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I don’t know when that appreciation for the unknown started to diminish, only that it did, and that a heart once open to life’s uncertainties slowly gave way to something more brittle: the need for predictability, and a grip on control over every aspect of my future. I recall a catalyst for that shift in my sophomore year of college, when a routine dental procedure led to an infection in my throat and lungs that nearly killed me. There is nothing like a brush with death to reorganize a nervous system around one objective: survive. I came out of that year more disciplined than I went in, more terrified of failure than I’d ever been, counting calories, moderating every emotion, and managing every interaction like a variable I could control if I just tried hard enough. It was exhausting, and I didn’t comprehend the toll it would eventually take on me.

We are primal creatures underneath all our sophistication, wired to scan for threat, even when that threat is hardly existential. As a result, we seek the certainty — the known entity. Tony Robbins has spent decades teaching that certainty and its apparent opposite, the craving for surprise, variety, and change, are both core human needs, often battling inside the same person. Certainty says: if I know what’s coming, I can prepare, and at least minimize the damage. Antithetically, uncertainty implies that a life fully mapped in advance, with no surprises and nothing left to discover, would be unbearable. We vacillate between the two all the time, and we spend most of our lives trying to reconcile a largely unconscious contradiction.

The most unexpected thing I’ve done, astonishing even myself, was leave a stable corporate career for an entrepreneurial path. The version of me five years ago would never have believed it if you’d told her she would give up the apparent “security” and professional identity of “success” for a career where the only certainty is that the odds are stacked against you. I still don’t have the predictability I spent decades trying to manufacture, particularly after my illness. And to be honest, I still don’t know what next month’s income will look like, yet somewhere inside that ongoing uncertainty, I have never felt more alive and like myself.

Since then, the best parts of my business have taken shape through people and opportunities I couldn’t have foreseen. I was on a train in New York, a city neither of us lives in, reading (not ironically) The Courage to Be Disliked on my way to visit my college roommate, when I met someone who is now a dear friend and business collaborator. It was an encounter we both now call a serendipitous Universe Collision. A separate opportunity, coaching and facilitating a founders group, came from a woman I met at Hoffman, which, if you are unfamiliar, is essentially an anonymous healing experience that can only be described as ten years of therapy in one intensive week. Neither one came from crafting social media content, a pitch deck, or a strategic plan. I was simply being myself, unguarded, out in the world, following my joy and doing things I love (and yes, I even love the therapy).

The same thing happened recently in my personal life, after many years of singledom and cycling on and off the obligatory dating apps that mostly left me depleted and uninspired. A couple of months ago, on my regular morning walk, a man stepped into my path and asked me out. I would never have clocked him as a potential partner, but I was impressed by his courage, so I said yes, never expecting it to evolve beyond a first date. In the short time since, he has changed the shape of my days, even though very little of this relationship resembles what I thought I was looking for.

None of this is an argument against a clear vision and goals. A direction still matters. Certainty is useful when you need driving directions. But it is uncertainty, the unexpected, that makes the actual trip worth taking. It’s the wrong turn that becomes the better route; the sliding door moment when you meet the person who alters the trajectory of your life.

I believe wonder to be the most underrated emotion we have access to. We throw the word ‘wonderful’ around so casually that we’ve lost the felt sense of what it’s actually describing: the state of being genuinely in awe of your own experience. If you’ve spent years optimizing, gripping, trying to engineer every outcome so that nothing catches you off guard, I understand the impulse. I lived inside it for a long time. But I wonder what possibilities would unfold if we all opened our palms instead of tightening our fists? That kid in front of the closet already knew something it took me a lifetime to relearn: that not knowing what’s behind the door was the best gift of them all.

Sitting here in the quiet morning on my 41st birthday—a day that should be filled with joyous celebration—I find myself sobbing with grief. Yet I am reminded that life is the contrast: the immense gratitude for my blessings and the deep well of sorrow that I’ll never again hear my mother’s voice singing me happy birthday. I’ll never listen to her reminisce about the day I was born, and she’ll never get to experience the joy of watching me bring life into the world. And yet, my cup is spilling over with love as messages pour in from the beautiful people that continue to grace my journey. As tears pour out of me writing this, I am proud of the woman I am today, not escaping or numbing, just feeling all of it. Trusting she’s with me as I begin a new year of this full-spectrum experience where mystery and magic abound.

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As I was undergoing long overdue oral surgery last week with my mouth pried open and nitrous oxide streaming up my nostrils, I suddenly felt an intense wave of grief surge through my sedated body. Upon seeing the tears streaming down my face and assuming the local anesthesia hadn’t fully kicked in, the doctor asked me if I felt pain. I shook my head “no” – not the kind of pain she was suggesting, anyway. It was a curious sensation to be practically numb physically with my consciousness on overdrive. While I was overcome by sorrow, the immobilization provided a unique, detached vantage point from which to witness my emotional self. I suspect I belong to the majority in that I rarely welcome the presence of the darker, heavier feelings. However, I have become particularly adept at evading them during the last year, namely those associated with the greatest loss I have ever experienced: my mother. Nevertheless, all of my defense mechanisms – the perpetual busyness, overindulgences, and plain old denial – did not entirely eclipse my self-awareness, and I admit they were futile. As exhibited in the surgical chair, no amount of anesthesia or physical paralysis can permanently dam the powerful swell of emotions that define the human experience.

This event led me to wonder: what am I truly afraid of, and why do any of us resist emotions at all? My analytical brain rationalizes that feelings are just vibrations in the body, and as my wise friend recently reminded me, they are always temporary. The discomfort never lasts forever, and I have ample evidence to prove that I can weather the challenges. Yet anytime a thought about my mother arises that elicits the familiar, foreboding sense of an imminent breakdown, the primitive voice in my head pretending to keep me safe says that it is not a convenient time to let go. Sometimes the excuse is that I’m in a professional or social setting where emoting is inappropriate or might make others feel uncomfortable. But typically, the grief surfaces in the quietude of my own space and company, and on those occasions, I tell myself that the emotional hangover that inevitably occurs if I allow its unfolding is unproductive. Cue Netflix and another glass of wine, which somehow I justify as more productive…

Evidently, it’s never convenient to enter the shadowy abyss of sadness, but there’s an important distinction between what we consider opportune and what is authentic and essential. If I’m honest with myself, the real fear is not the dull headache and puffy eyes; it’s that I will be lost forever in the ensuing darkness. I might actually have to reckon with who I am without my mom – my world. I liken my feelings to an ever-present current swirling beneath the surface, and the second I stop treading water, my sorrow swiftly and quietly drowns me. Dr. David Hawkins describes this common sentiment in his book Letting Go. “We have become afraid of our inner feelings because they hold such a massive amount of negativity that we fear we would be overwhelmed by it if we were to take a deeper look.” The activities that I use to avoid the anguish not only serve to help me compartmentalize the overwhelm, but also to fill a massive void left in my heart, mind, and daily life from the absence of my mother in physical form. Maybe if I stay occupied, I won’t be crushed by this certainty: that I will never again be able to share the experience of falling in love, of seeking advice when I get pregnant and have a child of my own, or of leaning on her through the inevitable heartbreaks in my future. Like a child that covers her eyes and thinks the outside world can’t see her, I am fooling myself into believing that I get to bypass the real work of grappling with reality. In her biographical memoir entitled The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion’s honest depiction of losing her husband struck a nerve for me. She states, “Grief turns out to be a place none of us will know until we reach it. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail…Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.” After reading those sentences, it dawned on me that I am resisting the haunting emptiness once I surrender to the truth.

While I confess that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of my grief, intellectually I understand that loss – deep, painful loss – is inescapable. And so are the tears that follow, again and again without warning. We do not get to pick and choose the most convenient time for them to arrive, but we can decide to invite them in when they knock on our heart’s door. We are all surfing the wave of life, and with that thrill come the inevitable falls. I liken this brand of pain to the space between impact and drowning. If I were really surfing, eventually I’d have to come back to the surface for air, but clearly feelings are not limited by the same rules as the physical body. They say that grief never really ends; it just changes form. Even when you think you’ve transcended it – when you’ve come up for air – suddenly you find yourself incapacitated in a dentist chair bawling your eyes out. We expend so much energy trying to keep our heads above water, fighting life’s natural cycles and filling the empty spaces inside, but perhaps we aren’t supposed to do anything. Humans are beautiful because of our trauma and fragility, not in spite of it, and the void under the surface takes on a new meaning when we are willing to put on the goggles and simply open our eyes. So, next time I fall off the surfboard and plunge into the ocean’s depths, I will try to remember that not only do I know how to swim, but I can also breathe underwater and my warm, salty tears feel right at home.

While getting ready for a first date a couple of weeks ago, I spontaneously turned my camera on and started talking about it. I didn’t have a script, and it didn’t fit into any strategic content plan. It was an impulse in the spirit of being more open and vulnerable; less curation, more me. I told the story of a man managing a construction site near my house—one I’d passed by almost daily for months—who stopped me on my morning walk a few weeks earlier. Without knowing a thing about me, he asked me out in the middle of the street with unabashed boldness. I was floored not only by his approach, but by the person who showed up in our first proper encounter. Nothing about this meet-cute or match made sense. And yet, as I write this, multiple (long) dates and phone calls later, I can’t fight my body’s signals. My logical mind is attempting to reconcile the ease and lightness I feel with the specific image I’ve long held in my mind of the partner I’ve been calling in. And despite the incongruity, it feels like a big exhale, a long time coming after a lifetime of holding my breath.

I’ll back up. I’m forty. I ended my marriage shortly after a fairy tale wedding. I also walked away from a corporate career I’d spent fourteen years building. Often, I feel like I’m still finding my direction while friends I’ve known since childhood are long since settled: careers established, families formed, the whole picture of their lives assembled on schedule. They have what I’ve always pictured as the definition of success at this age. I know the comparison pattern for what it is, and some days I still can’t stop running it anyway. But below the starting-over feeling is a new narrative I’ve been gradually crafting with the help of great coaching, mentorship, and years of my own, often arduous inner work: I’m not behind; I’m re-writing the definition of success, creating my reality in real time, on purpose.

It feels safe to show the idyllic travel photos on Instagram and the polished presentations on LinkedIn. It feels far more unsettling to reveal that revenue hasn’t yet become predictable, or that all the profit gets reinvested back into my own coaching and development. It’s uncomfortable to share the part where I’m sitting at home on Friday night in sweatpants, feeling lonely, or when I’m ghosted after a date with a man I thought I’d see again.

I’ve reflected deeply in the four and a half years since my mother’s passing, and I can see now how much of her life she spent chasing the picture of success. I name it without judgment because I understand exactly where it came from, and I can see how important it was to her to ensure everything looked perfect from the outside. All of it, the entire architecture of achievement as measured by everyone around her, and in the end, none of it mattered to her. I’ve carried her on my shoulder through most of my own life edit, observing my similar tendencies, and vowing not to lose the truth of myself the way she did. By the end, mom traded the designer shoes and bags for t-shirts and flip-flops, and the big house in the gated neighborhood for a cottage by the water. She never stopped loving her bling, but she wore it differently, rocking it in her leather jacket, while flying free on the back of her partner’s motorcycle (yes, that’s her in the image below, just a couple of years before she died). She’d finally let out her own long exhale: forgoing the facade in favor of the feeling underneath it. I think about that trade constantly, and while I, too, love wearing her bling, her lesson of freedom is the most valuable inheritance she left me.

I remember when I learned that everything we want in life is for a feeling. I held that notion conceptually for a long time, but in these last few years, as I’ve blessedly returned to the wisdom of my own body—to really feeling again—it’s finally landing.

This new relationship has been a powerful mirror of that. And I’m watching the same principle rewrite my business right now. I’ve spent years trying to model success after coaches I admire, and what keeps getting reflected to me is less forcing it into a mold, less linear plan, more portfolio, more me: different interests intersecting and weaving into something that somehow makes sense. Maxwell Maltz named this same thing decades ago in his book Psycho-Cybernetics: “Creative striving for a goal that is important to you as a result of your own deep-felt needs, aspirations, and talents, and not the symbols which the Joneses expect you to display, brings happiness as well as success.”

If you’re reading this and some part of you feels behind, questioning your own measures of success, I see you. And if some version of your life looks right on paper and you’re still lying awake feeling like something underneath it isn’t right, I see you, too. But let’s take a walk together in nature, shall we? Let’s remember our essence and our innate freedom, deep below the layers performed for the ‘Joneses.’ Let the universe dish up its magic, surprising us while we’re tending to our hearts, giving us no choice but to listen for the full-body YES, just like I did, gratefully, when that man appeared in front of me on my morning walk.

Yet the day of the first ceremony, my body decided otherwise: my period started unexpectedly, and out of respect for the guidelines of this particular indigenous tradition, I couldn’t participate. Having prepared for months and traveled all the way to Costa Rica, the isolation from the rest of the group was harder to sit with than the Ayahuasca. The irony wasn’t lost on me: the fertility “problem” (among others) I’d come there hoping to heal was the very thing keeping me out of the ceremony. Instead, I watched my peers retreat each evening and re-emerge the next morning, sharing their trip reports. Even though this turn of events gave me a softer, more beautiful alternative ceremony of my own, the old patterns of comparison and the dreaded FOMO still crept in. This wasn’t on the figurative brochure.

That same tension—wanting to belong to the group and, somewhere underneath it, wanting my own singular ceremony—is one I recognize from the rest of my life too. On paper, I followed a fairly traditional path: good girl, good school, good grades. But in my first job out of college, the rug was pulled out from under me in an unexpected layoff after eighteen months of relentless work and stress. My soul leaned into the detour. I pursued a role with a company that served only Latin America as one of a handful of non-Latin employees on staff. A few years later, that position led to the chance to move to Argentina and then to Mexico, as a young, naive gringa leading teams in a foreign language on unfamiliar terrain. In retrospect, the early professional divergence revealed as much to me about my own psyche as any plant medicine ceremony has: an internal tug-of-war between wanting to take the road less traveled, to step outside the mold, and wanting the conventional path, the one where I fit neatly inside it. Both desires have always lived in me at once, and I’ve never fully surrendered to either.

That inner battle took up arms again recently while I was home visiting family. Holding my cousin’s six-week-old baby, I watched him and his wife move through new parenthood together in their early thirties, both with good jobs, a house, and a partnership that from where I sat looked effortless and exactly on schedule. Why not me? Why did I take the life detour? I felt a familiar ache, and the old story returned: that I’m behind, that I did things wrong, that there’s still something in me to heal and fix. Being single and forty, just starting on my entrepreneurial path: that wasn’t in the brochure either.

A passage from one of my favorite authors, Neale Donald Walsch, has helped me make sense of the message I heard so clearly in Costa Rica. In his book Happier Than God, he writes that calling a condition “perfect” is not the same as calling it “wonderful.” It is to say that it’s ideally suited to your soul’s agenda in this moment, which may very well be to change the condition as a means of knowing, demonstrating, and experiencing the vastness of Who You Really Are. He says: “It is therefore very okay to observe previously created conditions, circumstances, or possibilities that do not please you, to take responsibility for your role in co-creating them, to speak a word of gratitude for their existence, and then to choose again, creating another condition or circumstance without judgment or condemnation.”

Something clicked when I read this. It hasn’t eliminated the tension I feel between checking the boxes of a “normal” life and being the one who goes her own way, often by myself, but it has put that tension into context. It’s all perfect, I suppose, if I’m open to receiving what it offers. I liked that idea enough to tattoo it on my arm last year: a permanent reminder that, at some level, I am always choosing in alignment with the lessons I’m here to learn, and to trust my inner guidance system.

Reaching what many call “mid-life,” seeking an epic love, building my own business after detonating my corporate career, feeling behind, left out, comparing, questioning the whole thing: it’s all perfect. I want the partnership. I want to stop doing math on my own timeline every time I hold someone else’s baby. And in the same breath, I love the life I’m building. I love that my work is a creative act—an expression of my values and purpose. I love being a bridge between cultures, and between the linear corporate world and the esoteric, emotional, and energetic domains. Feeling beautifully, sometimes painfully, alone on my path: also perfect. The loneliness and the freedom live in the same body. So does the fear of missing out. So does the quieter, stubborn certainty underneath it all, that I haven’t.

I know that everything I desire, and plenty that I don’t, is on its way right on time. I am choosing it, after all. And I know that I am here to create the kind of life that was never going to fit neatly into any brochure. I imagine none of it will look remotely like what I expected. And that, too, is all perfect.

I acknowledge my privilege as I share this image of my past self, which has evolved into a modern-day version that is very much alive and well in me today. The depiction is not boastful, nor is it sarcastic. While I get a good laugh and feel occasional mortification looking back at old photos, I am not ungrateful for my mother’s principal hand in designing that life. I know without a doubt she was nurturing me with the best of intentions. I am merely observing the probable source of my conditioned perfectionist mindset from a more developed consciousness and the smidge of wisdom I’ve gained in my years. I’ve realized that attempting or even fooling myself that perfection is achievable is my kryptonite: irresistible yet repeatedly interfering with the possibility of any true emotional freedom. And who am I – who are any of us – if we aren’t free? While I can hold appreciation and sentience in the same emotional space, “perfect” has a steep price that I have paid for as long as I can remember. I used to roll my eyes at my grandmother, who would predictably plump the pillows behind my cousins and me on our visits to her home the minute we stood up from her sofa. Now, that is me. I caught myself in the act just last weekend. Admittedly, I crave flawlessness in my surroundings, my appearance, my resume…every domain of my life. It deceivingly gives me a sense of peace, control, and worthiness. Yet, regardless of the girth of my pillows, the suppleness of my hair, or the amplitude of my wardrobe, I am still a human being who experiences the entire emotional spectrum, including but not limited to grief, anxiety, and insecurity.

Nobody can actually do what most of us mere mortals are constantly attempting, both consciously and subconsciously, which is to bypass those existential challenges and difficult feelings. If that were even achievable, arguably, we would be denying the human experience altogether. That said, we are adaptive beings, and society provides multitudes of avenues and rewards for hiding our flaws behind masks of beauty and order.

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My own pattern of succumbing to the perfection trap was illuminated for me recently through a new, romantic relationship. After multiple years of singledom, a man unexpectedly walked into my life and made me believe in the possibility of love again. My empowered self recognizes that I generated that belief…but I digress. It was a sweet reminder that I am indeed capable of feeling those feelings, after all. I had a fleeting sense that my inner work over the last few years had finally tuned me to the right frequency. Nevertheless, after a few months of dating, he suddenly ceased all communication with me. I was “ghosted,” which seems like something you hear about after a one-night rendezvous, or with 20-somethings as they taste the flavors of the dating rainbow. Oh, how naïve of me. I asked myself, how could this happen? I am the total package! Deep down, I admit that I may not entirely believe that about myself, nor was I necessarily convinced that this man was the one. Nonetheless, I yearned for the relationship’s unfolding to be…well, perfect.

Perhaps that’s where I had it all wrong. It’s unlikely that I will ever know what led to this abrupt disappearing act; yet, it aroused discomfort and insecurity in me, which, after some distance from the event, I now choose to see as a teacher. At some level, throughout our time together, I felt myself endeavoring to demonstrate that I could be the perfect partner to this man. I didn’t even flinch when his beloved dog created a crime scene out of one of my favorite pairs of heels. How could someone walk away from this cool, composed chick?

While I don’t purport to believe in perfection at an intellectual level, my programming has undeniably laid the foundation for me to pretend that state is attainable. But at what cost? Conceivably, this guy was keen enough to detect the façade. We relate to messy, we empathize with chaos, and we crave reminders that we aren’t alone in our turbulent journeys. We all want to feel accompanied and held in that humanity. While I can only conjecture as to the reasons for his behavior, and although there were definitely kinder and more mature ways to end the relationship (cough…have a conversation), I appreciate that the experience has helped me know myself a little better, or rather, know my heart better.

Not coincidentally, as I’ve been reading the latest book entitled Living Untethered by one of my favorite authors, Michael Singer, the following quote stood out:

This humbling experience, as I perceive it, served as a beautiful illustration that perfection is the mind suppressing the heart. And it is also lonely, boring, and fundamentally inhuman. It’s not approachable or relatable; it is like being a child in a museum of lovely things that you can’t touch. I contend that perfection is often just a ruse for our intrinsic and very normal beliefs of inadequacy. While looking attractive, having all the academic and/or professional accolades, and curating an orderly environment may lead to a short-term reward, if I learned anything from my mother’s awful disease and unfairly premature departure from this human plane (not to mention all the other atrocities we see daily), it’s this: life is flawed and rarely seems fair. No amount of contrived magnificence allows us to bypass the ugliness. Sure, maybe things feel easier at the outset because of how people treat you if you look the part. But ultimately, we are all in the same club, projecting our fears and yearning to feel whole, worthy, and included. Instead, I propose that we start a new club where the price of entry is unabashed authenticity, and the hot chicks that skip the line are replaced by those who are a bit more of a hot mess – hairspray optional.

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|<< Rewind |<<

As a kid, I was enraptured by the art of scrapbooking. Capturing beautiful moments on camera and the creative process involved in memorializing them captivated my attention for countless hours throughout my middle and high school summer breaks, which I can now recognize as my earliest experiences of being “in flow”. I was so absorbed in my project that time just seemed to disappear. I recall how beautifully tangible it felt – the joy of taking my rolls of film to a store, waiting days for their development, and finally, like a kid on Christmas, unwrapping actual photographs that I could hold in my hand and shuffle through repeatedly. Likewise, I savored my annual trips to the craft store, where I carefully selected the appropriate hardbound book that I would proceed to enliven with pictures, stickers, newspaper cutouts, tickets, and more…all evidence of happy memories of the past year. While those old, bulky scrapbooks consume a ridiculous amount of space as they deteriorate in my closet today, I cling to my nostalgia now that all my modern-day memories are siphoned to the cloud – some impersonal and arcane dimension where digital information hides out of sight, only to be summoned for viewing through one of our (too) many devices.

It’s fascinating and somewhat ironic, recalling the time I used to dedicate to the act of preserving my past; yet, as long as I can remember, I’ve been hurrying into my future with reckless abandon, afraid of arriving “late” to a self-imposed deadline to achieve the milestones on my life to-do list. Indeed, my relationship with time has been a complex one, and it continues to evolve. In his fictional book about Father Time, the first man on earth to count the hours, author Mitch Abom makes a poignant statement:

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”

Oh, how that fear resonates for me, and once again, I’m reminded of nature’s perfect order in which none of it exists. And while it is unlikely that I will resume my scrapbooking hobby, these old home videos reminded me of the fleeting nature of time as I perceive it and how moving it is to press pause on the metaphorical tape of life, rewind, and savor the moments past.

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While the finite nature of time can be a prison of our own design, it’s also a profound blessing. It is the container in which we feel all the sensations of our uniquely human presence, ranging from agony to bliss. Time is also the anchor from which we create our future realities. Without time, there would be no evolution; no dimension for dreams or goals that provide direction and significance through the challenges and accomplishments that mark our daily journeys.

Paradoxically (or perhaps quite cleverly, as the Universe will have it), I finally watched the resurfaced videos, and I was transported back to a blissfully unhurried state, simply enjoying the moments and people right in front of me. I watched my innocent young self, carefree on the Florida Gulf Shore, basking in the sand and waves. I marveled at seeing my mom skipping gleefully as she collected shells on the beach. And I smiled as I heard my grandfather’s classic dry humor after more than 20 years since his passing – my mother cackling behind the camera as she recorded him narrate his process of making gourmet “penguin wing” sandwiches for a picnic.

The Chinese have a term, Hui Gan, which can be described most aptly as “returning sweetness,” or the finish, as one enjoys with certain teas or a fine wine. These videos were not just priceless footage of family that I will never physically embrace again in my current dimension of reality, but they also epitomized the notion of Hui Gan. Just like a fine wine, I am relishing the flavor of those memories as they linger on my proverbial tongue and heart – an elegant complement to the enticing next meal of my life, yet to be served.

For the dear readers who don’t know me, an indication of my typically reserved nature is exemplified by the following: at some point during the recent three-hour exchange with my tattoo artist-turned friend George, he asked me if I’d ever been a debutante, to which I sheepishly answered yes. To my credit, he clarified that because I said I had lived in Georgia, he associated that notion with a Southern rite of passage for girls like me. However, despite hailing from Denver, Colorado, it was not a far-fetched impression. I recalled a well-rehearsed curtsey followed by a regal ball, donning a Cinderella-like dress that was subsequently preserved in an obtrusive, airtight box and stored in a closet until my mother finally mailed it to me a few years ago. To clarify, I do not regret or feel ashamed of that part of my history and how it translates to my current self-identity. And although I know that having been announced to society in formalwear has had no adverse bearing on the person I’ve become, much less a relation to my decision to get a tattoo, I cannot deny that as I was being newly inked this week, I felt a palpable rebellion against the prevailing persona that I’ve held for the better part of my conscious existence. The whimsical decision was a betrayal of sorts to my semi-conservative upbringing, and yet it not only felt liberating, but true. It’s not as though permanent body art is life-defining or exceptional. Nonetheless, for me, it was a totem on my evolutionary journey, or perhaps just a remembering of my genuine, intuitive essence.

Let me back up. As I write this, I am concluding a magical trip to Sedona, Arizona, where I spent nine days on a solo vacation. Although I’ve lived abroad and travelled extensively, there was something that felt uniquely daring, connective, and necessary about an extended escape in nature, anonymously exploring a novel geography and topography. Before my visit, I envisioned Sedona and all its renowned magic as a portal of sorts: a place where the majesty of the red rocks has the power to shift reality. Admittedly, I came on a mission to extricate myself from my current state: one in which my life regularly feels habitual and lacking real significance. Moreover, I no longer have my mother—my best friend and confidant—to reassure me that everything is going to work out. I craved the famous vortex energy that I wished would nurture me in healing and illumination, or at minimum, lead me to a legit psychic.

It is no coincidence that I landed at a quaint, independent hotel appropriately named El Portal. In any fictional story, portals are doors or passageways that exist to instantaneously deliver their protagonists to an alternate reality, transporting them from the mundane to the fantastical, where there is a greater purpose to be realized. While I didn’t board the Flux Capacitor back to the future where life is suddenly perfect, I did learn one of the secrets to that transcendence I was seeking: be open and curious. I’ve had more stimulating, uplifting interactions in the past week than I can recall in the last year. And I believe this is not just a result of stepping outside of my traditional social contracts and constructs, but also because of the emotional aperture that I am exploring. This place has been a gateway as much as it’s been a mirror reflecting more of who I really am: the one who engages in a profound conversation with a stranger at a bar; the one who prays with spirits of the rocks at an ancient Native American ceremonial site; the one who frolics barefoot in an icy creek; the one who capriciously tattoos her virgin skin. And yes, I am still the former debutante who appreciates a good manicure and balayage.

Dragonflies are often regarded as symbols of change, transformation, adaptability, and self-realization. From some Native Americans’ viewpoint, dragonflies represent rebirth and renewal. They are born underwater and spend most of their lives there, and when they first surface, they are almost entirely transparent. Yet when sunlight bathes their delicate bodies, they become the vibrant and enchanting creatures that are depicted across a multitude of art forms. I chose to tattoo a dragonfly on my wrist as an apt reminder that my mother is perpetually with me. Her wild beauty, her shapeshifting nature and her continuous reinvention are perfectly epitomized by this spirit animal. And as she always did in human form, Mom’s soul continues to reinforce my own capacity to find the inner portal –to gently inspire my heart to shine with any color or persona of my choosing.

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On my first evening in Sedona, I sat at a restaurant bar next to a woman named Irene, who was having dinner with her husband and one of her daughters. She passionately described her home here and how she lovingly toiled to cultivate the garden of her dreams in the backyard. In the next breath, she told me that she and her husband would soon move to Florida because their developing health problems compelled them to be closer to family there. Irene’s early-onset dementia revealed itself within a few minutes of our exchange, and it seemed as if she was preparing for her final chapter. Before she left the restaurant, I communicated my wish for her: that she allow herself the freedom to be guided by what truly illuminates her heart. Later, I realized that I was speaking to her as much as I was speaking to myself. How much of my life today is the result of my story of what is conforming and safe, or dare I say it, because of how I was presented to society before I even left the comfort of my childhood home? While Sedona may not have been the portal that Hollywood movies are made of, it did awaken me to a renewed perspective, and I am departing with a permanent souvenir on my wrist to remind me when I inevitably forget.

In case you are wondering, the debutante dress was surrendered to Goodwill after a failed attempt to sell it almost 20 years after the ball. I’m betting the tattoo is going to be a longer-term investment.

Dedicated to my luminary guide on this journey, Clint Frakes, founder of Sedona Sacred Earth.

I didn’t know what to expect, but the minute the orchestra struck its first chord, I had goosebumps all over my body. It caught me off guard because that middle school version of Nathalie who played the viola never quite felt like me. But as I sat in that darkened hall, I experienced a magical sense of wonder. I was awestruck watching dozens of musicians bent over instruments that have not materially changed in hundreds of years, reading notes that are their own language, producing sounds that no algorithm or interface could replicate with the same visceral charge.

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More than anything, I couldn’t take my eyes off the conductor. Having been to my fair share of ballets, I’ve vaguely noticed the conductor in the orchestra pit, waving his arms around madly, but without much of a second glance, much less any kind of reverence.

This time, I was transfixed watching someone whose entire role is to stand surrounded and slightly above a sea of instruments, wave a wand, and, as if by magic, weave the choreography of sound at precisely the right moment. How simple, and yet how beautifully complex. The musicians in their black attire; the unquestioning respect as the conductor made his way to the podium; the collective hush of an audience witnessing something that has been done this way for centuries, unchanging in the face of every social and technological advancement, every fear about artificial intelligence replacing what’s human, every cultural upheaval that insists the old ways are obsolete. And yet there I was, moved to my bones by an art form that has refused to evolve into something it isn’t.

I left that evening thinking about what’s True.

We live in a time where truth itself has become contested terrain: what’s real, what’s fake, what’s artificial and manufactured. Even the commonly thrown-around phrase “I’m speaking my truth” implies that it is a matter of personal interpretation. And of course, we have a right to our experience, our meaning, and the impact we carry from the things we’ve lived through. That is subjective and sacred and ours. But Truth, with a capital T, is something else entirely.

Truth is all-inclusive. It is that which applies universally to all things, all the time. It exists beyond narratives, judgments, and contradiction. It is what remains when you strip away every story you’ve told yourself about who you are, every fear you’ve accumulated, every identity you’ve borrowed from someone else’s expectations. And if I’m being precise about the quality of it, Truth is that which is most in flow, simplest in function, and most expansive in essence.

Which is exactly what I witnessed in that concert hall.

The conductor wasn’t striving. He wasn’t trying to prove his relevance or assert his power. He was simply flowing, weaving something alive out of the raw materials of vibration and silence, tension and release. There was nothing to add and nothing to subtract. The whole thing worked because it was Truth expressed by way of this creative art form.

One of my mentors, from whom I also learned this definition and reference point of Truth, says that life is a game of limitation. We are here to remember the Truth of who we are as we constantly meet our edges and expand beyond them. I keep returning to this idea because it reframes so much of what we experience as struggle into something more purposeful. The fear, the self-doubt, the narratives we build around why we can’t or shouldn’t or aren’t ready; these are the edges. They are the places where limitation meets the part of us that knows, underneath all of it, that we are more than what we’ve been conditioned to believe. We have the capacity to make beautiful music of our lives in our own unique way. What is True in us is everything that lives and thrives beyond those limitations.

And here is where the symphony becomes more than a beautiful evening out. Because the invitation, as I sat in that audience feeling something ancient and wordless move through me, is the same invitation that meets us in every experience: to step onto the podium of our own lives and simply begin. To trust that the music is already written, that the instruments are already tuned, and that our role is not to control every note but to flow with what wants to emerge. To live the authentic embodiment of our fullest self-expression, and in doing so, be the conductors of the life that is already moving through us.

My coach asked a question I thought I knew the answer to, something about where in my life I feel most free to be myself. I opened my mouth expecting the usual shortlist to tumble out: with my closest friends and family, in my journal, on a walk with music in my ears. But what came out instead was silence. And then, slowly, the truth: I couldn’t think of a single time, situation, or relationship in my forty years of life where I have ever felt fully expressed, without a curation of some sort.

I sat with that for what felt like a long time. Then I cried.

I learned to perform early. By four years old, I was already on stage, dancing, learning to read the room and move in whatever way earned applause. And while I loved dance for the art of it, something else was being wired alongside the pirouettes: an unconscious belief that the version of me most likely to be accepted, respected, or loved was the one I carefully assembled for the audience in front of me. I became a chameleon. In any setting, I could quickly read the room and mold myself into whatever shape felt safest. That skill gave me a lot over the years: excellent grades, a respected career in global HR where navigating cultures and languages and unspoken rules made me very good at my job, and a reputation for being polished and prepared.

It also gave me an exhausting, relentless drive to be perfect...to say the right thing, to never be caught off guard, and to make it look effortless while believing the fact that it was actually hard was the sign of my value.

To some degree, we all do this. We are tribal beings, and there was a time when true individuality carried a real existential threat. But for most people in our modern era, curated social media profiles aside, there is a space where you let your proverbial hair down. You say the thing that’s really on your heart. You stop caring what you look like, and you simply are.

For me, I can’t recall ever doing that. There have been glimpses, moments where I color outside the lines or swerve outside the lane. But I snap back quickly, lest I expose myself to rejection or judgment in some way. And this isn’t a dig on the people in my life. They haven’t asked me to perform. I simply don’t know any other way to be.

That realization moved me to tears of a particular kind: profound sadness mixed with something like recognition. Because isn’t that the whole point of all of this? The coaching, the retreats, the inner work? I have been fascinated by the process of knowing myself and my place in this vast universe for as long as I can remember, and yet here I was, humbly realizing that the one thing I guide others toward, the full, sovereign expression of who they are, is the very thing I have been quietly withholding from myself.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard throughout the years: “Life is not a dress rehearsal.” It’s often attributed to Rose Tremain, though it’s been popularized by many. I’ve always appreciated the sentiment: that we should live more in the present, savoring this one shot at existence rather than perpetually preparing for an unknown and largely uncontrollable future.

But now the phrase has taken on a different meaning for me.

Because a dress rehearsal, for all its imperfections, at least implies that mistakes are allowed. The performance hasn’t started yet, so there’s room to stumble.

I haven’t been living like I’m in a dress rehearsal. I’ve been living like I’m in a performance, where every room becomes a stage and every interaction a scene to get right, every version of me carefully calibrated for maximum approval.

What I want is the thing that lives between the two, where you’re present enough to feel it all and free enough to let it be imperfect. I can look at that little girl who unconsciously adopted this strategy and recognize she was doing the best she could with what she had. And I can also wonder, with a gentleness I’m still learning, how I begin to unlearn something so deeply wired into my body and my way of being.

After thirteen years of writing publicly, this is likely the most vulnerable and terrifying admission I’ve ever made out loud. It’s so old and so familiar that naming it feels like pulling a thread I’m not sure I know how to restitch. I don’t know where this leads or who exactly the Nathalie is beneath the performance. And that is terrifying. But I think the admission itself might be the first real act of not performing. Just a woman sitting with the quiet, unassuming truth that she has spent most of her life on a stage she built herself, and she is only now beginning to wonder what it would feel like to step off.

Maybe that’s where it starts.

With the willingness to be seen in the not-knowing. To let the dress rehearsal, where mistakes are allowed, become the real thing, in real time, on full display.

We go to performances to marvel at people’s exceptional capacity, but we connect as humans when we feel something real.

And this, flawed and uncertain as it is, is real.

She prompted me to personify a particular brand of limiting beliefs that continue to beleaguer me in my business and personal life, and “ogre” fell out of my mouth without hesitation. Perhaps my subconscious recognized the ugly, obstructive nature of the inner critic I’ve allowed to take up residence in my mind for longer than I care to admit. In that session, the ogre revealed a familiar refrain:

It has to be hard, so I can prove I deserve it.

At some point in my life, I decided I am not inherently worthy. That worth must be earned through effort, strain, and persistence. I learned that success must be preceded by suffering, and that ease is something you arrive at only after you’ve paid your dues. I can’t yet trace the exact moment this belief took root. Perhaps it was watching how hard my parents worked. Or maybe it formed as I moved through an education system that felt demanding, where I quietly concluded that I never quite measured up to the other kids. Regardless of it’s origin, I can see how faithfully I’ve lived by this belief.

In my mind’s eye, this ogre is blocking a doorway leading to another room. I can see a party happening inside. I can hear music and laughter. There’s movement, lightness, and ease. But I can’t quite make out who’s there or what they’re doing. I simply assume I’m not invited—or that I’ll need to slay this big, ugly beast to gain access.

The irony is that I am the one who conjured this ogre, and I am the one who keeps feeding him. And if I’m honest, I’ve also been the one hiding behind him. Even though I want to go to the party in the other room, there’s something strangely comfortable about where I am. In this room, I can blame the ogre if I don’t reach my goals because, well… it’s hard to beat an ogre. Everyone understands that. And if I do manage to take him down, how valiant and strong do I appear?!

The magic of that coaching session wasn’t in uncovering the belief—I already knew I was hard on myself. The magic was in seeing it clearly, in form. When the ogre appeared, I laughed. Not because it wasn’t a real pain point, but because of how absurd it suddenly felt. I don’t have to defeat him. I don’t even have to transform him with some kind of performative gratitude for his so-called protection. Just like I placed him there, I can let him step aside.

Nothing about me has to change. I don’t need to become more disciplined, more qualified, or more impressive to earn love or a thriving business. I don’t need to suffer my way into legitimacy. The party doesn’t require a password. It only requires that I stop insisting I don’t belong—and walk through the door unarmed.

Desire is indeed our fire. It lights something in us that wants to move forward, create, shape, and evolve. And for the last few years, I’ve been driven by a mounting desire: a desire to build a beautiful partnership and family, a desire to grow a successful, sustainable business, and a desire to make an impact and become financially free in the process.

However, recently, in the absence of my desires manifesting on my timeline, combined with financial pressures of unplanned home projects and a colossal termite infestation, I’ve wanted to take that fire and burn it all down (or maybe just let the termites continue their destruction). In fact, I’ve even questioned why I torched the very things I had going for me…career, marriage, and partnership…the very things I thought I’d have locked down as a “successful” 40-year-old woman.

A multi-day pity party notwithstanding, I managed to gain a different perspective after climbing out of my woe-is-me hole. I recalled a women’s retreat I attended a few months ago. The primary focus was on the inner marriage, or the integration of our alpha and omega/ masculine and feminine energies, which we typically seek to balance in partnership with another. Instead, we learned and practiced how to embody the love and completion that most of us crave externally based on the premise that we cannot seek in another that which we are unwilling or incapable of offering ourselves. That only leads to a trap of need, inevitable disappointment when it’s not met, followed by anger or resentment. One distinction that stayed with me from that experience, which feels particularly relevant right now, is the difference between desire and devotion.

Desire, where most of us operate from, is essentially that need; a yearning for something separate from ourselves, “out there”, just beyond reach. The act of wanting implies a gap between here and there, now and later, me and it. Devotion, on the other hand, is different. Though often used in a religious context, devotion simply means wholehearted dedication to something beyond oneself. It’s not a grasping toward the future. It’s a resting into the now; a reverence, and a loving commitment to what already is.

Desire isn’t misguided. In fact, it’s essential. It fuels our evolution and self-actualization. That ache for something not yet here is the creative tension that pulls us forward. Yet the trap of desire is that once we get the thing we thought we wanted, the satisfaction rarely lasts. We move on to the next goal, the next vision, or the next hill to climb. This is the path of the “bogey” (in contrast to the yogi)—the ever-seeker—always trying to fill something inside that can never be filled by external means. The desires we have are not inherently wrong, including my own aspiration to move through the adventure of life with my partner and best friend. But when the seeking is driven by the illusion that one day I’ll feel whole with that person by my side, or that I won’t have unforeseen challenges to navigate, then it will be a perpetual chase.

So, as I contemplate the events of the last few weeks that rocked my very foundation and reminded me where I continue to grasp for control, I wonder: what if instead I devoted myself to the version of me who trusts herself completely—who is already complete? The woman who already has a loving partner, a thriving business, and a profound impact on the world. This isn’t magical thinking; the fact that I can imagine her means she exists somewhere in another dimension. And if that’s true, then I can meet her here in this moment. I can choose to be devoted to her, to love her, and to embody her. I just hope she, too, can take on the termites.

This spectacle encapsulates the essence of Burning Man: an annual gathering of over 70,000 people of all ages, races, and nationalities. Every year, a temporary community is erected in the middle of a seven square-mile stretch of dusty land a few hours northeast of Reno, Nevada, dubbed “the Playa” (which aptly translates to “beach” in Spanish). The event’s core principles include radical inclusion, self-reliance, and self-expression, and they foster the greatest example of freedom, compassion, and originality that I’ve ever witnessed. Before attending, I was not only skeptical, I was terrified. Intentionally trekking into some of the harshest conditions imaginable with thousands of perfect strangers to figure out how to survive and thrive seems like a questionable pastime and use of resources, but I now understand the allure. Burning Man is not just a week filled with events and adventures that sober and drug-fueled minds alike can dream up. It is a transformative ceremony that beautifully imparts some of the most profound life lessons available, should its participants choose to pay attention.

First, people are inherently creative. That doesn’t mean that everyone is an artist on his resume, but there is no denying we all possess a multitude of natural gifts. There are no bounds to imagination and we are individually responsible for actively deciding and generating our respective realities. On the Playa, the awe-inspiring artistry, juxtaposed with the extreme elements of heat, dust, and (in my case last week) unprecedented rain and mud, deepened my appreciation for human resilience and innovation. Despite the challenging backdrop, people not only survived, but they created what was surely one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. Case in point – I witnessed a leader from my own camp engineer a small, 3-foot replica of the eponymous “Man” effigy. Due to weather conditions, the actual ceremonious burn in the center of the Playa was delayed indefinitely, but our mini burn drew an impressive crowd of a few hundred people who were overjoyed to support each other and celebrate, regardless of the circumstances. This ingenuity brought a rare intimacy to the large-scale event and an even deeper appreciation of its splendor.

Another observation I made as I walked, biked, skipped and trudged through the largest adult playground ever conceived was that we are all still kids at heart yearning to play without judgement or expectations of how to behave. It felt like I was returning to a natural state – no masks, no mirrors – just pure joy and fun. As I pedaled around the Playa on my lime green beach cruiser in a tutu and furry bear hat, I couldn’t ignore the fleeting feeling I had and the silly grin it elicited. When did I forget that fun is a necessary ingredient for a fulfilling life? While serious responsibilities and genuine hardship are inescapable realities for us all, if we never stop to celebrate the unlimited miracle of our existence, we’re missing the point.

Most importantly, the tradition of constructing magnificent art installations surrounded by music, educational workshops, spontaneous happenings, and a giant party with an intentional plan to burn it all down after a week underscores the ephemerality of life. That environment reflected my default state, which is to amass material possessions to buffer the discomfort of the full spectrum of the human experience. Yet, it reminded me that I don’t get to keep anything when my time is up. All I really “own” are the memories. The Playa is the epitome of nature – real, unpredictable, and ever-changing, and it’s from the cycle of creation and destruction that new ideas spring forth. Ashes cultivate the soil for future creation, over and over again in perpetuity. My time at Burning Man reinforced that despite my desire to hang my hat on some grandiose meaning of life, the purpose is simple: just to live its fullest expression. So, go play in the dirt, offer help to neighbors in need, cry among strangers in a temple bonded by collective suffering, and watch as it burns to the ground, knowing we have the power to build it all over again, ever different and better than before.

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Genesis 3:19

“All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” Ecclesiastes 3:20

In one such unconventional space where I allowed myself to traverse the pain, I had the profound realization that so many significant decisions in my life were subconscious attempts to avoid that very emotion. If it wasn’t the grief from losing some of the most beloved people in my life, it was the unassuming agony of simply believing that I wasn’t enough. I saw that I’ve been constructing a reality of falsehood to fill that hole, but it’s been like putting a Band-Aid on a broken ankle. Healing, I’ve learned, is an inside job. While I would do anything to bring my mother back, I would be a fool not to learn from her traumatic disease. It was only through the pain of losing her that I could see my learned patterns of masking the not-enoughness, many of which were unconsciously modeled by her, most notably self-neglect and body disassociation. From contraceptives to diet culture to cosmetic procedures, I sought external solutions to internal disquiet and a belief that perfection was an achievable state. But none of that generated true acceptance because, I realized, there was nothing to fix in the first place.

This narrative may seem intimate for a public forum, but it’s shared with purpose. As a female leader in male-dominated corporate spaces, my insecurities once hid behind a facade of physical attractiveness and assertive demeanor, masking my genuine self, which I perceived as inadequate. However, witnessing my mother lose everything external that she worked so hard to uphold and, more significantly, the transience of life prompted a profound reevaluation of my own self-criticism. It sparked a slow but seismic shift towards authenticity, which, I’ll admit, is a work in progress. While I do not judge anyone for the decisions they make about their bodies and their lives, and I believe we are all on our respective paths to remembering who we really are, I assert that stepping into the pain and even facing these uncomfortable truths about ourselves is the key to being better leaders and ultimately, living our most fulfilled lives overall.

Now, I stand before you, advocating for embracing our fears and discomfort as a gateway to better leadership and a richer life. Acceptance and vulnerability are not just personal virtues but professional strengths. If you’re considering stepping into this arena of truth, I offer a few recommendations:

1. Find a sanctuary for introspection with someone who can guide you, like a coach, therapist, or mentor.

2. Engage with your body’s wisdom beyond intellectual understanding through practices like meditation or mindful movement.

3. Ease into your pain with patience, allowing yourself to experience it fully without rushing or forcing.

4. Bring a new level of consciousness to your pain, approaching it with curiosity and even compassion rather than avoidance.

5. Remain with your feelings, allowing them to evolve at their own pace.

6. Let new insights flow from this process, and consider how they align with your deeper values and purpose. Read more about this here.

7. Return to a place of balance through grounding exercises like walking in nature that affirm your stability and security.

To be present in the full spectrum of life is to be fully alive. This richness is what makes us human and connects us to others. There is immense power in emotion, and in our willingness to face it, we find the keys to our spirit’s expansive nature.

Our Deepest Fear

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’s 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’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

~Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

Not coincidentally, this episode began shortly after declaring I was leaving my corporate identity behind. I was experiencing a death of sorts, and my body knew it before my conscious mind. In reflecting on this experience, which relentlessly persisted in the form of migraines and severe muscle spasms for four weeks without relief, I realized the overwhelming attachment I had to my former self. I was so identified with the job title, the structured schedule, and the rush of cortisol day after day as I jumped out of bed before dawn to start the whole charade over again. Despite an ever-present hum of anxiety and lack of authentic purpose, I took comfort in the safety of the familiar. I didn’t realize it until I was a few months removed, but I felt an illusory protection behind all the masks I wore in order to fit a high-achiever profile.

The pain I experienced when I finally decided to step into a new life ripe with uncertainty felt like a complete physical and emotional breakdown. Now that my body has recovered and I’m more distanced from the experience, I can see it for what it was: an unraveling. That word had a negative connotation until recently when I heard it eloquently explained in a podcast. Famed researcher and author Brené Brown explained that “ravel” means “a tangle, a cluster, or a knot.” And that’s exactly how I was unknowingly living for the entirety of my adult life: so tight that I could barely move, stifled by my self-imposed inflexibility. To unravel means to loosen the knot, but as you may experience in a good massage, you have to work through the pain to get the muscles to let go and relax.

I can’t say I’m fully unknotted, but I’m making progress through an intentional practice. This quote from renowned author Steven Pressfield hit remarkably close to home as I’ve moved through this life change: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” Years of being wound up in a system that celebrates and rewards stress doesn’t dissipate in a couple of months; my resistance to letting it go was strong and visceral. But as I gift myself with more compassion, grace, and the occasional massage, I know I’m on my way.

Imagine embracing the empowering belief that life happens for you? While real victims do exist in this world, I’d also assert that in the majority of situations, we are our own worst enemies. I certainly know I am guilty. Failure to own our innate power – to dream big and take massive action – is actually a function of fear. In a podcast by human connection specialist Mark Groves, he explains that a commitment to our dreams requires an expansive capacity to receive success and a deep trust in ourselves to endure disappointment and judgment. With that in mind, we can get curious about what we aren’t willing to feel in the process of creating our results.

Author and leadership guru Gay Hendricks highlights this phenomenon, which he calls The Upper Limit Problem, in his book The Big Leap. According to Hendricks, the principal obstacle to success that affects everyone is our tendency to sabotage ourselves once we exceed a self-imposed artificial limit. All of us have an internal control that sets a limit for the levels of success, love, creativity, happiness, and well-being that we allow ourselves to enjoy. Once we exceed this limit, we write stories like, “This is too good to be true” or “I can’t possibly have it all.” Then, we unconsciously fall back into our comfort zones, tethered by fear or unworthiness.

When I look back on occasions when I’ve accomplished a major goal, I attribute my success to unwavering commitment and belief in possibility. From the time I graduated college, I yearned to live and work in Latin America. I applied for a Rotary scholarship, the Foreign Service, and a multitude of jobs based in the region – all to no avail. It was a multi-year-long winding path, but eventually, I arrived. Sure, I had countless moments of doubt and demotivation when it wasn’t manifesting in my way or timeline, but I never lost sight of my conviction. I was also willing to persevere through those difficult feelings of disappointment, impatience, and critical feedback from my superiors telling me I wasn’t ready. Little did I know the discomfort and imposter syndrome in store for me when I eventually landed in Buenos Aires as a 28-year-old leading a team of locals.

Hendricks advocates that surpassing your Upper Limits begins with belief. Consider where you are sabotaging your results because you don’t feel like you truly deserve success. Or, what pain aren’t you willing to experience? Maybe you’re afraid of judgment or alienation from your inner circle as you make changes in your life that you know are required to accomplish your dream. Seek the support you need to identify those limitations, hold the dream with you (especially when your inevitable doubts creep in), and then watch with wonder as you prove that you’re the all-powerful creator of your life.

Imagine my disappointment when, the night before the first ceremony with my retreat group, my moon arrived. Normally, I’d rejoice as I’ve shifted my relationship with this biological reality, no longer viewing it as an unnecessary nuisance but rather as a vital sign and guardian of my dream for a future child. But this time, it triggered the old story of “inconvenience” and “weakness.” Yet, after speaking with some of the female facilitators and processing my disillusionment, I started to shift my perspective. Anyone on this medicine path will share the same message: the plant’s spirit works in mysterious and mystical ways. In fact, one doesn’t even have to drink her potent brew for the effects to manifest. We set intentions and attempt to release expectations, trusting that we don’t necessarily get what we want, but we do get exactly what we need.

Not coincidentally, my intention for this trip was to ask Mother Ayahuasca to show me my authentic self and reconnect me to the divine feminine that I’d locked away so that I could succeed in a man’s world, especially as I ascended in my corporate career in particularly masculine cultures. In the opening circle with my retreat group, I lay in meditation with my eyes closed, holding my intention in my heart. I felt warm, delicate hands resting on my womb, but when I opened my eyes, I realized there was no one with me. Looking back, it seems like a premonition. While the rest of my group spent their first night in ceremony drinking Ayahuasca, I communed with two medicine women, learning about their spiritual reverence for the moon cycle and how indigenous cultures across the world have honored it as a medicine ceremony in and of itself. It’s a time to gather, rest, cleanse, and give thanks. Since the womb is a portal for life, it must be cherished in the most sacred way. Thus, the combination with Ayahuasca is too strong, as they are both powerful purifiers of energy, and we can only safely process so much healing at one time. In fact, the elders say that long ago, women didn’t drink at all because it had no effect – it was the disconnection from our bodies that required the medicine to bring us home to ourselves.

Many traditions refer to the lunar moon as Grandmother. She is honored for watching over the waters of the Earth, regulating the tides, and nurturing the feminine because she also governs our cleansing cycle. Water always comes before new life, and I felt the spirits of my mother and grandmother united through Mother Ayahuasca and Grandmother Moon in support of my rebirth. Instead of the brutal purgatory that I anticipated and somewhere deep down felt I deserved, they gifted me an intimate, three-part ceremony surrounded by four female angels. We spent one evening gathered around an altar, as I was offered a ritualistic healing fortified by different sacred plants including nettle and tobacco. The next day, my soul traveled the celestial realm as we shared mushrooms, music, and pure magic. I grieved for time past, for loved ones lost, and I danced and played as the inner child within me was liberated from her cage. Indeed, my communion with the plant spirits offered me exactly what I needed. On my journey to radically loving myself in her totality, I am giving myself the medicine I was seeking outside – at last, coming home to myself.

Dedicated to Sathya, Dali, Mishy, and Sylvie at The Nature Within

Read about my previous Ayahuasca ceremonies in The Silence Between the Words, January 2023, and My Undoing, June 2021

This experience, which occurred at the start of a revelatory weekend of self-discovery with fifteen strangers, expanded my understanding of my emotional landscape. I generally consider myself emotionally aware, but I was humbled by how much I had yet to comprehend. Emotional intelligence is generally defined as the capability of a person to manage and control his or her emotions, and it’s comprised of various elements such as self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills. While self-awareness is fundamental, it raises the question: what do we do with said emotions? Unless we’re in environments like sporting events, concerts, or funerals where overt expression is accepted, we often bottle them up or use external stimuli to distract or numb ourselves. In reality, though, “control” or “self-regulation” only applies if we believe that some emotions are unwelcome in certain spaces or circumstances.

Instead, what if we accepted all emotions without identification with any of them? Consciously or not, most of us hold that certain emotions are “bad” or undesirable, like jealousy and rage (derivatives of anger) or disappointment and despair (offshoots of sadness). But as I continue my own personal development journey and coach others through theirs, I’m further convinced that while some emotions are indeed challenging, the distortion lies in the story we hold about ourselves in the feeling of it. An alternative and arguably more creative view is that they all serve as an electric charge that compels us to channel our inherent, creative life force energy. I learned last weekend that the greater the intensity of emotion we can hold, the more intrinsic power we can command. The opportunity is to decide how we perceive that charge and what we do with it in alignment with our values and principles. Unlike signals that relay the same message consistently (i.e., physical pain associated with an injury), emotions are not objectively negative or positive until we judge them or assign meaning to the circumstance that precedes them. Developing emotional intelligence is a starting point, but the next developmental frontier is emotional efficacy: the ability to experience the totality of an emotion. That is, in fact, a gift of the human experience. When we can stop identifying with a temporary feeling, we release it as a limitation and create more inspired choices. For example, sadness, which is the experience of losing something or someone we wanted to preserve in a specific form, can instead become gratitude for the beautiful experience of what was, recognizing that just like the emotion itself, nothing persists indefinitely.

Back in the room last weekend, when my turn to walk through the doorway inevitably arose, I caught myself checking out of my body as I prepared to take my first dramatic steps. I quickly realized, though, that I wasn’t there to stay comfortably the same or anesthetized to difficult moments but instead to stretch my emotional capacity. To simply play along and “get it over with” would rob me of an experience based on a past story of myself. So, at that moment, I decided to write a new one. To my surprise, that’s all it took; fear became confidence as soon as I made a choice. While I acknowledge that for this to become the default, it takes intentional practice and a supportive environment, but the exercise gave me a small taste of the freedom that exists on the other side of the proverbial door that I’ve shut on myself.

Credit and thanks to Kevin Walton @sourceradiance and The Light Beings community.

Later in the week, I found myself walking with a fellow classmate on a literal road around the idyllic retreat center as we dissected an earlier exchange between us. A few hours prior, having already spent multiple days rebooting our old operating systems, we tested our understanding of “negative transference.” We’d recently learned about this practice, which all humans carry out unconsciously hundreds of times per day: a reaction ranging from a quiet judgment to a compulsive outburst when we are triggered by someone else’s appearance or actions. We assume we’re responding to that person, but if we look deeper, we’re actually projecting our adaptive childhood beliefs and behaviors onto them. While this happens with perfect strangers, it rears its ugly head most often and distorts relationships with the people we are closest to. In the spirit of learning more about our own destructive patterns in the context and container of this retreat, we were asked to reflect on negative transference experiences with our classmates, people who had been strangers just days before. The next assignment was to approach someone we had identified and directly share how they triggered us, describing our negative perceptions and judgments.

I immediately recoiled at this exercise, expecting it to feel horribly awkward, and it did not disappoint. A woman I barely knew told me she perceived me as the kind of superior “it girl” you’d imagine personified in any number of middle and high-school dramas who ignores girls like her. While she took full responsibility for why and how she generated these feelings without even knowing me, I was horrified. Not only was that the opposite of how I intended to present, but it immediately regressed me emotionally to my experience in middle school, where I was the one comparing myself to the “it girls,” feeling worthless and invisible. I recalled how I begged my mother to help me fit in by buying the right shoes, styling my hair similarly, and wearing makeup to appear more mature (which, much to my dismay, she rejected). I believed that if I could mold myself into one of them – the popular girls – just maybe, I’d fill that hole inside. Practicing recognizing my own transference and being on the receiving end of someone else’s offered me not just a time capsule but a mirror. I realized that not only do I still carry a narrative of the insecure pre-teen somewhere in my psyche, but feeling insignificant is a fear that perhaps all humans share in some capacity. Here I was, almost 30 years after my first recollection of that feeling, being told by another adult woman that I represented those “other” women for her. Her perception highlighted how much I’d been distorting my relationship with myself, wearing innumerable masks in order to feel worthy and lovable. She inadvertently exposed my own shame story by vulnerably sharing hers.

While I missed the traditional Independence Day fireworks display as I volunteered for this uncomfortable journey of self-discovery, I gained something deeper: a celebration of newfound personal independence from my unconscious circling on the left road. The week offered a new awareness of how I continue to live a false narrative and the possibility of taking a different path. It also highlighted a collective humanity and the unity that is possible when we can safely express our fears. The left road is easier, I suppose – there, I don’t have to take responsibility. It tethers me to my familiar identity, even if it’s one that keeps me playing small. The right road requires the discomfort of feeling tough emotions and owning 100% of my contribution to relationships – most importantly, the one with myself. As I talked with my new friend, examining our respective experiences of delivering and receiving critical feedback, I realized we were walking on an actual road that kept looping back around to the same starting point. And that’s exactly where I’ll be in life if I continue to go left, returning to the same place of limitation. As Tony Robbins said, “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” We all have a choice. Mine is not always going to be the right one, but I intend to clear the brush from that road less traveled, the one leading to ultimate freedom.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

~Robert Frost

This got me thinking about what I notice now that I’ve created the time and space – now that I have the apparent freedom to do so. I’ve spent the last year living fuller than ever, experiencing a more comprehensive range of emotions than I imagined possible, mostly because I formerly avoided such extremes by burying myself in busyness. I traversed the depths of grief with the ever-loving plant medicine and the literal high of a hot air balloon floating above the ancient terrain of Cappadocia, Turkey. I embraced my inner child (and mud) playing on the Playa of Burning Man, and I continue to surf the choppy waters of early entrepreneurship. But I’ve realized one central false assumption: leaving my former career path and pursuing these experiences was not the secret to the freedom I longed for. In fact, I am no more free as my own boss than I was reporting to one. This pursuit itself held me captive, spun up in a web of my own making and avoiding the real confrontation: with myself.

It is said that wherever you go, there you are. I could only digest the truth of that statement in the simplicity of being with my breath and body. While my recent adventures have been undeniably enriching to my life, the spaces in between – the moments of silence and solitude – allowed me to get to know myself for the first time. Only there could I see who I am when all the noise is stripped away, and that freedom was always my choice to claim because freedom is who and what I am. I was under the illusion that my persistent feelings of disengagement, lack of fulfillment, and gnawing unease for so many years were caused by something or someone else, and in holding that perspective, I was a victim of my material reality. I lived in the trap that Richard Rudd wisely articulates in his prolific Gene Keys. He says, “Humans look outside themselves when they experience either an emotional high or low. We need to attach a reason to our emotional states. At the high end of the emotional spectrum, we believe that true joy is an effect rather than a cause. Because of this deep-seated belief, we spend most of our lives chasing whatever we think causes the effect of joy – it may be a perfect relationship, lots of money, fame, the perfect place to live, or even our God. At the low end of the emotional spectrum, the game we play is blame. We blame anything from the food we just ate to our partners or the government for the reason we feel bad.” With this inner orientation, we unknowingly imprison ourselves, trapped by our longing for a perpetual state of joy or ecstasy. When we are down, we long to be high, and when we are high, we long to hold onto that feeling. My mission to escape all that I perceived as unfavorable in my life, from jobs to relationships to the pain of loss, only reinforced my own limitation. Leave it to nature to be the greatest reflection of Truth; like the spiderweb, it was barely discernable, but it was always there if I looked from the right angle.

While my love for travel, quest for personal development, and insatiable desire for experiences that challenge my self-definition will likely always be part of my DNA, this last year of constant movement, like my walking route, has brought me back home. Instead of seeing my walks as an effect of breaking free, of having the autonomy to structure my days how I like, they represent an outward expression of my expansiveness and choices about where and how I direct my energy. I can see the endless array of possibilities available to me at all times and, in doing so, slowly disentangle my deep-rooted identification with my own constraints. Today, as I strap on my tennis shoes and set off down my familiar path, I marvel equally at what is newly blossoming outside and what is blossoming inside of me. And all it takes is a simple glance.

“You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim, and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down…” ~Brianna Wiest

As Abraham teaches, there are no coincidences—only conscious and unconscious desires made manifest. Last weekend, I attended one of Esther’s seminars in Miami, coinciding with a rather spontaneous decision to embark on my first extended three-day water fast. The fast, part of a protocol I’ve been following to address chronic gut inflammation, was no small feat for someone who loves to eat as much as I do. Yet, this endeavor became the perfect backdrop for receiving Abraham’s messages with a fresh perspective, years, and many life experiences after I first read that book.

One message in particular offered a timely and potent reminder: our reality is shaped by where we place our attention. According to Abraham, the only thing preventing us from manifesting our desires is our inability to allow them in. The Universe hears every creative impulse and constantly conspires to bring our longings into our 3D reality. Yet, instead of focusing on the joy of the desire itself, most of us fixate on the frustration of not yet having it. This focus on lack creates resistance and keeps us stuck. Abraham put it simply: most of life is meant to be spent in the desiring, as the moments of manifestation are instantaneous. So why not revel in the unfolding, savoring every step of the journey? By the time I heard this, I was 40 hours into my fast, teetering between moments of clarity and near delirium. The state I was in made me painfully aware of just how little I was commanding my own attention. Instead of fully appreciating the wisdom being shared in front of my eyes, I sat preoccupied with my grumbling stomach, my fatigued body, and fantasies of my next meal. I became a witness to my own resistance, oscillating between the discomfort I couldn’t escape and futile attempts to distract myself from it. I also realized that it wasn’t just the hunger hijacking my mind and body, but that even when I’m well-fed, I have a habituated pattern of living in this “fast forward” mentality in my everyday life, bypassing the present moment in anticipation of the next.

If all we truly have is the present, what would it be like to intentionally savor the here and now rather than dwell on what’s missing? During a break from the seminar, I stepped outside and allowed myself to simply feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I briefly let go of all resistance. In that instance of pure presence, a huge dragonfly landed on my leg and sat there for nearly two minutes. For the last few years, the dragonfly has been a symbol of my spirit guide, appearing only when I’m aligned with a higher frequency. It reminded me of the power of now—the fleeting, yet eternal nature of a single moment.

And so, for an instant, I delighted in it.