It’s taken me a bit of a minute to finally be able to sit down and pound this one out.

When I first had the vision of writing one essay a week in January—walking you through what I’m cultivating in 2026—I immediately ran into resistance.

Resistance in the mind.
Resistance in the body.
Resistance everywhere.

Total writer’s block. And no amount of mental tricks or movement practices or cups of coffee broke through it.

When that happens, I’ve learned not to push. I sit with the resistance and say, “Okay. You’ve got me stuck. I won’t try to break through—but I would love to know what you have to say.”

It took a few weeks for that resistance to soften enough for me to hear it, but we got there in the end.

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Somehow it went from New Year’s Eve to one week into the new year in about ten minutes.

I’ve had it on my to-do list all week to write this essay, wondering where the days went, and now—seven days in—here I am.

I’ve officially missed the window for resolution inspiration and New Year, New Me platitudes.

And honestly?
Good.

Because I’m not about those anyway. I’m about a perspective that’s gentler and far more compassionate.

See, what I’ve learned over the years is that resolutions, SMART goals, resets, and challenges are usually short-lived attempts at self-improvement. When the novelty of the fireworks fades, so does our resolve.

Discipline dies.
Willpower wanes.
Vision boards vanish.

And all we’re left with is a familiar pile of self-blame, shame, and unworthiness.

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I’m done with that story.

What I actually want this time of year is rest. Cuddling. Warm soup. Hot tea. Recovery from the year that just asked everything of me.

Which, interestingly enough, is exactly what Nature is doing right now.

Resting.
Digesting.
Preparing—quietly—for spring.

This is the season when I start thinking about gardening. Backyard projects. Flowers and robin’s eggs. I think about soil and start sketching out what I might grow—and what I’ll do with the harvest when it comes.

But I’m not planting seeds yet.

I’m preparing the ground.

I’m paying attention to what needs to happen so that when seeds are planted, they can actually take root and grow.

Which is why January isn’t the season for deciding what we want to do, get, or achieve.

It’s the season for asking what needs to be cultivated so our intentions can grow naturally—without force, frenzy, or burnout.

To cultivate is to create the conditions for what is already naturally present to thrive.

If I want better health, for example, I don’t need more pressure or punishment. I need to cultivate an environment that supports sleep, nourishment, pleasure, and enoughness.

From that soil, health emerges in its own time.

That’s why my word for the year is CULTIVATE.

It’s on my vision board—which is really more of a vibe board. I didn’t paste on everything I want to harvest. I focused only on the quality of the soil I want to tend.

Because when the soil is right, the growth takes care of itself.

This year, I’m cultivating safety, flow, presence, and stewardship. And I’m remembering this:

I’ll be exploring each of those more deeply in upcoming subscriber conversations, so if that resonates, this is a good moment to step inside and join me.

For now, here’s to a new year—not of reinvention, but of care.

May we cultivate the conditions that allow the lives we long for to grow.

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The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.

We’ve heard that said many, many times. In fact, it’s even documented in the Scriptures, many times; my favorite is probably James 4:13-14:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we shall head off to this or that town and spend a year doing business there and making money.” Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

I was just posting on Facebook about how Daisy (my adorable pittie mix) and I never thought we would have to re-invent our home, relearn what love, family, and safety feel like…but here we are, nonetheless, birthing a totally new chapter of life as a widow on my own.

But there’s been nothing easy or tidy about this birth. It’s been a struggle every step of the way, metaphorical and physical:

• My body is being re-birthed

• My livelihood and daily routine are being re-birthed

• My sense of self and of value is being re-birthed

And it’s messy. In the words of Professor Hinkle: “Messy, messy, messy!”

The fact of the matter is birthing something new is never a one-and-done. In fact, the birth is the easy part…and it leaves in its wake the messy business of raising what is new, of living with and developing whatever wasn’t there before.

And really, birth - as exciting and beautiful as it is - is also the death of whatever came before.

Mary found this out the minute she laid Jesus in that manger. So let’s see what that might have meant for her.

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Dear God, everything just hurts…and I’m so tired.
He’s finally asleep. Everyone is finally gone…I think those shepherds left a sheep behind…great.

I don’t know what to do now. We’re here, out of money, this stable is cold. Joseph says he might be able to find work long enough to pay for our trip back to Nazareth but, I just don’t know. The looks there, the gossip, I thought it would go away when Joseph finally took me in but…

And I want my mom. Here we have no one, no choice, no options but survive.

And how am I supposed to raise this “child of promise” with nothing?

What’s the next step?

I thought when he was born I would have the answers but…

…crickets.

Humans have this strange relationship with time, in that we seem to be the only ones that actually experience it. It’s like dog math, and we’ve all seen the memes: “When mom leaves for 2 hours, she’s been gone for 20 years. When she leaves for 2 minutes to get the mail, she’s also been gone for 20 years.” The rest of the created order lives in a blissful state of presence. Now is it. But humans? We’ve got this linear time thing going on that insists on a beginning, middle, and end. We think and live in story lines and we don’t like it when chapters bleed into each other, when the plot gets messy, or when there isn’t a tidy “And they lived happily ever after” at the end.

• We want a neat, bullet-point outline.

• We want to solve for the variable.

• We don’t want to move on until what we’re in the middle of is neatly tied up.

But life isn’t like that, is it?

When something new arrives, even if we are prepared for it, it’s not a “happily ever after” moment; rather, it’s really just a new beginning and, unlike a story plot, there are no bullet points. There is only NOW and now tends to be uncomfortable and unpredictable.

The problem isn’t that birth - whatever kind of birth we’re talking about - doesn’t deliver clarity.

The problem is that we expect it to.

And being the story-driven creatures we are, we are horrible at managing our expectations.

So, on this Christmas Eve, the night that so many of us are gazing at beautifully arranged Nativity scenes, singing inspirational carols, and lighting candles in darkened sanctuaries, if you’re expecting a tidy wrap up to Mary’s journey…

…there is none.

Mary is alone in a new town with a newborn, her husband is looking for work, there is no one coming to rescue them, and if she thinks life can only get better from here?

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

Because while the heavens may have rearranged themselves for this blessed event, the world certainly did not.

Life just kept being life, in all of its messy, heartbreaking, joyful, unpredictable glory.

But what I can say is that, based on my own experience, I have always been held together, somehow.

And so will you.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO:

So, as this Advent season closes — without a bow, without a tidy ending — sit with these questions for a while.
No need to answer them all at once. Let them work on you quietly.

• Where are you waiting for clarity before allowing yourself to live what is already here?

• What has arrived in your life that doesn’t yet make sense, but is asking to be carried anyway?

• If “being held together” is enough for now, what pressure might you be able to release?

The last not-quite-three months have been a roller coaster. That’s really the only honest way to describe it.

There’s a part of me that wants to stop saying “since my husband died,” because another part of me knows that, outside of a very small circle, people have already moved on. There’s a voice in my head that says, No one wants to hear your grief anymore. And if I’m being honest, some days I don’t want to hear it either.

I notice the days that feel easier and quietly count them as wins. Days when I can think about our twenty-eight years together and feel tenderness instead of sharp pain. Days when I can get out of bed with energy, get things done, laugh, and function in a way that passes for normal. Those days feel like progress.

And then the tears show up anyway.

Not because something is wrong, but because this is how the body processes loss. Grief isn’t just emotional. It’s biological. My body had adapted to my husband over decades. My nervous system learned his rhythms, his presence, his safety. When he died, that imprint, his signature in my very cells, didn’t disappear. The body takes time to adjust, and tears are part of that adjustment.

So yes, the last not-quite-three months have been a roller coaster.

And like any roller coaster, I’m learning that the best way through it isn’t to brace myself for every turn, but to soften. To stop gripping so tightly. To let my body move with what comes instead of fighting it.

Softening doesn’t mean giving up.
It means allowing what’s already here.

Joy and grief.
Relief and sadness.
Hope and anxiety.

They can all be here at the same time.

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Which brings us back to Mary.

She’s now about three months pregnant. The belly is likely starting to show. People are noticing. And she’s being witnessed…just not in a way that feels safe or kind.

So she leaves.

She catches the next caravan out of Nazareth and heads to Jerusalem to stay with her cousin Elizabeth and Zechariah, her husband, for a while.

Sometimes the best medicine is to just get-the-hell-outta-Dodge.

Elizabeth would have been a soft landing place. She knew what it meant to live outside expectations. She knew what it meant to carry shame that didn’t belong to her. A barren woman, now pregnant in her crone years, Elizabeth had lived under scrutiny and speculation for decades. She understood what it meant to be talked about, misread, and judged.

And when Mary arrives, something remarkable happens.

Before Mary explains…
Before she defends herself…
Before she justifies anything…

Elizabeth sees her.

She doesn’t ask questions, hesitate, or moralize.

She says:

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb…
Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her.”

For the first time, someone outside Mary’s own body recognizes what has been happening inside it.

For the first time, Mary is witnessed without suspicion, validated without interrogation. And reassured without conditions.

And only then does Mary sing.
Not in Nazareth after the angelic visitation.
Certainly not during the first trimester, when all she can do is hold her breath and hope for the best.
But once she has been seen…and welcomed into softness.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO:

Elizabeth doesn’t create Mary’s becoming, but she supports it. She provides the safety that allows Mary’s nervous system to soften enough to keep carrying what she’s been entrusted with.

This is what Week Three of Advent is about.

Not forcing joy, bypassing fear, or pretending everything is fine.

But allowing yourself to be received, letting someone else hold the truth with you, and letting your body soften in the presence of safety.

Softening isn’t passive; it’s not giving up. It’s the truest expression of surrender: when we stop bracing long enough for life to move through us instead of against us.

Mary didn’t - in fact, she couldn’t - soften alone.
And neither do we.

As you move through this week, sit with these questions gently:

• Where in my life am I still bracing instead of softening?

• Who feels like a safe witness for me right now, someone who can see me without trying to fix me?

• What might shift if I allowed joy and grief to exist together, without demanding one cancel the other out?

Week Three is not about resolution.
It’s about support.

It’s the moment when becoming becomes bearable; not because it’s finished, but because you don’t have to carry it alone.

And now, you are safe to sing.

I’ve spent this week helping my mother decorate her house for Christmas — putting up the little tree, gluing clips back onto ornaments, and arranging Nativity scenes. She has at least five displayed in her small home, and there is somehow always room for one more.

Naturally, this turned my thoughts toward Mary, whom we left last week standing inside the shock of her own surrender after speaking the famous fiat: “Be it unto me according to your word.”

From that single sentence have come entire symphonies, sermons, prayers, paintings, and theological frameworks. Mary has been exalted, venerated, beatified, even named co-redemptrix in some traditions. As if the moment she said yes, she floated into a protected spiritual bubble where nothing messy, human, hormonal, or frightening could touch her.

Somehow I don’t think that’s what happened. In fact, just the opposite seems to have happened because no sooner does she utter those historic words when…

…the damn angel just POOFS. Disappears into thin air.

No final pep talk.
No reassurance.
No “you’ve got this.”
Not even a "peace out".

She said yes, and immediately found herself standing alone in a room where everything had changed and nothing had changed at the same time.

That’s the part we rarely talk about.
The silence after the surrender.
The moment when the support disappears and you’re left with the weight of what you just agreed to.

And the next time we see Mary in Scripture, she’s leaving Nazareth and traveling to visit her cousin Elizabeth — and Elizabeth, six months pregnant with the future John the Baptist, is the first to recognize that Mary herself is carrying Christ.

Leave it to a miraculously pregnant crone to call out the not-so-obvious…

But this raises the question:

What happened between the angelic visitation and the divine recognition?

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The first trimester.

That strange season where everything is happening but nothing is visible. Where new life begins in total secrecy: cells dividing, DNA knitting itself together, a future taking shape before it has a face or a name.

And meanwhile, Mary is just… living.

A teenage girl with a controversial pregnancy, trying to go about her daily work while her entire inner world is reorganizing itself:

• replaying the angel’s words
• imagining every possible consequence
• wondering how Joseph will respond
• trying to appear normal in a community that could condemn her
• physically exhausted, nauseous, disoriented
• carrying a secret that is both holy and terrifying

And I doubt she floated peacefully through those weeks. I doubt she glowed. I doubt she was serene.

In fact, I’m certain she had moments where she wondered if she could undo what she had agreed to. Every culture in every era has had ways women could disappear a pregnancy. But she didn’t. She carried on. She moved through each day as best she could while waiting through each night with a whispered prayer for strength, for courage, for guidance.

If it were me?

I’d be a blithering idiot and a puddly mess.

Let me rephrase that: I am a blithering idiot and a puddly mess.

Because this is exactly where I am right now.

New life — the life I must build after losing my husband — is quickening. Healing is happening. Cells, hormones, fascia, identity, purpose — all of it is re-patterning itself.
A future is forming that I cannot yet see.

But from the outside? It looks like nothing is happening. Or, worse yet, it looks like all the wrong things are happening. It looks like the same widow drinking her tea, walking her dog, building her business, and navigating a holiday season she never imagined would feel this hollow.

That’s the nature of first trimesters — literal or metaphorical.

Everything essential is happening beneath the surface

and none of it comes with instructions, timelines, or guarantees.

You don’t know how things will turn out.
You don’t know what the new life will look like.
You only know that you can’t stay who you were,
and you’re not yet who you’re becoming.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO:

That is Week Two of Advent.

The waiting.
The in-between.
The hidden work beneath the visible world.
The ache of “nothing is happening” while everything is.

And the waiting isn’t passive. It’s the daily practice of countering every doubtful thought with the memory of the original promise, the angel only you saw, the knowing that belongs to you alone.

Mary lived that.
So do we.

And as we’ll see soon, the worst didn’t happen. Things unfolded exactly the way the angel said they would; not because Mary forced it, but because she didn’t undo what she had said yes to.

And the same can be true for us.

If we don’t get in our own way.
If we don’t abort the process before it comes to fruition.
If we allow the unseen work to continue shaping us.

This is the work of Week Two: the waiting that builds the world.

So in this second week of Advent — the week of waiting, uncertainty, and invisible work — give yourself some room to breathe. Waiting isn’t weakness. It’s part of the process. Just because you can’t see change yet doesn’t mean nothing is happening.

Take a little time and sit with these questions. No pressure, no searching for perfect answers:

• What in my life feels hidden or “not yet visible”?

• Where am I tempted to rush, fix, or undo the very thing I said yes to?

• What small signs or inner nudges remind me that something is taking shape underneath the surface?

Week Two is about trusting the work you can’t see yet, about staying steady in the in-between, about letting the early stages of becoming do what they’re meant to do.

It’s uncomfortable - very, very uncomfrortable.
It’s slow. It’s even stupid slow.
But it’s normal.

This is where new life grows long before it can be recognized.

May this week give you patience for the process, confidence in your yes, and enough steadiness to keep going while everything is still forming.

In May of 2020, when everything shut down and the world was trying to figure out what was happening, my husband and I pulled out of the RV campground we’d been living in and started what turned out to be a five-year adventure. That trip wasn’t supposed to begin until 2025, but the fallout of the pandemic stripped us of so many options that leaving early became the only realistic choice.

We were excited, yes… but also drained. It felt like everything we’d planned, worked for, or counted on had been wiped clean in a matter of months. We weren’t actually left with “nothing,” but emotionally it was a hollow place to stand. We had to trust the day in front of us and take things one step at a time.

Looking back, I can see that this emptying, this forced reset, opened doors we never expected. It led to a community we didn’t know we needed, and one that would eventually hold us through some of the hardest years of our lives. We had no idea then how important that support network would become.

And we also had no way of knowing that by the time we originally planned to start the trip…one of us wouldn’t be here anymore.

If there’s a takeaway from that season, it’s a simple one:

Life doesn’t wait. If something is calling you, do it now.

Now we’re at the first week of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas. I grew up observing Advent every year, and even though I’m not as traditionally religious as I used to be, I still feel a strong connection to the story, especially to Mary.

This year that connection feels sharper. I’m not even three months into being a widow, and viewing Advent through that lens brings a different kind of understanding. A friend said recently that she was seeing Advent as a “season of surrender”; surrendering to hope, peace, love, and joy, even during the darkest of times, times that seem bereft of all hope, peace, love, and joy. That idea landed hard for me.

So this year, I want to look at Advent through surrender-colored glasses, guided by Mary, the epitome of surrender, of accepting and trusting. And I hope that both you and I will gain something beautiful and glorious as we follow in her footsteps.

Picture Mary as a young teenager, maybe fourteen or fifteen, newly engaged, preparing for a life she probably felt excited and hopeful about. Her plans were in motion. Her future looked stable. She had done everything “right.”

Then the damn angel showed up with news that blasted her plans to pieces.

She was going to have a baby.
It wasn’t Joseph’s.
And she hadn’t asked for any of it.

In an instant, everything she expected for her life shifted. Her reputation would take a hit. Her engagement was at risk. Her safety wasn’t guaranteed. Her entire world turned upside down in the seconds it took to say, “Hail, Mary.”

And yet her response wasn’t resistance or panic or bargaining.
It was simple, and those words continue to peal through time like The Bells of St. Mary:

“Be it unto me according to your word.”

That wasn’t passivity; it was making space.

Accepting reality without immediately trying to judge it, fix it, control it, or predict the outcome.

That response is the heart of Week One of Advent.
It begins with a clearing-out — voluntary or not — that makes room for what comes next.

Here’s what I’m listening to:

I’ve gone through my own emptyings, many, many times. Most recently, as I mentioned before, 2020 cracked open one version of my life. Becoming a widow this year cracked open another. Both created unexpected space, the kind you don’t want and didn’t ask for, but space all the same.

Advent begins there; in the moments when life changes shape and we can’t hold onto what used to be.

So amidst the trimmings and trappings and traffic jams that violate everything this season is about, ask yourself these questions and sit with them for a while; let the answers present themselves, without force:

• Where are you being emptied right now?

• What part of your life is shifting or dissolving?

• And what might this clearing-out be preparing you for?

Week One is about recognizing the emptiness not as failure, but as room.
Room for what you couldn’t have carried before.
Room for what you didn’t have the capacity to receive until now.

It’s not glamorous.
It’s not easy.
But it’s honest.

This is where Advent starts.

May this week give you the courage to let go — and the spaciousness to receive what’s next.

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I originally came to yoga because my lower back simply refused to let me stand upright. Gentle yoga was the only movement that didn’t punish me for whatever size or season I happened to be in at the time. It eased the pain, gave me back my spine (literally), and slowly introduced me to a truth I would spend the next thirty years learning:

My body was speaking long before I ever learned how to listen.

As I kept showing up, yoga stopped being “stretching” and became a language. Ancient wisdom braided with breath. A way of hearing myself, responding to myself, and eventually… respecting myself. My entire sovereignty paradigm, in health and in life, probably began right there on the mat. And no, despite the urban legends, I’ve never bumped into Satan in a yoga class. Yoga helped me internalize the teachings of Christ more deeply than any sermon ever did.

Paid subscribers get the rest of this essay — but…

COMING SOON FOR THE PUBLIC READERS ON SUBSTACK:
I’ll be opening a four-part Advent series called Surrender: The Season of Making Space.
Advent is, at its core, the sacred pause before the new arrives — the stillness, the waiting, the quiet internal rearranging.
It is, in every way, a collective savasana.

This essay is the doorway.
Advent will be the path.

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My son and I were talking over dinner the other night. Yes. At the table, not in front of the TV. Since I moved in, dinner has migrated back where it belongs: around real food and real conversation. A small miracle in the age of screens and noise, but there it was, an old-school, 1974-style family meal.

We started talking politics, or more accurately, the national circus. He said what really frustrates him about people - co-workers, social media, YouTube, national news, all of them - is that they don’t realize that what happens in the federal government barely and rarely touches our real lives. Yet everyone is obsessed with it, hypnotized by the daily drama and then shouting from their soapboxes the same dribble, while the local issues, the ones that actually shape our existence, the ones that really need our votes, get buried and not noticed.

Everyday life is where sovereignty lives…not on Capitol Hill.

Now, sometimes the feds do crash through the door. Take the current shutdown. Because my late husband was a combat vet, he’s supposed to be interred in the state veterans cemetery. But that process has been frozen because the office handling it is closed. Bureaucratic limbo wrapped in grief. My ability to honor his wishes is being held hostage by people who can’t balance a budget or behave like adults.

Still, my daily rhythm goes on mostly unchanged. But the same can’t be said for the millions who suddenly lost access to SNAP benefits.

And here’s the part that gets on my last nerve. We’ve built entire systems around the idea that dependence is compassion. That government handouts equal care and equality and equity and all the progressive, emotionally sloppy words. It’s a seductive illusion, comfort masquerading as kindness, but the truth is, every entitlement program chips away at your divinely imbued sovereignty, your ability to build your own damn life. Anything the government gives you, it can (and will) take back.

How equitable is that?

Yet, out of this mess, something beautiful is happening.

Meet Heretic Coffee (full article HERE), a Portland café (yes, that Portland, the one everyone loves to call a lost cause because it’s quacking and flapping like a lost duck). Starting November 1, they announced they’d feed anyone who lost food benefits for free. When confronted with the financial devastation this would cause them, their sentiment was, if they go bankrupt doing it, so be it. Better to serve humanity than serve lattes to the elite while neighbors starve.

That’s moral rebellion birthed from a shared morality (which our Constitution lives or dies on) and a picture of true human sovereignty in action.

Within days, the world noticed. Donations poured in, over $300,000, to keep the mission alive. They posted:

“If you are hungry, come eat. The world has you.”

Meanwhile, politicians in Oregon are already patting themselves on the back for “ending the shutdown.”

But anyone with a working memory knows kabuki theater when they see it. While the cameras roll and the speeches drone on, it’s not policy that’s feeding people, but neighbors. It’s the barista who refuses to look away. It’s the small, sovereign acts of humanity happening in the cracks where bureaucracy failed (because that’s all bureaucracy can do).

That’s what sovereignty looks like in the real world. It’s not about defiance for its own sake. It’s about remembering who we are when the scaffolding of control falls apart: creators, providers, protectors, problem-solvers.

The Declaration of Independence, arguably the boldest mic drop in human history, nailed it:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those rights don’t come stamped with a government seal. They’re built into our DNA. And when we hand them over for the illusion of safety, we aren’t being protected, we’re being pacified, patronized, and pinned like a bug on a Boy Scout board. Safety that comes from someone else is never real safety.

I’m 55. I’ve worked since I was sixteen, hustled for every dollar, paid into systems that were bankrupt before I ever started contributing. Every year, Social Security sends me a polite little statement, a fantasy ledger of money that will never exist. Gen-X was raised on the myth that if we worked hard and kept our heads down, we’d be fine. Turns out, the only ones fine are the ones who wrote the myth.

Benjamin Franklin allegedly said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Well, folks, welcome to the end.

But here’s the twist: when something dies, something else is born. And what’s being born right now, in places like that Portland coffee shop, is a quiet revolution.

A new republic. A human one.

Because government was never meant to babysit us. It was meant to leave us the hell alone so we could build, create, and thrive. Sovereignty isn’t about isolation, it’s about remembering that we’re divine creators with moral agency and muscle. When we reclaim that, when we feed each other instead of begging to be fed, we end the game.

If you’re done playing by their rules and ready to reclaim your own, ask yourself where you handed over your sovereignty for the comfort of safety. Then imagine what it might feel like to take it back; not someday, but now.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be unpacking what sovereignty really looks like when it’s lived out loud; how it tastes, moves, and breathes in real life. I’d love for you to be part of that exploration. Click below to subscribe and let’s keep this human revolution alive.

What does sovereignty mean to you, right now, in your real life? Drop it in the comments and let’s get this campfire started! 🔥

I don’t know how many of you spent your summers at camp — but me? Every summer from the time I was nine until I graduated high school. And even after that, I went back to work on staff.

Summer camp (mine was religious, of course) became the axis my whole year revolved around. I spent at least a month each summer at various camps — music, scouting, religious instruction, more music — and my favorite memory from all of them was the evening campfires.

Staff would arrive about an hour early to kindle what would soon be a roaring blaze. We’d start with silly songs, break into games (always girls against boys), perform cabin skits, sing more songs… and then descend into devotional teachings.

There was something sacred about a leader standing before the fire, Bible in hand, offering words to calm our day’s energy, nourish our souls, and prepare us to sleep in peace.

And every night, just as the sun tucked itself behind the mountains and the first stars shimmered in the ebony sky, we’d stand, raise our right hands to the dying flames, and sing this benediction:

Day is done,
Gone the sun,
From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky.
All is well,
Safely rest…
God is nigh.

Just thinking about it still brings tears to my eyes.

I don’t remember the morning chapels or Sunday services; what I remember is the wisdom, love, and care shared around the campfire.

(And the s’mores, of course. 😄)

There’s something primal and deeply human about intentional fire. No other species uses it, yet we rely on it for warmth, food and, most importantly, community.

When Scot and I were work-camping in Maine, we kindled smaller fires every night. Friends and family would gather with food and drink, and we’d sit together as the flames licked upward into that same starry sky.

Campfires have always been a place for connection; a space to build relationships, transmit wisdom, and shape culture from person to person, generation to generation.

It used to be that every home had a hearth, a fireplace or a wood stove. I actually have one in my bedroom now, and yes, I can even build a fire myself (will wonders never cease?).

There’s nothing cozier than a wood fire on a cold, damp autumn day. It dials down my nervous system, increases my sense of safety, and releases creativity and thought.

It’s the perfect backdrop for diving into who we are as human beings — for remembering that our inherent rights come not from other people, but from Source, from God.

When I started Cozy Campfire Chats, I imagined a circle forming around it; a circle of kindred spirits, fellow sojourners waking up from the world’s illusions to the truth of who we are and why we’re here.

I didn’t know what that would look like at first. But it’s coming into focus now.

Here’s how I see it:

Each month, I’ll kindle the campfire with an essay on sovereignty. It might be historical, philosophical, or metaphysical; something to chew on and carry through the month.

For example:
• What are the Judeo-Christian and other cultural foundations of human sovereignty?
• What did the Founding Fathers actually say about it, and where did they get their framework?
• How does sovereignty show up in our physical and mental health, our culture, and our communities?
• And how is slavery sometimes disguised as freedom?

Then, each week, I’ll send something just for paid supporters — deeper dives with journaling prompts, thoughtful challenges, and subscriber-only conversations about the preservation and propagation of a free humanity.

We’ll explore natural law and how it pervades everything from biology to spirituality. We’ll look at how the United States was founded not just as an experiment in self-government but as a sacred space where human beings could reach their divinely granted potential — made in the imago Dei.

And we’ll talk about how we lost that space to those who would keep us enslaved… and how to reclaim it.

And because Bigfoot is a thing for me…you can expect that archetype of freedom to show up more often than not.

So pull up a seat (or a log).
Grab your cocoa and your s’mores.

Let’s enjoy the warmth of truth, of freedom, and of each other — as we kindle together this Cozy Campfire Culture.

🔥 If we were sitting around this campfire together… what story would you share? Share it in the comments and let’s get this blaze burning bright.

This is probably the hardest essay I have ever written, and will ever write. No sketching it out in my head, no creative collaboration with ChatGPT, no rough draft edited 67 times to get the metaphors and turns of phrases just right. Just a first-draft free write of everything that’s been building up inside of me since the night of September 23. Less than two weeks ago. The night my husband died of a massive stroke and cardiac arrest in our bed, me alone with him, on the phone with 9-1-1.

I was there as his eyes spun in wild fear and confusion as he didn’t know what was happening. I was there as they rolled back in his head, as his tongue started doing that weird in and out thing, as the death rattle sounded. His eyes came back, locked on mine one last time, and then he was gone, even before the paramedics could get there. Less than 10 minutes from beginning to end (thank God for that tender mercy); and even after his spirit departed, his body kept fighting - pulse, breath, warmth, slower, slower, slower.

Thus ended the life of a man who give his for his nation but whose nation gave nothing in return.

I have been sitting in silence, on the steps of our camper overlooking the lake, for nearly two weeks now, putting together the pieces and connecting all the dots that ended that tragic night.

We’d been fighting the Veterans’ Administration for nearly a year, trying to get full disability for him based on things that were clearly linked to the Gulf War - Desert Storm in 1990-91. Not just from the burn pit and oil well fire exposure, but from the pyridostigmine bromide pills he was forced to take as a Special Forces soldier - an experimental anti-nerve agent drug that may protect against nerve agents but also attacks the autonomic nervous system, the system that keeps all the bodily background programs (breathing, digestion, heartbeat, etc.) working. He was up to 50% and it was an uphill battle all the way. The Gulf War service connection was never made.

We fought the VA Healthcare system just to get him seen by a doctor - but what is ONE DOCTOR assigned to thousands supposed to do with a 62-year old veteran that comes in complaining of heart issues, arthritic symptoms, breathing issues, lack of energy…and his tests all come back clear? Is she supposed to dig around like a modern day Dr. House and find the sneaky, invisible thread that connects them all? Is she supposed to note that, even though the assessment was positive for PTSD that first day, maybe there was a connection between that and the random physical symptoms he’d been having throughout the years? That maybe, she would have thought, “Hmmm…his sympathetic nervous system, his fight-or-flight mode, has been stuck in the “ON” position for more than 30 years…that can’t be good…”.

No. She just said, “Lose weight.”

She also said, “Monitor and record his pulse and blood pressure. Report it daily to my nurse.” He was dead before she could review it and respond.

In the last week of his life, Scot began experiencing a cascade failure of all his bodily functions - breathing, sight, walking, eating, eliminating…all started shutting down to where, in only 7 days, he went from being my vibrant, loving husband to being stuck in a chair…and not even a wheelchair. He couldn’t even wheel himself 2 feet without passing out from the effort.

In the end, although my heart is grieving wildly for the loss of my husband of 28 years - we just celebrated that anniversary - I am grateful that God took him quickly, grateful that he was gone before the body went into its final death throes.

And I am grateful that I was with him the whole time - rubbing his chest, holding him in some way, letting him know that I loved him so very much.

But I am not grateful for the blind stupidity that has brought our nation to this point of trusting the government - whether the VA, the HMOs, any of them - for our health, our well-being.

In fact, I’m fucking angry.

Angry that “we the people'“ have sold out our birthright of sovereignty and self-government, self-management, self-rule, for a mess of pottage disguised as safety, as security, as benefits.

If my husband hadn’t been forced to rely on the socialistic, single-payer health system that is the Veterans’ Administration, if we’d had the means to actually tend our own health throughout the years instead of being overcharged for a government-regulated healthcare system (yes, private healthcare isn’t really private - you did know that, didn’t you? It’s owned by Big Pharma which is in bed with the government) to the point where we couldn’t access it, if we’d been able to reconnect with Nature’s healing processes decades ago instead of being forced into the hustle and grind and survival culture of this sick and twisted society…he might be alive today, looking forward to another healthy 30 years with his wife and family.

He died in our RV, in our campsite in northeastern Texas (we hadn’t even been able to buy a house yet)…and, since he hated me driving, I never learned to pull the camper, so I can’t even leave the site of his passing.

I have been left alone, with nothing.

Nothing, that is, but a vision to turn Wild Squatch Wellness into a blazing movement…not a cozy campfire, but a raging wildfire that burns away the blindness of our fat, dumb population who are enjoying their bread and circuses while the modern-day Neros burn down the empire. A wildfire that restores true sovereignty to each human being ready to wake the fuck up and take back their freedom and their radical self-responsibility for their own lives. A wildfire that refines and purifies those ready to stop playing this sick game where the only ones who win are those who make up the rules and convince us that they are the only rules.

Sovereignty begins with our health, and our mindset. It begins with us learning how, as creatures of Nature, we have been disconnected from Nature, from our Source, from each other, and from ourselves, and listening our way back into connection. My course, Feed Your Fat turns the diet industry on its head - it’s a starting point. But we need to go further.

I need help to do that. Friends and family have been raising money to help get me back on my feet and home to our son and his family in Idaho. The funds they are raising will get me there and buy me some time to grieve, to heal, to start piecing my life and direction together like a patchwork quilt…to re-launch my health course for women victimized by diet culture and start realizing my vision for Wild Squatch Wellness as a path back to individual and corporate sovereignty - inalienable, inherent rights granted to us by Nature and Nature’s God, outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. It will buy me time to fight the VA and raise my voice to representatives, senators, and maybe even the President himself. (I wonder if Dr. Oz can connect the dots as well as I can…)

My husband was robbed of his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Don’t be the next one.

Support the GoFundMe to help me take my next steps, and join Wild Squatch Wellness (both links are below) in honor of my husband, Donald Scot Violette, 12/11/1962 - 09/23/2025. He would want everyone to take back their freedom; it’s what he lived and ultimately died for.

GoFundMe

Wild Squatch Wellness

Thank you for your help, your support, and for your courage as you take brave and bold steps away from slavery and bondage, towards freedom and sovereignty.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who loved to caw at the crows in the palm trees out front. She raced across the yard each evening to meet her daddy and danced on his feet. By two she pushed her dachshund–poodle, Twinkie, in a doll carriage, already preferring live and furry pets to cold, static, and rather creepy fake babies. She refused to keep clothing and diapers on, blew horns, pounded on pianos, and danced to whatever music happened to be playing.

She was the original Wild Squatchling.

She was also carrying a suitcase she never packed. A suitcase that built itself around her belly, her hips, her thighs, her back. A suitcase that made her look like she’d eaten a suitcase.

She was me.

The world named that body wrong. At four, an overzealous nurse told me I was “too fat” and should have only one piece of toast at breakfast instead of two. With that directive, the measuring began: against the yardsticks of doctors, teachers, pastors, media, and well-meaning friends. I learned to believe that my body, my appetite, my very presence were proof that I was broken. That body was evidence that I needed to change, that I needed to fight it to meet all those yardsticks’ demands.

This is the story I am reclaiming; because the past was never a mistake, but instead the tale of an intelligent organism doing exactly what it needed to do to keep me alive and safe. Feed Your Fat is the map out of that old story: how to listen to the tissues that have kept me alive, and how to nourish them so safety, at last, can become the new baseline. So let’s dive into what I’m reclaiming, what I’m forgiving, and what I am now receiving with love instead of war.

The Rest of the Story

Before I breathed my first full breath, my world had already been startled. When my mother’s car rolled at six weeks pregnant, her flood of stress hormones washed through me, wiring my tiny nervous system before it was fully formed. Babies don’t get to choose; they inherit the chemistry of whatever current flows through. I arrived braced and primed for danger in a body tuned to scan, store, and protect first, and thrive second, if ever. Stress makes the body hold on to fuel, just as future uncertainty makes preppers cling to basement rations.

Layered under that early imprint was another kind of code: the epigenetic echoes of my ancestors. Epigenetics, the science of how life experiences can switch genes on or off without altering the DNA sequence itself, has shown us that trauma and adaptation can ripple through generations. Guernsey resistance, Ashkenazi genocide, Dust Bowl hunger: people who survived war, famine, and imprisonment by conserving, storing, and enduring.

• Researchers have seen this in descendants of Holocaust survivors and in children conceived during the Dutch Hunger Winter. Those instructions didn’t vanish; they were passed down in my very cells. Their command, echoing from generations past, was clear: always prepare for famine, exile, loss. My metabolism obeyed, learning to hold everything, because tomorrow might bring nothing.

And then there was my thyroid, quietly underpowered from the start. A thermostat and metronome rolled into one, the thyroid sets both heat and tempo. Mine ran low, which meant a slower rhythm, weaker muscle tone, and movements that never quite kept pace. Fat accumulated more easily, not because I was lazy, greedy, or “food-addicted”, but because I was wired to burn and move less. By age four, that fat had already become a kind of scaffolding, a soft armor that kept me upright in a world that might have broken my fragile frame, protection disguised as failure.

Added up, these three factors gave me a body that stored fat not out of failure, but out of a die-hard mandate to keep me alive. My body slowed down, braced up, and throughout my entire life, continued to reinforce its soft and squishy protection.

What looked like a chubby little girl (and later, a chubby teenager who wondered why no one would ask her out) who ate too much toast at breakfast was actually a body running on three survival programs at once…and it’s this story, both mine and countless others’, that is so often, if not always, overlooked by doctors, coaches, diet programs…everyone that recites that tired mantra, “eat less, move more.”

To the onlooker, whether concerned medical professional, scornful football quarterback, or well-meaning diet “expert”, my body looked like “too much”. In reality, what it was actually saying was: I will keep you safe no matter what storms come.

Sovereignty Begins in the Body

Here’s the thing: if the fat didn’t come because I overeat and undermove…then why would undereating and overmoving make it go away? That is where my journey to health sovereignty began, when I decided to ignore the noise coming from the outside, and finally listen to the wild, inner truth: fat isn’t a mistake to punish. It’s the messenger, and, instead of evidence of failure, it is the evidence of a body keeping its promise to survive.

So yes, I eat the second piece of toast. Always. Not in shame, but in honor of the body that kept, and still keeps, its promise. Because sovereignty begins in the body.

It might look like a small act, just breakfast, but it’s actually a silent but forceful rebellion. Every bite is a refusal to bow to the billboards, doctors, and diet books that keep chanting their enslaving spell: eat less, move more. It’s choosing trust over fear, nourishment over noise.

That is embodied sovereignty: lived bite by bite, toast by toast. Not rules, but reclamation. A planting of our own flag in our own soil. Because every sovereign act, every second piece of toast, every refusal to bow to fear, is a breaking of that spell.

I’ve been building Wild Squatch Wellness for nearly a year, and it’s taken that long to distill its true mission: helping you rediscover and reclaim your individual human sovereignty, one cell at a time. We live in a reality where almost everything is outsourced - our health, our values, our spirituality, our relationships - to systems outside ourselves. The result is exhaustion and confusion.

But the spell only holds if we believe it. By stepping back into our bodies, by creating an inner environment that supports genuine, natural health, we break the incantation. We prepare the ground for everything else. From there, we can make informed, sovereign choices about how we live, love, and lead.

Health Sovereignty is Only the Beginning

Health sovereignty ultimately means reclaiming the authority to care for your body from systems that want to outsource it — diet culture, medical bureaucracy, supplement industrialism, the “experts” who say your fat (or any other pathology) is the enemy. Instead of obeying their edicts and ingesting their prescriptions, you learn to hear your body’s language and meet its needs.

Feed Your Fat is health sovereignty because it:

• Flips the script. Fat isn’t failure; it’s safety, repair, protection. That’s the sovereign reframe. No external authority gets to declare your biology broken when it’s actually working on your behalf.

• Restores dialogue. Fat is a messenger. It speaks of hormones, of a nervous system on overload, of mitochondria in need. Sovereignty means you don’t shoot the messenger; you listen and respond.

• Rebuilds capacity. The body doesn’t need punishment, it needs resources. In the course and in community, you’ll learn how to nourish thyroid, liver, and mitochondria so your body can self-regulate. Sovereignty isn’t force; it’s tending your own inner garden.

• Resists domestication. Our present culture wants tame, disciplined, starved bodies — the kind that comply with every other mandate and constraint on our freedom. This work unhooks you from that myth and teaches metabolic repair as liberation.

So in plain words: Feed Your Fat is health sovereignty because it puts the keys back in your hands. It says: Your body isn’t broken. It’s speaking. And you have the right, and the responsibility, to answer.

Now What?

Sovereignty always begins with relationship — with your body, with food, with the stories you’ve carried. That’s why Feed Your Fat doesn’t start with rules. It starts with listening.

Sovereignty isn’t about being pushed into a program. It’s about choosing the path that truly serves you. Feed Your Fat is one such path, and if it resonates, I’d be honored to walk it with you.

So if this essay tickled something in you, let’s start with a conversation. We’ll meet on Zoom, not to sign you up on the spot, but to discern together: Is this the right step for where you are in your life right now? (Note: At present, Feed Your Fat is open only to women [XX].)

Schedule Your Call Here

If you’d like to keep traveling down this trail with me, subscribe to Wild Squatch Wellness for more campfire chats and more explorations of what it means to live as a sovereign being. Share this piece with someone whose body might also be asking to be heard.

Sovereignty, like wildfire, spreads one spark at a time. Together, we can turn this campfire into an unstoppable blaze of freedom.

Disclaimer: I am educated in health, wellness, and nutrition, but I am not a licensed medical provider or nutritionist. Please do your own research and seek counsel from your own trusted healthcare providers before making any decisions about your personal health and wellness.

Anyone who has known me for more than a minute knows that health and wellness are near and dear to my heart. I mean, I went on my first, medically-recommended diet when I was four years old…

FOUR. YEARS. OLD.

Take a minute.

Breathe. Cuss if you must…or just if you want. I’m down.

Now that you’ve gotten that reaction out of your system, think about it: wouldn’t any medical provider worth their salt, upon seeing an obese four-year-old, ask, “I wonder what’s going on in there…this is not normal. There’s got to be something that needs attention.”

But no, and I remember this like it was yesterday and not 51 years ago. The nurse, all decked out in her white dress, white SAS shoes, and her starched white cap looked at me over her clipboard and said in her best Mrs. Maisel voice, “Ninety pounds; honey, maybe you should only have one piece of toast for breakfast instead of two, alright?”

Okay, maybe she didn’t have that pinched, nasally, Brooklyn tone…but that’s what my four-year-old self heard, and that is what started my lifelong battle with food, with weight, with my body itself. And in response, over my lifetime, I have used every possible diet and fitness program save bariatric surgery or prescriptions to try and achieve “optimal health.”

The results? Same every time. Lose the weight, gain it back…all while eating “healthy”. All while “working out”. All while not having a free-for-all at Dairy Queen, but while following all of the rules given to me by doctors, gurus, influencers, and of course, our “we-only-have-your-best-interests-in-mind” government agencies: food groups, diabetic exchanges, food pyramids, the plate…all of it. Plus a severe case of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and a body that was slowly shutting down…the last body temperature I took before I started this journey was 95.6°F and my hair was falling out.

And where was Dr. House all this time? Of course, he was a bit of a jackass but at least he knew how to figure things out.

Well, I’m done with it all. Over the last two years, having fired all of my doctors and ditching all of my prescriptions, I have been getting to the root cause of my thyroid condition, which led me to understand why I was fat to begin with, and to a place where I could actually listen to that layer of adipose tissue. I finally understood why it was there, why it kept coming back, and why it won’t leave right now.

Oh. I’ve also raised my basal body temperature by nearly three degrees; a clear indicator that my system is waking up and remembering how to work properly. No restrictive diets, crazy workouts, or medical procedures; just consistent and surprisingly simple nourishment.

This is stuff women who have been violated and victimized by the diet and medical industries need to know.

All that said, I’m working on a new program called Feed Your Fat, created especially for women who are done with confusing, conflicting diet plans and ready to finally experience their best health by listening to and trusting their body’s unique wisdom.

If you’re tired of the noise — the diets, the gimmicks, the overwhelm — this might be the kind of solution you’ve been waiting for.

But before I launch, I want to make sure this program honestly meets your needs. So I’m inviting a few women to have a quick, relaxed, no-pressure chat with me. Just 15-20 minutes to hear your story, your struggles, and what you would want to see in a health program if you were creating it. No sales pitch. Just a real conversation.

If that sounds like you, you can:

• Click HERE to book a time that works for you.

• Or just reply to this and let me know you’re interested.

• And if you have a friend or family member who you think would be interested, by all means, forward this to her. I’d be happy to do a group call to make her feel more comfortable.

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. Your voice matters, and I can’t wait to hear from you.

Keepin’ it raw, real, and ever-so-Squatchy.

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That might not sound like a big deal, but I don’t usually dream. Or at least, I don’t usually remember them, so when I do, I’ve learned to pay attention. They always come bearing some weird kind of wisdom, wrapped in bizarre symbolism and stitched together from whatever my subconscious found lying around. So, I wrote it down.

But first, some context.

The first 25 years of my life were shaped almost entirely by religion. And not just “go to church on Sundays” religion; I mean uniforms, brass bands, ranked approval, and red kettles outside of K-Mart (if you’re too young, Google it). I was raised in The Salvation Army from womb to exit. And while I could (and maybe one day will) write an entire book about it, all you need to know right now is: I was very good at playing the game. And even though my heart’s been out of it for a long time, sometimes that old language still sneaks in and delivers the message better than anything else.

Okay, dream time.

We were on tour; maybe Alaska, like the high school band trip I went on when I was 16. Except this time, we were older. Revisiting the same places, just decades later. Scot was with me, but he was clearly uncomfortable. He hadn’t been part of that world, didn’t share the memories or the meaning behind it. He was just… there. Watching.

Then the scene shifted. Suddenly, we were at Crestmont: the seminary where young cadets train to become ministers. I was back in uniform, getting ready to go into chapel with Scot. Everyone around me was wearing Colonel trim, denoting them as senior officers. Peers who had played the game better than me…still a lowly Lieutenant. Not promoted. Not decorated. Just… there. Trying to play along.

Then I looked down.

My shoes were navy blue. Not black. That’s a big deal if you’ve ever been in any sort of uniformed culture. Because wrong shoes = wrong person. And to top it off, I was wearing knee socks instead of pantyhose. So basically, I was both underdressed and dressed like a 10-year-old.

Here’s where it gets weird: I asked if the Shoe Guardian was still around. (Yes, my dream self invented an official spiritual footwear custodian.) He was. I found him just as he was packing up and asked, “Do you have any black shoes in a size 10W?”

He looked at me and said: “It’ll take weeks to grow them.”

Grow them. Not find. Not shine. Grow.

I asked if he had anything else in that size. He pointed to a pair of ribbon-tied wedge sandals.

I put them on.

And instantly, my whole outfit transformed into a multicolored, flowy, boho look. The uniform was gone. The structure was gone. And I knew — I wasn’t going to chapel anymore. I turned to Scot and said, “I’ll wait outside.”

And that’s when I woke up.

Early. In pain. Like most mornings these days. My back didn’t hold up overnight (even on my GOAT mattress), and I had to shuffle out to the front room and scribble down whatever I could remember in purple gel pen before it slipped away.

Shoe guardian? Sure. Because when none of the current archetypes fit, I apparently just invent my own.

But as I sat there, groaning as I debated coffee or tea and tried ignoring the dog nudging me to take her out for her morning constitutional, I leaned - albeit a bit creakily - into what this dream was trying to tell me, I kept circling back to one thing: Outgrowing things. Systems. Roles. Outfits. Shoes.

It reminded me of a poem I wrote this past spring about a plant that had outgrown its pot. What used to support it was now strangling it. So I rehomed it — gave it space to stretch. And made room for new life.

Here’s the thing: what I’m going through right now - physically, emotionally, everything-ly - feels a whole lot like that plant.

My fascia is literally repatterning. Muscles, bones, and nerves are relearning how to be me. And it hurts. Like… sobbing-on-the-couch-for-days level pain. My legs, knees, hips, and feet feel like they’re being reassembled in real time. And they are. Because I no longer walk the way I used to — metaphorically or physically. As much as I’d like to, I don’t get to skip the part where it burns and aches and feels like my legs forgot how to leg.

There’s something about that dream that hit me deeper than usual. Because it’s not just my body that’s changing. It’s everything. Scot and I are in this weird limbo — between jobs, between seasons, between stories — and it’s painful. Not just inconvenient. Not just uncertain. Painful.

And maybe you’re feeling it too. In your own life. In the world. Because let’s be honest; everything is in flux right now. We’re watching the systems we thought would always be there break down in real time, and we’re having to learn how to live without the old uniforms and ranks and chapels that once gave us meaning.

Somewhere along the way, we started believing that growth was supposed to be clean and comfortable. That transformation would be exciting. Enlightening. Instagrammable. Worthy of a TikTok viral video.

But real growth?

It sucks. It breaks you open. It makes you twitch and twitter and tremble. It burns through the scaffolding you thought was your skeleton. It turns green, pops out of its too-tight shirt, screams like a rabid banshee and breaks things. It makes you want to crawl back into whatever box you just climbed out of…because at least you knew how to operate in that box, even if it was slowly killing you.

In my former life as a clinical therapist, one of the most vital things we worked on with clients was distress tolerance because so many mental health crises stem not from pathology, but from our sheer inability to sit with discomfort.

And isn’t that exactly what we’re seeing on a global scale?

• Don’t like your face? Get it fixed.

• Don’t like your grief? Numb it.

• Don’t like your parts? Swap ‘em out.

• Don’t like your life? Filter it, distract from it, disown it.

We’re not falling apart because we’re broken. We’re falling apart because we’ve forgotten how to be human in discomfort. We’ve built an entire culture around avoiding pain, and then we’re surprised when nothing feels real or rooted or whole.

And here's the kicker, shared two centuries ago by someone who got to die before resurrecting (yes, I’m envious): Old wineskins cannot hold new wine. Old shoes can’t carry the new you. Old chapels can’t contain your boho spirit. Old bones can’t hold the rewilded blueprint now humming through your DNA and into your fascia.

The structure that once shaped and supported you… now cages you.
The pot is too small. The roots are cracking through tile.
And the only thing to do is rehome yourself — tenderly, slowly, painfully — into something wilder. Something TRUER.

“What did you expect? Pumpkin juice?”
— Madame Pomfrey, when Harry had to regrow all the bones in his arm.

Pain doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It means something real is happening.

So if you’re in the middle of it too — raw, achey, barefoot in the waiting room — know this:

You're not broken, you're just growing.

And no, it’s not pumpkin juice.

But it might just be exactly what you need. And it will probably save your damn life.

As I sit here writing this, it’s all I can do not to succumb to the hot tears pooling in my eyes. The pain I’m experiencing is unlike anything I’ve felt before; it’s burning, sharp, and exhausting. I have no motivation to write, create, smile… nothing.

When I chose healing—when I looked at my freezing, thinning, shrinking frame in the mirror and said, “I choose healing over skinny”—I had no idea what that would really mean. I thought it might involve a few months, maybe a year, of targeted nutrition… 20 or 30 pounds of weight gain while my thyroid recalibrated… and then a smooth return to my familiar, lean self.

What I got was something else entirely.

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Yes, there have been wins - major wins. My body temperature has risen by 1.5 degrees; an enormous metabolic shift. My hair and nails are growing like mad, my eyebrows have returned, and my mood is far more stable. I can handle daily and unexpected stress with a kind of calm I never used to know. My nervous system is steadier. And I’ve done this without medication or a doctor overseeing it. Through nourishment, yoga, guided meditation, and fascia-focused movement, I’ve been walking a radical healing path that, quite frankly, doesn’t show up in any mainstream protocol.

But along with the wins has come more weight than I expected (don’t ask me how much—I tossed the scale), and something I never saw coming: a full-body reconstruction. Bone, muscle, fascia… all reorganizing, reshaping, and rebuilding.

And it hurts.

Today, it’s my feet, my ankles, my knees. I’m puffy and inflamed from the toes on up. With the fascia finally softening and allowing movement, the bones of my feet are beginning to shift; maybe for the first time in my life. I’ve always had fallen arches and plantar fasciitis. In fact, I wore my first pair of orthopedic shoes when I was just a year old. One of the many reasons I dieted so hard for so long was to lessen the load on those broken-down feet.

Now, that old tension is moving upward; through my ankles, my shins, into my knees. Both knees ache deep inside the caps. This is the pain of reorganization. Of fascia releasing and bones remembering how to hold me.

Because healing doesn’t always look like healing. Transformation doesn’t always feel good.

We talk about caterpillars turning to goo inside the chrysalis, but I wonder: has anyone ever asked what it feels like to dissolve? If it’s anything like this, I think many would choose to stay a caterpillar. The imaginal state isn’t something to enter lightly.

There’s one person I know of who went through this kind of full-system resurrection and came out whole on the other side: Jesus. And honestly? It’s occurred to me what a luxury it was that he got to die first. His mitochondria re-ignited and his cells re-knit beyond the place of consciousness. Jesus got to resurrect offline; I’m doing it fully awake and aware and let me tell you - going through all this while still alive? It sucks. Some days more than others. Today is one of those days. I can barely walk. My mind is foggy. Even watching a movie feels like too much.

(I wonder…is this part of “Greater things than these…”?)

And yet…I asked for this. I declared that my body is made to heal. And healing is exactly what it’s doing.

This process is painful, yes, but it’s also proof that, when I set an intention and support it with aligned action, the Universe responds. That gives me hope—because if this intention is being honored, so too will the others:

• The supportive income

• The home we’ve dreamed of

• The impact I long to make

• The space and resources to show up for our family in ways we’ve never fully been able to before

So no, I’m not dead. But I am resurrecting, from the inside out. Because inside is where all true and lasting healing and transformation begins.

And one more thing: if you’re hurting and holy and kind of pissed about it…know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

I posted this yesterday on Facebook (if you follow me there, you may have seen it, but maybe not…if you don’t follow me there, here’s your invitation). I posted it super early in the morning, when we had just hit the road, on our way to my husband’s first visit with his medical team at the VA Medical Center. Our expectations were low and so when the day turned out to be rather great, we were both pleasantly surprised.

The Universe was obviously rigging everything in our favor.

Later that evening, we drove to the community pool where we are camping and enjoyed what is becoming a daily routine, moving our aging joints and muscles in a slightly more forgiving environment. 30 minutes later we emerged, went back to the truck, cranked the ignition, and…

…NOTHING.

After a few clutch pumps and tries, the starter finally engaged, but it really put a damper on what had refilled our hope tank. The thought of pouring yet more money into this truck - one we feel like we’ve rebuilt, bolt by bolt, over the last three years - especially when money feels tight and dwindling by the day (I’m still looking for more stable income on my end) reversed our perspective.

Obviously, the Universe was not rigging everything in our favor.

I woke up this morning once again doing mental math: Where would we get the money to fix the truck? We have more medical appointments tomorrow, next week… how are we going to get there? When will those jobs I applied for call me to interview? The swirl of things in my waking mind has been relentless. I’ll admit - it’s so hard right now to act as if everything is rigged in my favor.

It reminds me of this classic Taoist tale:

The Farmer’s Luck —
A farmer’s horse runs away. The neighbors say, “Such bad luck!”
The farmer says, “Maybe.”
The horse returns with wild horses. The neighbors say, “Such good luck!”
The farmer says, “Maybe.”
His son breaks his leg trying to tame a wild horse. “Such bad luck!”
The army comes to draft young men but passes over his son. “Such good luck!”
The farmer says, “Maybe.”

I woke up this morning, once again, doing mental math in my head. Where would we get the money to fix the truck? We have more medical appointments tomorrow, next week…how are we going to get there? When will those jobs I applied for interview me? The swirl of things in my waking mind have been relentless, and I will admit, it is so hard to act as if everything is rigged in my favor.

That tale has also been swirling around in my mind, and the words of Jesus along with them: “Judge not…the sun shines and the rain falls and the righteous and the unrighteous.” He realized that our greatest suffering comes when we attach morality judgments to life events that happen to everyone, regardless of who and what they are. And we never know the full story of anything, do we? For all I know, that starter conked out at the perfect moment, giving us enough time to fix it before we drive another 80 miles to the next medical appointment and get stranded away from home.

Choosing our perspective is our greatest superpower; and that farmer knew how to use it. While everyone was calling good luck and bad luck, he just stood there with one raised eyebrow and said, “Maybe.” Similarly, when we practice accepting what comes as what simply what comes, we are able to navigate it more calmly and return to trusting that, even if we don’t feel or understand it at the time…

The Universe is rigging everything in our favor.

For further thought…

What’s happening in your life right now that makes you question all your choices?
How can you reframe what’s happening into a non-judgment zone?
How does that shift your emotions and your ability to make sound choices around it?

I would love to hear from you in the comments or by replying to this email - I read and respond to everything I receive.

Last week, I published an essay called The Great Domestication — and How to Undo It.
In it, I talked about how our Founding Fathers carved out a space for greater human freedom than the world had ever seen…

…and how, in just a generation or two, we were domesticated right out of that wild birthright.

I made the case that if we want to reclaim our sovereignty - our freedom to live as whole, self-governing human beings - the first place to do it is where it hits closest to home: our own bodies. Not just by yelling about broken medical systems or our tainted food supply (though that work matters too), but by tending to the living soil of our own cells.

Go read it. It’s worth ten minutes of your time. It’ll make what I’m about to say hit even deeper…because writing that essay cracked open a whole new sovereignty-versus-slavery rabbit hole for me.

So go read. Then come back. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. Let’s go deeper.

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As you now know, I’ve spent a lifetime wrestling my health and weight — enough that it led me to not only fight for my own healing, but to become a health coach so I could help others do the same. I love this work. Helping people win has always been my morning wake-up call.

But staying stuck at the annamaya kosha - the food body, the meat suit - was never enough for me. I always knew: Once the body comes back into order, what’s happening in the mind? The spirit? The soul? I could see, even then, that a healthy, nourished person is a clear-thinking person. A clear-thinking person is a free person. And enough free people build a society that’s harder to enslave.

What I didn’t yet realize back then is this: we haven’t just lost our health sovereignty; in fact, it’s been systematically eroded for generations. We have been poisoned, depleted, and trained to fear our own bodies. We’ve been taught to silence the messengers - the pain, the cravings, the extra weight, the burnout - instead of tending the root.

Here’s the wild truth:
An unwell population will never create a well world.
A dis-eased people cannot heal a dis-eased world.

When your body is sick, depleted, and full of toxins, you can’t think straight. You can’t discern what’s true. You can’t make sound, sovereign decisions. If you’re living on Hot Cheetos, freezer pizza, and Mountain Dew, and/or highly processed protein bars and copious amounts of salad with fat-free/sugar-free/zero-calorie dressing (what is actually in that, anyway?) your gut-brain axis is fried…and what are they feeding the masses? Hot Cheetos, freezer pizza, and Mountain Dew on one end and chemical “nutrients” on the other. Industrial seed oils. Refined sugar and flour. And petroleum-based medications for the diseases they caused. It’s the perfect trap, a trap putting every single one of us at the mercy of a very special (read: evil) few who profit from our disconnection. And the worst part? We’ve become our own jailers, and we are too sick, foggy, disconnected, and exhausted to see the bars that we’re living behind.

What really snapped this into focus for me was watching the globe navigate the pandemic of 2020 and beyond. Think about it: Shelter in place and order Uber Eats with your stimmy check. Get a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts for the shot. Stay inside, away from natural spaces and sunshine…seriously, WHY did they close the national forests?

I remember asking myself: Why would they push the very things that erode people’s health, when the greatest weapon we had against their weapon was our own natural vitality?

It was a living, breathing example of the Great Domestication at work. We have been trained to hand over our sovereignty - our immunity, our instincts, our wild coherence - to systems that thrive on our depletion.

So if you’ve ever wondered why your mind feels foggy, your belly fat won’t budge, your cravings roar at night, just look at what you’re being fed, not only physically, but mentally. Spiritually.

This is not an accident. It’s all by design.

Here’s the fractal truth:

• Our world is a mess because people are a mess.

• The soil is depleted because our bodies are depleted…heck, not even our poop is worth anything to the planet anymore.

• Politics and the world stage are just reflections of the chaos at a cellular level.

We’ve been taught to shoot the messengers: silence the symptoms, numb the pain, medicate the inflammation, burn the fat, bypass the cravings…but the root stays sick. And a sick root will always bear rotten fruit.

But your body is so much wiser than they want you to believe. It was made for natural law. For coherence. For sovereignty. When you tend to your health at the root level - nourishing your cells, feeding your metabolic fire, listening to your messengers instead of shooting them - you restore your own self-governance. You stop storing and creating chaos in your body…and, because as within, so without, we stop storing and creating chaos in the world.

As within, so without. It’s an ancient Hermetic principle that we see at all levels of nature, our greatest teacher. As you restore your own health, you restore health to your family, your community, your nation, and your world.

This is why Feed Your Fat — my upcoming course on cellular-level metabolic healing — isn’t just about losing weight. In fact, it’s not really about losing weight at all. It’s about creating the conditions for your body to finally self-regulate weight, energy, and repair, just the way natural law designed it to.

Because when your cells are nourished, your metabolism is safe, and your messengers are heard, your body stops storing and creating chaos. And a body that stops storing and creating chaos becomes the seed for a life, a family, and a world that stops storing and creating chaos, too.

Now go make yourself a nice sammie and feed your fat.

Feed Your Fat is coming in September. Until then, here’s where you can start your own Great Undomestication:

• The Burnout Butt Pack (FREE!)

• The Squatchy Summer Reset ($7)

• The Burnout Backpack ($27)

Some thoughts for discussion…

Pick one. Or all three. The campfire’s open — come share what you’re seeing, feeling, remembering.

Where do you see “as within, so without” showing up in your life right now?
(Gut, home, community, world — what’s mirroring back to you?)

When have you caught yourself shooting the messenger instead of tending the root?
(A symptom, a craving, a conflict — what did it reveal?)

What does feeding your fat look like for you today?
(If you were Momma Squatch by the creek with a sammie, what’s on your plate?)

Hi, I’m Hannah—founder of Wild Squatch Wellness. While it may sound like a health program, it’s really a movement to reclaim human sovereignty: the wild, wise, self-ruling nature we were born with. Sasquatch (literal or metaphorical—you decide) is our symbol for what was never meant to be domesticated. Most of us start the journey through the body, but these Cozy Campfire Chats often wander off-trail. If you're ready to remember what your very cells already know, you're in the right place.

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Let’s start with a picture. Imagine a room full of men—yes, men, the biological XY kind—gathered in a colonial building over two centuries ago, wrestling with what would become the most radical human paradigm in modern history. Today, we might call them a think tank or a founding board. Back then, they were the Founding Fathers of the United States. And whether you revere them, resent them, or fall somewhere in between, what they were attempting to codify was a concept that had rarely, if ever, been put to paper in such terms: human freedom.

They weren’t talking about loose ideals or casual preferences. They were assembling a framework for sovereignty—self-rule, free will, liberty bound not by kings or clergy, but by natural law - the law ingrained and encoded into the DNA of the entire universe. And they opened that framework with what might still be the most powerful sentence ever written in English:

We hold these truths to be self-evident… that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That wasn’t just a political declaration. It was metaphysical. These truths weren’t being handed out by a ruler or institution—they were already embedded in the human soul.

And still, within a single generation, it began to fall apart. The container cracked because, quite frankly, most humans will choose slavery over sovereignty if it feels safer. We trade responsibility for predictability. We cling to systems that demand compliance, as long as they also promise security. And when things go wrong, we blame the system, the boss, the doctor, the government—but never the part of ourselves that quietly handed over the reins.

Think about it:

• It’s easier to follow the plan than to build your own.

• It’s easier to blame the medicine than to research the root cause.

• It’s easier to say, “That’s just how it is,” than to risk disrupting what keeps you comfortable.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the health and wellness industry. And yes, it is an industry. Behind every program, pill, and protocol is a profit model designed to keep you tethered to someone else’s version of health. The rules are constantly shifting, the science is selectively presented, and if you’re not actively investigating the system itself, you’re likely being shaped by it.

That’s why the body is the best place to begin reclaiming sovereignty. Because that’s where the control runs deepest.

My own journey started with weight—145 pounds of it, to be exact. I had a sluggish thyroid, or so I was told, and weight gain had been a steady theme since childhood. My doctor recommended bariatric surgery. Instead, I chose a structured program that offered support and accountability. And it worked. I dropped the weight in about 18 months, and for a while, I thought I’d cracked the code.

Until it stopped working.

Despite following the same routine, the weight started creeping back. My labs were off, my doctor shrugged, and I found myself on medication that didn’t seem to be doing anything at all. So I made a new choice—one that flew in the face of everything I’d been taught.

I fired my doctor. I stopped the meds. I walked away from the program. And I started doing my own homework.

I studied metabolic function from a cellular level. I read research—both modern and ancestral—that most practitioners aren’t even aware of. I began experimenting with food, with rhythms, with nourishment beyond calories. I stopped treating my body like a machine that needed fixing and started listening to it like a living ecosystem that wanted to heal.

It didn’t happen overnight. This time, there was no instant transformation to post on social media. But slowly, things began to change. My temperature rose. My energy returned. The brain fog lifted. And even though I was carrying more fat than in my poster-perfect after pictures, I was actually healing for the first time in my adult life.

That’s when I realized: We talk a lot about personal freedom, but most of us are still imprisoned by the oldest leash of all—body control.

Domestication didn’t just teach us to follow rules. It taught us to distrust our hunger, to silence our intuition, and to outsource our power in exchange for approval. It dressed obedience up as wellness and called it a lifestyle.

If we want to reclaim sovereignty, we have to begin where that leash is tightest. Not with politics or philosophy, but with the body. The burned-out body. Because burnout isn’t just exhaustion. It’s a consequence of domestication.

When you’ve spent your life following rules that were never meant for your biology—eating according to charts, resting only when it’s “earned,” and living in constant fight-flight-or-freeze just to keep up—it’s no wonder your body finally hits the brakes. Burnout is what happens when the wild part of you has been suppressed for too long. It’s not a personal failure. It’s the body saying, “I can’t survive like this anymore.”

Enter the Burnout Butt Pack. It’s a field guide for the fried nervous system, a pocket-sized rescue kit for the overachiever who forgot how to stop. It gives you the micro-practices, mindset shifts, and immediate nourishment your body is begging for—without shame, blame, or overwhelm.

The Squatchy Summer Reset is what comes next. And no, it’s not a detox or a diet. It’s relief—for the summer burn of trying to meet impossible cultural standards: to shrink, to smile, to show up for everything, to expand and expand and expand... but somehow also stay small. Squatchy Summer Reset invites you to step off that hamster wheel. Just a few days of grounded, real-food nourishment, supportive rituals, and nervous system decompression designed to help you find your rhythm again. No apologies necessary.

Neither of these tools is about fixing you. They’re about freeing you. They’re the first steps back to something ancient: your own damn self, to a place where you can actually connect with and listen to your wise body.

And once you start listening… everything else begins to shift.

It’s that shift that “they” are so afraid of. Because when you no longer need them, they no longer get your money. And in this domesticated space - this farm, if you will - we’ve all consented to, where convenience is king and confusion is currency, following the money trail will always reveal the truth.

So I’m offering the Burnout Butt Pack for free. And the Squatchy Summer Reset is just $7. Not because they’re worthless, but because your - our - sovereignty is priceless.

And these are your first steps off the farm and back into the forest…where the Wild Squatches are.

Want to explore the stories and texts that shaped this perspective?

📚 Click here for the Cozy Campfire Great Reads for this essay.

🐾 BONUS: Meet the Mythic Side of Cozy Campfire Chats and Wild Squatch Wellness
If you're ready to explore where this movement began—not just in the body, but in the story—you can read my original short story, Where TheWild Squatches Are.

This whimsical, allegorical tale lays the foundation for the world behind Wild Squatch Wellness—and introduces the characters who walk beside you as you reclaim your wild.

👉 Click here to download Where The Wild Squatches Are (free)

Affiliate Note: Some links in this list may be Amazon affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you) if you choose to purchase. It helps support my work—and keeps the the sovereignty movement moving.

This isn't a required reading list. It's more like a trail map for your wild return. The books and texts below are some of the most impactful resources I've encountered—or am currently exploring—as I unravel what it means to reclaim my own sovereignty.

These aren’t “self-help” books. They're disruptors. Deprogrammers. Sacred agitators.
If you’ve read my essay The Great Domestication – And How to Undo It, you’ll see how each of these supports the wild truths we’re remembering together.

🧠 DOMESTICATION & POWER STRUCTURES

📖 Animal Farm – George Orwell
A deceptively simple allegory about how power corrupts, how revolutions are co-opted, and how slogans slowly replace truth.

📖 Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
A telepathic gorilla, a disillusioned man, and a deep examination of the myths of modern civilization. If you’ve ever felt like something about society just doesn’t add up… this is why.

🐺 SOVEREIGNTY & THE WILD FEMININE

📖 Women Who Run With the Wolves – Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Myth, story, and deep feminine remembering. This one doesn’t just teach—it initiates. Required reading for Squitches.

🩺 TRAUMA, BODY WISDOM & NERVOUS SYSTEM HEALING

📖 The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk
If you’ve ever wondered why healing doesn’t happen just by “thinking differently,” this book explains it at the cellular level.

📖 My Grandmother’s Hands – Resmaa Menakem
Racialized trauma, somatic healing, and ancestral restoration. This is a body-first guide to reclaiming safety and agency. Best received not just through the lens of skin color, but through the deeper dynamics of power, dominance, and internalized hierarchy—which can affect anyone raised inside systems of control.

🏛️ FOUNDING DOCUMENTS & REVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY

📜 The Declaration of Independence (U.S.)
A manifesto of self-evident truth. Whether or not you resonate with its historical context, the language of unalienable rights still stirs something primal.

📖 Ralph Waldo Emerson – Selected Essays
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." That about says it all.

🔮 SPIRITUAL TEXTS & UNIVERSAL LAWS

📖 Luke 17:21 – “The kingdom of God is within you.”
📖 Romans 12:2 – “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
📖 John 8:32 – “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
📖 Rumi – “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

🏕️ One More Thing

You don’t have to read them all. You don’t have to agree with everything.
You just have to stay curious enough to ask,
“What if I already knew the answer—and just forgot how to hear it?”

🔥 Read The Great Domestication – And How to Undo It to see how all these pieces fit together.

There’s a prize to be won through labor, through wrestling. I’ve been listening to quite a few commentaries on The Matrix mythology, and one thing that is consistently reiterated is that the first version of the matrix was an absolute flop because it was too perfect. Too idyllic. Too everything-served-up-on-a-silver-platter… and humanity railed against it.

They needed conflict, challenge, and obstacles to navigate; mountains to climb; contests to win; growth to achieve.

I think it's embedded in our very DNA. Even in the Judeo-Christian origin story, Adam and Eve couldn’t leave Paradise well enough alone, could they? And when they were escorted out? You’re gonna have to work for it now, and labor will be painful.

Thorns, weeds, tears.

Later on, after stealing his brother’s birthright blessing, Jacob had to wrestle to keep it. And keep it he did, but he took a limp throughout his life in exchange.

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Or consider, for a moment, the founding of the United States of America.

For a brief, shining moment, we had delivered to us, on a very hard-won silver platter, a space in which humanity could thrive in perfect freedom. Not freedom to loll about in splendor, but freedom to labor and achieve for oneself and one’s progeny, rather than slaving for a king, a lord, or a master. It was a space where we were free to rule ourselves, according to the dictates of our own consciences under the constraints of the laws of the universe, instead of living as serfs.

But no…within just a few decades, we traded that hard-won birthright for a mess of Marxist pottage, pottage that promised ease, equity, equality, and participation trophies for all. And we’ve been losing that fight, to our detriment, ever since.

I’ve found a whole new degree of wrestling in my writing lately, especially with the recent invasion of AI into the process. And I have to say that, while I welcome it as an inexpensive, real-time collaborator, a suitably brutal editor, and, more often than not, comic relief, it’s often very tempting to succumb to the ease it offers….

The ease of trading wordsmithing and wordcrafting, both of which express intention, focus, and labor, for mere wordplopping (yes, I made that up) is something we encounter far too often now. I understand the anger and frustration many artists feel, watching those who perhaps haven’t paid their dues by wrestling with their art reap monetary rewards in a system where, until recently, those rewards had to be earned through toil, tears, and mastery of craft.

I see the same thing in my healing and health journey, a journey on which I lost 145 pounds, relatively effortlessly. The cookie-cutter program was intensely researched and developed, and all my doctors loved what it did for me. But in the end, what I thought was a major health win was only a superficial illusion because I never did the hard work of truly understanding where, when, why, and how the extra weight and fat came from.

And that was not because I didn’t want to do the work; anyone who knows me knows I’m a worker, and I don’t shy away from the hard, the new, or the challenging. I didn’t do it because I didn’t know it was there to be done; and, to be fair, the experts who created the program didn’t know (and probably still don’t know) all of the cellular factors at play in how my health developed over the decades.

In retrospect, since my weight wasn’t a result of overeating, why would undereating fix it?

That’s the work I’m doing now, and this healing process is a lot harder, slower, less predictable, certainly not linear, and far less immediately gratifying than my previous, stunning before-and-after pictures demonstrated.

So… this isn’t about the dangers of AI lulling us to creative sleep, though there is that concern. This isn’t about how formulas and recipes make success too simple and easy, causing it to slide off like eggs from a non-stick pan, though there is that. And it’s not even about participation trophies and how they destroy human ingenuity… and, while they have destroyed at least two generations, this isn’t about that either.

What it is about is why.

Why are we humans the only creatures in all of nature so determined to have to earn our way? Because it certainly seems that if we don’t fight for it—if we have just a few moments of ease—everything we’ve worked so hard for disintegrates before our very eyes, and once again, the battle commences.

Why are we so not satisfied? Why must we always be striving to progress (not even to be perfect, because we know there is no such thing)? Why must we always be on a quest to level up?

Is that what separates and defines us apart from every other creature on the planet?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that a swath of mythopoeic dependent clauses won’t stir the soul, but an essay where each word is weighed and measured, tried, found wanting, and revised until it feels just right? That will mold minds, change lives, and ignite nation-forming wars.

A body that sheds fat the easy way—through restriction, surgery, and magic pills—will grow it right back. But a body that heals over time, from the inside out, will carry you for a century or more.

Thomas Jefferson wisely said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Or, if there is no pain, there is no gain.

And somehow, I think we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Before You Go…

If something I’ve said has given you pause, even for a moment, I would love to hear about it. These questions aren’t meant to demand answers, but to encourage your own pondering. If you feel called to share your reflections, know that I will hold them gently, and reflect them back with great respect and care.

1. Where in your life have you chosen ease over depth, and what did it cost you?

2. What part of your journey feels like it’s been "earned through toil, tears, and mastery of craft"?

3. Is there an area of your life or body that’s asking for a slower, deeper kind of healing?

4. What beliefs do you hold about struggle and success, do you feel you have to suffer to grow, or do you resist ease out of guilt?

5. If you were to write your own myth, the kind that would stir the soul, what would the central struggle be? And what would be the gain?

This passage dropped into my mind this morning as I lay quietly in a restorative front-lying twist on my yoga mat.

I used to preach this passage. I’ve stood behind pulpits with my Bible open, teaching others what it meant to store up treasure in heaven. But I didn’t fully understand it—not really—until it rose up through my body, unbidden, decades after I had walked away from the pulpit.

And not just the pulpit. I’ve walked away from clinical offices, classrooms, and weight loss coaching too. Once I even left my marriage…each time, I thought I was leaving another failed situation.

But maybe I was just walking closer to the truth.

And with that realization, puzzle pieces started falling into place.

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When Treasure Turns to Emptiness

Seven years ago, I filed for divorce. Not because of any major betrayal or incident, but because I was empty. I had spent years investing all my worth, value, and capacity for love in things and people outside of myself. My sense of belonging lived in the approval of others, in external stability, in being wanted, needed, praised. And when those things failed to deliver, I had nothing left to give.

At the time, I didn’t know how to love my husband of then 21 years—not because he was unlovable, but because I was incapable. My treasure had been stored in the external, and when moth and rust came, I mistook the emptiness as his failure, not my own disconnection.

The truth is, I wasn’t rooted. I had no internal storehouse.

A good friend saw it in me and, as I was recovering from my “failed” divorce attempt, said it out loud: “You have such a deep need for belonging, but leaving your husband and joining a new church isn’t going to give that to you. You have to find that for yourself.”

That truth landed hard—and it echoes louder every time I try to chase worth and belonging through external means.

When we rely on people, systems, or things to elicit love or belonging within us, we unintentionally set them up for failure—and ourselves for collapse. It's an unfair expectation. No one and nothing else can hold the weight of our worth. And when we ask them to do so, we create the conditions for mutual disappointment, distortion, and even destruction. In a world that demands we make others feel like they belong, we rarely ask whether we know how to belong to ourselves.

In the years since—five, maybe all seven—I’ve been flipping that script. Learning what it means to feel love and belonging that spring up from within. Learning that safety isn’t the absence of chaos but the presence of self. Learning that when I stop outsourcing my worth, I stop fearing its loss.

Presence, I’ve come to learn, is simply consciousness aware of itself. Not performing, not proving—just noticing. Just being. And in that awareness, I began to sense a love and belonging that no one else could give or take away.

And I think that’s what Jesus meant.

When our treasure—our sense of value and significance—comes from internal awareness, from divine presence, from that sacred space where God meets us in the quiet of our own soul, nothing outside of us can shake it. No bank account. No betrayal. No diagnosis. No bad day.

That’s why, seven years later, I can look at my husband (now of nearly 29 years)—the same man I once left—and tell him, without hesitation, that I’m not the same woman. When he fears I’ll walk away again (yes, I withdrew the filing, but the wound still echoes), I can say: you don’t have to worry.

Because my love for him is no longer conditional.

It doesn’t hinge on our house, our income, his success or behavior. It isn’t fragile. It isn’t a trade. It’s rooted in me. In the love and belonging that lives in my own soul.

Rooted in Presence, Not in Fear

And because of that, I can face uncertainty—in our relationship, in the world, in our day-to-day life—without falling apart. I don’t have to time-travel into the future and react to what hasn’t happened yet. I can respond to what’s here now. From peace. From presence.

Jesus continues, just a few verses later:

“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life…Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? Do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’…Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness [that presence and sense of calling that is already within you!], and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
(Matthew 6:25–34)

These aren’t just verses. They’re a blueprint for living inside your life, instead of constantly trying to control or protect yourself from it.

And yes, this includes my relationship with my body, too.

For most of my life, I treated my weight like a savings account of worth. The smaller I got, the more value I believed I had. Every compliment was a deposit. Every pound regained was a withdrawal. My treasure was in my shrinking.

So of course I lived in fear. Of course I felt bankrupt the moment the scale crept up. My worth was stored in something that rusted. Something that changed. Something that was never meant to hold the full weight of my soul.

From Shrinking to Sovereignty

But I don’t live there anymore.

Now, whether my body is lean or lush, whether the bank account is full or empty, whether life looks “successful” from the outside or not—I know where my treasure is.

And I know who I am without shrinking to earn it.

So instead of letting an unknown future shape today’s fear-based choices, I let today be the seed. I let this moment be the act of trust. I live as if I already belong—because I do.

And I love because I am love.

That can’t be taken. That doesn’t rust.

And maybe that’s the deeper pattern I’ve been living all along. Each time I walked away—from the pulpit, the clinic, the classroom, the diet program, even my marriage—I thought I was leaving failure. But really, I was leaving what could rust. What couldn’t hold me. What couldn’t carry the weight of my becoming.

Now I know where my treasure is. And finally, I know how to stay.

Your Turn

Where have you stored your worth in things that change—relationships, appearances, achievements, approval?

What would it feel like to let your treasure come from within—from the part of you that already knows you belong?

I’d love to hear your reflections. You’re not alone in this unraveling and re-rooting.