward motion. Change has to happen at that same level. Not through more thinking about the problem, but through a process that speaks directly to the subconscious pattern and asks — genuinely asks — for something new to replace it.

This is the work I do through ThetaHealing®: identifying the specific obligation belief and the specific sin/wrong belief creating the bind, bringing them into conscious awareness together, and then working with Creator to change them at the root. Not managed. Not talked through. Changed — often instantly, because you’re finally addressing the actual code instead of arguing with its output.

What Gets Freed Up

When the belief shifts, something practical happens, and it’s worth naming plainly: the imposter feeling loses its grip on your output.

• You stop needing the work to be perfect before it’s allowed to exist.

• You start being able to receive a compliment as information instead of a threat.

• You stop translating every success into a debt you now owe the universe.

The fire that is your core chakra — drive, identity, personal power — gets to do what fire is actually for: fuel the next thing, instead of consuming you with the fear of being found out. The fire at your center was never meant to burn you. It was meant to fuel you.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Where do I attribute my successes to something other than myself — luck, timing, other people’s efforts?

• What do I believe I’m obligated to be or achieve — and what do I simultaneously believe is wrong or shameful about actually achieving it?

• When I imagine fully receiving credit for my work, what shows up first: satisfaction? or fear?

• Are there beliefs I’m carrying that say success will cost me something — belonging, safety, love?

• What would it feel like to know who I am, apart from what I produce? Or apart from the community or family I belong to?

Notice which of these topics create a visceral reaction, that small tightening, that flicker of recognition. That’s your core chakra, telling you exactly what is upholding imposter syndrome and what is preventing the fullest expression of your identity and your purpose.

These identity and imposter-syndrome patterns — the specific beliefs keeping your Precious Gem out of balance — will become a guided video healing session, just like the Root Chakra and Sweet Spot sessions before it. Eventually! Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about how I could help you individually, here’s a link to schedule a free visit with me:

Yes, I want to learn more!

The chakra information and reflection questions in this post draw on Teri Leigh’s book The Goldilocks Principle: A Practical Guide to the Chakras*, as well as her teachings on the chakra system through The Creator Retreat program.*

This is the third in a series exploring the chakra system through the lens of subconscious belief work — following “Rooted, Rattled, and Restored” and “The Sweet Spot.” My tagline holds true here, too: creating healthy patterns from the roots up.

Like most good, life-changing things that have happened in my life, I had little idea what I was getting into when I first applied to be in The Creator Retreat.

At the time, I was only familiar with Teri Leigh -- the creator and facilitator of The Creator Retreat -- because for months I’d been reading her Substack and then [once it launched], her “Fierce Love” Substack on the recommendation of a friend.

Teri -- who introduces herself as “a weirdo introvert from Minnesota who loves fiercely and gives a shit; can we be friends?” -- writes there about the ICE Metro Surge Operation from the perspective of those living in her home town of St. Paul.

From the moment I first discovered it, I’ve appreciated the substance of Fierce Love: the frequent-but-not-too-frequent updates she provides on the ICE surge, the fresh, first-hand perspective she writes from about the Surge’s intended and unintended consequences, and the clever, loving, poignant ways that Minnesotans have responded to it.

But as the months of reading Fierce Love went by, I became increasingly interested in Teri’s writing itself, (and eventually in the Writer’s Retreat -- more on that below) for at least two reasons:

First, ever since high school, I’ve been intrigued by the craft of writing. And I’ve come to believe that one thing good writers have in common, whether they are poets, political speech writers, novelists, or preachers, is that they draw you in: their words let you witness what they are witnessing…hear what they are hearing…sense what they are sensing.

And wow, how well Teri’s posts about the ICE Surge do that:

• Look, there’s an unmarked, tinted-window car parked with the engine running and lights on…

• Hey, those flak-jacketed, heavily-armed masked people who are pulling that woman from her car and forcing her into their car -- are they ICE agents -- or are they out-of-state vigilantes? Did I just witness an arrest? Or was it a kidnapping?-- oh my God, how am I supposed to be able to tell the difference?

• Look, there’s my neighbor again today, dropping off “a tater-tot hot dish” and giving “an understanding hug” to my neighbor…

Second, for the past 30+ years, I’ve served a variety of Episcopal congregations as a parish priest, writing either a sermon or a parish newsletter post (or both) nearly every week all those years. That adds up to a lot of preaching and writing -- but most of it is known only to those in my congregations.

So in early 2023, I migrated over to Substack, with the intention to share my writing with a wider readership and eventually serialize several books gestating in me.

As I reflected on all I’d preached and written, I asked myself questions such as:

• “Is this good (interesting, relevant)?

• Does it draw the reader in?”

And if the writing met those two tests, I’d ask a third question:

• Does it work?”

In other words, if the one thing all good writers have in common is that their writing draws the reader in, is there one thing all effective writers have in common that “sends the reader out?” -- in my context, out into their daily lives more encouraged and empowered to fulfill Jesus’ first and greatest commandment to love God and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self?

Well as the saying goes, “when the student of deeply engaging, speak-the-truth-in-love writing that makes a difference is ready, the Creator Retreat appears.”

So one day while wrestling with these questions, I scrolled to the bottom of one of Teri’s posts, where I first learned that in addition to writing Fierce Love, she also leads The Creator Retreat.

Intrigued, I clicked.

They had me at “a quiet space for sensitive souls to create in community.”

The application process required answering some of the most interesting and probing questions I’ve been asked. Figuring I was a longshot, I didn’t overthink my answers -- I just wrote freely. Some time later, I got an email saying they’d like to interview me for a spot because they sensed, based on my application, that “I belong in a space like theirs.”

Like I said, like most good, life-changing things that have happened in my life, I had little idea what I was getting into.

Turns out it was this: for 10 months, I get to spend 90 minutes each Thursday on Zoom with one of the deepest, most intuitive, smart, quiet-thoughtful small groups I’ve been in.

• I wanted to learn more about writing that draws readers in; I now meet weekly with writers who not only share that same interest, but practice it on a regular basis.

• I wondered what makes writing “work” and wanted to meet writers who seek not just to “make a point” but to “make a difference.” Enter Teri and an unassuming-yet-brilliantly talented group of facilitators she has gathered around her, who lead us through exercises and discussions on precisely those questions. (Just scroll through the bios in that link -- I swear, spending time with any one of them is worth the price of admission alone: their combined energy is what, transporting.)

Not only that, the Creator’s Retreat keeps surprising me:

• In March -- “The Inhale” -- I learned (am learning) to breathe. (You’d think I’d have learned that sometime earlier in life, say, as a newborn. But there’s a creator’s world of difference between unconsciously taking breaths and purposefully breathing.

• In April -- “The Vow” -- we made promises to ourselves, sacred ones, gently but firmly held.

• In May -- “The Root” -- I learned (am learning) the implications on writing of a spiritual paradox I’d long known: the deeper your roots are, the more you can spread your wings.

• In June -- “The Release” -- I explored (am exploring) how to lighten up, and let go. We did a deep, scary, exhilarating dive into “the places that keep us stuck: perfection habits, control grips, protective patterns, old stories about how visibility works.”

And to think I’m only halfway through this retreat. Thanks be to God, and the sensitive souls on Substack, I can’t wait to see what the next six bring.

If The Creator Retreat calls to you, we have a self-study option to work through the curriculum on your own, which you can sign up for today. Otherwise, our next cohort will start in March 2027, and applications will open in January. Follow us here until then.

Creator Retreat Self Study

We also have a full library of our Guest Presenter Archives where you can watch all of last year’s, all of this year’s guest presentations from Substack Royalty such as Suzy Rowlands , Tom Kuegler , Kristi Keller 🇨🇦 , Megan Lee , James Bailey , and Dr. Kelly Flanagan

Guest Archive

is baaaaack!

crossed 2,000 subscribers since last year, which is the perfect rate of slow and steady consistency at play. She posts her sweary, ranty, single-mom shame shits every Friday, and I look for her post for my end-of-week giggles.

I often have to read a line or two of hers three or four times because they are things I would never allow myself to think, much less say out loud, and here she is, putting them in writing. And then I laugh, partly at what she wrote and partly at myself. Making me feel like she’s in the room with me.

Megan built her brand out of the parts of herself she wants to hide...swearing, meltdowns, temper tantrums, and deepest ugliest fears. She bears it all: the mom-guilt, the ex-guilt, and the guilt about the guilt.

Megan is all about celebrating the weird. She’s watched hundreds of sensitive, sideways, too-much humans try to sand themselves down into something marketable, and she’s spent her career proving that’s backward.

The rougher edges are usually the ones people remember.

Megan Lee is a full-body eye roll that morphs into a deep soul sob and ends in laughter-snorting. It’s emotional whiplash in the best way. She says the things the rest of us only scream into pillows. There’s this rhythm to her—the swing between rage and revelation, between swearing at the world and laughing with it.

And

Megan Lee is also exceptional professionalism and she has a brilliant business acumen when it comes to personal and creative branding.

I Hired Megan - Worth Every Penny

In my first year on Substack, when I was deep in the dreaded “void” and wondering how to make people notice me, I hired Megan to help me with branding. I had already fallen down several “marketing coach” rabbit holes that cost me tens of thousands of dollars, and was about to just quit for good.

Megan’s first task to me was to fill out a substantial questionnaire. It had curious questions, introspective questions, totally unprofessional questions, and questions I never would have imagined would help her understand my business. But most of all, it was fun. The questions were so weird and out of the norm that they felt the exact opposite of every marketing and branding coach survey I had ever done. (and I had done a lot of them).

I spent a couple days on her questions and gave her 45-pages back.

At the time, I had three Substack publications that I want to blend together in branding, somehow.

Megan helped me untangle my own scattered presence across three different Substacks. She read every answer I gave her and somehow came back to me with a better awareness of myself and my business than I had ever seen in 20 years of business! Then she found the thread running through all of it and handed it back to me, clearer than I’d ever seen myself.

Her answer was Rainbow Watercolor, with an emphasis on the purple.

Two months after that work together, I had a Note go viral. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The branding mattered. People were noticing me within seconds and sticking around because my brand finally made sense. A couple months later, I launched The Creator Retreat, and now look at me!

Then, in January, when 4000 federal agents invaded my city and upset the entire ecosystem of Minnesota. My main publication took a hit. I felt like ICE had ice-d my ambition and sense of purpose because everything I wrote and had ever produced suddenly felt frivolous and pointless.

Then I had another note go viral. But this time it went mega-viral. I became an accidental activist, and I knew I had to rebrand my main publication into a whole new passion.

Because of what Megan taught me in the time we have worked together, I was able to rebrand The MindfulSense Mentor (a chakra coaching page) into Fierce Love. I gained 6000 followers and kept the ones who have always been loyal to me over the years.

Megan was instrumental in that quick pivot process, and I’ll forever be grateful for how she took the elusive and angering world of marketing and made it safe and yes, even cozy, for me.

P.S. I also got to meet Megan in person last year, and she is every bit as raw human authentic in real life as she is on the page. She is one of my favorite Substack people.

Turn Your WEIRD Into Your Biggest ASSET

Megan’s workshop on BRANDING is the business advice we sensitive souls don’t know we need. She helps us embrace our weirdness and turn it into fuel in this bold, sweary, soul-hug of a workshop on branding your unapologetic self.

Are you struggling to fit in on Substack (and life)? Do you feel like nobody really gets your unique blend of weird? Are you worried that if you actually show up in all your weird wonderfulness you’ll only hear a solo cricket scratching its ass? Ooof. Join Megan Lee from Shame Sandwich as she shares her own struggle with feeling ashamed to show up as herself, and like she never fit in to leveraging her weirdness and turning it into her greatest strength. In this workshop, you get a giant ass permission slip to let your weirdest weird out, with Megan leading you through brainstorming exercises and, walking you through your WEIRD Substack Brand Checklist and answering your burning brand questions.

About Megan Lee

Some people call her Megan. But her friends call her funny, her kid calls her moooomm!!!!!, her ex calls her bitch, and she calls herself Jim Carrey in female form.

When she’s not writing her little heart out over at her Shame Sandwich newsletter trying to expunge all of the shame she’s been carrying her entire life (what’s that, you didn’t have a cult-ish childhood?) you can find her dancing in her home office (fancy for: small portion of her bedroom) swearing profusely at bad drivers, or trying and failing at being the worlds best single mom.

Her dream is to one day spend an entire day eating popcorn. And be a published author with a side of comedian.

Come as your most unedited self Thursday. Come with the version of you that usually gets cleaned up before it’s allowed in public. Megan built her whole business on proving that version was never the problem.

Upgrade to paid if you want the replay, popcorn and profanity and brand clarity fully intact.

Thank you, Megan, for coming back to show us that the mess was the brand the whole time.

We also have a full library of our Guest Presenter Archives where you can watch all of last year’s, all of this year’s guest presentations from Substack Royalty such as Suzy Rowlands , Tom Kuegler , Kristi Keller 🇨🇦 , Megan Lee , James Bailey , and Dr. Kelly Flanagan.

Guest Archive

If The Creator Retreat calls to you, we have a self-study option to work through the curriculum on your own, which you can sign up for today. Otherwise, our next cohort will start in March 2027, and applications will open in January. Follow us here until then.

Creator Retreat Self Study

There’s a folder on my desktop called “Not Yet.” Last time I counted, it held nine drafts, nine attempts at the same handful of hard things. Lately it’s been filling up.

For years I called that folder my cowardice, proof I didn’t have the nerve to finish what mattered most, evidence that I was a writer who could do the easy pieces and flinched at the real ones.

But I’ve been calling it my practice lately, because that’s what the folder actually is: a practice room instead of a graveyard.

The Inherited Belief

Somewhere, maybe, you learned that you write the hard thing after. After you’ve healed, once enough time has passed that you can hand the reader a clean lesson with a bow on it.

Maybe it came from the memoirs where every hard thing has already resolved into wisdom, or from the writing advice that says to wait until you have perspective, or from your own protective instinct, the one that wants it to close before anyone sees.

Unfortunately, the clean version is often the dead version. By the time the hard thing has become a tidy lesson, you’ve sanded off the part that was actually true. The reader can feel the lacquer. What they came for was the splinter.

The Sensitive Creator’s Particular Trap

Your unwritten hard pieces don’t sit quietly in a folder; they follow you, showing up at 2 a.m., until they start to feel like evidence that you’re not brave enough or ready enough or far enough along to deserve to write them.

So you wait. You wait to feel “ready,” although for the hard stuff that feeling never quite arrives, and you tell yourself the waiting is responsible, that you’re protecting yourself and honoring the material by leaving it alone.

Your sensitivity is handing you accurate information, and I’ll offer that perhaps you’re reading it *a little* backwards. That heaviness when you open the file isn’t a sign to stay away. It’s there because you’re standing right next to something real, and your body worked that out before your mind did. It happens like that sometimes.

Writing It Is the Healing, If Healing Comes

Here’s the reframe I’d offer to you.

You don’t write the hard thing once you’ve recovered from it. The writing is one of the ways you recover (and sometimes the only way). Sometimes you don’t recover at all, and you write it anyway, present tense, unfinished, honest.

I waited a long time for my accident to become a story before I’d write it. The wound refused. It stayed a wound, so I started writing it as a wound, and that’s when the work got true.

The writing was never the reward at the end of the recovery. It was part of the recovering itself.

What the Practice Actually Is

A practice has a shape. Here’s the shape of this one.

It tolerates the unfinished draft. You don’t have to know what the hard thing means before you write it. The meaning, when it comes, shows up inside the writing and almost never ahead of it. Write the version that ends in a question mark. That version counts.

It lives in the body: your jaw tight, breath comes shallow, and the chest doing that heart beaty thing. None of this is a stop sign; it’s heat coming off something real, and the work is staying near the fire without putting your hand all the way in.

This fire respects distance. Some material sits too close to write yet. That’s real, but it’s not a failure of nerve. You can write toward it sideways, taking the small adjacent moment instead of aiming at the center of the thing. Waiting on purpose, and without shame, can belong to the practice too. It’s your practice after all. Your body knows the difference between waiting and avoiding, even when your mind pretends it doesn’t.

The Reader Doesn’t Need Your Wound

This is the part that can tangle a creator up. It certainly does to me. 🙂

The reader does not need your open wound. The reader needs your witness.

The first draft is the wound talking, raw, necessary, and often meant for you alone. Shaping is the slower work that comes after: asking what a reader can actually hold, what they can carry home, what serves them. The practice is what grows your capacity to do the second without losing the truth of the first.

You’ll write hard pieces that never publish, and those count too. The draft that lives in the “Not Yet” folder and goes nowhere still did its job, because it moved something in you. That folder was never a measure of your failure; it was the room where you kept becoming someone who can sit beside their own hard material and set words down next to it.

The Practice, In Three Sentences

Here’s the whole thing, small enough to do today.

Open the doc. Write three honest sentences about the hard thing. Don’t finish it. Don’t fix it. Don’t decide whether it’s any good. Close the doc.

Come back Thursday.

That’s it. That’s the practice. You repeat it until the day a piece is ready to leave the folder, and you’ll know that day when it arrives, the same way your body knew the heat. Until then, the returning is the work.

You don’t have to be healed to write it. You don’t have to be ready to begin. You don’t have to publish a single word of it to be doing the practice.

You just have to open the folder. You’re already standing at the door.

The sacral chakra has a name that I love: the Sweet Place. It occupies your pelvic bowl where the organs live that are designed for holding something for a time and then letting go, receiving and releasing. And significantly, the sacral chakra is governed by water — the element of movement, flexibility, and flow. It’s the energy center of creation itself.

[This month, in Teri Leigh’s Creator Retreat program, we’re learning that,] if you’re a creator, this chakra is basically your home base. Every time you sit down to write, paint, record, or build something new, you’re drawing from this well. So when it’s out of balance, you feel it — not just emotionally, but in your body. And your body is always trying to tell you something.

Here’s what I’ve learned, both through my own life and through the clients I work with: physical tightness or instability is rarely “just physical.” It’s often a set of beliefs, lodged in the body since a specific experience, designed to protect you, and still running in the background like old software.

When the Hips Lock Up: Fear of Change

The hips are what move us forward. When they’re rigid, it signals fear of change. When they’re unstable, it signals fear of commitment. When they ache, it’s worth asking: what am I trying not to move toward?

After my friend Kendra passed away last year — something I wrote about in “Rooted, Rattled, Restored” — I noticed a tightness in my hips that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t subtle. My body was holding the question I couldn’t yet ask out loud: How do I live without her? I don’t know how to move forward into a life that looks different than the one I had.

That’s fear of change, stored in the joints that are designed to carry us forward. And it registered in my body and in the stagnation of creative work in the months following.

For creators, this might also show up as the project you won’t finish because finishing means it’s real, the new direction you won’t try because it might mean leaving the old one behind, or the niche you won’t commit to because committing feels like closing a door. Your hips might be the first place you feel it before your mind catches up.

Creating From Surrender, Not Force

The reproductive organs are where we birth joy and creation. And here’s the thing about that process — it has never, in the history of anything, responded well to force.

You cannot force a baby to be born before it’s ready. You cannot force a seed to bloom faster by pulling on it. And you cannot force your best creative work into existence by gripping it harder. Force doesn’t create. It controls.

Compelling creativity requires surrender. Not passivity — surrender. There’s a difference between giving up and opening your hands. When we create from force, the work often feels heavy, both to make and to receive. When we create from surrender — trusting the process, trusting the timing, trusting that the idea will come when it’s ready — the work moves through us instead of being dragged out of us.

What We Hold In: The Bladder

The bladder lives in the realm of the sacral chakra, too, and holds our emotional fluid. Hold it too long, and we get overwhelmed. Release it too soon, and we leak — emotionally reactive, unable to contain what’s ours to process privately.

My third son wet the bed until he was about ten. Back then, we’d just begun to learn about the emotional roots of physical symptoms, and we came to understand what was happening for him. The youngest of our three boys, he often felt left behind, unable to keep up, never enough. And when his older brothers mocked him for showing anger, he learned that anger wasn’t safe to express. So he held it in. All day. And at night, when his body finally relaxed into sleep, what he’d been holding all day released too — through his bladder.

Once we cleared the anger itself, and the underlying beliefs about who he was allowed to be in his family, the bedwetting stopped. The body had simply been doing what it was told: hold this in; it isn’t safe to let it out.

If you’re a creator who has ever sat on a finished piece of work for months because putting it out into the world felt unsafe — too exposing, too likely to be mocked or dismissed — this is the same pattern. Something in you learned, a long time ago, that what you have to express isn’t welcome. The work you’re holding back isn’t actually about the work. It’s about whether you believe you’re allowed to take up space.

Discernment: The Large Intestine

The large intestine’s job is to discern wisdom from waste. When it’s healthy, letting go is a satisfying, embodied release — not everything that comes in is meant to stay.

We’re already constantly making these calls: what to keep, what to release, what feedback to take in, what ideas to act on. But most of us are making these decisions from old, ego-based programming, the survival rules learned by a younger version of us who didn’t have much information but installed the rules because it kept us safe at the time.

For creators, two patterns show up here, just like the physical symptoms of the body:

Constipation — holding onto something out of a need for control, or a fear of letting go. This is the draft you’ve revised forty times. The idea you’re sitting on because releasing it means it’s no longer fully yours to control.

Or the other extreme, Diarrhea — too little control, refusing to hold onto even what you need. This is jumping from project to project, never finishing, scattering your energy because committing, staying with something, feels like getting stuck.

That programming is old code still running quietly in the background, on outdated hardware. But the system that kept you safe at seven isn’t built for the life you’re creating at forty. Through my healing practice, using the ThetaHealing® protocols, I’ve learned that we can download new instructions for wiser discernment, like updating a computer’s operating system.

When we shift into making these calls from a higher perspective — from the soul’s view, from Creator’s view — discernment stops being driven by fear and starts being driven by clarity.

A Better Way: Going With the Flow

Going with the flow doesn’t mean being swept under. It means learning to read the water. Wise discernment plus going with the flow is like navigating a river. You’re not trying to stop the water or force it in a different direction. You’re paying attention, noticing the submerged obstacles, choosing when to steer around them and when to find your way through. The general direction of the river isn’t yours to control. Your relationship to it is.

That’s the sweet spot. Neither gripping, nor abandoning ship. You’re discerning, from a higher perspective, what’s actually yours to hold and releasing the rest.

Questions Worth Sitting With

Your body has been keeping notes your whole life. The Sweet Place is just asking you to read them. Here are Teri Leigh’s questions that might help you learn what your sacral chakra is expressing:

• Where am I unwilling — or unable — to go with the flow?

• Where am I gripping too tightly?

• Where do I feel stuck?

• What am I holding onto that needs to be released or expressed?

• Is there an imbalance between work and play, responsibility and relaxation? Or, am I balanced by swinging between extremes?

• Can I release control and still move forward?

These Sweet Spot themes — control, learning to gently balance joy and guilt, work and play, holding on and letting go — will eventually become a guided video healing session, too. Stay tuned! Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about how I could help you individually, here’s a link to schedule a consultation:

Schedule a session with Kyle

The chakra information and reflection questions in this post draw on Teri Leigh’s book The Goldilocks Principle: A Practical Guide to the Chakras*, as well as her teachings on the chakra system through The Creator Retreat program.*

The Creator Retreat is a quiet community for sensitive souls to create. We offer a 10-month cohort program annually, with a self-study option available. Our next cohort application will open in January 2027.

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Presented LIVE to Creator Retreat Cohort on June 18, 2026

Available as workshop replay to Guest Archives members.

Get Your Guest Archives All Access Pass

The first time I felt Mel’s energy on a Zoom screen, she cracked open a glitter egg and it exploded between us. We spent the next year and a half fingerpainting together through the interwebs.

She’s a big personality in a very small package, fully at home talking about things that make other people shift in their chairs: sex, shame, storytelling, sobriety. This woman is so good at being raw, and honest, and real. All the good stuffs that matters.

When I learned she was only 4’11”, I actually said out loud, “Of course she is!” It made perfect sense. That much life needs a compact container just to keep from overwhelming the rest of us.

And then I found out she was one of the Wall of Moms in Portland during the Black Lives Matter protests — locked arms, bicycle helmet, goggles, and a spine made of lightning — and my whole heart burst. A few weeks ago, we had a good talk about how Minneapolis and Portland complement each other in the Resistance.

I have a memory of watching the Rodney King riots from my dorm window in Beloit, WI. I saw my corner gas station looted and burned. I remember the ache in my lungs when I watched the video of George Floyd’s murder. So when I picture Mel standing on the front lines of justice in her homemade protest armor, I feel the kind of deep exhale that only happens when someone shows you how to be brave and joyful at the same time.

Mel is a woman who shows up. In all the ways.

That was who showed up to Creator Retreat in 2025.

She arrived with no Substack, no publication, no plan. Just a pull toward community and a willingness to take the suggestions and see what happens (sound familiar, recovering humans?). She didn’t even know “creator” had a specific meaning in Substackland.

She promised that she is a good student and always does her homework. Well, she did. And she became the poster child for all the success that The Creator Retreat community can bring.

Mel built a Substack. Published twice a week, every week, all year. Started an analog letter writing playshop program. Joined my Abundant Money Mindset cohort, where she went from a decades-long cycle of “$300 in the bank and $10K in debt” to paying off her credit cards completely and building a steady, growing income. When she broke her scarcity mindset, she asked for twice her usual rate for a project she’d been volunteering for — and got it. And now, she’s currently building a retreat center in Fiddletown, CA, where she hosts an artist gallery, runs playshop events, and performs in local theater.

She’s a Performance Art(isan). That’s her term and it’s perfect.

I watched Mel go from “I don’t know if I fit here” to “this feels like home” over the course of one year. I watched her writing get braver, her voice get steadier, her relationship with money transform from anxious fog to clear-eyed tool. I watched her miss exactly one session all year — and she watched the replay.

And then, when the year ended, she stayed.

Mel is now in our Creator Retreat 2.0 cohort, the hyper-focused business growth intensive for graduates. She also voluntarily shows up to the new cohort’s sessions regularly, just because she loves the community that much. This Thursday, she’s presenting to that group — a graduate returning to give back what she received.

There’s no separation between who she is and how she shows up. She lives her “Witch in a Lab Coat” energy everywhere.

Mel is a storyteller, performer, writer, musician, mosaicist, and artist of the in-between. Her art doesn’t come from polish. It comes from process.

She’s a rainbow sparkle in riot gear, and she’s one of ours now.

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Sexuality, Creativity & Connection

Open discussion of sex and sexuality tends to be taboo in our culture. This silence breeds shame, and shame is one of the most powerful creative inhibitors there is — when we’re cut off from fundamental parts of our humanity, we limit our capacity for authentic expression and innovation.

This workshop explores the profound connection between sexual wellness, creative flow, and meaningful human connection. It’s a bold, bright homecoming to the parts of ourselves we’ve been told to hide. The parts that squirm, the parts that burn, and the parts that never stopped wanting to be expressed.

About Mel Moseley

Mel is a performer, musician, writer, mosaic artist, and the self-described witch in a lab coat behind Mel’s Messy Love Lab — a Substack where she treats her own life as an ongoing experiment in love, art, and radical honesty. She’s been doing the work of shedding the cultural, family, and religious messages that told her who to be, and figuring out — with curiosity and a lot of mess — what’s actually true for her.

Her Analog Letters series is exactly what it sounds like: handwritten letters, sent to real people, shared with the world. Because connection is the whole point.
Mel knows how shame blocks the river of creativity. She also knows what it takes to clear the dam. Her life is a living example of what happens when we stop trying to be acceptable and start telling the truth — and she holds space with the kind of warmth that makes even the hardest conversations feel like a letter from a friend.

Mel's Messy Love Lab

I am a theater artist, musician, writer, storyteller, facilitator, artist, and witchy experimenter doing my very best to live an authentic life.

By Mel Moseley

This workshop is a glitter cannon of truth, tenderness, and creative liberation—and it’s just for our paid members.

If your inner artist has ever blushed, squirmed, hidden, or held back… this is your invitation to drop the shame, grab the glitter, and come play in the full technicolor spectrum of expression.

Mel’s workshop is one of those rare, holy-silly, soul-expanding moments we’ll be talking about for a long time.

Get access to Mel’s workshop replay, and the full library of our guest presenter workshops.

Guest Presenter Library

I arrived on Substack in January of 2024.

For the first 10 months my growth was flat. I had 20-30 subscribers. It was in November of 2024 that I first heard about the Creator Retreat. I came across a post,

In this post she introduces herself as a “quirky, curious, intuitive soul wrapped in a small package with a big story.” She explains how her life has shaped who she is and how it led her to the point of establishing a “sanctuary for people who feel to weird, too sensitive, or too ‘out there’ for traditional spaces.

As I read her words, I thought, well… that’s me in a nutshell. I continued watching for her Creator Retreat posts from there on.

That same day in November 2024 she published,

In it she reminds readers that when writers, artists of any type “creators” get stuck, or need to fill the well that has gone dry, they will often go on a “retreat.” Online creators are no different. We need to recharge our batteries, too.

In subsequent posts throughout November and December of 2024 she further explained what the Creator Retreat would look like, she reframed “strategizing” growth to a growth journey. She also discussed the importance of looking inward, finding balance and connecting heart to creativity.

Every post I read struck a cord deep within.

I began to feel that maybe this would be something for me. The call for applicants came and I thought about applying, but was unable to pull the trigger. Her first cohort was filled. I continued to read her posts all through 2025.

A few of the people I’m subscribed to or follow were involved in this first Creator Retreat program. I also started following their progress. One of my favorite writers is Jeannie Ewing, apparently she, too, had some misgivings. She writes about it here:

The year 2025 was coming to a close and The Creator Retreat was gearing up for another round of applicants for the second cohort. Early in 2026, I got as far as filling out an application and then bailing just before pulling the trigger and sending it.

I mentioned this to Jeannie. She spoke to me about how she had done the same thing the year before. She then told me to go “do it”. She also said that when she went back in all her earlier responses were still there. She just needed to complete and hit send.

So, what was stopping me?

Imposter syndrome AKA feeling like a fraud, doubting my own competence. Imposter syndrome is a real thing for highly sensitive people. I grew up as the family guardian, the truth-teller, the care-giver from a very young age. However, I never felt good enough.

For the most part I did very well in school with minimal effort. So, I believed it was luck that earned those good grades. Playing instruments, singing, connecting with babies, toddlers and young children all came easily to me. Wow, I was so lucky… or so I thought.

I felt very much the “weird” one, the one that could just look at the sky at 6 am and know if we could go on a long canoe trip in the Adirondacks, or no, we would need to pack it in early as there would be thundershowers by 3, or 4 pm at the latest. I was the one that could “read the room” with ease.

I was the one that “sensed” things, what to, where to go, what to avoid. When reading statements like “For introverts, sensitive souls, and “weirdos” who don’t fit the mainstream, the fixed formulas provided by ‘experts”’in online business feel like overwhelming noise.” I knew I had “found my people.”

I was standing on the cusp of making a good decision for me or aborting. All that was left was clicking on that send button. Turns out, my prior answers were not saved. I had to start all over again, which I did. I also shut off the inner critic long enough send the application on its way.

Biting my fingernails is something I gave up as a preteen. Perseverating about outcomes is something, I gave up at least a decade ago. I turned to my writing and refused to obsessively check my emails. I may, or may not admit to checking emails at least one or two more times than usual…

By the time I had applied, I had already done an article in collaboration with Alexander Lovell, PhD, one of the Creator Retreat co-leaders, and he was so lovely to work with. So, what was I afraid of?

Yes, my old nemesis, Imposter syndrome. I pushed through it and hit send. I’m now in the midst of this unique program that combines deep inner work along with some of the practical nuts and bolts of building community. As we build community we find success within our reach.

If The Creator Retreat calls to you, we have a self-study option to work through the curriculum on your own, which you can sign up for today. Otherwise, our next cohort will start in March 2027, and applications will open in January. Follow us here until then.

Creator Retreat Self Study

We also have a full library of our Guest Presenter Archives where you can watch all of last year’s, all of this year’s guest presentations from Substack Royalty such as , , , , , and

Guest Archive

In 2020, when the world was in lockdown, I wrote. A lot.

It was the only thing I knew what to do with all the quiet time. I published three books in one year: a yoga book an agent gave up on in 2009, a novel I started with my high school students in 2004, and a dare to myself to write and publish a 100-page how-to book between Halloween and Thanksgiving to outshine the winter darkness.

I did it.
I published them all.

And in the process, I sold my soul to the devil named Perfectionism.

For most of the year, I couldn't sleep at night because I couldn't get comfortable in my hips. Every position I tried, my hips ached. During my daily dog walks, I often had to pause and readjust because I felt like a hip joint was out of socket. During my yoga practice, my hip stretches were tighter than they had ever been. I blamed it all on sitting too much, but that wasn’t the truth. I moved plenty.

Writing a book for publication—especially doing it all by myself without the funds to hire a team—meant I was focused on every little perfectionistic detail. My days were filled with editing, proof-reading, and formatting. Very little was actual writing.

All that Perfectionism and Control over getting it just right wrapped itself all up in my hips. I quit writing for almost a whole year.

Publishing three books in one year wasn’t about writing, it was about proof-reading and editing. I lost all creative flow.

I felt completely stuck.

We’ve all had those times in our creativity when we feel stuck. Like everything we try to do is just sludge, and everything we produce is uglier than mud. Or when we do think we’ve found that sweet spot, it doesn’t land with the audience and we go back to questioning ourselves and our work, which makes us even more perfectionistic and over-efforting.

It took a whole year to unwind the tightness of that perfectionism. I stopped believing in my writing. I lost my passion for creativity. I lost my joy.

Over the next year, I had to learn to let go. to find the joy and play in my work again.

And I did. I found that sweet spot. My writing now is playful and joy-filled and fun-tastic, and I can churn it out without being overly concerned about it being perfect.

This month inside The Creator Retreat we remember the play place, the childlike joy of jumping in the puddles and streams and hula-hooping our hips as we ring-around-the-rosy of our creativity and weirdness.

Spiritual Inner Work: Letting Go & Getting Messy

Thursday June 4

This month, we return to the hips and pelvis—the seat of creativity, flow, pleasure, and movement.

The hips and pelvis are the deep basin of our being—where ancient, unspoken emotions settle when they haven’t had room to move. Grief, shame, desire, and fear of letting go all live here. When we grip too tight, when we micromanage our creativity, when perfectionism takes the reins, the hips respond with tension, clenching, and pain. They freeze up. They ache. They lock down. Because our hips were designed for fluid motion—for forward movement, rhythm, flow, and release. If we don’t process what’s tucked in that sacred bowl of the body, we get stuck—creatively, emotionally, spiritually. And we start walking through life like we’ve got a stick up our ass.

We explore what happens when your writing and creativity gets tight, stuck, or over-controlled… and how that mirrors tension in your body.

Each of these is a signal that something in the hips is clenched. That something old is waiting to be felt. That something sacred wants to flow.

• Tight, overly-structured outlines that leave no room for intuition or surprise

• Endless tweaking and editing without ever hitting publish

• Avoidance of vulnerable stories for fear they’re “too much” or “not polished enough”

• Stopping mid-project because the inner critic says it’s not good enough

• Forcing inspiration instead of letting ideas emerge in their own timing

• Burning out during launches because the creative flow has been replaced by hustle

• Writing from the head only—cut off from body, emotion, and deeper truth

• Procrastinating important pieces due to fear of what they might unleash

• Comparing your writing to others’ and feeling frozen by inadequacy

• Staying stuck in idea mode without ever bringing anything to life

This month, we’ll stretch, shake, and soften. . . both in our bodies and in our creative work.

Through sacred somatic play, we’ll:

• Loosen the rigidity in the pelvis using MOZI Method – VINI (a pelvic alignment and shimmy shake-out)

• Engage in ritual water practices that gently melt tension and clear perfectionistic energy

• Explore how creative energy moves when it’s supported instead of managed

And we’ll meet the awkward, hilarious places where joy and messiness live—without needing to "get it right."

Business Outer Action: Flow Through It with Water

Cohort: Thursday June 6
Paid Subscribers Replay: Friday June 7

When sensitive souls enter the world of business, it often begins with high hopes—and quickly collides with perfectionism, control, over-efforting, and burnout.

We grip too tightly, try too hard, chase every dollar, and then swing to the other extreme with a full-body “fuck-it-all”.

This month’s Business Outer Action invites a softer, wiser way. We’ll explore how to stay energetically clear, emotionally regulated, and somatically aligned—even in a world that rewards hustle. We will apply a common sense approach to dealing with difficult business situations such as:

• When you're emotionally flooded—criticism, rejection, decision fatigue—water can help you down-regulate.

• After energetically draining interactions, such as a boundary-crossing client sends a guilt-trippy email.

• If you're stuck in perfectionism or fear of being seen, such as editing the same draft 14 times and still can’t hit publish.

• You’re overwhelmed by a business decision. Or have lost a big contract/client. Or experienced a disappointing failure.

Even in business, we can move forward without force—cleansing what clings, softening what grips, and flowing toward what’s true.

Subscribe now

Sexuality, Creativity & Connection

Open discussion of sex and sexuality tends to be taboo in our culture. This silence breeds shame, and shame is one of the most powerful creative inhibitors there is — when we’re cut off from fundamental parts of our humanity, we limit our capacity for authentic expression and innovation.

This workshop explores the profound connection between sexual wellness, creative flow, and meaningful human connection. It’s a bold, bright homecoming to the parts of ourselves we’ve been told to hide. The parts that squirm, the parts that burn, and the parts that never stopped wanting to be expressed.

About Mel Moseley

Mel is a performer, musician, writer, mosaic artist, and the self-described witch in a lab coat behind Mel’s Messy Love Lab — a Substack where she treats her own life as an ongoing experiment in love, art, and radical honesty. She’s been doing the work of shedding the cultural, family, and religious messages that told her who to be, and figuring out — with curiosity and a lot of mess — what’s actually true for her.

Her Analog Letters series is exactly what it sounds like: handwritten letters, sent to real people, shared with the world. Because connection is the whole point.
Mel knows how shame blocks the river of creativity. She also knows what it takes to clear the dam. Her life is a living example of what happens when we stop trying to be acceptable and start telling the truth — and she holds space with the kind of warmth that makes even the hardest conversations feel like a letter from a friend.

Mel's Messy Love Lab

I am a theater artist, musician, writer, storyteller, facilitator, artist, and witchy experimenter doing my very best to live an authentic life.

By Mel Moseley

Want all of this without the live Zoom commitment?

The Creator Retreat Self-Study gets you every single thing we talked about above (MULA, consistency magic, Suzy’s workshop, Yoga Nidra, MOZI, community chat) plus nine more months of spiritual inner work and business outer action, delivered as recordings on your schedule.

Same depth. Same arc. Same magic. Just without the pressure of showing up somewhere at a specific time.

You’ll have a Circle community full of other sensitive souls processing alongside you. And there is no “falling behind.” That’s actually very on-brand for everything we teach here.

$250 one-time or $25/month for 10 months. Access through December 2026.

Come find your rhythm with us 🌳✨

Yes, Please!

When the Ground Shifts Beneath You

There is a language the body speaks long before the mind catches up.

Cut off at the knees. Went weak in the knees. Didn’t have a leg to stand on. The rug pulled out from under me. We use these phrases so casually, not realizing how literally they land in the body — in the hips, the knees, the calves, the feet. The root chakra, that foundational energy center governing our legs and our sense of standing in the world, is where safety, security, stability, and structure all take root. Or, as the case may be, where they begin to unravel.

Teri Leigh, in her teaching “Un-woo-woo-ing the Chakras,” puts it plainly: “Your root chakra manages the messages and information running through your body about safety, security, foundation, stability, and structure.” And when that foundation is shaken, the body doesn’t stay silent. It speaks in symptoms. It speaks in patterns. It speaks in the beliefs we hold, often without knowing we hold them.

This is a story about learning to listen — and then doing something about it.

Uprooted: A Personal Reckoning

In the first week of May, sitting with Teri Leigh’s Creator Retreat cohort for the second year in a row, I found myself arriving at the root chakra lesson again. The same week of the program. The same season of the year. But not the same woman.

A year earlier, it was during this very same lesson that I became quietly, devastatingly aware that my beloved sister-in-law, Kendra, was not going to survive the cancer. She passed in early June. And now, a full year later, as Teri Leigh asked us to consider, “What knocks you off your feet?” — the answer rose in me immediately:

Kendra’s death.

My twin brother brought Kendra to meet us shortly after our first child was born, 30 years ago. She and I became instant, effortless friends — bonded by phone calls and proximity of heart even when miles separated us. Over the years we shared everything: health, wellness, and spirituality; parenting, homeschooling, and home decorating; thrifting and truth-telling. Losing her was not simply losing a sister-in-law. It was losing a companion, a constant, a mirror — we were literally mistaken for one another so many times, and people even thought we were twins, when it was my brother and I who were actually twins!

Kendra’s death has also been creatively silencing. In the year since she passed, I have struggled to maintain any consistency in my creative output, whether in my Substack posts and notes or in establishing the body of healing work I have long felt called to share. I would begin and stall. Show up and disappear. The roots of my creative identity, I now understand, were tangled up with hers. Who was I without the conversations we shared, the mutual encouragement, the witness she offered to who I was becoming. (Crying again as I reread this.) Losing her didn’t just uproot me personally. It uprooted the creator in me.

So, in April this year, just weeks before this root chakra lesson in early May, I found myself floundering again, creatively adrift in a way I couldn’t immediately explain. It was Teri Leigh who named it for me: I was approaching the anniversary of the trips I had made to be with Kendra, to care for her, to accompany her to appointments, and to simply be present with her in what we didn’t yet know were her final weeks. My body and my subconscious had been keeping that anniversary even while my conscious mind had moved on. The creative stalling wasn’t laziness or resistance. It was grief, right on schedule, doing what grief does — returning to the roots.

And then, I discovered a belief I hadn’t known I was carrying:

I don’t know how to live without Kendra.

Sit with that for a moment. Not knowing how to live is a roadblock to living itself. The body, faithful and literal as it is, heard that message and responded accordingly. Within weeks of her passing, my body began to speak: tightness through my hips and calves, pain in my feet, the abrupt cessation of my cycles, hair loss, weight gain. Yes, these are also recognized markers of menopause. But I had not experienced them before her death. They arrived, all of them, immediately after.

The timing was not coincidence. It was communication.

A Second Pillar, a Prior Loss

Grief, it turns out, has layers — and the root chakra holds them all.

Ten years ago, my father passed suddenly, following a brief stroke-like episode. My relationship with him had not been particularly close; we had lived six hours apart for two decades, and our phone calls were rare. And yet, when he was gone, I felt something structural give way inside me. I described it then as losing one of my pillars. He had always been there — not prominently, not loudly, but steadily — like the footings of a house: underground, unseen, utterly essential to the stability of everything built above.

You don’t think about footings. Until the building shifts.

That is what an imbalanced root chakra can feel like: a subtle but pervasive sense that the ground beneath you is no longer solid. And when the ground shifts, we compensate. Teri Leigh describes it this way: “An imbalanced root chakra shows up as overthinking, people pleasing, overgiving, hoarding, trying too hard, overdoing, over-busyness, and overachieving. We overcompensate for not feeling safe by trying to control everything we can.”

Sound familiar? It did to me.

For those of us who create — who write, who build, who offer our work and our voice to the world — an unsteady root chakra doesn’t just show up in our personal lives. It shows up on the blank page. It shows up in the inconsistency, the procrastination, the bursts of frantic output followed by long silences. It shows up as the inability to establish and maintain a creative rhythm, because creativity requires a kind of safety, the felt sense that it is safe to be seen, safe to be heard, safe to put something real into the world and have it received. When the root is shaken, that safety evaporates. We either push too hard, producing from a place of proving rather than flowing, or we go quiet altogether, unable to find the ground beneath our creative feet.

From Uprooted to Restored

Here is what I know: beliefs buried in the subconscious body do not dissolve simply because we become aware of them. Awareness is the first step — the essential step — but it is not the last.

Through my practice of ThetaHealing®, I worked with the belief I don’t know how to live without Kendra, and with the many smaller, tangled beliefs that surfaced alongside it. I brought them up into the light of conscious awareness. I made a conscious choice to have them changed through the practice of focused, spiritual meditation that speaks not just to the thinking mind but to the subconscious patterns underneath.

In the three weeks that followed, something in me began to stir. I can only describe it the way nature demonstrates it: like a tree emerging from winter dormancy. Slowly, steadily, surprisingly — coming alive again.

Perfect timing for a root chakra recalibration.

What This Has to Do with You

You may not have lost a Kendra. But you have almost certainly been knocked off your feet by something.

Perhaps it was a loss — sudden or slow, expected or shattering. Perhaps it was a relationship that withdrew its support, a financial foundation that crumbled, a health diagnosis, a betrayal, a transition that left you scrambling for solid ground. Perhaps it was a foundation that has never felt solid. Something, at any rate, that your body has been quietly speaking about, whether for many years or one.

Teri Leigh’s question is worth sitting with: What knocks me off my feet?

And my question: What beliefs do I carry that hinder my creativity? And, why am I feeling so “at sea”?!

Maybe, having read my story, you’re even thinking, “I want a root chakra recalibration!”

Well….. as part of my “coming alive”, I have been inspired to create The Root Chakra Recalibration video for you, a guided ThetaHealing® session, designed to do the work for you that awareness alone cannot: to shift the negative charge held in trauma memories, to release the identities and definitions that no longer serve you, and to download to you new ways of knowing yourself to be safe and secure, supported and stable.

This is not “abstract philosophy to ponder” as Teri Leigh says is typical of chakra system gurus. These are tools that I deploy on your behalf. Practical, prayerful, powerful tools for changing the patterns you have lived out — from the roots up.

The Root Chakra Recalibration video coming soon!

Subscribe now

Kyle Fisk, author of this piece, is available for 1-1 Theta Healing Sessions.

Book with Kyle

One of Substack’s Best Kept Secret

I’ve known Suzy here on Substack for over two years, and every single interaction I have with her is energy-shifting, and sometimes deeply life-changing.

In one of our first interactions, she called me “bloomin’ brilliant” in her brightly colored British accent. Those words penetrated every fiber of my being and became my mantra, motto, and life’st mission for the next two years.

I give some credit to Suzy for the birth of The Creator Retreat because her “Bloomin’ Brilliant” charm-spell was instrumental in birthing and creating the idea of The Creator Retreat into reality.

Then Suzy offered a bonus presentation for us last fall and I discovered quickly that her teaching style closely matches my own. In fact, she embodies the concept of “it takes one to know one” because in calling me “bloomin’ brilliant” she clearly had to embody that energy herself.

Suzy Rowlands IS Bloomin’ Brilliant, and she is opening her heart and voice and wisdom up to The Creator Retreat!

Grounded Before Consistent

Many creators struggle with consistency not because they lack discipline, but because their nervous system is overwhelmed, activated, or quietly exhausted.

✨

In this workshop, Suzy invites creators to reframe consistency through the body rather than willpower. Drawing on mindfulness, somatic awareness, and the power of language, she explores why pressure-driven creation so often leads to burnout, avoidance, or self-judgement, and how grounding can restore steadiness, clarity, and trust in the creative process.

✨

Participants will learn how dysregulation shows up in their work, why “just push through” rarely works long-term, and how to create from a place of safety rather than urgency. The session includes a gentle, somatic or sensory-based reset creators can use before sitting down to work, and simple tools creators can return to again and again to support sustainable, embodied, and compassionate consistency online.

Suzy Rowlands

Suzy Rowlands is a writer, speaker, and expression doula who helps people say the things they most want to say, out loud, on purpose, and without collapsing into a puddle of panic. Her background spans public speaking, NLP, meditation, and the kind of life experience you can’t get a certificate for.

✨

She’s passionate about voice, presence, and the power of language to bring us back to ourselves.

✨

Whether she’s gently coaching someone through a wedding speech or helping a nervous system find its ground before hitting “publish,” Suzy brings depth, playfulness, and big-hearted honesty. She doesn’t pretend to have it all together, but she’s very good at walking beside you while you gather the bits.

Suzy Exhales

I help sensitive souls overcome fear, find their voice, and speak from an open heart—blending joyful presence, intuition, and quirky self-expression to create magic in the world.

By Suzy Rowlands

Creator Retreat Guest Workshop Archive

If Suzy’s energy lights you up (and trust me, it will), you can access both of her workshops inside the Creator Retreat Guest Archive.

And Suzy’s just the beginning.

The Archive is a growing library of workshops from some of the most soulful, brilliant creators on Substack. We’re talking 15 workshops from our incredible 2025 lineup, plus at least one new guest workshop every single month through 2026. These are the kinds of humans who make you want to go do the thing.

$79. One-time. Lifetime access to the full archive as it grows.

A treasure chest of wisdom from creators who get it.

👉 See our 2026 guest lineup here

👉 Browse the full 2025 workshop collection here

These workshops aren’t your typical “grow your Substack in 30 days” stuffs. They’re deep, real conversations about writing, creativity, nervous system care, and building something that actually feels good. From people who actually walk the walk.

Your sensitive soul deserves this kind of support. And at $79 for a library that keeps growing? That’s less than most creators charge for a single workshop.

Come hang with the weirdos. We saved you a seat. ✨

Yes Please!

The Earth Holds the Beat

Sally has been wanting to write her memoir on Substack for years.

Not just write it—serialize it, share it, turn it into something real. Something that invites other moms like her to comment, and turn her memoir into a conversation, a community of women encouraging each other. Something brave.

But writing, for Sally, always comes in fits and starts—like a faulty faucet.

She dreams in paragraphs but lives in errands.

Every time she clears space to write, someone needs her. Her grown kids, her aging parents, a friend in crisis, a neighbor with a “quick favor.” And Sally—heart of gold, chronic over-giver—says yes. She always says yes.

But even when the house is quiet, and the tea is poured, and the laptop is open—something happens. The ideas feel messy. The timeline feels blurry. She waits for inspiration to strike, but it never shows up when she has the time to actually write.

And on the rare days she writes something raw and true, she edits it into a polite, polished performance. The vulnerability gets stripped away. The realness becomes “readable.” She wants to appear put-together. Professional. Worthy.

She publishes randomly, here and there, when she is both inspired and courageous enough. Which isn’t nearly as often as she wishes it could be.

Then she wonders why no one comments. Why no one sees her writing, and those who do don’t really seem to feel her words.

Sally needs to ground.

She needs the kind of roots that can hold her steady—not just when it’s easy, but when the world pulls at her from all sides.

She doesn’t need a content calendar. She needs root systems. And a sprinkle of mossy forest magic. You need root systems. And a sprinkle of mossy forest magic.

That’s what we are offering inside The Creator Retreat this month.

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Spiritual Inner Work: Standing Tall, Rooted Deep

This month, we return to our feet. Literally. Like, wiggle-your-toes-in-the-dirt return.

Through a delightfully earthy practice we call MULA—(that’s fae speak for I’m safe and Mother Earth has snacks)—we’re going to remember what it feels like to be held.

As sensitive souls, we live in a loop of over-giving, over-doing, and over-censoring. We try to be the responsible fairy of everyone’s feelings, and forget our own.

But guess what? The Earth doesn’t need us to prove anything.

She just wants us to plant our feet and breathe.

In May’s magical inner work, we’ll ground into our bodies, call our power back from all the chaos goblins, and relearn how to feel safe—not someday, but now. Feet on the floor. Breath in the belly. Words with roots.

We promise, this isn’t the usual walk barefoot in the grass type grounding exercise. We already know that one and we use it, but sometimes it just isn’t feasible. What we will learn this month is a practical 10-second grounding exercise that you have never learned and makes so much damn sense you’ll be wondering why no one teaches this in grade school.

You don’t have to earn your safety. You already belong.

Business Outer Action: Building Trust in the Beat

Here’s the unsexy spell that actually works: consistency.

Not daily. Not perfect. Just dependable—like a tree you can lean on.

95% of business blunders come from being wobbly. Not unreliable in character—just in rhythm. If your audience doesn’t know when you’re showing up, they can’t trust the pulse of your work. And if you don’t trust it either, it all gets... crunchy.

This month’s business outer action lesson is all about finding your creative drumbeat. We’ll ditch the rigid calendars and instead craft something magical: a rhythm your body and audience can dance with.

You’ll learn why:

• Consistency boosts SEO and signals the algorithm elves

• Reliable posting creates energetic trust

• Showing up steady says more than any sales page ever could

So we’ll practice: Step. Breath. Post. Repeat. Like spellwork. But with pixels.

Guest Presenter: Suzy Rowlands

May 14, 2026

Grounded Before Consistent

Many creators struggle with consistency not because they lack discipline, but because their nervous system is overwhelmed, activated, or quietly exhausted.

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In this workshop, Suzy invites creators to reframe consistency through the body rather than willpower. Drawing on mindfulness, somatic awareness, and the power of language, she explores why pressure-driven creation so often leads to burnout, avoidance, or self-judgement, and how grounding can restore steadiness, clarity, and trust in the creative process.

✨

Participants will learn how dysregulation shows up in their work, why “just push through” rarely works long-term, and how to create from a place of safety rather than urgency. The session includes a gentle, somatic or breath-based reset creators can use before sitting down to work, and simple tools creators can return to again and again to support sustainable, embodied, and compassionate consistency online.

Suzy Rowlands

Suzy Rowlands is a writer, speaker, and expression doula who helps people say the things they most want to say, out loud, on purpose, and without collapsing into a puddle of panic. Her background spans public speaking, NLP, meditation, and the kind of life experience you can’t get a certificate for.

✨

She’s passionate about voice, presence, and the power of language to bring us back to ourselves.

✨

Whether she’s gently coaching someone through a wedding speech or helping a nervous system find its ground before hitting “publish,” Suzy brings depth, playfulness, and big-hearted honesty. She doesn’t pretend to have it all together, but she’s very good at walking beside you while you gather the bits.

Suzy Exhales

I help sensitive souls overcome fear, find their voice, and speak from an open heart—blending joyful presence, intuition, and quirky self-expression to create magic in the world.

By Suzy Rowlands

Closing Invitation

This month is for the ones who feel tender but true.

For the ones who’ve been waiting to feel safe enough to share their real magic.

For those who want to commit to themselves, their dreams. To plant and tend and grow that writing seed inside themselves until the seedlings burst and bloom for all the world to see and enjoy.

The Earth holds the beat. Come find your rhythm with us.

Paid subscribers get access to all the lessons, live sessions, workshops, and forest-floor revelations.

Come root in with us 🌳✨

Want all of this without the live Zoom commitment?

The Creator Retreat Self-Study gets you every single thing we talked about above (MULA, consistency magic, Suzy’s workshop, Yoga Nidra, MOZI, community chat) plus nine more months of spiritual inner work and business outer action, delivered as recordings on your schedule.

Same depth. Same arc. Same magic. Just without the pressure of showing up somewhere at a specific time.

You’ll have a Circle community full of other sensitive souls processing alongside you. And there is no “falling behind.” That’s actually very on-brand for everything we teach here.

$250 one-time or $25/month for 10 months. Access through December 2026.

Come find your rhythm with us 🌳✨

Yes, Please!

I have a confession.

I spent years saying affirmations into my bathroom mirror like a good little self-help student. I said them, believed them (sort of), and they kinda-sorta worked. But not really.

This week inside Creator Retreat, we got all up in the science of it, and had a lot of fun with my word-nerd brain.

Sankalpa is a Sanskrit concept that’s been around way longer than your morning routine app, or your vision board treasure mapping practice. Sankalpa is NOT the same thing as an affirmation. It’s your affirmation practice on steroids!

Affirmations live in your head. A sankalpa moves through your entire nervous system, riding the wave of your breath, through the sounds of the actual letters you choose and what they do to the frequency and vibrations of the physical tissues of your body.

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The RAS thing will genuinely blow your mind

Your brain has a system called the Reticular Activating System (the RAS) and it’s basically your brain’s personal algorithm. Out of the thousands of data points hitting your senses every second, your RAS decides what bubbles up to your conscious awareness, and it decides based entirely on what you’ve been telling it to look for.

So if you keep telling yourself “I’m overwhelmed, I’m behind, my list is too small, no one’s reading this”... your RAS is out there in the world finding every single piece of evidence to confirm that story. The good stuff is there too, it’s just getting filed in the back where you can’t see it.

A sankalpa trains your RAS on purpose. Which, as a sensitive soul who is very susceptible to her own inner narrative, is kind of a big deal.

The phonetics lesson is where it gets really fun

Inside this session you get a full breakdown of how the sounds of specific letters carry actual energetic qualities. The F’s, M’s, N’s and W’s are soft, feminine, nurturing. The B’s, G’s and J’s create movement and action. The Z sound fizzes and energizes (think “oozing” or “blazing”). The “ooh” sound grounds you. The long “I” sound makes your body want to grow taller.

So when you’re crafting your sankalpa, you’re not just picking words that sound nice, you’re literally choosing a frequency. And once you learn this, you will never look at a word the same way again.

Our writer in residence Amanda Saint used “I am a soaring sensation” and her Substack grew 25-30% in two months and her highest-ticket program filled overnight. The S’s linger and last. The “oa” in soaring reaches upward. She wasn’t randomly manifesting. She was specifically, phonetically, somatically coding her nervous system.

This is the lesson.

What you actually walk away with

Five concrete rules for crafting a sankalpa that works (including why “I am debt free” is accidentally making your debt worse), a full understanding of the internal vs. external intention distinction (this one is the unlock for why law of attraction works for some people and not others), the letter-sound energy guide you’ll use forever, and a simple daily practice to instill your sankalpa using the MOSI method and yoga nidra.

It’s practical. It’s nerdy. It’s a little bit witchy. It is absolutely my favorite lesson of the whole year.

Here’s what two of our cohort members said after this session:

How to get your hands on this

The Creator Retreat self-study gives you access to the full replay of this lesson plus every other session in the archive. Guest presentations, writing workshops, somatic practices, the whole deal. It’s the complete library of everything we’ve built this year, available at your own pace, in your pajamas, with your coffee.

You don’t have to wait for the next cohort. You don’t have to apply. You just enroll and start watching.

If the idea of understanding WHY your words are either working for you or against you, and then getting a practical tool to actually shift that, sounds like the kind of thing your sensitive soul has been looking for... it’s in there.

Enroll Here

Our first month inside The Creator Retreat is about breath. We use the breath to soothe our anxieties, slow down the hustle-culture pace, find space for ourselves and our own needs, and cleanse our minds of the stinkin’ thinkin’.

While every person in the room had done some form of breathing practice before, and some even have taught it to therapy clients or to birthing mamas, everyone admitted the breathwork practice we learned here was different, more profound, and more impactful.

It’s only been a week of practice, and already we are seeing huge benefits and results.

Shelley, a certified HeartMath practitioner and a licensed therapist has been teaching breathwork to her clients for years. She shared that this Creator’s Breath she noticed a significant different in this breathing vs. the “belly breathing” she’d been practicing and teaching. So she started showing her clients, and it changed everything!

“It has been life changing to breathe really down into your lungs, HUGE, thank you for that!”

As a nurse, Nancy had taught breathing to pregnant and birthing mamas for years. Deep breathing supported her through natural labor with all three of her babies. Later, after the death of her daughter, she noticed how emotional pain had settled into her joints and body. She said intentional breathing “certainly helps to relieve the joint pain.”

So when she learned The Creator’s Breath, it was easy for her to apply, and she decided to apply it immediately in two 30-minute sessions to help her through a stressful drive through traffic.

What she didn’t expect was that deep extended practice opened her writing creativity to a full-faucet gush over the next several days!

Tracey shared that she had a health challenge that landed her in the ER this week, so she decided to apply it while waiting for care and support, for hours.

As a recently retired lawyer who is coming down from decades worth of high stress work, she has been experiencing a deep need for rest and soothing, which she found waiting in the ER while doing the breathing.

She reported that a few rounds of the breath would make her want to fall asleep, and even amidst the chaos and stress of the ER, she was able to sleep for hours.

And when a person has lived in adrenaline for years, that softening can feel like a miracle.

We were gathered in a space for creators, writers, artists, thinkers, and sensitive humans trying to find a more grounded rhythm for sharing their work. Very quickly it became clear that breath belongs to the creative process in a much deeper way than most of us have been taught.

Because creativity asks something of the nervous system.

• It asks us to stay present when we feel vulnerable.

• It asks us to remain open when doubt starts talking.

• It asks us to keep showing up when the world feels noisy or harsh or fast.

And when the body is tight, the page tightens too. When the body finds room, the creative spirit finds room.

This is one of the things I love most about The Creator Retreat. We are not only talking about how to publish, how to share, or how to keep going with creative work. We are tending the inner conditions that make that work possible. We are creating a way of building that includes the mind, the body, the spirit, and the nervous system.

At the end of this month, the self-study version of The Creator Retreat will open, and this breathing lesson will be included inside it. Along with the full monthly teaching, you’ll get access to the practices, the deeper context, and the gentle rhythm we are building inside this year’s retreat.

If you have been longing for a creative practice that helps you slow down, feel steadier in your body, more spacious in your mind, and more able to meet the page with honesty and calm, keep an eye out.

The self-study is coming at the end of the month, and this breath is one of the first doors in. . . It could very well be the deepest fullest breath you’ve ever experienced.

Subscribe now

This week, we held the first meeting of the 10-month Creator Retreat Cohort.

Fifteen-ish humans on a screen, some awkward nervous energy, so a few “emotional support pups” made appearances as both comic relief and calming agents. And, right on cue, the tears came as the sacred community container opened.

This is what happens when the right like-minded and sensitive-hearts gather to share.

One participant, John, said it plainly: “the tears started flowing.” He told us, “It surprised me. . . it was just so incredibly powerful… it’s something and something deep within me needed to know that… needed to know that.”

That’s what happens here.

The Creator Retreat is a creative growth program, yes.
We support Substack writers, yes.

We talk about voice, visibility, audience, consistency, and all the things you actually want when you say, “I’m trying to build something.”

And.

We begin somewhere most “grow your Substack” programs skip right over:
self-awareness.

Some writers are carrying decades of self-doubt dressed up as humility. Some are brilliant and tender and quietly convinced they take up too much space. Some are so used to being the “good one” that receiving reflection feels like danger. Some are hiding their gifts behind competence, behind sarcasm, behind perfect formatting, behind silence.

In The Creator Retreat, we build the inner foundation first, so when you do take outward action, it doesn’t cost you your nervous system.

This week, the theme that kept rising up from the group was kindness. One participant said, “I’d like to share that… the theme that I heard throughout this circle today is kindness.”

And then Carola — 66 years old, luminous, honest — shared something that felt like a door opening.

She said she used to believe her kindness was “really fragile and really tender and… needed to be cloaked and guarded.” Then she described seeing people’s faces as she met them, and realizing: “oh my gosh these people see me as kind.”

When she returned home, her partner reflected it back with joy: “Like, yeah, that is your strength, Carola… that is who you are.”

This is why this retreat is sparkled in glitter, and I want to hand it to every sensitive creator who has ever tried to be “less” in order to be safe:

Carola said, “that’s why I declare it out loud… to give it breath. And the sparkle and power that it is.”

Then she added: “It’s never too late. And I’m 66.”

If you’ve been waiting to feel “ready,” let that land.

This is what makes The Creator Retreat different.

This isn’t a growth-hack program that tries to push you into visibility with pep-talks and posting schedules. It’s a container where you learn how to recognize yourself clearly, speak from that place, and build a writing life that feels steady from the inside out.

Sure, people come to this retreat thinking they need a better strategy, but they discover that they needed a place where their tenderness could be seen without being managed, fixed, or minimized. A place where they can be witnessed long enough to stop arguing with their own light.

The Self-Study version (and why it still works)

The self-study track gives you access to the lessons and practices so you can move through them at your own pace, in your own living room, with your own cup of tea. You can watch replays, revisit exercises, and let things land slowly.

And you still get community.

You can engage in comments and chat, share reflections, ask questions, and receive that steady, human mirror that makes all the difference.

If you’re a sensitive creator who wants growth that feels nourishing, this is for you.

Doors for the self-study will open at the end of March.

Subscribe now

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What You Get

Each month, you will receive access to self-guided work playshops to dig into your process as a creator.

• Spiritual Inner Work - No Woo Required
  Think of it as a deep dive into the stuff that trips us up as creators—anxiety about hitting “publish,” that pesky perfectionism, and the overwhelming “what-am-I-even-doing” vibes. This isn’t about fixing you (because you’re not broken); it’s about helping you find balance, clarity, and a little more ease in your creative process.

• Business Outer Action - A No-Hustle, Authentic Approach to Growth
  Month by month, we break it down—simple, actionable steps to grow your Substack audience without sacrificing your sanity or soul. Forget the numbers game and the “crush it” culture. This is about showing up as you and building something real, steady, and meaningful.

• Access to Our All-Star Guest Presenters:
  These aren’t your typical “gurus.” We’re talking Substack royalty with their own tales of growth, detours, and redefined success. Through video replays of their workshops, you’ll get insights and ideas that will make you feel less like you’re fumbling alone and more like you’re being guided by someone who gets it.

• Community Support - Connection Without the Chaos
  Imagine a space where the comments section isn’t a battlefield but a warm, inviting room filled with thoughtful conversation. In our open comments and chat threads, you’ll find a like-minded community of creators who get it—the anxiety, the self-doubt, the small wins that feel monumental. Whether it’s swapping tips, sharing your latest triumph, or just knowing you’re not the only one who’s stuck on a tricky sentence, this is your go-to space for camaraderie, encouragement, and real talk. It’s not about competition; it’s about lifting each other up while navigating the creative journey together.

  Apply Here

  

March — The Inhale · Breathing → Void

March begins with spaciousness.

We explore breath as a creative doorway: the way a steady inhale changes the way we write, publish, respond, rest, and belong. “Void” becomes a sanctuary word here. We practice meeting the quiet without rushing to fill it, and we notice what rises from that depth when the body feels supported.

We also hold hands in community, never feeling alone in the void, but creating a sacred and supportive incubator to nurture our precious creations.

• Guest Presenter ~ Neil Cunningham
  Tuning into Feedback: Seeking and Receiving the Right Frequency

• Writing Workshop w/ Amanda Saint
  Clarity in Chaos: Writing Techniques for When Your Mind is Scattered

April — The Vow · Consistency

April invites devotion.

We explore the vow as a gentle structure: a promise that feels like love, not pressure. Consistency becomes something we build through relationship—with our words, our audience, our time, our tenderness. We share what helps each of us return again and again, and we let consistency become personal, sustainable, and true.

We also commit to our craft, and our audience, developing a drumbeat and heartbeat rhythm to our creative process, creating regularly because it is life-blood to us.

• Guest Presenter ~ Kristi Keller
  The Perfect Substack Post

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Purpose-Driven Prose: Crafting Writing with Clear Intent

May — The Root · Grounding

May brings us down into the earth.

We explore grounding as a creative resource and a community resource. Rootedness shows up in the way we pace ourselves, the way we hold boundaries, the way we trust our own timing. We notice what strengthens when we stop floating above our lives and start writing from the ground we actually stand on.

We also work through a mirroring process of reflecting to each other what we see and experience in our work, giving insight for future work on branding, image, and design.

• Guest Presenter: Suzy Rowlands
  Grounded Before Consistent

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Sensory Writing: Creating Immersive, Grounded Experiences

June — The Release · Letting Go

June opens the hands.

We explore letting go in the places that keep us stuck: perfection habits, control grips, protective patterns, old stories about how visibility works. Release is both inner and practical. You will feel your writing loosen. You will feel your decisions get simpler. You will discover what becomes possible when the body stops bracing.

We also embark on a “Sparkle Check” process to help us begin crafting our “About Page” from a structured space of letting go of perfectionism and embracing authenticity and integrity.

• Guest Presenter: Mel Moseley
  Sexuality, Creativity, & Connection

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Revision Without Attachment: Professional Editing Techniques

July — The Flame · Confidence · Branding

July lights the fire.

We explore confidence as something we inhabit, not something we earn. We explore branding as a living expression of self—voice, values, tone, presence, point of view. This month often reveals bright clarities: what you stand for, what you want to be known for, what you keep circling around because it matters. The flame helps you claim it.

We also dig into the art and science of branding and explore design, color palettes, and that split second moment in design that captures or repels an audience.

• Guest Presenter: Megan Lee
  Turn Your WEIRD Into Your Biggest ASSET

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Voice & Authority: Developing Your Distinctive Writing Style

August — The Circle · Give & Receive · Collaboration

August brings community into the foreground.

We explore the art of giving and receiving in ways that feel clean, nourishing, and mutual. Collaboration shows up here as a creative amplifier, a friendship practice, a visibility practice, and a trust practice. Together, we experiment with what it feels like to create beside other people and let support move through the circle.

We also co-create opportunities to collaborate with each other, making it feel safe to share the spotlight, and generously expand our networks. And, we learn how to collaborate with AI in a way that stays in alignment with our integrity and authenticity.

• Guest Presenter: Tom Kuegler
  Improve Your Relationships, Life, and Articles With AI

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Reader Connection: Writing Techniques That Create Intimacy

September — The Resonance · Voice & Listening · Monetization

September tunes the instrument.

We explore voice as vibration, as truth, as the sound of your actual self arriving on the page. We explore listening as a creative skill: listening to the body, listening to readers, listening to signals of desire and fatigue. Monetization enters the conversation through resonance. We pay attention to what your people respond to, what you love making, and what wants to become sustainable.

We also take a deeper dive into our relationship with money. Many creators don’t find the financial success they crave because they have an unhealthy money dynamic. We address this in depth this month.

• Guest Presenter: James Bailey
  On Money & Meaning

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Dialogue Mastery: Writing Conversations That Sing

October — The Vision · Intuition · Core Values

October lifts the gaze.

We explore intuition as a reliable inner compass and core values as the anchors that keep your work coherent. This month supports decision-making. It supports clarity. It supports the power of choosing a direction and letting that direction shape your content, your offers, your collaborations, and your boundaries.

We will dig deep and start to explore the ancestral and unconscious belief patterns that self-sabotage our success. We start changing the narrative on success and gain perspective on potential.

• Guest Presenter: Kyle Fisk
  Subconscious Saboteurs: Your Beliefs are Blocking Your Ability to Receive

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Intuitive Structure: Following the Natural Shape of Your Story

November — The Map · Faith · Business Plan

November turns insight into structure.

We explore faith as steadiness: the kind that holds you through doubt, slow seasons, and tender seasons. We explore business plan as a supportive map—clear enough to guide you, flexible enough to honor your humanity. The focus stays personal and real. Your plan fits your life, your capacity, and your definition of success.

We also dig deep into the bigger picture of our work, zooming out to the long-term perspective as well as zooming in to the long-term successes we have already achieved.

• Guest Presenter ~ Dr. Kelly Flanagan
  Control: The Sneaky Killer of Creativity

• Writing Workshop w/Amanda Saint
  Writing with Depth: Exploring Big Themes Without Preaching

December — The Horizon · Future Forward Action Plan

December opens the view.

We gather what you’ve learned about yourself across the year and we shape it into a future-forward action plan that feels aligned and alive. The horizon holds both completion and beginning.

This month supports integration, celebration, and clear next steps, with community support around what you are carrying into the next season of your creative life.

Apply Here