Opening the Heart

When there has been trauma in the body, what does it look like to begin to truly trust the opening and guidance of the heart?

We have so many reasons to close. To protect our hearts. It’s tragic, really, all the excuses we could have for self protection. 

I’ve had plenty. 

And I’m happy to say, they are being challenged at the next level as I’m being invited to open in places that I maybe didn’t know I was closed. 

I recently found myself in a situation with a man where I did not expect there to be attraction. We’d gotten together as friends and colleagues and then, on this particular day, as he said later, as I’d opened the door and he found me to be “radiant.” 

Radiant. What an “open” expression. I am quite sure that that is the first time a man has ever called me radiant, which is such a beautiful compliment. More than a compliment, it’s an affirmation that as I have been doing the good work of tending to this feminine essence, it is reflecting outward. 

The thing was, however, I felt quite tired on that particular day. I’d had a really deep session with a practitioner the day before, and perhaps I’d describe myself as tender. I wasn’t sad or armored or anything like that. I was just integrating some information that was making me a little tender. So perhaps I was even more unguarded than usual. 

I’ve done a lot of work on my body and the traumas it had endured, and I’ve done a lot of work on my heart to unguard it. I think the feminine heart could be at any given point tender, or elated, or somehow otherwise feeling deeply. If we’re not guarding our hearts, then it will be feeling something, because that’s what it does. 

And so I’ve been contemplating this thing of opening. There’s always the interesting thing we do as humans where we ask, “What am I opening to?” and then we decide if we can open to meet that external thing – whether it be an offer, an agreement, a man’s invitation, etc. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I immediately noticed that the external situation was not my first reference point. For decades in my life it had been. “What is the man doing? What is the man feeling? What is the man offering and am I open to it?” But this was entirely different. 

My reference point was entirely internal. I was pacing with my nervous system. “Is my body opening toward this idea, or closing?” Did I feel the familiar old closure of guardedness, and if so, what did the body need? I was tracking my opening and closing. Anyone with previous trauma related to men knows what I’m talking about – the familiar guards come up as we feel things out. There were plenty of times in the past when my body gave me “Closure! Constriction! Do not proceed!” warning signs that I did not head, which lead to more of my own depletion later. I was noticing this time that it was just natural to stay attuned to myself first – I was going to follow my body’s lead. 

“No moving forward, on any given day, without openness in the body.” 

That’s progress. For any woman. High fives all around when we’re listening to the body. 

However. 

I realized something major. When I was tracking my body’s contraction or expansion, I was essentially tracking the nervous system. I was tracking whether or not the nervous system felt safety or fear. And in doing so, I was not attuning to whether or not my heart was opening and what my heart’s truth was. 

This is really important, because given the way trauma works, we could be experiencing somatic symptoms of a past trauma in a very safe present-day situation. And if we’re only attuning to that and forgetting the heart, then we’ll make it about the past, the trauma, and the nervous system. The attunement to the body is amazing, but then, there is the next-level attunement to the heart.

Beyond previous experiences of depletion or hurt, beyond how the body holds trauma patterns of constriction, there was a new invitation to notice and expand into. “Does the heart want to open? Is the heart opening?” 

I’ve been traveling with the real-life sequence of the teachings I call Heartland now for over a year, but when I felt Spirit nudge me in February to open them back up in in April, I was immediately inside of a next-level learning about the heart. I was back inside the “initiation” of learning these deep transformations to leave more and more layers of feminine depletion, guardedness, and old story behind, and to come into feminine replenishment, the heart, and the experience of the spark of creation. 

In Heartland, we journey to a place of prosperity in the Heart. Not just money and wealth, but true, soul-aligned, heart-opening, blissful, no longer afraid, understanding the creation energy of the cosmos HEART. 

There are eight areas of the Heartland teachings, like a sequence. I had told this man, when sharing about Heartland, that I felt that I was somehow in stage seven of eight. I had conceptualized what stage eight might look like, but was still stretching into it as a woman. Well, you can’t stretch into the Heart of the Heartland until you’re really, truly, willing to move beyond the stories of depletion, fear, the times things were taken from you in the past… the traumas we’ve held in the body, and all the reasons to close the heart. 

And then I saw myself doing it – tracking the sensations of the familiar fear responses in my body (which again, it is really important not to override those sensations) instead of tracking the radiance of my own heart. 

And I think that’s a big part of the leap. Tracking expansion just as much as we’re tracking constriction. Tracking the heart just as much as we’re tracking the nervous system. 

I am not the woman that previously attracted men who were willing to take my life force energy from me. But sometimes something in me forgets and still thinks that I am her, and then my nervous system has a closure response. 

I am instead the woman who has worked on the radiance and prosperity of my own heart. I am the woman who has honored the journey of this body and soul. I am the woman who will decide how to proceed, and I am the woman who is choosing to stand now fully in the New. And the New is the land of the Heart. The place of internal and eternal prosperity. The place beyond taking, where we remember the stories of depletion as a distant memory we have overcome, but where now, we radiate. We shine. We shine our diamond, crystalline hearts, and as we are, good men like this one will not help but to be magnetized and awed by it, and because we are ready, the feminine can now open even deeper. 

First open the body, as the body is ready. Then, open the heart. This is the place where the cosmos will join you in the dance of creation. This is the true Heartland, accessible beyond separation, closure, and fear. This is the place your soul deserves to reside.

Chapter 1: Heartland

The following is a draft first chapter of a book about women reclaiming our feminine resources. I call this the journey to the “Heartland.”

I was living in a man’s house, packing up my belongings after living there for less than a year. I’d moved my child, two cats, and everything I owned to this property per an invitation to “make a life together,” and here it was, the winter holidays, and he was in Ohio with his mother escaping the situation that was going down in his 920 square foot house. Which was: me, boxes everywhere, and everything he didn’t want to face.

I had actually paid him rent. 

He invited us to live with him, but he had wanted some rent. I paid it because he wasn’t rich, we were both entrepreneurs, and I didn’t mind contributing. I will never again move into a man’s house and pay rent. But there were a lot of things we potentially should have made clearer agreements on to prior to making the decision to move in together. 

Live and learn – isn’t that the name of the game? 

I had sent him an email that asked for the last rent back, since I wouldn’t be staying, to reallocate to the moving costs. I think it had actually been his suggestion, and I was following up on it. 

I sat down, at dusk, surrounded by piles of boxes at the kitchen table (my barn wood table that I’d now be moving back to storage), just moments before I had to host an online women’s group, and opened his reply email which said, “I will assess how you’ve left the place, after you’ve moved out, and if it is in a condition that I approve of, I will refund you your money. I will be assessing the house, the barn, and my wood pile.” 

“His wood pile?” I thought.  

Why the wood pile? Why would I ever touch the wood pile? The wood was his to use when he lit the wood stove in the barn, which I never did. Why would he even think to “assess” me on the condition of his wood pile before he gave me back the money that he’d already agreed to give me? These new conditions didn’t even make sense. 

And, it angered me, because I had never once disrespected the property or the house. He had invited us to make a home, and I had treated it as such. I was not at all the kind of person to take vengeance on his property. Why did he all of a sudden assume this? 

I couldn’t even begin to imagine how he had managed to rationalize whether or not I would get the money he’d already said he’d reimburse me, now conditionally based on the quality of his wood pile. Of all things!  

I was so tired of being assessed. He had asked me and my child to move in with him, to “make a life with him,” just months prior. It was six months from our move in date to his “never mind” date. A man who had never lived with a woman, let alone her child and two cats. A man who had seemed like a sure thing, like a safe bet. He volunteered with teen boys’ groups, he woke up early to pray every morning, he had even prayed when he made love to me and miracles happened (which was essentially the reason I had said yes – it was like God was there between us). He felt like a safe bet because he’d seemed innocent and good hearted, and I was trying to ensure that this kind of shit would never happen again. Because I’d seen it all before. 

Going after the girl, getting the girl, wanting the girl to reflect your manhood to you, and the “never mind” moment when they saw themselves in me (Oh, I’m not actually the man I promised you I was), and then, it is amazing how men will blame a woman for that moment of felt-inadequacy. I’d fallen for the man many times who wanted to be “that guy,” and then realized he actually wasn’t, but it’s easier to dismiss the woman than to be the man who actually looks at his shit. 

Not all men. I’m not a man hater. But I know this pattern really, really well. There seemed to be a tangle when I got involved with men – where my resources would somehow be threatened. I had been an entrepreneur for three years at that point, and this was the second relationship that I’d involved myself with that ended up making my life much harder rather than easier or more pleasurable. This was the second relationship in three years that ended up costing me a lot of money rather than resulting in me having more time and energy for my business and family. And, these relationships, not surprisingly, in the end looked and felt a lot like my relationship to my father. I’d seen this pattern with a previous boss and with prior partners too. It seemed to be everywhere and I was somehow late to truly waking up to it, even though I analyzed masculine and feminine all the time. 

There was always the really good beginning, and then the really surprising ending. There was wanting to believe the man, and then the dark shadow of the man revealed something much different. And I was the common denominator. I was somehow getting myself into a revolving pattern. And I was determined to figure it out and put a stop to it for absolute good. 

I was depleted. 

I was having to find energy where I didn’t know if I had any left. 

I had cried with my forehead to the soil on this sacred, sacred piece of property, asking “Why?” 

I had even allowed myself to get to the point where I was sending this goner an email saying, “Hey, can I get that money back please to pay other men to move my things for the second time this year?” 

You could say I was at a breaking point. But not a mental-break, the kind of breaking point where you say “no more” about a pattern in your life, and you fucking mean it. 

The wood pile comment, and his promise to assess me based on his bizarro parameters, and decide whether or not I would have access to the resources that he’d already volunteered to reimburse me for my move, was the last straw. 

I was a grown woman, a mother, who had made a home in his home per his invitation. There was no part of me that would want to harm anything here. I had a deep connection with the land, and experienced deep and corresponding spiritual realizations and awakenings in relationship to this sacred place. I was having a harder time leaving the land than I was leaving him. Him, I was done with. He could drop me and my child when the honeymoon period wore off, and this lack of allegiance, again, I’d seen before so I wasn’t even that emotional about it. Fine. I’d put my eggs in the wrong basket. Now I had to pack up my entire life of belongings, give away the new trampoline and basketball hoop I’d bought for my son, be unsure for months what exact next move I would make – and all of that felt more like a pain in the ass than something that victimized me. Before, I would have fretted and felt like a victim, but not this time. 

This time, it was just a pattern. This time, it was just the end. Here was this pattern, showing up with this man, who, I was sure months earlier would never have dreamed of or approved of the sort of behavior he was now demonstrating. He was a stranger now. 

It was like a dark, trickster bug got into these men, these men who had loved me and laid with me, who wanted to see themselves as my partner and as a parental figure and masculine influence for my son, and then would get to a point where they literally did not care about my wellbeing. They did not care. At one point he had said (in a text because he never even had a conversation to my face), “I don’t care where you go. Just get out. And don’t pull that single-mom card with me.”  They always turned on you. Starting with my father. The dark got into them and they would turn into something unrecognizable. 

And, there was always an element of control. “If you behave to my liking, I’ll reimburse the money you’d given me. But it’s based on my assessment. And the state of my wood pile.” Control, control, control. 

Which is when I snapped. 

Snapped in the best possible way. 

Snapped in the way a woman who has been trying to be good finally breaks free of the bondage of contortion. Snapped like that lead character in Fried Green Tomatoes as she screams “TOWANDA!” as she smashes the young guy’s car because she’s tired of being a doormat. Snapped like I was going to get that reoccurring dark trickster bug out of my fucking life if it was the last thing I did. 

I had to stand up to it. If I didn’t, it would never go away, and it had hunted me down so many times, and I didn’t have the resources to keep losing. This was the end. This trickster who took without replenishing, who would cause a man to watch my demise and detach from his heart. This trickster that would withhold resources, time and again, just like my father had, until he approved of my behavior. 

I knew that trickster inside my father, inside previous partners. I had known this energy my entire life. It used to scare me, but not any more.  Now, I was going to get it the fuck OUT of my life. 

“The wood pile? You’re going to assess me on the condition of the wood pile?” Game on, fucker. 

The heat rose in me, fueled by an eruption of previously-suppressed, primal emotion. I was clear headed, decisive – I wasn’t crazy. My movements became bigger. I became bigger. 

I looked at the clock and gauged that I had about eighteen minutes before I had to host my call. I found a headlamp and shoved it over my messy hair to see in the dark. I put on the old garden gloves I’d almost pitched while packing the day before. And I put on my winter coat, though I would be sweating by the time I was done. 

I found my way in the dark to the wood pile. 

THE wood pile. 

I knew the one he was referring to. Some of it had been chopped, and some of it was still in large, round pieces. And I carried each piece of that fucking wood pile through the yard, to the nearby cliff. And then I heaved each piece, one by one, over the edge. Towanda. 

“Assess me on the fucking wood pile!” HEAVE! 

“Go right ahead!” GUH!

“Hold my resources over my head and look what happens!” THROW! 

“A few hundred dollars? Really? You want to control me based on a few hundred dollars?” HUH! 

“Best money I have EVER spent!” GAHHHH! 

I’m sure the neighbors heard me. I no longer cared about impressions.  

Fifteen minutes. Ten. I had time. I’d be there. And I’d share my choice – this conscious and wild choice – with them, unashamed. The call was, after all, about women taking our power back through a process I call Sacred Remembering. I teach energy sovereignty. I have been doing the work of actively reclaiming my energy from trickster energies and outdated paradigms, but I’d be damned that I had let myself get into another situation of feminine depletion. 

No. More. 

It was exhilarating. I was standing up to this fucking trickster that had haunted me my entire life, I would no longer, not ever again, be controlled by it. The trickster that for my entire life would seek to control me with one thread of direct threat to my resources and then another. Through various men. Always a similar story. 

A destroyer presence. A taker of my energy. A power-player over my resources. But it was getting weaker, clearly, because it was grasping for a few hundred dollars and controlling me over what, a wood pile? It was certainly losing it’s power. And I would ensure that this would be it’s last grab as far as I was EVER concerned. 

I had felt it’s presence forever. The way it lived in men, in people in positions of power, in patriarchy itself. 

The threat that was immanent in so many ways – behave, or lose. Conform, or lose. Obey, or lose. Listen to me, or lose. 

“NO MORE!” 

HEAVE! 

NO MORE. 

Period. 

It was done when I threw the last, giant second of log over the edge. 

No more. 

I felt the trickster’s power die in that moment. 

I’d been fighting this thing for so long, and I had sworn that before I left this place, I would figure this out. I had actually said that to him, when he said one day in October that he was done. I said, “Well, you can wait a damn minute until I figure things out.” And I also said, “I’ll go when the land tells me it’s time to go.” 

The land and I weren’t finished yet. And I wasn’t leaving a victim. Not this time. 

I would figure out why I could be loved by men and then just as easily depleted and discarded. I was somehow attracting and allowing it, yes. And, that trickster entity was not inside of that man when we started. It was like he was infiltrated and then began acting against me. I believe he was. It’s the dark arts of the Destroyer. Sending it’s dark forces into men when women get too big for their britches. These poor men don’t even see it coming, this ego-identification that makes them a pawn to destroy the feminine. 

“Fuck her and her resources,” they say. 

I had finally stood up to all the ways I had been taken advantage of, all the ways that my resources had been threatened in my life by a man invaded with the trickster. 

And I was done. 

I was sweating and panting. I was dirty and unpresentable. I was a wild woman. And I went in, sat down at the table, surrounded by boxes, and told the women what had just happened. 

Because I wasn’t ashamed. I had just taken my power back. 

Best money I had ever spent. 

In the end, in the email he sent me with his arbitrary tally and justification of what he was reimbursing and why, he only deducted $50 for the wood pile. (Wink.) 

Learn more about Heartland for women to move from depletion to replenishment at www.sarahpoet.com/heartland.

A letter to modern women

I IMAGINE YOU’VE BEEN FEELING LIKE YOU’RE LIVING A DOUBLE LIFE – THE ONE OTHERS CAN SEE AND THE ONE YOU KEEP QUIET FROM EVERYONE ELSE. YOU CRAVE MORE OF THE AUTHENTIC YOU, THE SPIRITUAL TRUTH, AND A LIFE OF YOUR OWN CHOOSING WHERE YOU GET TO BE MORE FREE, MORE ALIVE. 

I IMAGINE YOU’VE BEEN FEELING LIKE YOU’RE LIVING A DOUBLE LIFE – THE ONE OTHERS CAN SEE AND THE ONE YOU KEEP QUIET FROM EVERYONE ELSE.

YOU CRAVE MORE OF THE AUTHENTIC YOU, THE SPIRITUAL TRUTH, AND A LIFE OF YOUR OWN CHOOSING WHERE YOU GET TO BE MORE FREE, MORE ALIVE. 


Your heart aches to step more fully into the world you imagine is possible. You want to be fully you, everywhere. 

You want to know what “fully you” even means. You question whether or not this is for you, this life of authenticity, deep soul knowing, and flow – but something in you whispers, “Keep going. Keep walking toward it.” 

It feels like home – this You. 

I know that this modern world makes it pretty damn hard to be yourself. You were sold a story about how to make something of yourself, how to succeed, and you’ve been following those rules, but you haven’t reached fulfillment.

You’re likely sad and agitated and pissed for feeling you’ve wasted time. 

I assure you – you are right on time. 

You know there is a lot to uncover. You know it doesn’t have to be such a struggle to be yourself, to honor your heart, to love and to be loved. 

You want to speak your truth. You want to be courageous. You don’t want to be among the generations of women who couldn’t say or do or be who they wanted to be. 

You are so right. On all accounts. You are not weird or crazy, and you are just the right amount of “different” – because the world needs your difference. Your courage. Your unique perspective. Your passion. Your ideas. Your leadership – just by being who you are most meant to be.

The solutions to what the world needs are inside of modern women. I know and believe this entirely. The answers are inside of women, and inside of you.

There is a lot to uncover. This path – back to your physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, energetic sovereignty – is a path packed with mystery, celebrations, reclamations, and WTF moments. This path is one soulful uncovering after another. It’s never done. And it always, ultimately, gets better. I want to help ensure that.

Your greatest hope is that you discover the true depth of who you are. 

My hope is that you find the truest, most sacred version of you. 

So here is my wish for you, love. That you listen to the whisper – the one that is getting louder. That you trust your radical, creative nature even when no one else around you understands. 

I am here for you on your journey, because my truth is that it is my joy, purpose, & mission to serve modern women, like you, waking up to the truth of who you are. 

I dimmed my light. Oh yes I did. I fought with myself about who I really was. Some days I still do. I was a double-master’s degree school principal and I was good at it. It didn’t make “logical” sense for me to walk away from the resumé I had built or the house I had bought. It didn’t make “sense” for me to follow my soul in the way that I have chosen to.

I was an accredited leadership professional and yet I knew that if I didn’t also honor the whole of myself, I wasn’t actually succeeding. So I followed my own calling, making many mistakes along the way – and all of the mistakes occurred when I mistrusted myself. And all of the glory-moments came when I listened to my own truth, my own calling – sometimes a whisper and sometimes a shout. 

But it is so worth it – this path of personal reclamation. Your energy is your own. Your relationship with what is holy is your own. (Yes, religious trauma is a thing, just like patriarchal trauma, emotional trauma, and money trauma are also real things. Your hunch is correct – it was not okay.) Your life is your own.

You get to be you. You wouldn’t be here otherwise. The world needs your gifts. The world needs your leadership. 

I will never tell you that this path will be a cake walk. We are changing the world with our courageous “yes” to ourselves as women awakening to the truth. Many will not want this current boat to be rocked, which will create resistance for you. And so my intention is that in this space, you have resources. You have community. You have safety and support and reminders that you are a sacred badass and then some. We are stronger together. 

WE ARE HERE TO GIVE OUR INTUITION VOICE. WE ARE HERE TO RECLAIM THE HEALTH OF EVERY CELL OF OUR BODIES. WE ARE HERE TO HONOR THE SACRED FEMININE RIGHT NEXT TO THE SACRED MASCULINE. WE ARE HERE TO BE AND DO AND LOVE IN THE BIGGEST WAYS THAT WOMEN EVER HAVE. WE ARE HERE TO LEAD – WITH HEART, WITH HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE, WITH BALANCED KNOWING. 


The time is now. Yes, listen to your “yes.” Know you. Don’t ever stop. 

I look forward to meeting you, connecting with you, and honoring your path.

I am here for you!  

All my love, 

Sarah Poet

Staying Home to Come Home: Women in the Pandemic

I heard that from many women during quarantine – the realization that what modern life expected of them no longer felt sustainable. 

What happened when you stayed home during quarantine? I’ll hear whatever story of change you want to tell, but what I really want to know is what happened on the inside of you? 

As I write this, we got the “stay home” order in North Carolina almost exactly three months ago. And, now, even though the cases of Coronavirus are greater than they were three months ago, the “stay home” orders are now increasingly lifted for economic reasons. There is a push for things to go back to normal, and yet, I hope we don’t miss the available lessons. 

How did this quarantine and all that it exposed change you? And is it still? 

For a little context, I’m the mother of an 11 year old son who lives between two houses, and I’ve worked from home via the internet as a life coach, distance healer, and women’s & relationship coach for over two years. So the format of my work was not affected when this hit, and actually, I was prepared for it because I’d already been through the highs and lows of such deep transition and could now assist others. And, I was able to actually spend more time with my child, which exposed quite a bit.

While I won’t bore you with the small accounts of what happened during quarantine, I will say that all of the things that were not working in our busy day to day life immediately became apparent when we stayed home. Discrepancies in parenting between households and the way our child had grown emotionally avoidant in fifth grade came to the surface to be revealed. We looked at it, and within two weeks, we had a new schedule and a new family therapist. I’m so grateful for that, because it’s made a huge positive impact on our child, and we otherwise would have missed it, had life just kept on. 

Then, in April, a baby goat was born on the farm we lived on, and I thought, “Good grief I’m so glad he’s not in school right now.” Because when we heard the mama goat yell out in labor, he was able to run and get to the pen in enough time to watch the baby goat land in the hay. He got to help name it Pixie. 

In case I need to spell it out, this was incredibly special. We’d moved out of the city a few months prior, and now, the choice to have done so grew even sweeter. My boy was watching the birth and early rearing of a mammal, learning about the placenta and birth, watching the milk come in and holding Pixie in his arms at 10pm in front of the mama goat’s nose while the farmer worked to prevent mastitis from setting in. My son had a place in things that was different as a result of staying home.

So I became “that mom” when I emailed the school – the school where I was formerly the middle grades principal – and I said, “Now that we know North Carolina isn’t counting grades this year, and my son is building forts while learning about measurement & cooperation, planting gardens, and is deeply engaged in the life of a new baby goat, I’m going to advocate that we all relax with the piles of computer work.” On Earth Day, when there was homework to research something online, I intervened and simply submitted a picture of him and Pixie the goat instead of evidence of a closer relationship with the Earth.

Real life again mattered more than assignments or schedules. And I was witnessing that my child was touching childhood in a way that he would not have if not for this pause. And as I looked around at the women’s groups that I was hosting, each woman was touching life in a new way as well. 

We were touching life. Eventually. Because each life went through an adjustment period in quarantine, as you know. Uncomfortable at first, and then, there was more life.

I was facilitating two women’s groups online – one a six-month Mastermind that had begun mid January 2020, and another a group called Choosing Nourishment that came together right at the beginning of quarantine when I noticed that women, even though they were already tired and juggling quite a bit in their lives, jobs, and households, and you may have thought that quarantine would provide reprieve, were actually quite frazzled in their nervous systems as a result of the changes. 

“You want me to stay home, work from my computer, and homeschool my kids?” 

“You want me to stay in the house with this husband of mine that is unwilling to actively help us figure out our finances?” 

“You want me to stay in the house with the man who doesn’t care at all what my opinion is and makes me feel invisible?” 

The panic was up. The nervous systems alert. This did not feel like a good idea to stay home. In fact, to some, I noticed that it felt really scary. Like modern life had been some sort of very busy distraction, and even though it wasn’t necessarily working or feeling good, nor particularly fun, it was the norm, and they’d learned how to manage it. This was the same reason I’d left working in schools to start my own business two years ago – modern life just wasn’t sustainable any more.

I heard that from many women during quarantine – the realization that what modern life expected of them no longer felt sustainable. 

As time passed, and as we held the space in confidence and safe space in these women’s groups to talk about how to choose the nourishment, how to be in communion with this opportunity to push pause, I noticed that all of the women began to care less about whether or not things like the homeschooling got done, and cared more about feeling good, re-connecting with their families, and listening to their authentic inner voices. 

Feeling good matters. Knowing oneself matters. Being able to sit and breathe in a body with a settled nervous system matters. And modern life makes these things “self-care” periphery practices instead of, well, the norm. But in quarantine, more women began to prioritize a rebalancing that they’d previously only dreamed of. 

Priorities shifted. Preferences stated more clearly. Boundaries realized. 

And then, about six weeks into quarantine, in the Mastermind that is all about the quest for the Sacred Truth within each woman, after months of clearing old stories and identities, a “Coming Home” theme emerged. 

And I chuckled as I said, “Hmm, staying home to come home.” 

And everywhere I looked to see what women were doing, in these groups and in the collective of women, I kept hearing women say: 

“Maybe it doesn’t have to go back to the way it was.” 

“That was never sustainable and we knew it all along.” 

“I don’t even want to go back to work. I never want to feel like that again.”

“Maybe I won’t send my child back to school next year.” “Maybe it’s time to finally own my skills as a healer.” 

“Maybe it’s time to start the business I really want to start.” 

It was mandated that we all stay home. Yet, it was rather unsuspected how we discovered that so many women, would, also, come home to themselves. And I love witnessing it. It feels like only a beginning to what has been such a long time coming. 

Women remembering who they are. 

Women coming home to the truth of who they are. 

Women, refusing to live unsustainable lives. 

Women, planting gardens and knowing rest for the first time in years. 

Women, making plans for what they might create next. 

I truly hope that we don’t go back to life as usual, that this actually changed us in the way it had the potential to change us. Because through a wider lens, this is how the feminine rebalances with the masculine, a story I told of my own life in my TEDx from last year. So much happens when women come home to themselves. 

Worlds open.

The feminine principle, the archetype – which involves rest and bodies and satisfaction and families first – was touched through this quarantine experience. I’d say it was awakened, in many women. 

How did this change you? What are you willing to go back to and unwilling to go back to? What will you do differently? 

I chose to integrate family and home life with my partner, moving in together during quarantine. I chose to begin to walk in nature daily, even though I’d lived in nature before and yet failed to prioritize it. I chose to begin organizing a potential home-school cooperative for the fall with the same children that my child was able to play and bond with during the spring. 

I’m beginning to dream of new systems of education and women’s entrepreneurial collaboration that before seemed so far off, and now, it feels like the time to choose based on deeper preference and intuitive knowing. 

I found myself choosing to relax and read fiction, to sleep in, to start a new yoga practice. 

I chose to come further home, and I choose it still. 

And I’ll ask you, women, did you come home? And I’ll encourage you. Come home to the truth of who you are. Don’t go back to an unsustainable status quo. If you allowed yourself to dream, what would you create? 

If this article speaks to you, let’s work together.