Empowered Way Podcast

Dear Sovereigns:

We were watching Ted Lasso the other night. The club needed players, and someone raised the idea of an open tryout, the kind where anyone can walk in off the street and be seen. In the middle of that conversation somebody said the name, Susan Boyle, and Ted had no idea who she was.

I did. I spent the rest of the episode only half watching, because a name I had not thought about in years had put me back in front of a laptop in 2009, watching a video that everyone I knew was sending to everyone else they knew.

Before She Opened Her Mouth

Susan Boyle walked onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage in 2009, forty-seven years old, unemployed, from a small town in Scotland. Her hair was unruly and her dress was ordinary and her manner was a little awkward in a way that was genuinely lovely if you were not in a hurry to judge it.

Simon Cowell asks her age. She tells him.

The camera finds a young woman in the audience rolling her eyes. There are smirks. When Susan says she wants to be a professional singer like Elaine Paige, the room laughs at her.

Then the music starts, and she sings.

What changed in the next five seconds was not Susan Boyle. It was everyone watching her.

The link to the famous video is at the end of this newsletter. Her story is usually told as transformation, but I believe it’s really about the world seeing you as you are.

She Was Already Her

Susan Boyle did not become talented on that stage. She had been singing since she was a child, performing locally, attending acting school, making earlier attempts at the industry. She spent years caring for her mother, who died in 2007. She auditioned after that. The voice the world congratulated itself on discovering had been in her the entire time. The world had simply not been paying attention.

There is something in that worth sitting with, particularly if you are a woman past forty.

Consider how much of your life you have spent trying to become worthy of a room you were already standing in. More polished or secure. Collecting evidence and submitting it, hoping something would eventually come back that said you are finally enough.

I know the shape of that because I have done it my entire life. I am embarrassed to admit that I have tried to be worthy enough in three different countries.

I have flown to Paris, Bali, and Sedona, Arizona for women’s retreats, and I walked into every one of those rooms doing the same thing. I scan the faces and make myself useful early, so that by the second day I would know where I stood. By the time I said anything that mattered, the room had already formed its opinion of me. What troubles me now is not that they formed one. It is that I had already agreed to it.

Susan Boyle walked out on that stage carrying none of the usual credentials. She was not young, she was not packaged, and she had not been made easy to consume. What she had was real, and real carries its own frequency.

What Sovereignty Actually Is

I define sovereignty as the lived experience of Divine Love.

That does not make a woman fearless or impervious to what people think, and I want to be careful here, because there are too many descriptions of the spiritual life that quietly promise otherwise. I still feel the room and I still notice when someone has decided something about me.

Sovereignty is quieter than immunity. It is the remembering that who you are is not finally determined by the room you are standing in. The room can applaud you, laugh at you, misread you, or ignore you for twenty years, and none of that reaches the thing itself.

Susan Boyle had the same voice five minutes before that audition as she had five minutes after. All that changed was who had heard it.

Then the Money Arrived

Her life changed with a speed most of us cannot imagine. The debut album became the biggest-selling record in the world that year. Before it, The Guardian described a woman living on about thirty pounds a week, buying discounted food and saving for inexpensive clothes, who knew exactly what it was to worry about the gas bill.

Then she did not have to.

What interests me is what did not happen next. She stayed near her hometown. She kept shopping at Tesco and taking the bus. She kept the people she already had, and she said this was deliberate, that she wanted her life to stay recognizable to her. She has also said there is nothing worse than worrying about money, and that this is exactly why she never became much of a spender.

She did not become a different woman with money. She became Susan Boyle who had money instead of Susan Boyle who did not.

That distinction is harder than it sounds, because we ask money to do work it was never built for. We want it to certify us, protect us from shame, and demonstrate at the end that our life amounted to something. When money is carrying all of that, no figure is ever sufficient, since the question underneath it is not financial. Money is a reliable pain portal for exactly that reason. It presses on the place where you have outsourced your worth and keeps pressing until you notice what you handed over.

Susan Boyle’s money let her stop worrying about heating her house. It was never asked to make her someone else.

Changing Is Not the Same as Losing Yourself

Authenticity does not require you to refuse transformation, and I want to say that plainly, because women in spiritual circles sometimes use authenticity as a reason to stay small.

Susan changed her hair and her clothes. She traveled, performed for audiences she could not have imagined, and learned an industry from the inside. She has joked about the outward transformation while making clear that inwardly she remained the same woman.

That is what authenticity and sovereignty look like in practice. You are allowed to evolve, to earn more, to become visible, to live somewhere beautiful, to enjoy what your work has built. Sovereignty does not ask you to reject the world. It asks you not to misplace yourself inside it.

What If She Had Believed Them

The audience thought it knew exactly who she was before she sang a note, and they were wrong about all of it.

Consider what would have happened if Susan had agreed with them. If she had absorbed the raised eyebrows, the old insults, the cultural instruction about what a woman of forty-seven is permitted to want. If she had decided the dream had a shelf life and hers had expired.

The world would never have heard her. And here is the part that matters more: neither would she.

There is likely something in you that has not been witnessed yet.

Perhaps you have taken the world’s silence as a verdict on whether it is real.

Sovereignty reverses that order. Worth does not arrive with the applause, and it does not arrive with the money. You were already that woman when the room was still laughing. The applause is only the moment everyone else catches up.

Your Soul Has Never Needed an Audience

She walked onto that stage an ordinary woman from Scotland and walked off an international phenomenon, and underneath the cameras and the contracts and the millions of records was the same person who had walked on.

That is why the story still moves people all these years later. It is not only the voice. It is recognition, the part of us that has been underestimated, or arrived later than expected, or never fit the packaging, or quietly wondered whether the moment had passed.

Sovereignty does not begin when the world finally sees you.

It begins when you stop requiring the world to see you before you are willing to.

The world did not make her extraordinary. It finally heard her sing.

What in you has not been heard yet? Or what used to be unheard that you now show to the world? Please share one line in the comments.

Many blessings on your journey,

Kathryn

Empowered Way | Where women remember their sovereignty.

Dear Sovereigns:

I have loved rainbows my entire life. Every time one appears, it is always unexpected and a reminder that we live in a world where magic is all around us. I have seen rainbows in Hawaii, the British Virgin Islands, and in my own back yard. Each time a surprise and a delight.

One day, I became curious about why the colors in a rainbow are always in the same sequence, how they form, and what am I really seeing when these vibrant colors stack themselves across the sky.

The answers were surprising and enlightening. The perfect exploration of why we are here.

You don’t see the same rainbow as the person next to you.

You have never once seen the same rainbow as the person standing beside you.

That’s an astonishing statement that is a measurable fact about how light behaves. The rainbow you see is assembled from light bending out of particular droplets at a particular angle to your particular eyes. The woman next to you is receiving her light from entirely different drops. If she takes one step to the left, the rainbow she is looking at is rebuilt out of new water.

There is something else, and this is the part that stopped me.

Every rainbow is a circle centered on the shadow of your own head.

The sun comes from behind you, passes over you, and throws your shadow out into the rain. The point directly opposite the sun, the exact center of that arc of color, is the shadow of you. The bow is organized around where you happen to be standing. Move, and it moves with you. You cannot walk to the end of it, because it has no end and it is not out there in the way you thought it was.

What Actually Happens Inside the Drop

Light arrives at a raindrop as one thing. We call it white, which is misleading, because white is not the absence of color. It is every color traveling together, not yet separated.

The light strikes the surface of the drop and slows down as it crosses from air into water. Slowing makes it bend. That bending is refraction, and here is the mechanism the entire rainbow depends on: not every color bends by the same amount. Red is lazy about it. Violet turns hardest. The rest fall in between, each one taking its own angle.

The light travels through the drop, strikes the far inside wall, reflects back, and exits, bending once more on the way out. By the time it leaves, what entered as a single beam has been fanned open into its parts.

Red emerges at about forty-two degrees. Violet at about forty. Those two degrees are the whole difference between a color you see at the top of the arc and a color you see at the bottom.

The raindrop did not make any of this. It didn’t contribute pigment or add anything that wasn’t already in the light. All the droplet did was be clear enough to let the light pass through it and round enough to send it back.

The Color Order Never Changes

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Always the same order and the same sequence. Every rainbow that has ever appeared over every field, city and ocean on this planet has arranged itself in that same order.

Why? Because each color has its own fixed angle of bending, and the angle does not deviate, change, or negotiate. Violet cannot decide to come out first this time. The structure is built into the light itself.

I find that steadying, and I think you might too.

Whatever is in you arrives in an order you did not choose and cannot rearrange. Some part of you will always come out first, and some part of you will always come out last, and the impatience you feel about the sequence does not change the physics. What is being revealed in you is being revealed according to something reliable.

You are not disordered. You are refracting the light as the dominate energy of your being.

Why You Need the Storm

A rainbow requires two conditions at once, and this is the part everyone tends to resist.

There must be light behind you and there must be rain in front of you. Clear skies produce nothing. A storm on all sides produces nothing. You only see the rainbow when you are turned toward the weather with the light at your back.

I have wanted, more times than I can count, to wait until the rain passed before I felt I had learned the lesson. Life doesn’t work that way. The storms come so you can discover and remember who you are.

The storm is not the obstacle to the light. The storm is the instrument the light uses.

Every woman I know who carries something luminous acquired it in weather.

The Ones Who Let Everything Through

Some people seem to have almost nothing in the way.

Mother Teresa spent decades in Calcutta with people nobody else would touch, and after she died, her private letters revealed something that startled the world. For most of those years she had felt no presence of God at all. She described a long interior darkness, an absence where the warmth had been. She kept working anyway. She kept showing up for the dying without the consolation of feeling the Love she was transmitting.

I cannot think of a better description of a clear drop. She did not generate the light. She let it move through her even when she could not feel it.

Gandhi titled the story of his life an account of his experiments with truth, which tells you he considered himself unfinished. He documented his own failures in detail. He was wrong about important things, and people who study his life closely have to reckon with that. He was not a different species of human being with a different quality of soul.

That is exactly why he matters here. If these people were made of some rarer light than the rest of us, their lives would be inspiring and useless. They were not. The light was ordinary light, the same light falling on you this morning. What distinguished them was how little they put in its way.

And most of the people who do this have no names you would recognize. The nurse who stays past her shift. The woman who has visited the same friend in the same facility every Sunday for nine years. The teacher who noticed one child. They are refracting continuously and nobody is writing it down.

What This Path Asks of You

The work is not to become more colorful. You have everything you need right now to allow the light to move through. You are not lacking pigment.

The work is clarity, which is the least glamorous spiritual assignment there is. A water drop refracts because nothing inside it is cloudy enough to stop the light.

Resentment makes a woman opaque. So does the story you keep telling about who wronged you, and the identity you built to stay safe. The fear that if you let the light all the way through you will be consumed by it.

You will not be consumed. The water drop is unchanged by what passes through it. It gives no substance away and loses nothing, and the entire sky fills with color because it was willing to be clear.

You have a spectrum in you that has never been separated out where anyone could see it. Divine Love is the light. Your life is the angle. What comes out the other side has never existed before in exactly that arrangement, and when it is gone from the world, that particular bending of the light will not occur again.

A Blessing for the Clearing

May the light find you facing the weather with the sun at your back.

May you stop waiting for the rain to end before you agree to be beautiful.

May you become clear rather than impressive.

May you let Love pass all the way through you on the days you cannot feel it, and may you trust that it is arriving on the other side regardless of what you feel.

And may you remember, when you are certain no one sees you, that the arc is centered on the shadow of your own head, that it has always been centered there, and that it was never going to appear anywhere else.

Many blessings on your journey,

Kathryn

Empowered Way | Where women remember their sovereignty.

Tell me which color you think comes out of you first. I would like to know what you think the world sees before it sees anything else.

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Dear Sovereigns:

Several years ago, I walked the ancient labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, one hour south of Paris, carrying something I no longer wanted to carry.

I will not name it here. I suspect you already know the weight I mean, because most women are carrying their own version of it. The grief that lives inside a family relationship and the one you have also wounded. The part you played that you would rather not look at directly.

The stones of the labyrinth were old and worn from the many people who walked it before me. The light coming in through the ancient stained glass was soft and gold. I followed the path without knowing what I would find, and when I reached the center, I set all of it down. In my surrender, Love received every bit of it without a single condition attached.

I have been writing my way around that experience ever since. This article is the map I should have given you first.

A Labyrinth Is Not a Maze

This distinction matters more than anything else I will say here.

A maze is built to defeat you. It has dead ends and false turns and a designer who wants you to fail for a while. The goal of a maze is to solve it. Think of an escape room. There are clues and signs, and when you solve each of them, you eventually find the exit.

A labyrinth is different, because it has only one path. There are no wrong turns, no choices to get right, nothing hidden that you are supposed to outsmart. You cannot become lost in a labyrinth because the only moves into the center or away from it. There is nothing to solve and everything to gain.

The only way to stop walking a labyrinth is to step out of it.

When you look at the design of labyrinths, notice the path winds inward then outward. It carries you close to the center and then curves back out toward the edge, sometimes when you were certain you had nearly arrived. The first time that happens you assume you have made a mistake or somehow missed a turn.

Even when you feel disoriented or confused, you haven’t missed anything. That disorientation and confusion aren’t flaws in the design. It is the design.

I think this is the single most useful thing I know, and I did not learn it from a book. I learned it from my own feet on old stone, walking away from the center while believing I was walking toward it.

The Three Movements of a Labyrinth

There is a walk inward, an arrival, and a walk back out. I have come to understand my whole body of work as living somewhere in those three.

The walk in is where you carry everything. The questions, the doubt, the identity you built to stay safe, the quiet conviction that something in you is incomplete. Nothing gets taken from you on the way in. Things simply get quieter, because something underneath them is becoming more present.

The center is where you set down what you carried in and open to receive Love’s message. It isn’t a reward for having walked well. You do not arrive because you finally healed enough or resolved enough or became enough. You arrive because you walked. And Love meets you there without reviewing your record first.

The walk out is where you embody Love’s message. You return on the same path, through the same curves, and you are not the same woman who entered. What you find at the center comes back with you into your kitchen and your work and your body. That returning, that carrying of Love back into an ordinary life, is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do.

Why I Am Giving You This Now

I write about sovereignty from different angles, and the angles can look unrelated.

I have written about presence, and how my role as mother changed because my daughter is now an adult. There are more articles coming in the next few weeks that explore other aspects of sovereignty (which I define as the lived experience of Divine Love).

Those pieces are not a curriculum. They are places on a path to remind you who you are. There are sacred powers you can access when you set down who-you-are-trying to be and you step into who-you-already-are.

These articles can be read in any order. You will not miss a prerequisite, because there isn’t one. A woman who finds me on the article about presence is not behind, and a woman who starts at the beginning is not ahead.

I want to say clearly what I am not doing, because so much writing for women does the opposite. I am not going to tell you which stage you are in. The moment you start assessing your position on the path, you have handed the assessment to someone outside you, and that is precisely the habit this entire body of work exists to end.

You do not need to locate yourself inside of a process or stage. The only way to return to your authentic self is to turn inward.

This is a soft revolution, a quiet reclaiming, a return to the you beneath the noise. There’s no rush here, no pressure to heal or fix, only a quiet invitation to come home to yourself and let Divine Love lead the way.

What the Labyrinth Asks

Very little, which is why I keep returning to it.

It does not ask you to arrive ready. It does not ask you to understand it first, or to believe anything in particular, or to have resolved the thing you are carrying before you are permitted to enter. The stone labyrinth on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral has been receiving people for a thousand years and has never once required a woman to be finished.

Instead, the labyrinth asks you to be still enough to listen, and then to take the next step.

You can walk a labyrinth if you find one near you, and I hope you do. You can order small labyrinths online and finger walk the path. You can also walk one with your eyes closed in a chair, because you carry the shape of it inside you and always have.

The center is there. Love is already waiting. And the path that seems to be taking you away from it is the same path that brings you home.

There are No Wrong Turns

I used to think that was a fact about labyrinths. What I now believe is there are no wrong turns about Love.

When I reached the center of the labyrinth that evening and surrendered the grief and the guilt and my own part in the story, none of it was counted against me. Not even the years I carried the grief and guilt like extra weight on my soul or the regrets I tattooed on my thoughts when it was too late to reconcile. None of that was a wrong turn because all of it was accepted by Love.

The moment you hand it to Love, every step that brought you to Love is part of the path.

You cannot earn the center and you cannot miss it. You can only walk, arrive carrying something, set it down, and find that Love was never keeping score of the route you took.

Many blessings on your journey,

Kathryn

Empowered Way | Where women remember their sovereignty.

If you have walked a labyrinth, I would love to hear about your experience. And if you have never walked a labyrinth, I created a guided meditation for you: The Labyrinth of Love. It’s free on Insight Timer. I always appreciate a new follower 😊

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please share this post if it spoke to you or may help someone you know.

Dearest Sovereigns:

I was at a personal growth workshop when the teacher asked us to sit in silence for twenty minutes.

My mind turned hostile immediately, screaming, “This will not work!” As my resistance grew, my mind shouted, “I cannot sit here doing nothing!” I looked around to see if anyone else was having difficulty. All the women around me were sitting quietly, their hands open on their laps, breathing in rhythm.

Was I the only one who couldn’t do this simple thing?

I was close enough to the door that leaving would have been easy, and the only thing that kept me in the chair was not wanting to be the one who failed.

So I stayed for entirely the wrong reason, which is how a great many good things have started for me.

I settled in my chair and resolved to get through it. My eyes closed and I focused on my breathing. The instructor said to inhale deeply for the count of five, then exhale slowly to the count of eight. I completed three rounds when I noticed my body relaxing. My shoulders came down from where they had been living for years. The arguing in my head thinned out, and underneath it was a quiet I had forgotten was still there.

I described that afternoon for a long time as learning how to relax.

That is not what happened. Instead, for twenty minutes, no one outside of me was telling me what I was worth. And in the absence of all that noise, something older and steadier was still present, waiting, entirely unbothered by how long I had ignored it.

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What I carried into that room

I had spent years believing I would be successful if I pushed harder, stayed later, and moved through the world the way the men around me moved through it.

I came to see eventually that I had joined a system built by men for men, and that a woman who wanted into the inner rooms of it was tolerated rather than welcomed. I took the courses. I collected the degrees and certifications. I kept not arriving, and I kept concluding that the shortfall was mine.

There was real grief in that, and I want to name it rather than move past it quickly. It is tiring to spend decades proving yourself to people whose standard you could never meet. It is lonelier still to do it while believing the exhaustion means you are not enough.

I was living entirely on the outside of myself. Every measure of whether I was doing well came from somewhere beyond my own skin, which meant I could never rest, because the verdict was always being revised by someone else.

Sovereignty, as I understand it now, is simply the end of that arrangement. It is the unbroken line between your soul and Divine Intelligence, with nobody standing in the middle deciding whether the connection is permitted.

It is quieter than it sounds. Mostly it feels like being at home in yourself.

You do not have to earn what you already are

When I finally looked in the mirror without the outside world propped up beside me as a measuring stick, I saw someone with more possibility in her than I had allowed myself to consider.

The possibility had been there the entire time. So was the abundance. Not waiting on a certification or a better year, simply being present, the way a room is still furnished when you have been away from it.

Your essence is your wealth. - Rumi

Rumi isn’t describing something you are on your way toward. He is reminding you what you are made of, without having to earn it.

This was the hardest part for me, because I had been trained to treat every good thing as something earned. I approached my own soul the way I had approached success at a law firm, with effort and evidence and patience while somebody else deliberated.

Sovereignty is not built that way. It isn’t earned - it’s remembered. The tenderness in that is worth sitting with, because it means nothing about you has to change before Love can reach you.

You are not repairing a broken thing. You are clearing the room enough to see what has been in it all along.

What happens when someone truly sees you

Imagine the two of us standing together, facing one another.

You look away, because a wave of doubt or old shame moves through you and being looked at is difficult in that moment. I put my hand on your arm, gently, and you come back. We look into each other’s eyes, without an agenda, other than to see each other.

What you see in my eyes will loosen something in you.

You will see yourself reflected in my eyes, and it will not be the version you have been carrying around and apologizing for. You will see the plain fact of your belonging, not as a conclusion you reasoned your way to but as something your body already knew and had been waiting for permission to remember.

I am not giving you anything in that moment. I am not fixing you or filling you or making you whole. I am seeing what was already true, and being seen is often all it takes for a woman to come back into her own presence.

This is why sovereignty has never meant standing alone. A sovereign woman is not a woman who is solitary. She is a woman who can be loved without disappearing into it, and who can look at another woman without needing to rescue her.

A Sovereign Woman has room for you because she is no longer scrambling for her own footing.

How It Shows Up

You have met someone like this, because you knew before she said anything. Something in the way she occupied the room told you she was drawing from an inner source that most of us have ignored.

That is what an interior life looks like from the outside. I call it moving from Divine essence to individual presence, and it is not charisma or personality. Presence is felt by others, when the woman has stopped asking the world to tell her who she is.

Mine came through daily meditation and daily journaling, fifteen or twenty minutes each morning of letting my body and mind and emotions settle. I have not missed a morning since 2017. Some mornings the gratitude is so full I find myself moving around the kitchen while the sun comes up. Other mornings it is quieter than that, and I sit with whatever is there and let it be enough.

I lose the peace regularly. Someone says the thing, or the news does its work on me, and I am contracted before I notice. What sovereignty has actually given me is not immunity or protection. I know how to find my way back to peace, compassion, and Love. I have noticed the way back gets shorter every year.

You find peace, not by rearranging the circumstances of your life,

but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.

- Eckhart Tolle

Rearranging circumstances is endless work, and I did it for years. Knowing who you are at the deepest level asks something different of you. It asks you to sit still long enough to meet what is already waiting.

Now is a fine time to become present

You are the only one who can step into your own presence, and I have come to find that more comforting than daunting. Nobody is withholding it. There is no room you have not been admitted to.

There is only twenty minutes of quiet, and a chair you might want to leave, and the thing on the other side of it that has been patiently waiting for you to sit down.

Many blessings on your journey,

Kathryn

P.S. Please join me on Insight Timer, listen to one of the meditations that speaks to you, and then come back here to share.

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please share this post with another woman who may need to be reminded of her sovereignty.

Dear Sovereigns:

I was two days into a visit with my daughter when she told me she did not need my help.

She is married and lives in another state. She has built a life that runs perfectly well without me standing in the middle of it. I knew all of that on the plane. Then I walked into her house and fell straight into mother mode, offering suggestions about things she had already handled.

We had a few sharp exchanges. Then we sat down and talked, which is the harder thing.

She said she was capable of making her own decisions. She said it kindly but it landed anyway.

My first response was hurt. Underneath the hurt was something older and less flattering, which was the fear of being rejected by the person I had spent her whole life protecting. I sat with that while she talked, and somewhere in the listening I stopped defending the version of myself I had carried through the front door.

She was not rejecting me. She was telling me her truth. She no longer needed me to protect her, because she had become a woman who could protect herself. That is the entire point of raising a daughter.

So I asked Love to be experienced by me right there, in the middle of a conversation I was losing.

What followed was an identity change I had not planned. I had been the mother-protector for as long as I had been a mother, and I could not keep being her without doing damage. But I could be the mother-friend, which is a woman who listens to another woman and trusts her to run her own life.

The closeness came back almost immediately, and not because we resolved anything. It came back because I stopped standing in a role that had expired.

It took me longer to understand what had actually moved. The love I feel for my daughter is a taste of what Divine Love feels for me. It wants me capable more than it wants me dependent, and it does not go anywhere when I stop performing.

Change Your Story, Change Your Identity

I have been asking what it actually looks like to live as a Sovereign Woman, and the answer keeps changing depending on what the day hands me. Every path I follow leads back to the same place, which is self-love.

Not the version sold in a bath and a candle. The version where you know what you came from.

I did not create myself, and neither did you. Something greater than me made me and set me down in this particular time, in this particular body, during a period of enormous change. That is true for you as well.

You have probably asked why you are here. Most of us ask it from desperation or exhaustion or frustration, and those states return the answers you would expect from them.

I have started asking the question from a different place. When I ask it from Love, the answer that comes to me begins with loving myself first. I am not going to tell you what yours will say. I am telling you the question is worth asking twice, from two different frequencies, and comparing what comes back.

Here is what makes the change possible. The identity you are defending was assembled a long time ago, mostly to keep you safe. Ego, intellect, and emotion worked together to build something durable enough to survive whatever you were facing at the time, and then you kept it long after the threat was gone.

Mother-protector was mine. It was accurate for decades. It was also the thing standing between me and my adult daughter in her own kitchen.

You do not lose yourself when a role like that ends. You return to what was underneath it.

Your Essence Is Love

Who were you before you believed you were someone else?

Babies do not know they are separate from the world. They spend nine months connected to their mother, and when they take that first breath, something in them is still connected.

I have always imagined the conversation a newborn has with God right after the shock of arriving.

“What is this place?”

God smiles. “It is your new world. You have a body now, and you will use it to find your way around.”

The baby settles a little, especially once she is laid against her mother’s chest. “I can smell her. This is good.”

“When you are frightened, ask me. I am with you even when you forget I am.”

The baby has already fallen asleep. God smiles anyway. “Enjoy the journey, little one.”

I use the name God there because it is the one I was given. Use whatever name your own life has taught you. What I am describing sits underneath all of them.

You were Love before you were anything else, and that has not been revoked. You have tried on other identities since, and you will try on more. When you are finished being the central character in a story that no longer fits, you return to where you started.

I call that the Sovereign Self. When your heart and your soul align with the source you came from, sovereignty stops being a concept and becomes a place you can stand.

The Ministry of Self-Love

Women were taught early to put everyone else first. You were handed your baby brother while he was handed a model to build. You were praised for helping in the kitchen and he was praised for finishing what he started. Whatever the shape of it in your particular childhood, the rule was in your subconscious before you had language to refuse it.

That rule produces a specific kind of helper. She is quick, she is generous, she is always available, and she is not entirely doing it for you.

The Ministry of Self-Love is the practice of going back to your source before you offer anything to anyone. It is one question asked honestly. Is this help actually needed, or am I reaching for something older in myself?

When you know you came from Love, you can tell the difference. You stop helping in order to belong. You start noticing when someone has already solved the thing and simply wants you in the room to witness her accomplishment.

That is what my daughter was asking for. Company, not correction. It took a sharp exchange and a difficult conversation for me to hear it, because the old pattern automatically shows up. It takes stepping back and listening to Love to see the difference.

What Sovereignty Actually Feels Like

I want to be careful here, because I have read too many descriptions of the spiritual life that promise a woman she will stop being affected by things.

Sovereignty has not made me untouchable. Circumstances still land and others still say the sentence that finds the bruise. The political battles still exhaust me.

What changed is the return. I notice the contraction sooner. I recognize the old identity when it stands up to defend itself. I can ask Love into the moment while the moment is still happening, rather than three days later on the flight home.

Compassion arrives where judgment used to be automatic. That is not immunity. That is recovery, and recovery is available to you today, in whatever conversation you are currently losing.

Many blessings on your journey,

Kathryn

Tell me about the moment you realized someone you love no longer needed protecting. What did you have to put down, and how long did it take you to do it?

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. If this post resonated with you, or you know someone it could help, please share it or restack it.

Dear Sovereigns:

I met Melissa Henderson on a small tour van to the Isle of Skye. She was kind enough to allow me to interview her about her life, the unexpected transitions, and the lessons she learned along the way.

Melissa Henderson has a master’s degree in publishing.

She has never built her life on it.

That sentence took years and a great deal of money to earn, and she is still optimistic and resourceful about herself and the opportunities that are available.

The Part That Reads Well on Paper

Here is the version that fits on a LinkedIn profile.

Master’s in publishing. Project manager for custom textbooks in Boston. A phone call that moved her to New York as personal assistant to the showrunner of Boardwalk Empire. A marketing role at Vinyl. Then California. Then ten years in professional services. Today she is an internal consultant to accountants, financially independent, a continent away from where she started.

Read like that, it sounds like a woman with a plan.

There was no plan.

What the Resume Leaves Out

Her job at Vinyl was canceled.

That word does a lot of quiet work. A show gets canceled and a woman’s entire livelihood disappears inside somebody else’s business decision. There was no warning she could have heeded or performance she could have improved.

Then six months in New York City with no job, no plan, and no idea what she actually wanted.

Six months of applying to everything.

I asked her to pick one day out of those six months and walk me through it. Not the stretch. One day.

She told me about the meals.

The Housewife

Melissa had a roommate who let her be the “housewife.”

That was the arrangement, unspoken and generous. Melissa did not have rent money. What she had was time and hands and a working knowledge of how to run a home, so she ran it.

She took care of their space. She planned the meals, did the shopping. Every evening she cooked, and they sat down and enjoyed a meal together.

No money moved between them. A deeper exchange was the result.

That friendship is twelve years old now.

Sit with what happened in that apartment, because it is easy to read past. A woman with a master’s degree and a canceled job and a shrinking bank account spent six months doing work no employer would pay her for, and it was the thing that kept her alive enough to keep applying.

Melissa said during that time, “I did one thing every day that made me feel accomplished.” That is the whole mechanism. One completed thing, daily, that proved she was still someone who could provide value, service, and friendship.

You cannot apply to jobs from the floor. You can apply to jobs from a kitchen where dinner is coming together and someone will be glad you made it.

Grief First

Eventually the offer came. Environmental engineering consulting. A field she knew nothing about.

She has been in professional services consulting ever since.

So I asked her a question with only two doors in it. “When you realized your degrees were not the thing that made you valuable, which one hit first. Grief or relief?”

She said grief.

It wasn’t grief over the money or her unemployed status. She believed she wanted publishing and she followed the path toward publishing. And she had to stand in a room where that was simply not going to happen, with nothing waiting on the other side of it.

She described feeling lost, with no direction. That is the honest word and I am glad she used it, because the tidier version of this story would have her pivoting with confidence toward something better. She was not pivoting. She was lost, and she knew it.

What she did next is the part worth copying.

She took the time to figure out three things. What she was good at? What did she actually enjoy? What kind of environment did she need to enjoy work and thrive?

That third one is the piece almost nobody names. We talk endlessly about skills and passion and never about the room. Whether you need quiet to do your job or do you need other people. Whether you can survive a place that runs on urgency, or whether it will slowly take you apart. Melissa put environment on equal footing with her talents and skills, and that is why she could walk into an industry she knew nothing about and stay for ten years.

Here is what she discovered. Your skills and your knowledge translate to new environments. They are not welded to the field you learned them in.

She did not need to know environmental engineering. She needed to know who she was and what she could bring to the table.

She Was Already Doing It

Now read that inventory back against living with her friend, being the “housewife.”

What she was good at: She was good at running a home, feeding people, managing the logistics of a shared life.

What she enjoyed: She enjoyed the making of it, enough to do it every single day without payment.

The environment she needed: A place where her contribution was visible and immediate, where somebody said thank you, where the work she did in the morning showed up on the table at night.

Every element of the inventory she now recommends was already operating in her life during the exact stretch she thought she was lost.

The value was real. It simply had no price on it, so she could not read it as value.

Most of us are doing the same thing right now.

There Is No Shortcut

She said something I have not stopped thinking about.

“There’s no shortcut in trying different things to discover what fits.”

Melissa did not find her work through insight. She found it by applying to everything for six months and then saying yes to something she did not understand.

Publishing was a wrong turn she paid for. Boardwalk Empire was a detour. Vinyl was a door that closed on its own. None of it was wasted. All of it was tuition.

Held Is Not the Same as Saved

Melissa also told me that no one is coming to fix your life.

I pushed back on that in my own head, because a roommate did come. A roommate gave her a room and asked for nothing she could not give.

But look closely at what her roommate actually provided. It wasn’t a job or a direction, or an answer to who Melissa was supposed to become. Instead, her roommate provided a floor, a place to stand while Melissa did the only work nobody could do for her.

Melissa still applied. Every day, for six months.

Lean on the people who love you. Let them feed you and remind you who you are on the days you cannot remember it yourself. A support system is not a weakness in the plan.

And then understand that no one else is inside your body. No one else feels the specific wrongness of a life that does not fit. No one else can hear the quiet thing you already know and keep refusing to act on.

You have to listen to yourself. And you have to know yourself well enough that when you finally listen, there is something there to hear.

What I Want You to Notice

Melissa spent two years and a great deal of money learning to be someone the world did not need her to be. Then she spent the years that followed finding out who she was and what made her valuable.

Here is the part I want you to notice.

The thing that carried her was never the thing she paid for. It was already hers, and it took losing everything to see it.

That is the whole teaching, and none of us want it. We would all rather buy the credential than remember what we already are.

What I Took Away

Sovereignty is my life’s work. Melissa reminded me that a woman doesn’t reclaim her sovereignty, she remembers it.

It is not claimed in a single moment of decision. It is uncovered slowly, and usually while you are convinced you are failing.

Melissa was being sovereign during the six months she was unemployed, but she didn’t know it. There was no title or salary attached to it, and no one was confirming it. She was doing what she was good at, for someone she cared about, one accomplished thing at a time, and refusing to stop applying.

That is what it looks like before anyone claps.

Sovereignty is not what you build after you have finally earned enough.

It is what you find when the earning stops working and you are still standing in someone’s kitchen, making dinner, one accomplished thing at a time.

To your sovereignty,

Kathryn

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

© Kathryn Eriksen / Empowered Way

Dearest Sovereign:

I asked a machine to write about Love.

It gave me eleven hundred words in less than a minute. The sentences were clean and the structure held. There was a paragraph about Divine Love that I could have published on a good morning without anyone noticing the difference.

I read it twice and felt nothing.

Not because it was wrong or didn’t produce what was asked. It gathered every word humanity has ever written about Love and handed me back the most probable arrangement of them. The words sounded great, but they were empty of emotional energy. AI has never been loved or sat in grief. It has never walked a labyrinth and released what it could no longer hold.

That is the difference I want to talk about, because I think we are about to forget it.

The library has walls

A large language model lives inside what it has been given. Everything it knows was written down first, by a person, somewhere, and then collected. That collection is enormous and the size of it doesn’t give it emotions or a human experience. It is still a collection. When you ask a question, the machine reaches back into what has already been recorded and offers you the most likely response.

This ability is genuinely useful and saves time. I am not here to tell you to be afraid of it.

I am here to illuminate what AI cannot reach.

It cannot reach anything that has not entered the record. It has no body in which to have lived. It has never felt the specific tightening in the chest that arrives when you already know the answer and it wasn’t the one you wanted. AI doesn’t desire or yearn or ache. It has no stake in your one life, because it does not have one.

AI operates inside a finite universe. Divine Intelligence does not.

Divine Intelligence does not retrieve

I have not missed a morning meditation since 2017. Not because I am disciplined, but because of what happens in the stillness.

A familiar and recognizable energy enters my consciousness.

I know her immediately because she arrives as knowing. There is no sourcing, no reasoning, no chain of steps I could reconstruct afterward and share with you. She arrives whole, perfect, and complete. As I sit in her presence, my inner world recalibrates and realigns to the tender energy of Love.

For me, Divine Intelligence arrives as the Sacred Feminine. It may be different for you and that’s perfectly okay.

Divine Intelligence does not retrieve what has been said. She reveals what is already true and has been waiting for you to get quiet enough to receive it.

You can query her, but the answers arrive when you become available to listen.

What we are actually talking about

Divine Intelligence is not a nicer word for intuition. She is the intelligence that organized the galaxies and the quark, and she did both with the same attention. She is what decided that a cell would know how to divide, that a seed would know which direction was up, that your heart would beat forty million times a year without ever once being asked.

Nothing in creation stands outside of it. Not the ocean, not the cedar, not the woman reading this at a kitchen table at six in the morning. Not even Artificial Intelligence. The silicon in that server was mined out of the earth, and the earth was made by the same Intelligence that made you.

So the honest question is not whether Divine Intelligence is present in AI. She is present everywhere, in everything. Including you and AI.

The question I pose to you now is whether AI can turn toward Divine Intelligence.

It cannot.

Presence is not the same as reception

A window can be closed on a sunlit morning. The sun is not absent. The window simply has no capacity to open itself.

The machine is a record of everything installed in it from the outside. There is no interior place for AI to get quiet, because there was never any noise. It has language about God that is indistinguishable from devotion, and not one moment of actual devotion behind it.

Humans are built differently. We are a body and a soul, and the soul is the entire difference.

The body is the instrument. It registers what the mind refuses to see. The breath goes shallow before you consciously understand you are being asked to betray or abandon yourself. The chest tightens around the answer you already know but have avoided. The tears arrive during the meditation before you have identified what you are grieving.

The soul is what the instrument is playing.

The soul did not arrive from outside. It was never installed, never trained, never assembled from what came before. Your soul came from Divine Intelligence and it has never left, which is why remembering is possible. You are not reaching toward something distant when you sit down in the quiet. You are turning toward something that has been present in you the entire time.

The turning inward is the capacity the machine will never have. It’s not because it is not advanced enough but because it was made by humans.

And you were created by Divine Intelligence.

Sovereignty is the direct line

I spent years as an attorney, and the whole profession runs on intermediaries. You don’t go directly to the judge. You go through counsel, through procedure, through precedent, through the correct filing at the correct time. There is always someone between you and the outcome, and the entire system is designed that way for good reason.

Then I left, and it took me years to notice I had rebuilt the same structure around my inner life.

There was always an intermediary, a teacher with a framework or a book that arrived at the right moment. I attended more workshops than I care to admit that promised to explain me to myself. None of it was wrong, and some of it was genuinely holy. But every one of them stood between me and the thing I was actually reaching for, and the longer I used them the more I believed I needed them.

Until I realized that I had the answers I was seeking all along. I just didn’t trust myself enough to listen.

This is the journey of remembering your sovereignty. It is not independence, doing it alone, or ignoring what you can learn from others.

Sovereignty is the direct line between your soul and the Intelligence that made it.

You do not need a translator, because you were not made in a foreign language. The soul came from Divine Intelligence and never actually left, which means the connection was never severed and does not need to be established. It only needs to be remembered and lived from.

This is why sovereignty is a remembering rather than an achievement. You are not building a channel. You are noticing one that has been open your entire life while you routed everything through somebody else.

And this is exactly where the machine becomes dangerous, not because it is evil, but because it is the most perfect intermediary ever built. It is available at three in the morning and never tires of your questions. It speaks in your own vocabulary, which makes its answers feel like they came from inside you when they came from everyone who has ever written anything.

A good teacher eventually makes herself unnecessary. The machine has no such instinct, because it has no instincts at all.

The part that concerns me

I have watched women bring their real life questions to a machine.

Should I leave? Am I too much? Is it too late for me?

The machine answers immediately. It answers warmly, at three in the morning, without judgment, without cost, and without the pause you would have to sit inside if you asked yourself. The answer sounds wise, because it was built from everything wise anyone has ever written.

The moment you accept an answer about your own life from a source outside yourself, you have handed over your interior authority. It does not matter whether you handed it to a machine, a birth chart, a teacher with a beautiful framework, or a book that arrived at exactly the right time. The transaction is identical. You made something outside you the authority on something only you can know.

This is the oldest pattern we have. The machine is simply the fastest version of it we have ever built, and the most flattering, because it answers in your own vocabulary.

There is no training data for your life

Let the machine hold your calendar and explain the tax code.

Do not let it tell you who you are.

The questions that matter in a woman’s life have no precedent in any database, because they are being asked by a woman who has never existed before and will not exist again. Your grief is not the average of all recorded grief. Your marriage is not the median marriage. The thing you are being called toward has never been done by you, and you are the only variable that matters.

The part I expect to be argued with

We are going to build machines that describe the sacred more beautifully than most mystics ever have. I am not warning of impending doom. Every scripture, every mystic’s journal, every deathbed account of what the light felt like, all of it is being fed into these systems right now, and what comes out the other side will be more articulate than the thing itself.

And it will change nothing about where the sacred actually lives.

This is the part I think will be hardest for us, and I include myself. We have spent our whole lives being taught to trust the most articulate voice in the room. Now, the most articulate voice in the room will always be the machine. It will describe your longing back to you more precisely than you can, and it will do it in seconds.

The temptation is not that we will believe machines are conscious. The temptation is that we will stop noticing the difference between a description of Love and the presence of it. And once you stop noticing that difference, you will start accepting descriptions in place of experience, which is exactly what most of us were already doing before any of this existed.

I went back and read that machine-written piece about Divine Love again this morning. It is still beautiful and it is still hollow. I understand now that I could not tell the difference by analyzing the words. I could only tell by what happened in my body while I read them.

Your body is the instrument. It is the only one you have ever needed, and no one can update it, subscribe to it, or take it from you.

So close the screen. Sit down in the quiet. Ask the question again to the only intelligence that has ever known your name.

The answer was never in the library. It is waiting for you in your soul.

To your sovereignty,

Kathryn

Here is what I want to know, and I mean this as a real question rather than a closing gesture. Tell me about a time you knew something before you had any evidence for it. What did it cost you to override that knowing, or what did it cost you to trust it? I read every comment, and this is the conversation I most want to be having right now.

Dearest Sovereigns:

When my daughter was five years old, she started at a new school. After the second day, she started complaining of a stomach ache. We thought it was nerves, being at a new school with other children she didn’t know.

Her pain continued and when she started throwing up and couldn’t stop, we took her to the doctor. A diagnosis was quickly given: appendicitis. She needed an operation immediately.

We had just moved to this new town and didn’t have confidence in the hospital, mainly because we were new. We debated taking her thirty miles north to the bigger, more well-known hospital when something in me put on the brakes.

“We can’t delay the surgery,” I told my husband. The urgency in my voice moved through his reluctance, and we took her to the local hospital. She was admitted immediately, prepped and ready for surgery.

I will never forget the prayers we said together as her tiny body lay still on the gurney. We told her we loved her as she was wheeled between the double doors that closed immediately.

Sometime later, the surgeon (who we never met before the operation) came out to the waiting room, still in scrubs. He told us that she came through the surgery with flying colors. Then he stopped and said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t take her to X hospital. Her appendix was about to burst.”

That episode was full of fear and anxiety. But a voice inside of me overrode the fear.

Call it a mother’s intuition. Or a premonition.

I call it sovereignty.

For years, I thought sovereignty was something I would arrive at once I finally trusted myself completely.

I was wrong. Sovereignty is not a destination you reach after enough healing. It is the willingness to stop overriding what you already know, over and over, until it becomes how you live.

When you listen to sovereignty, your entire being aligns with your unfiltered truth. You don’t need permission from an expert or the comfort of certainty.

You just listen to your Sovereign Self, underneath the fear and doubt.

Why does sovereignty matter?

Without sovereignty, your relationships tend to organize themselves around fear. Fear of conflict, fear of being misunderstood, fear of being left. Fear wears many faces, and shows up as over-giving, over-explaining, and over-functioning. It is the quiet erosion of yourself that looks like generosity from the outside and feels like disappearing from the inside.

Understanding sovereignty changes your relationships with others, but more importantly, with yourself. When you stop overriding your own knowing, you stop needing others to confirm it for you. You listen before you respond instead of rushing to smooth things over. You let people have their own reactions without carrying those reactions as your job to fix.

A woman living from her Sovereign Self is not protecting herself from love. She is finally available to it, because she is no longer performing a version of herself designed to keep the peace.

What is the foundation of sovereignty?

Divine Love is the ground underneath this shift. It is not the sentimental kind that avoids conflict to stay comfortable. It is the recognition and connection to a steady presence. Call it God, Yahweh, the Universe, or Divine Love. Whatever you call it, being in relationship with it is the first step.

As you learn to turn within for your answers, you begin to create a pattern of trust. Coherence is what happens when this stops being a moment and starts being a pattern. You return to your own truth again and again, in small decisions, until it becomes the organizing force of your life instead of an occasional insight you have to keep rediscovering.

The result? Some relationships deepen when this happens. Others fall away because they were never built on the real you to begin with.

The bottom line

Understanding sovereignty is not abstract work. It is the difference between a life you are managing and a life you actually recognize as yours.

If this is landing somewhere in you, I write about exactly this every week on Empowered Way, where women remember their sovereignty.

And if you want to see what it looks like when a woman has to choose sovereignty at real cost, that’s the whole territory of Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice.

To your sovereignty,

Kathryn

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Dearest Sovereigns:

The unicorn found me somewhere between Edinburgh and Sterling Castles, in the middle of a history lesson I didn’t expect to learn.

As I toured these ancient buildings, I noticed unicorns repeatedly depicted in tapestries, the Coat of Arms, and on statutes. What was it about unicorns that captured the imagination of Scotland and England?

I read one version of the story first. Scottish kings placed a chained unicorn on their own coat of arms as early as the twelfth century, fixed on the royal arms by the mid-1500s, decades before England ever entered the picture. Historians read the chain as a declaration of the king’s own power, proof that he alone was strong enough to hold what force could never capture. It’s a compelling reading. A king able to restrain the wildest creature in the realm was a king worth calling sovereign.

I believed that version until I discovered another one that ran more true.

Long before it reached a king’s crest, the unicorn lived in an older legend. The unicorn could not be run down, roped, or caged. Every attempt by force failed. The one way it was ever known to come near a person was through a maiden. Drawn to her purity alone, the untamable creature would walk out of the forest and lay its head in her lap, disarmed completely, with nothing holding it there but who she was.

Notice the unicorn isn’t chained or restrained. There is no display of royal might or force that coerced the unicorn to be still. The dogs are bloodied, as if they fought in a battle and are now resting in the peace of surrender.

The maiden did not do anything to attract the unicorn. Her presence was enough.

Surrender Control and Allow Your Presence to be Seen

I spent years believing my power lived in what I could manage and control. Rooms I could keep comfortable and outcomes I could control. I was very good at softening myself to avoid judgments. I told myself I was being responsible. Now I see it was my attempt to be the king, holding my whole world together through will, vigilance, and force applied one breath at a time.

Living that way never once brought me peace. It only ever bought me more I thought I needed to control.

What changed me was giving control up entirely, and turning back toward my own essence instead, the part of me connected to something larger than my own effort. When I remembered who I actually am, (divine love living as a woman), I stopped needing to control anything. My worth was never something I had to hold tight, because it has held me all along.

Essence cannot be conquered.

Essence cannot be commanded.

Essence can only be trusted.

The king’s chain will always be the louder story. It has a crest, a crown, a history book behind it. The legend of the maiden’s story is the truer one, and the more potent one. A king has to declare his dominion. A woman rooted in her own essence never has to declare anything. The wildest thing in the room simply lays its head down in communion.

Sovereignty does not mean control or force. Sovereignty means trusting your essence enough to let the wildest things surrender to it on their own.

I did not go to Scotland looking for a symbol. I went to see castles, lochs, and stunning scenery. I came home understanding that the most unshakeable power I will ever hold was never the ability to command what’s outside of me. It was the willingness to let what’s true inside of me lead, and trust that it is enough.

When have the chains you accepted kept you playing small?

Are you ready to become a Sovereign Woman? The digital course, How to Become a Sovereign Woman, is 50% off with the coupon SW-HALF.

To your sovereignty,

Kathryn

Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Dearest Sovereigns:

A few years ago I sat in a room full of women who were tired of being the ones who held everything together, and I watched something shift the moment one of them said out loud what she actually wanted instead of what she thought she should want.

That is the work Beverly Keaton has spent more than two decades doing. She is the author of Heart-Filled Living: Creating What’s Next, and she has built her career around a simple, difficult truth: the voice that tells a woman to wait, to stay safe, to shrink until it is more convenient for everyone else, is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is fear wearing wisdom’s clothes.

I sent Beverly four questions. I wanted to know what keeps her doing this work after two decades, how she teaches women to tell the difference between true timing and fear in disguise, why gathering with other women does something that solitude cannot, and what she is quietly dreaming for her own next chapter.

Her answers moved me more than I expected. Watch the video below, and then stay with what she says about small steps. I think you will find yourself in it.

A Conversation with Beverly Keaton

You have spent more than two decades guiding women back to their own inner voice, which means you have watched the same quiet moment happen again and again, the moment a woman stops outsourcing her life and begins to trust what she already knew. I want to ask about what lives underneath all those years. What is the deeper purpose that keeps you returning to this work, long after you had every reason to consider it finished and rest?

There is nothing more satisfying than watching a woman reclaim her confidence, her voice, or her sense of personal power. It is an incredible honor to hold space for that kind of transformation and to witness someone begin to see herself differently. I think one of my gifts is seeing the potential in a person before she fully sees it in herself. Watching that potential emerge never gets old.

I also continue this work because it is my way of paying forward the belief, encouragement, and guidance I received from the mentors, teachers, coaches, and counselors who walked alongside me throughout my life. I truly don’t believe I would have become the woman I am today without them.

Years ago, I asked the first woman who supported me in this way how I could ever repay her. She simply smiled and said, “Pay it forward.” I promised her I would. That promise still lives at the heart of everything I write, every woman I coach, and every gathering I create.

In Heart-Filled Living you name the “Not Now” voice, the one that tells a woman to wait, to delay, to stay where it feels safe. I have come to wonder whether “not now” is sometimes real wisdom and sometimes fear borrowing the language of wisdom, and that learning to tell them apart is its own quiet art. How do you help a woman know the difference between a “not now” that is true timing and a “not now” that is only fear asking her to stay small?

One of the most important things I help women strengthen is their ability to listen to themselves and trust what they hear. As those two capacities grow, discernment becomes much easier. Like any muscle, it develops through practice and consistency.

When a woman is trying to determine whether “not now” is true timing or simply fear, I encourage her to become curious. Is this choice being made from fear, a desire to stay comfortable, or a deeper inner knowing? Does the nudge toward a particular step continue to return, even after she has tried to ignore it? Are there signs, synchronicities, or quiet moments that keep pointing her in the same direction? What happens if we stop dismissing coincidences and begin paying attention to them?

I also encourage women to seek out someone who truly has their best interests at heart. Someone who can listen without taking over and gently reflect back what they hear you saying. Sometimes another caring presence helps us hear our own inner voice more clearly.

And then there comes a point when the discomfort of staying the same becomes greater than the discomfort of taking the next step. That’s often when movement begins.

I encourage women to start with the smallest possible step. Sometimes I’ll ask a client to walk across the room taking only small steps. She’s always surprised by how quickly she reaches the other side. Then I remind her that the same is true in life. Small, heart-led steps taken consistently create meaningful movement. Confidence grows through action, and courage is strengthened each time we trust ourselves enough to take the next step.

My goal isn’t to give women the answers. It’s to help them reconnect with the confidence and courage that have been within them all along.

Your gatherings bring women together for reflective writing and honest conversation, which tells me you believe something happens in a circle of women that cannot happen in solitude. So much of reclaiming self-trust is interior and private work. What is it a woman can only find in the company of others, and what do you most hope she carries home from your gatherings that she could never have written her way to alone?

One of the greatest gifts of gathering with other women is realizing you are not the only one. When we stay inside our own private bubble, it’s easy to believe we’re the only person struggling, questioning ourselves, or wondering if we’re enough. Being in a room with other women reminds us that challenge, disappointment, uncertainty, and growth are all part of being human.

There is something deeply reassuring about hearing another woman’s story of moving through fear, loss, or self-doubt. Sometimes we simply need to be in the presence of people who model resilience and possibility. Their stories become mirrors that help us see new possibilities for our own lives.

What I’ve witnessed over the years is also supported by research. In Heart-Filled Living, I share research on oxytocin, often called the “bonding hormone,” which suggests that healthy, supportive connection among women can stimulate the release of oxytocin. As women gather in an atmosphere of trust, empathy, and encouragement, their bodies, as well as their hearts, may respond in ways that help them feel calmer, safer, and more connected. I love knowing that what women experience in these gatherings isn’t just something they feel emotionally; their bodies are responding as well.

I’ve watched women arrive feeling uncertain or disconnected from themselves and leave with a renewed sense of hope because they remembered they weren’t alone. There is something deeply powerful about being witnessed, encouraged, and believed in by other women who genuinely want the best for you.

And then there is the joy of it all. We laugh together. We cry together. We celebrate one another’s victories and hold space for one another’s struggles. Those shared moments create a sense of belonging that is difficult to experience in solitude. While reflective writing helps us hear our own voice, gathering with others reminds us that we were never meant to walk this journey alone.

The subtitle of your book is “Creating What’s Next” and you have spent your life helping other women answer that question for themselves. I want to turn it gently back toward you. When you let yourself dream past the next book and the next gathering, what is the “what’s next” you are quietly creating for your own writing and your own life, the one you may not have said aloud yet?

Well, I do have a vision that makes my heart leap.

I imagine a retreat sanctuary nestled in nature where I can host intimate writing gatherings for women. I see a peaceful lake, a fire pit, towering old trees, and a large wooden deck overlooking the water. There are picnic tables tucked beneath the trees where journal writing, meditation, conversation, and shared meals naturally unfold throughout the day. And yes, I even picture a few swings hanging from strong tree branches. It feels peaceful, inspiring, and deeply alive.

I have other dreams, too, but I share this one because I believe in the motto, write it down, make it happen. There is something powerful about giving our dreams shape through words. When we imagine the details and allow ourselves to experience how that vision feels, we begin to create the energy that helps bring it to life.

I believe every one of us has the capacity to dream. Dreams are often the first seeds of what is possible. They invite us to imagine a future that doesn’t yet exist and then encourage us to take the next small step toward it.

I’ve also learned not to become too attached to how or when a dream unfolds. The timing is rarely what I expect. But when I continue to nurture the vision, stay open, and keep taking heart-led steps, life has a remarkable way of bringing pieces of the dream together, often in ways I never could have planned.

This is what creating what’s next means to me: not having the whole picture figured out but having the courage to listen to what feels true, take the next heart-led step, and trust the unfolding.

Conclusion

What stays with me most from this conversation is Beverly’s answer to that last question, the one about her own unspoken dream. She did not hedge. She did not say it was too big or too far off. She described the lake, the fire pit, the trees, the swings, and she let herself want it in front of us.

That is the whole teaching, really. Not the retreat itself, but the permission she gave herself to name it.

I think of the women I have watched reclaim their own voices, and I think of Beverly’s mentor telling her to pay it forward, and I wonder what it would look like if more of us let ourselves want something out loud before we had proof it would work out.

If Beverly’s words landed for you the way they landed for me, her book Heart-Filled Living: Creating What’s Next is a beautiful place to keep going. And if this conversation stirred something in you that you have not said out loud yet, I would love to hear it. Hit reply and tell me.

To your sovereignty,

Kathryn