Fierceness is required: embracing strength through love.

Also, simultaneously a few weeks ago, my friend Lisa sent me a picture in a text message and let me know that she felt guided to set up a place for me on her prayer altar. In the center of this prayer altar was a picture of me.

Journal Prompts to consider before, during, or after reading this blog:

  • Where in your life are you feeling like you need to fight for something? Is it exhausting or energizing you?
  • What is the difference, for you, between sacred fierceness and fighting?
  • How do these two feel different in your body? In your breath?
  • How do you want to embody your sacred fierceness more in your life right now?

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Betsy and I said, “Betsy, I do not want to have to be the warrior anymore.”

You can hear the exhaustion in that statement.

Well, I believe, because I experience, that there is always a divine dance of Creation going on. A sacred unfolding.

In that statement of mine, there was exhaustion, but there was also a little stuckness. I had tired of being a warrior along the way….

Also, simultaneously a few weeks ago, my friend Lisa sent me a picture in a text message and let me know that she felt guided to set up a place for me on her prayer altar. I was surprised because we hadn’t talked about an exact thing that would have prompted this, but I wasn’t surprised because I know that Lisa is always listening to the divine and if she felt to do it, there was a reason why.

Lisa is a friend that continually makes magic and I truly love to notice and weave the Mystery with her.

In the center of this prayer altar was a picture of me. The layout of everything on the altar was astonishingly beautiful and thoughtful, but the picture surprised me because it was an old photo that I’d had on the back of my first business cards. She’s had this for years.

The photo, I realized in that moment but also more deeply throughout the next few weeks (that’s what I mean by “weaving”), was historically very significant to me because it was the first time that I “saw myself.”

I had gone in for professional headshots, and the photographer nudged me to take off my sweater and do a few shots in my flimsy old tank top, that truly I felt at home in.

The photo, when I saw it, still a school principal at that time, was strength. It was me. It was the me, underneath, that I felt but that I didn’t always know how to express, and here it was embodied.

And then, that was the photo that showed up from Lisa. A reminder.

And then I said, “Betsy, I don’t want to have to be the warrior anymore.”

Well, then a few weeks went by, things happened, and I did an 11 day spiritual practice that truly helped to regain so much life force, and then as I cleared energy, of course this affected things in outer relationships (as it always goes.)

And as I was witnessing an old pattern arising related to men & masculine, I noticed I felt different. I told Betsy, “I felt fear for a minute, but then I felt strength.”

The strength was different. It wasn’t a fighting strength. Younger-me had a lot of fighting strength, and then that was lost, or rather, let go. I grew tired of always being resilient. But (and I’ve written about this elsewhere), that was okay. Because fighting strength requires the nervous system, and one day that will tap out. True strength and resiliency comes from a different place. Turns out I’ve been cultivating it for some time, but am just realizing it.

Last year, I went deep deep down into the space of my own heart. I got so familiar with the aches and beauty, and I came to know love differently.

As it turns out, from that place is also where strength returns.

I was sitting in prayer this morning, and I asked, “Divine Shekhinah, what do I need to know right now?”

And in dropped the message, “The Sacred Warrior in you is a part of your divinity. It is sacred. Feel it now.”

And I sat with that message, the frequency of the Sacred Warrior, with the picture from years ago, the realization that Lisa had helped to evoke this via her prayer altar, and a part of me consciously returned.

Fierceness is required. Sacred Fierceness and the Warrior come through the space of the Heart, and can be trusted. Some things are worth standing for, worth being fierce over.

My path requires fierceness. I am here to disrupt common narratives and repattern aspects of patriarchy. I am here to introduce new information and tell stories. To be me and live my purpose requires the Sacred Warrior.

I am grateful to re-incorporate this, to walk in integrity with this divine energy, to the weaving, to the Mystery, to true sacred sisters Betsy, Lisa and more. I am grateful to look, once again, at this picture and see a true essence, and welcome it.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”

Photo credit https://www.heatherhamborphotography.com/

Part V: A priestess gets a sanctuary.

The part of me that still wants to hide under a rock was really unable to deny the level of miracle of the following. 

So, it was about mid 2022 when I knew that my LLC would become a Ministry, and began to make the logistical shifts. 

Then, it was February of 2023 when my soul distinctly instructed me to join a Mystery School and become ordained. Wow, okay, an ordained priestess with a ministry. Um, okay. This was not the ego that decided this. It was always in motion, in these years of “Sacred Remembering” and teaching women to take back their sovereign source connection from a separation message from church, etc, that said God was outside of her and only accessible through men and certain permissions. 


Sacred Remembering was always a new kind of church. 

So then I take on this work and am moving to a community that is focused on regenerative ethics, I’m thinking about the Regenerative Feminine all the time, and the land here is teaching me things, and then…. 

they put in my care a Sanctuary. 

They gave me the role of renting the retreat space, more accurately, which involves a big gorgeous Sanctuary. And, I am able to utilize it as well.

Remember, I told you in Part 1 I’ve done land channelings and energy work with the man who owns the property. I said to him in a text, “You know, following my soul to establish a ministry, then become ordained, now you give me a Sanctuary – this sacred life is pretty cool.” 

He responded with, “I’ve seen a vision of you there in almond colored robes.” 

I’m still curious about what the almond colored robes are about, as I have no plans for that. For now, I’m staying curious. 

I’m saying yes. Not to the robes just yet, but to the ALL that is transpiring. To the life that is orchestrating itself on my behalf – the life I’m ready now more than ever to co-create with. I am saying Yes to my Sacred Path, now. Again. I am saying Yes to Devotion.

On 5/5 my intuition told me to write a five part update. I think I’ve done that and as I approach the end I wonder if I’ve covered it – what Spirit had intended in having me do this. 

I don’t know. I won’t. That’s the thing. My job right now is not to know every answer or every right move. It is not to anxiously try to produce or manifest all that I (ego) ever desired. 

My life is energetically wider. The ground of my feminine is more fertile. This is what happens when the feminine continues to heal from patriarchy and feel more safe, and more secure in her resources. She widens and deepens, like loose, rich, deeply plowed soil. She is fecund. She is ready for life to Seed her. I feel the width of energetic space that I’ve not yet felt before. Something doesn’t have to fill it today. Fecundity is a yummy and regenerative thing. It is mine to allow life to happen through me now, as the forest does, as the soil does, as the womb does. 

Ah, fuck. Spirit is telling me to tell you what I want now. Hmm…. the woman can serve, but can the woman desire??? Yes. Here it is.

I want partnership in the physical realm that is the true double-union connecting to the God realm. 

I want Heartland to get published. 

I want to turn my various teachings and memoir stories into books – some of which are already mostly drafted. 

I want stability and goodness for my son as he enters high school next year and for the next four years. 

I want community – here where I live, the global community we’re creating, and Sacred Remembering Community. 

I want to see you in this Sanctuary, I want to show up there and be a channel.  

I want to live in the Heartland, and I want to invite you in, too. 

Thanks for reading. It was fun to write this and to share it with you. And always, I hope to connect with you further, more deeply, very soon. 

Join the Sacred Remembering Community HERE, for modern women, waking up to the Unified Truth of who they are.

Join the Heartland waitlist HERE for women wanting to step into the 5D timeline of Regenerative Feminine, free of patriarchal imprints.

See you there!!

Part 4: I have no idea what I’m doing.

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. Because I’m not here to regurgitate existing options, most of which (all of which) were designed in patriarchy.

I’ve heard over and over from various sources that when you really get close to something, it feels like nothing makes sense and it’s all going to fall apart. I’ve heard that when it’s about to all come together is when most people tear it down. 

I have no idea if things are coming together. 

I have, in my life, worked for things to watch them fail. I have given my all to things that did not become financially viable. I have poured love into relationships that did not pay off. 

I likely also have pulled out just before things were about to get good. I’ve watched myself almost sabotage things in the very recent past, with enough self awareness now to know when to zip it lest I destroy something viable. 

I have some wild ideas. This past week, I was interviewed on my friend Laura McCann’s show called “People We Adore” because Laura recognizes that I have some pretty new ideas. And what I appreciate about her reflection of me and my ideas is that she reflects to me things like, “You’re living it. You’re living on the edge. You’re living the experiment you believe in.” 

Thanks for noticing, Laura. 

It’s true – I’ve done pretty wild things like left a stable career when my son was in the 4th grade and then sold our home to free myself from karmic shadow-masculine contracts. On and on. I have lived the Sacred Remembering path and my life doesn’t even make sense anymore by conventional standards (some things are a little difficult to justify to my ex-husband, for example, as I take my child with me on this journey.) 

Recently, I dissolved my LLC, started a Ministry, moved to community, got a bit of a job after five years as an entrepreneur to put some stability under my ass, and am turning my membership into a space of regenerative prosperity for all women involved. I could have kept building an “empire” but it started to feel shitty and lonely. Did I pull out before it got good? Or did I know it wasn’t the way? Hmm…. maybe both? Maybe who knows? Maybe who cares! 

Let’s start with… I dissolved my LLC. 

So, LLC is a legal structure and essentially a taxable entity, and one option on a standard menu when one wants to “go into business.” Well, we as sovereign, questioning and discerning women might start to ask ourselves questions like, “Why if I want to do my soul’s work in the world, do I need to do it under a prescribed legal structure?”  “Why, in said legal structure, is it actually harder to accrue resources? Why am I participating in something that makes it more difficult to redistribute money directly to women?” (Because that’s not what it was established to do, of course.)  

When one starts to ask, “How can I become the most sovereign with all of my resources?” then one receives innovative answers. 

Having an LLC didn’t feel good after I built it and looked around me. It was another way that I’d bought into patriarchal structures that, seems to me, didn’t actually serve me or regenerative economics. So, no thank you. My mission is my mission and doesn’t belong to a predetermined legal structure and I don’t need permission from a Big Daddy agency in order to run it. Bye! 

Secondly… A Ministry… 

This one gets really fun in Part 5, just wait. But here I’ll say – if my work is not through my ego (part 2) and my work is my mission (it is) then my work is service. It is not a business, it is not for profit, it is not something to be mandated by anyone other than Source. My soul’s work and mission is via my own sovereign energy and that of Creator, and it is through this co-creative relationship that the magic and miracles of the work and influence will come about. So THAT is where I want my energy, money, time, attention, resources, and talent to go. I do not consent to agencies siphoning off of my energy while I’m trying to do my soul’s work, thank you very much. 

This Ministry is about our sovereign connection with Source, with this planet, and is held in the unified field, where your energy will naturally organize. This Ministry is about each woman’s sovereignty, and for each woman to learn to foster and trust her sovereignty and direct connection with the divine. This Ministry is a strong antidote to separation messaging and is a path to reunification with the Sacred, with Source, with the Soul. Women, standing in the truth of who they are – resourced AF with SOURCE. 

Thirdly… A Membership Community aka Sacred Remembering (Church)… 

Here’s where I’m really following my intuition to (hopefully) create an actual space where the Heartland regenerative energetics are thriving and women are becoming MORE financially resourced. I sense an entirely new energetic structure of regeneration and replenishment coming for everyone involved. I’m still receiving the specifics (you know, from Source), and more and more come to me the more I commit. 

For any one woman to create an empire, and have other women following her, could become a little schemy and also it’s an old method of hyper-individualism that breeds competition. Blech. I didn’t really set out to have to “sell myself” as an entrepreneur, but that’s what that style of solo entrepreneurship requires. It’s constant. It is so much pressure to keep producing even when one feels lonely or downtrodden (and in that model, it’s not even okay to admit that). So I grew up a bit. 

I want to receive money for my sacred work. I also want my friends to receive money for their sacred work. I want to pay women who I know to help bring the sacred work into the world. I want women to get paid rightfully for their energy. I want to have enough and share more. I want to create a network of women that all benefit when one woman benefits. These are New Earth energetics, these are regenerative ideas, and it is rightful. So I want to figure out a way that this happens. Together, in Heartland Ministries and the Sacred Remembering Community, I believe that we will figure this out. 

I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. Because I’m not here to regurgitate existing options, most of which (all of which) were designed in patriarchy.

Fffffffff that. No. 

I am here to help establish new paradigms. With my life. With my energy, heart, body and resources. Only that will do. 

A few years ago, feeling timid yet much more determined and courageous than I am even now, I was standing in the kitchen of the house I ended up selling and I thought, “Well, fuck. It’s as though my soul is guiding me such that I can’t even participate in anything patriarchal anymore. It just doesn’t even work.” Yes, dear past-Sarah, you nailed it. That was and is exactly the case. 

I’m a rebel and I don’t necessarily even mean to be anymore. It’s just who I am. It’s messy, especially when I let the human ego get loud in my head with notions of failure or scarcity. I think the difference is, I’m no longer naive. I’m aware that patriarchy and sexism and separation exist everywhere everyday and just because I say “no” to it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect my life and the lives of those I love. 

In fact, the fact that I’ve said “no” to it with my life and it still exists has, in the past, made my life much harder. Complacency is easy. Actually figuring out how to be sovereign in your energy such that you can’t be siphoned from, and also, such that you don’t feel like you just walked through a battlefield every dang day is significant work. Thankfully, I am “getting it” and it’s getting easier. 

Sovereignty isn’t about fighting or defending. It’s about discerning and owning the fuck out of what you give your energy to and what you don’t. When women do that, it changes the world. 

My job is to live as often and as many moments as I can in what I call “The Heartland” – the space of the Regenerative Feminine. Because when I live it, and teach others how to feel and hold the frequencies, we transcend patriarchy. 

Boom. 

You know, I think this might be the point of the breakthrough. I have a pretty good feeling about it. But if not, if you’ve known me for any time at all, you know I’ll keep going. 

PS: 

I do want to say thank you – to the women who see me NOT succeeding in so many (traditional) ways and who hear my worries and who still sit beside me, join my ministry board of trustees, make altars on my behalf, and believe in me when I crash. Thank you for continuing to come to the Sacred Remembering calls, for referring your friends, for trusting me to caretake your partnerships and your children.  I love you. Let’s do this. Let’s get paid well and make new models. I can’t do it without you and don’t want to. The New Earth is here and we are it. 

If you’d like to join the waitlist for Heartland 2023, it is now open HERE.

https://www.sarahpoet.com/heartland
https://www.sarahpoet.com/heartland

Part 3: Turning Pro

A month ago, I was spending a day in New York City with my two children. 

That sentence doesn’t really feel like my life. 

My son and I traveled to visit my sister and her baby in New Jersey for spring break, which is where my daughter lives. My daughter was adopted at birth -I’m a birth mom – and she’s going to grad school while living at home with her awesome parents and she joined Rowan and I for a train ride into New York City for the day. 

It was awesome. I could count on one hand the number of days that I’ve ever spent alone with my two children. (We’ve spent many days together with family via it being an open adoption from the start.) 

After visiting the MET, we were walking toward the Strand bookstore (one of my favorite places in NYC is Union Square and the Strand, but turns out not so much for my kids.) So I drug them down to Union Square Park and I was telling Phoebe, my daughter, how I’d submitted a book proposal to a semiannual contest at HayHouse this past winter and in February it received an honorable mention and was in the top ten. 

Her face so genuinely lit up with excitement that it was one of those moments that I was transported out of the tunnel-vision of “This is my life where I frequently struggle and I’ve got to just keep plugging away at it” and into a realm of “Oh, she just reflected that this is super cool and you know what, IT IS!” 

And we were headed into the STRAND! Such a fantastic independent bookstore, and I was like, “All I want is to have books published!! Look at all these people who saw it through, who did it. I’m doing it!” 

And then I looked down and saw the book Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. I’d read The War of Art a few years ago when a coach had sent it to me, and I definitely took it as a bit of a sign that I’d just shared not only that I’d gotten close to winning a publishing deal, but also, that I knew why I hadn’t. 

Heartland is incredible. It’s a new idea, it’s an original transmission, it’s well written, entertaining with sacred stories, and full of a “codex” of new information for women to come out of scarcity and into a regenerative and prosperous ethos. This book has not been done before (couldn’t possibly, because like Liz Gilbert describes in Big Magic, it’s coming through me) and also, the world needs it. HayHouse recognized that. They told me that clearly I was a gifted storyteller and the idea of writing about women’s resources as they related to men & patriarchy was important. 

The constructive criticism they gave was spot-on. My most important chapters hadn’t been polished, so I didn’t submit those in the proposal. What I submitted didn’t give them a true taste of the teachings within this “teachable memoir.” I think I can win the contest without an editor (I got an honorable mention without an editor) but the Heartland that would win the book proposal contest is a more poignant and powerful version. It’s the one I’m now able to finish. 

I bought Turning Pro. Of course I did. 

And it was an awesome decision, and an awesome book, and I’m pretty much listening to Steven Pressfield weekly at this point because he talks about overcoming resistance, putting your ass in the chair, and showing up for the muse. 

(That’s what I’m doing by writing this five-part story update, you see?) 

Steven Pressfield doesn’t let you get away with bullshit. Nor would HayHouse, nor does God, nor should I. 

So, I’m writing daily, in my new house. I’m showing up to the keyboard and the projects and it is painful like birth some days getting myself to show up, and then, when I do, it’s like euphoria. Pretty much every time. And every time I write Heartland, it writes itself. I’m honestly writing things that my human ego personality, that would hold onto suffering for eternity if I let it, can’t even believe I know or I’m saying. 

I don’t know if I’ve ever really admitted that for all the things I can do, for all the things on my resume to all the things I spouted on about on that podcast, to the way I can channel and hold sacred and profound spaces, I have still struggled and suffered so much as a human – both who didn’t know I was worth it to actually struggling to survive really dark and horrible shit. Like, for example, losing a daughter at 19, and then on and on from there. One of my primary life lessons in Human Design is about mindset. Where will I put my focus, and what can happen if I practice all of what I preach? 

I want to turn it to gold. I want to disown nothing and allow everything and still turn it all to gold. 

I don’t know if I’ll win HayHouse next year, but I’ll publish this book regardless, and then another, and then another, because this life of mine requires it. 

Requires it. 

People who know me well say that they trust me, as a leader and teacher, because of my willingness to be real and honest. I think that this is me, owning my humanness, and expanding in self-trust at the same time. 

This is me, sitting my ass where my heart wants to be, as Steven says, so that I do something with this precious life and this collection of sacred and mundane stories, skills and talents that maybe, just maybe, I can affect the world with. 

My work now is to show up inside the process because the process itself is calling. My work is not to do anything so that some result happens. The work is commitment, it is living, it is answering the soul’s call and not waiting another day or year. 

Part IV is next…. I have no idea what I’m doing.

Part 2: Ego Death

Looking back, last year was an ego death. 

It wasn’t a dark night of the soul – I’ve had those. It was more so a beautiful messy emotional and true period of time in which I allowed anything that didn’t feel good to dissolve and disassemble, and where I actually, genuinely and truly came to love myself. 

Honestly, I wish this for all of us. It was the most gracious thing that could have happened to my life.

My self esteem had always seemed to be fine, but as it turns out, I didn’t feel lovable. I felt that what had been reflected to me, over and over, was a sense of being picked over, or (men or potential clients) not valuing the offer of my heart. This impacted my self value and financial value as well. It sounds so sad, I know. And it was! It felt awful trying to constantly overcome that and keep putting myself, my work, and my heart out there. (I wrote about what took me down last year in this post here.)

The journey to one’s own genuine lovability is a bit like walking barefoot on uncomfortable gravel in wet clothing with too few coins in your pocket… for a long time. 

And then truly realizing and knowing your lovability is like warming to the bone, chill be gone, and all the comfort returns. 

My father had this cassette tape when I was growing up of a sermon where Pastor Ed of my childhood church talked about five-year-old me. My PopPop had just died, I was five, and I was apparently in Pastor Ed’s office for him to console me. I genuinely liked him. But the sermon he gave talked about how I recognized that he wasn’t feeling well himself, and the line that my father quoted about me my whole life was when Ed said, “Her arms went strong around my neck.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about the five year old me that knew how to love like that. 

She rocks. 

Her heart is good and she’s more than lovable. I love feeling her heart that is my heart. 

You know how when you do EFT (tapping) and you say the script, “And I deeply and completely love, honor, and accept myself?” Well, a year ago, I was tapping with diligence and I didn’t know if I truly believed the script. I wanted to, but the feelings didn’t match up. Did I not love myself? Was I feeling the chilled-to-the-bone feeling of unlovability as it had been reflected to me? Either way, it was unpleasant period to traverse. 

Now, I tap and I’m like, “Yeah I do!” and it’s very real. There’s not an ounce of doubt. I love, honor, and accept myself. I’m not perfect or flawless, but I’m good. I love my goodness. Like that five year old me, revealing the pure heart of me, I like my loving heart. 

Loving my heart is different than loving my ego or personality. It’s not egoic. It’s like knowing that I’m good with God, that the “I” doesn’t matter as much as the love, and acting through love. 

Recently I was talking with a friend about the concept of identity. Sometimes we feel like we need to have words to describe identity. Like “Gay, straight, pan, woman, man, trans, teacher, entrepreneur, soul-preneur, healer, partner…” and so on. We, the human with the life we try to construct and put together, and the ego with the questions that ask “Am I good enough yet?” “Have I done enough yet?” these are the parts of us that want to make sure that everyone knows who we are. 

And those were the parts of me that didn’t know if I was lovable, because the metrics weren’t really showing the proof that my ego needed. 

Was my work enough? Was my love enough? Why wasn’t it being reflected back to me? 

Last year, was I loved or lovable was the question that I walked through unexpected mud with, and then, the liberation came through something like a love affair with the divine. Or just the Sacred Remembrance that the love of the divine is mine. The human in me will fuck up or not know what to do, make mistakes in relationships or be too much for someone and get hurt. These are conditional, and these are human conditions. My personality will continue to be involved, because the ego never goes away so long as we’re still human, and that’s perfectly fine. So the term “ego death” is a bit metaphorical, because the ego stays. It just ceases to control you, it ceases to be your why. 

Right now, I honestly don’t know the exact place of the woman named Sarah Poet. I don’t feel attached to that. That’s not my focus. Rather, my focus is listening for what wants to be created through the life force that I am. My focus is on being love in more moments. My focus is in living a mission I was put here to live. Really, it’s to feel and express the mission my soul came with in this lifetime, and the “I” follows that. 

Part of that mission, I know this to be true, is to gracefully experience love. First in my own heart, and with the divine, and then with others. My mission is also to write, to bring forward the teachings that life has given me while I’ve been fumbling around the past number of years so desperately trying to be successful yet with awakening details that blow one’s mind – my ego personality was working hard, and Spirit was still working through me, and if I can go ahead and enjoy some newfound stability, then I can organize these findings into some healthy transmissions that maybe, just maybe, can impact the world on a larger scale for the better. Not because my ego personality wants to make money or run a business, but because the world could benefit from what I’ve learned. 

As a mentor of mine said to me this week, “Sarah, you’re a teacher.” It’s true. I was a career educator, it is throughout my Human Design, and Spirit’s been nudging me to recognize the words “spiritual teacher” lately. This is a funny and wild thing for a human woman to recognize, to accept, to commit to walking the path of without corruption that comes through the ego. Thank God the path has lead me through such humbling depths such that the ego is now subdued enough that I can get the work done without being attached to the identity of teacher. Well played, Soul. Okay, I accept. Let’s do this. 

I’m working on allowing myself to recognize that what happens when the ego lets go, and the life is lived through love, is probably a pretty amazing thing. It’s probably bigger and more successful than anything my ego-identified self ever dreamed of before. And I am so glad that it is not my ego that will be driving that train, and that my love, and the vastness of my heart, finally feels ready for what may happen – if my soul and the divine decide this is what is meant to be. 

Thanks for reading my update. This was part 2. I’ll be back with parts 3, 4, & 5.

Do you have a desire to be able to own your full story, the full truth of who you are? Join the Sacred Remembering Community today. www.sarahpoet.com/community

PART 1: Update – I got a job & moved to community.

Last year, I started to dream about living in a community with my son. I had dabbled in sharing land with other mothers during the beginning of the pandemic, and I liked the idea of groups of intentional people coming together around a purpose or cause. 

I am very much an introvert, and I actually have very little patience for long, winding conversations about ideals. I prefer setting conscious intention and then trusting that my/our actions and the Creator are co-creating according to that intention. So I didn’t want to live in an ideological or unspecified “intentional community,” because I thought it would drive me nuts. 


So after a breakup last year, I’d had it. I called a friend who was well connected and told her what I was looking for. “I want to live in community. I want to work with good people toward a common goal. I want to raise Rowan among other people and not be so damn isolated. This solo path is exhausting.” 

I spoke it. 

She introduced me to some people the following weekend and I felt a connection to that land. I hoped that it might work out, but long story short, that wasn’t the place. 

The year went on and one day, an old friend asked me for a session that I’d offered her over a year prior. When I read the email, I got full body chills. That, to me, is a sign that something sacred is at play. For weeks or even months, I didn’t know what that sacred thing was. 

We did the session and she saw and experienced my wisdom and skill at coaching and energy work. She had known me for a long time, but she was surprised by how far I’d come. She knew me when I was a school principal. Now, I am a woman who has been walking my soul path, clearing my trauma on all levels, honing my energy, and living in union with Spirit for many years. To say the least, I’m different than I used to be! 

She had been advising a local man who wanted to bring a big vision through. He was at an age appropriate for retiring, but he had one last major, albeit ideal, project he wanted to complete. She introduced me to him and he said that the conversation we had over tea was one of the most interesting conversations he’d had in a long time. 

What did we talk about? The Regenerative Feminine, applying concepts of resource sustainability and regeneration to women, the Heartland, the things I’d been channeling for the past three years connected to my ancestral connection to this region, and more. 

I started working with him. I took a job – at first a few hours a week, then up to a half time salary. After five years of entrepreneurship, I began investing my life force and energy into the community that he has built and wants to build. This has been a huge adjustment, and honestly, necessary. On a sovereignty path, it’s easier to be fully sovereign on your own. But the real work is in relationships, which this situation is teaching me in real time. 

As I visited this piece of land, thirty minutes south of Asheville where I’ve lived for many years, the Regenerative energies were immediately clear. In one of my first encounters with this land, in a vision she showed me “entangling” with her like in the movie Avatar when they’re about to ride those winged creatures and their hair intertwines. It was magical. 

My journey of becoming sovereign in my feminine resources, of clearing the shadow masculine & feminine from my own life, of knowing my value and worth, and the journey I’ve been walking since 2020 of the Heartland – the place beyond power and domination, the place of the Regenerative Feminine – has been long! In February of this year, a book proposal for Heartland received an Honorable Mention from HayHouse – the biggest publisher of spiritual books on the planet. Everything felt like it was getting closer to coming to fruition. This land seemed to tell me that there was nothing left to worry about. This land seemed to welcome me into a new kind of frequency. 

The process of establishing an exchange agreement based in sovereign energetics, that valued all of my resources – not just my time – was a big process. I’m not sure we got it completely correct, but I lived a process that was pretty cutting edge in that I advocated to get paid for feminine resources that our economic system historically overlooked. I look forward to helping other women and organizations in these kinds of fair-exchange conversations in future consulting work. 

Last week, I walked into the empty house on the property that my son and I would be moving into the next day. I wanted to do a deep energy clearing that I’d learned from Sarah Thomas years ago to purify the space for us. I did some work outside the house, too, to let the Spirits of the Land know that we intend to be in right-relationship with them. 

On the counter inside the kitchen was a freshly baked coffee cake from a woman who lives here, and a bouquet of flowers picked from the farm. I was greeted by two coworkers with hugs and celebration, and a fancy little note in the flowers said, “Welcome.” 

I’m writing this in my new dimly lit bedroom, two cats on the bed and a dog asleep on the floor, listening to the first rainstorm I’ve heard here. I live at the bottom of a spillway that looks like a waterfall, at the bottom of a lake, and I’ve heard that as the surface area of the lake collects extra water, the amount coming over the waterfall which is essentially in my front yard can become quite…. powerful. Flowing, forceful water, collecting in front of my home – so many feminine metaphors exist in this place.  

In Heartland, “saturation” is a frequency of the regenerative feminine. So is “pooling.” Saturation is when the particles of matter all become encoded with the connectivity of water, allowing for a transmission of regenerative current to spread through everything. Pooling is when resources collect and when a woman doesn’t have to keep moving in order to keep receiving, rather, she slows and allows her resources to pool – counter to patriarchal notions that tell her she must always be productive. 

I’m living at the bottom of the lake, where an abundant waterfall of water spills, slides over huge rocks, and pools in front of my deck. 

I am listening for Her messages. I am listening to this land. 

Less than a year after I set the intention, I am living in community. Not too hippy, not too idealistic. We’re building solutions for regenerative economics and each contributor’s resources will amplify. I get to bring my wisdom and energetics to this place. A few weeks ago, I lead five coworkers in an Earth-energy healing around a big Grandmother tree.  She showed me the vision the night before, how to involve the core team, and each step of the process. I invited them that morning, they came, we laid roses and co-created a land clearing. My 72 year old male “boss” included. 

So, it’s pretty cool. I’m grateful. My son gets here on Wednesday and he’ll have a summer job here this summer. People are asking about him and looking out for us both. As a single woman, responsible for parenting and the economic responsibilities of my family, I was tired of being a one-woman-show. I was tired of fierce entrepreneurship and fierce independence – ready instead for a little interdependence, a little more recognition of what we all need and require… belonging. 

Thanks for reading my update. This was Part I. I’ll send more soon. 

PS: My work isn’t going away. In fact, that’s kind of the point to repositioning my life in this way. It’s like I made an inner-masculine decision to put more stability in place in my life, as a woman and a parent, so that my life’s true work can come through. And I moved to a place where the point of the community is for each person’s true work to come through. 

Heartland 2023 is coming. Heartland is the place of the Regenerative Feminine. Join the waitlist HERE: www.sarahpoet.com/heartland

Saying the “R Word” triggered an old trauma. This is a soul story of choosing Unity over separation.

Acknowledging the truth of a trauma ultimately allows us to integrate more into our own wholeness. But the real-life path of this is messy. Trust me, I know.

It’s been a year since I said the R-word. I remember because today is 2/22 and I sent the letter right before this date last year, because I was going to the beach the weekend of 2/22 and I wanted it to be sent before the three days I’d spend beside the ocean. 

I hadn’t ever thought of it as the R-word. I’d said, “childhood abuse” and “sexual trauma” for years, but not the R-word. 

Once last year, a counselor and healer I’ve seen for fifteen years was talking to me about the work I do and is my purpose to do in the world, and she was saying how I take all these life experiences and alchemize them into something to offer for others. And she said encouragingly, “You’re not meant to talk directly about incest, you’re meant to talk about love and all the things you’ve found on the other side.”

I hadn’t ever said “incest” either. 

But then my sister got pregnant in 2021, with this baby that actually came to me three months before she was even pregnant, and it had said, “I’m coming, you have to tell her.” Yes, I’m talking about hearing from the Soul of the baby before it had incarnated. I heard it loud and clear, but I hadn’t spoken to my sister in a long time – nor my other sister or parents, and I waited to take action, wondering what exactly to do. Then, six months later, I found out that she was three months pregnant. I had stalled, and now it was time. 

I’d asked to speak with her, but likely knowing what it was about, she declined. I pressed  a bit, said I had to, and she drew a boundary. 

I started to panic, actually having the first panic attacks in years. In my apartment, I have a meditation cushion inside a walk-in closet and one day I was in there just panting and praying, “What to do?!” and the voice said, “Well, let’s start with breathing.” 

I was panicking because I couldn’t keep this child safe if she wouldn’t listen to me. And it was coming from the same deep-down knowing that came without words for all those years as a child that I wasn’t safe, and then the first years of my son’s life when I would keep him away from my father at all costs, because that was my instinct, but not ever directly saying why. The family just went on pretending like nothing was ever, nor had ever been, wrong, and that was why it had been such a mind fuck for decades about whether or not I was going to even believe myself. But why would your full and basic instinct be, “Keep the children away from your father” if that instinct wasn’t warranted? Don’t anyone dare try to negate or explain away that rhetorical question. 

There was a fierceness that arose after the panic attack in the closet. If I had to drive ten hours and knock on her door, I’d do it. I was going to do whatever was needed. But then, I was in a session with a practitioner about what was happening, and afterward I knew what I needed to do. I didn’t need to drive to her house, I needed to expose this. It was almost a blessing that she wouldn’t listen, because if she had, then this silenced, festering thing would just stay among two women and still be protected. I had to expose the truth the whole way. 

It was a knowing, a deep-down, clear as day knowing, the feeling I get when there is not another way forward. 

I’d known since I was fifteen that something had happened to me. When I had my first boyfriend, memories came back, and clearly. But I don’t remember what exactly they were, because when I confided in my mother at that time, she told me not to be silly. I remember the day. It was summer time and she was driving and I remember her stoic face, looking forward focused on the road, telling me not to be silly. To say it more clearly, I told her that my father had sexually abused me, and her response was, “Don’t be silly.” 

And so I spent about fifteen years trying not to be silly. 

My mother says she doesn’t remember me ever telling her that. This is called “dissociation” and my mother has it. Big time. Because in the years that I’ve been uncovering and honoring the truth of what had happened to me and to my family back through the generations, for the purpose of healing, I have tried to sit and talk to my mother. I’ve asked her to sit on Zoom so that I could see her eyes and expression as I asked her questions. She denied ever knowing, or ever remembering me telling her, and yet, when I finally said the R-word, nothing changed then either. 

This showed me that I was right all along. It’s an incredible thing to try to reconcile or even wrap one’s head around – that your mother may have known and didn’t protect you. That you were somehow her sacrificial lamb. It’s almost impossible to fathom, and I’ve been grateful to women like Eve Ensler over the years who named such choices of some mothers – to ignore the thing that would have to tear a family apart if acknowledged, in order to secure one’s own resources by acting as if nothing had ever happened. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said, as she discounted the thing she didn’t want to look at. 

I spent my twenties in a codependent relationship with one man, which was a way my psyche sought safety because both he and I knew that I’d been abused, but within the relationship, we could deal with it. I spent my thirties reclaiming my body from trauma patterns, reclaiming the truth and my power, reclaiming the health of the gut with “inexplicable” lifelong stomach pains and trouble digesting. Reclaiming, reclaiming, reclaiming.  I had the worst digestive issues when intimacy with a new man would become a possibility. I learned to identify how I was overriding trauma symptoms and entering relationships with men too quickly, and I learned how and why I was attracted to men who seemed to love me but then would discard of me – not surprising since my father stopped talking to me long before I said the R-word, but when I stopped taking his money and removed myself from the power dynamics. 

When I gave my TEDx and started telling even a little bit of the truth that had been kept behind the curtain, I lost contact with them more and more. I always had the sense that owning the truth would mean losing them. It did, and I knew I had to keep choosing my path. I also knew that to exist within the family unit meant to participate in a great pretending. I instinctively knew this, but I had no idea how right I was. 

I spent years reclaiming my ability to tell my own truth, and to even use my voice, as it had been stuck in my throat for so many years. I spent over a decade in various therapies trying to figure out my trauma-ridden brain and its sense of enoughness, lovability, worthiness, and just where all of the tendrils of coercion and abuse had reached. It was an extensive search. And a maddening one. Eventually this coincided with a rich spiritual, sacred journey as well. 

In 2020, I wrote and delivered an original monologue for the classic Vagina Monologues V-Day event on two stages in Asheville about the sins of the Father (double entendre) and the hidden abuses in the church. Because the R-action had actually occurred at least once in a church. IN the church. I was under five, and he broke me, on purpose. Very much on purpose. 

He was raised in a satanic cult as a child. No one in my family talks about this, nor do they really know – another reason I’ve stayed kind-of quiet. My deep spiritual journey whereupon I asked questions such as “Why does patriarchy and separation even exist in the first place?” had lead me to actually discover the truth of the S R A in 2019. History explained through good vs. evil and the systemic mechanisms of keeping people away from unity and a unified Source – the S R A has been very instrumental in that. 

And then I found out that it had infiltrated my family lineage, and that my father had been affected very, very directly and personally. Isn’t it amazing how life just lines up the pieces for you to discover the truth of who you really are? I had been healing trauma for over seven years at that point and was living a life committed to the journey of the soul when I found this out. In the beginning, I wouldn’t have been equipped to handle the news. In fact, I spent about a year even integrating what this even meant. It explained so much, and yet, now I knew the tendrils went much, much deeper. Because if he had been raised in a cult, then he had also raised me with cult-like mind control and tendencies of coercion, abuse, and soul-breaking. I knew a lot about trauma at that point and began trying to wrap my head around the potential effects of intergenerational trauma from cult abuse, let alone sa ta nic rit ual cult abuse. Most people dismiss that this even exists, because it is so hard to accept and because it involves far more people and people in power than anyone wants you to know, and I found one psychiatric doctor who validates patients who have these stories. He was too busy to talk with me about my intergenerational curiosities. 

I was raised by a man who was raised in the most horrific circumstances, who witnessed brutal, indescribable things. The worst of human behavior. They broke him. And he never had the therapies, the trauma interventions, the parenting classes, or anything that would prevent him from passing on what he had learned, and from using the cult tactics on his family. He’d married a teacher and I was their first born daughter. He had the devil inside of him and I know he wanted to do well also, because he spent a lot of time in church, gave a lot of money to charity, and tried to give us a good and prosperous life. So we didn’t talk about the devilish parts, because my mother wanted the white house on the suburban street with the photos of a normal family in frames in the stairwell. So she kept it looking good and we didn’t talk about his episodes. In the same “don’t be silly” strategy, she’d go on serving dinner if there had just been a fight or if he had disappeared again and she didn’t know where her husband was.

My body was always confused about what it felt and sensed, the inexplicable fears and digestive issues, the fierce rebellion I felt. And as an adult, I spent many years breaking free – slowly at first, and then fiercely as if my life depended on it, and then, just when I thought I was pretty regulated about it all, this letter had to be written and that sent an unexpected fire alarm to my brain. Fuck if it doesn’t take so much longer to heal than you think it will. Even after years of reclamation, and teaching other women to reclaim their voice and truth from patriarchal traumas and silence, I wasn’t exempt from a deeply embedded trauma reaction, probably in response to a deep threat made long ago about what might happen if I ever told. No doubt, and I remember many such incidents now, it was a threat on my life. 

I sent the letter it to everyone in my family my generation and above. I sent it to the parents of the daughter I’d placed for adoption at birth. I said, “He raped me.” I said, “I believe she knew about it.” I said, “Do not leave children in their presence.” I did not feel fear when I sent it, I felt clarity. I knew it had to be done, and I would do it a thousand times over so that the lineage of secrecy and child abuse stop. And it did. It feels a bit, in hindsight, like willingly stepping in front of a train that has been picking up cargo and momentum for a very long time. Thankfully, I suppose I was strong enough at that point to not even realize the personal risk. That train just had to stop. 

My aunt wrote me a card with hand-drawn heart balloons that said how sorry she was that she hadn’t known and didn’t protect me as a child. I heard from my cousin, “My mom believes you….” and then the trailing off of that sentence made me realize that others didn’t. 

Oh. Well, I suppose denial is a strategy that’s been at play for a long time, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised that they just “opted out” of believing me. I’m not necessarily offended by this, but I also have no time or tolerance for it. Some never reached out at all. 

The letter did elicit a reply from my sister and we scheduled a phone call. While she wouldn’t directly talk about it, I was able to ask her a series of yes/no questions such that I finally understood that she understood me, and that this child would be protected. That’s all I cared about. This was the first grandchild born into the family since my son thirteen years prior. I’d protected my children but I wasn’t going to be there to directly ensure the safety of my niece or nephew. 

But then interesting things happened. The sex I was having with a partner began to feel rammy at best. I didn’t feel his heart and I felt a lot of his anxiety in the sex. Because he struggled with erectile dysfunction, I tried to be loving and kind, and yet the sex was not connected enough for me. I tried to work with him through it – always the coach, always the one to see some soul-potential and hope they walk through that door, always the one to give too much or stay too long. (Former habits, I’m now happy to say.) Eventually he stopped trying to find access to his heart by ramming himself into my vagina and he left. Not great timing in the grand scheme of things. Ram-ram-goodbye as a pattern was a significant trigger for me, and it contributed toward a… well, a breakage of sorts. A deep heartbreak occurred from it all. It was all too much. 

My family was so far gone. I still haven’t met my nephew. My other sister is pretty much best friends with my parents, and no one acts like I ever said rape. My grandmother served him Thanksgiving dinner and my mother sat beside him, which I was surprised to find was another hit to my heart. I didn’t know that I’d care about the added layers of loss and I didn’t see them coming. 

I had always been the strong one. I was resilient, strong, ran on adrenaline when I had to. In my years of deep reclamation that felt like survival and liberation both, I got a lot of black tattoos. At first, I got big black flowers on my shoulder blades and around my shoulders, and then realized that I’d subconsciously given myself self-protective armor. So I got more tattoos down my arms so it didn’t look so much like armor, but I did look like a badass. I was frequently called a badass. 

People have told me things like: they assume I’m always fine, they assume I am always able to make money, they assume I don’t need anything because I don’t ask, that I’m always strong. Because that’s how I learned to be. I learned from my mother to pretend like everything was under control even when it wasn’t. I’m writing these things in retrospect, as I realized them while looking in a really authentic mirror this year. 

This year, amidst all of this, the most beautiful things also happened. I went so deeply into the gaping hole of unlovability that I felt – a foundation that had been set long ago – and there I sat, not self-abandoning. My friend Audrey recognized where I was and sent me homeopathic potions and love notes for support. I did the emotional freedom technique, hiked in the woods in the mornings with my dog, treated my body with care, and increased my nutrition – every day. I did parasite cleanses, enemas, kundalini yoga, EMDR, energy healing and more. These are a few of my favorite things to get free of abuse frequencies and lingering wtf cult mind control programming. 

I aligned with Source. I partnered with the Divine. I healed with the Earth and with the earth grids. I lived Heartland – this work that I began calling “my dharma” during this time. I was pissed I wasn’t finishing writing a book and it felt like an eight-month set back in the journey. Of course it wasn’t. 

I deeply cared for myself differently than I ever had. I wasn’t surviving anymore. I was loving myself and wanting to know how I felt truly free and beyond what had been. I stopped being defined – energetically and otherwise – as the one who this had happened to. It was done. 

I found myself in an uncharted place – the territory of my true heart. It was messy and pure. I took down the guards and learned more deeply how to have clarity about what gets my resources without having to defend myself. As a result of childhood abuse, including emotional and though it’s an overused word, narcissistic abuse, I had a habit of giving myself to things in hopes that I’d be valued after the fact. This resulted in habits of over-giving or what I call “giving to get” which are both unsustainable and inauthentic. I believe I have learned authentic love, and what do you know, straight through the authentic portal of my own heart as the pathway to God. 

During this time, my business both financially failed and there was a wisdom to allow it to disassemble its previous structure in order to be rebuilt on different energetics. Even though I have had (before this year?) a knack for holding things together and making it look like I was successful, after the letter and the rammy sex trigger, my money stopped flowing. Spiritual people say, “You’ll always have what you need.” Well, I didn’t. And I also couldn’t push myself to “sell” anything anymore because I just wanted to do things authentically, with people who wanted the same. So I let go. There are different energetics at play regarding money when you have had this kind of trauma, which I now understand better and am devoted to helping women get free. Rape trauma, combined with psychological trauma around safety and money, is a different beast that is not going to be easily overcome with positive thoughts or affirmations. It is way, way more than that and getting through it, I have found, requires focus and devotion. I couldn’t beat this before when I’d tried toughness or resiliency or manifestation techniques or spirituality alone. It has required a daily grit inside of a daily love inside of a daily faith. This I will share in Heartland – we have to be able to clear the residual trauma energetics that steal our life force and make it difficult to secure or hold money, and we get to be prosperous in our own Source-Alignment. Our Soul is enough. In fact, it’s so powerful that that is why we were harmed to begin with – to make us forget. 

My father had used money to manipulate my compliance in more fucked-up ways than I can even figure out, and so my psyche never wanted to need help, but this past year I did. I had the opportunity to really undo patterns of both believing I needed the rescue while simultaneously fearing it, learning that to receive help was safe, and doing the soul work of trusting that my business, finances and psyche were all likely perfectly reorganizing themselves in tandem with the divine. But it was a mess and I had to face the fears I thought were long-past about having enough and being supported. Hint: it comes from within. The more aligned I am to my authentic frequency, sacredness, creativity and soul, the more fulfilling and resourced it all gets. 

The other thing that happened was that I became far more loving and graceful, and this continues. My business became a ministry. My membership stopped being an aspect of a sales funnel and instead a joyful community with growing purpose and cohesion. I stopped sharing unless I really had something to say. I started creating again – like, real, soul-activating, right brain electrifying, eros-derived creativity. I’m still diving into that, most recently with a frame drum. On all those walks in the woods, I was more and more deeply activated into gridwork, earth relationship, my divine sight, and how the fucked up earthly circumstances are all part of the bigger invitation to return to love. I deeply realized the human need for belonging, on the other side of all of that fierce independence, leadership and resiliency. I need connection and belonging. I need it still. 

I have known for years that I was walking a “soul journey” that I was then meant to share back, but I took a break in that. I didn’t know if I was done or broken or unmoved or what, but I honored the time to go inward and had no idea when or if I’d come out. And what I want to say about this space is that it is a holy mess. It is a holy becoming, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, at the risk of sounding cliche. I’ve known that I’m on this walk that quests, “What does Union actually look like in this lifetime?” and yet, actually exiting the matrix reality of “I was violated by my father and it didn’t stop there” is a wild ride in the lived experience. It is a story of separation, for certain. I call finding our way through these 3D “realities” in a separation matrix and then allowing ourselves to choose love, to be who we landed on earth to become, the Sacred Remembering path. 

Maybe it was the reality of losing family seemingly once and for all last year, or maybe it was a little invisible string in my brain, implanted long ago by an old, satanic threat, that got pulled when I spoke out that said, “If you say this, you will be killed and the people you love will be killed.” Maybe it was the pattern of abandonment showing up again from men. I didn’t realize what had happened as it was happening, but my brain just got stuck.  I just did the best I could do to love myself in the day to day. 

And then Spirit pulled me forward. My friend Lisa began walking beside me daily on the spiritual path helping to activate me toward strength and an integrated high-heart and monad. My kundalini yoga practice became a daily practice as I watched my brain changing for the better, clearing the fog and patterning of mind control. At the turn of this year, my soul said, “Enough EMDR, enough therapy and trying to figure it out, look forward.” Special miracles happened. I heard Spirit say, “It is done.” I heard the guidance, “Go beyond your Earthly parents and realize that you are a child of the Divine.” When I said yes to that, I realized something new called the Holy Daughter Template, which is more divine information about the feminine beyond patriarchy and what this actually feels like. 

So why am I writing this? 

Well, it’s 2/22 and something in me said to do it. I realized that I subconsciously pulled the red shirt out of my closet that I’d worn for our Sovereign Womb Ceremony on 2/22/22 where over 80 women and men joined for the remembrance of the sovereign feminine before the Fall of Lyra – before separation. I’d sent the letter right before that ceremony, and then something in me committed as I led the ceremony, and as I stood on the beach in the following days, something in me knew to open Heartland again for a group of women, which I did. 

Spirit’s always there. 

The soul is always trying to integrate truth, light, and wholeness. 

Life is always life and then it is so much more. 

Was there a turning point? If I had to say that there was one, it was realizing (again) that what the destroyer energy of domination, patriarchy, and control does is to interrupt love, to try to destroy it, and to separate union. It is the greatest pain I can imagine, and I’ve felt it very deeply in this lifetime and countless others. My heart has been working some deep, deep alchemy in recent years to heal the pain of separation. To say that it’s hard sometimes is an understatement. 

To be resilient in the nervous system is not enough. It is not enough to fight these forces of separation, and to fight them only exhausts you.  It requires an epic re-connection to Source, a re-devotion of the entire soul, and to source strength from Source. Otherwise, and I know from experience, one will be knocked down, again and again, in an attempt to stop Union from happening. I don’t doubt that they especially seek to attack those who carry the light of the Christos Sophia, those of us on the Unity team. It is absolutely true, and we have to be strong through Union, through Source. 

To name the truth to keep the next generation of children safe (and yes the lineage lines were cleared, and yes it was worth it), I ended up experiencing more separation than I’d ever known to expect. With the end of another relationship that borderline triggered my sexual trauma and all the way triggered the pain of unlovability, I got to alchemize the pain and know the heart and love in a new and reclaimed way, and to know the Beloved beyond form.  

And then I realized – the pain of separation is how the bad guys win. It’s their whole, cowardly gig. And so I choose love. I choose to move beyond the energetics of separation, and I choose to remember the frequency of pure love and try to live inside the integrity of that as many moments of the day as I can remember to do so. More and more, I touch the spaces beyond separation. My gut is healing another layer of tension that I recently discovered. My mood and my blood sugar don’t tank anymore. I’m calmer. I don’t get as caught up in triggers and I re-Source back to the Divine.  My nervous system is pretty regulated thanks to Kundalini yoga. My mind is strong and beyond gads and gads of mental programming that I didn’t even see until I was ready to go beyond it. 

I will never again feel shame or silence about my past, I will hold it like sacred, swaddled truth, and I will create with it, because of it, because of it all. I will no longer live in separation. 

I’ve said this so many times in my work, and I have to remember it myself – this year being one big example. In the old template of separation, we orient and operate as women in response and reactivity to external masculine. If we are living our lives watching what patriarchy is doing, watching what men are doing and protecting ourselves from how they might take from us, we are living in response to the perpetrator. Any real-life perpetrator can be long gone from your life and the remnants still there. Isn’t that just how the evil works? Controlling you long after they are gone. When we orient to that, we define ourself as “the child who was raped,” “the woman who has endured trauma,” and so on. We become defined in the fight against it. But there is another freedom and another template altogether, when we realize and leave that all behind. When we set it free, and remember it is Union that we came for and Union that we ARE. 

It’s been a year. And that’s enough. I am sacred, I am sovereign, I am free. I am the child of the divine. My creation doesn’t depend on the external, rather my womb creates with the light of God. 

I am the Holy Daughter. I am love. I AM.  

*** Blessing this space within the love of the Unified Field and within the clear and sacred grids of Gaia.*** 

The purpose of fear & how to get free.

If we look at it as if everything is happening for us rather than against us, that a purpose of fear is to direct you to your sovereignty.

I find fear to be a fascinating, tricky little bitch.

And I say that with respect to the role that fear plays in our lives. If life is a spectrum of emotions, all somewhere between love and fear, how often do you lean toward fear and how often do you lean toward radical love?

How often are you choosing one or the other, versus operating on a default?

I think if most people are honest, fear is the common default.

The fear of not having money causes people to slave away their waking hours to someone else’s cause.

The fear of not having love causes people to spend endless hours on dating sites or pining for that love that might one day grace their lives.

It’s wild, how much time and energy fear takes from you.

Recently, I learned more information about my upbringing that revealed some really grotesque truths to me. I grew up in a family with deep secrets that most everyone in the family still avoids or denies knowing. But in an effort to bring the truth to light, and to liberate my psyche from habitual trauma responses, I go digging for the truth where most would prefer to avoid it.

And even when I discover a truth that is fascinatingly fucked up, at this point, I’m actually grateful for it. Why? Because it helps me to feel less fear.

Did you ever notice how fear has a tendency to become pervasive? It’s nebulous. It sneaks into places you didn’t expect it to be. If one good thing happens for you, you might find yourself wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. This is fear, just lingering around you while you let it.

The purpose of fear is so that you have less power and autonomy – words that could be used to describe what I call Sovereignty. The purpose of fear is so that you spend your time worrying or giving your power to something other than your true purpose, distracting you from your own clarity.

Fear, truly, is not working for you. It’s working against you, unless you notice it and redirect your actions accordingly. Fear will cause you to live on an adrenal-response autopilot called fight/flight. It will hijack your nervous system and therefore your attention. All of these things are taking your life force and, again, stopping you from being who you came to be.

After finding out about another layer of horrific family secrecy that was used to control me as a child – with effects lasting in my subconscious well into adulthood – I was watching the mechanisms that had been put into play long ago. I was, to be clear, not in a fight/flight response about what I’d found out, but rather, I was observing it neutrally so that I could study the response patterns in my thoughts and body.

I became the watchful observer, to witness the cause/effect, and to change my behaviors accordingly. To get more power and sovereignty back.

What I found was that I was actually living, to some degree, from a fear-based energy due to a trauma response from long ago. I couldn’t see it before now, and then, by shining the light of day onto it, the patterns became clear.

And then it became relatively simple to see what to “do” about it.

First of all, don’t react. Don’t give the fear more fear.

Second, don’t turn away. See it, look at it, stare it down. Fear lives in the dark, so shine the light. (Light-shining podcast forthcoming.)

These two things together, simple in concept only when the nervous system has the capacity not to engage in the fear trigger, can neutralize a fear.

The purpose of fear is, honestly, to control you. Fear lives off of your energy while you spin in circles trying to outrun it. Fear that is the result of a trauma keeps you in a loop of victimhood, wherein your energy is perpetually wasted.

To get sovereign, we have to look at our fear patterns. We could say, I suppose, if we look at it as if everything is happening for us rather than against us, that a purpose of fear is to direct you to your sovereignty.

What are you afraid of?

Where are your fears running your behavior?

Where is fight/flight fueling your decision making about how to spend your time, energy, and attention?

Where are you checking out in your life in order to avoid feeling the fight/flight?

If you’re courageous enough to look at these answers, you can get in front of the fear. You can neutralize it. And in that way, the purpose of fear, when you get wise to it, can be to help you stand in the full power and truth of who you are.

Sarah Poet is a polarity integration expert with a knack for seeing the hidden shadows that result from this bizarro separation matrix we inhabit. To book a consultation for individual or couples coaching, or workplace gender reconciliation counseling, please visit www.sarahpoet.com/book.

Photo: Stock, pexels . com

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.