This post has been made available to everyone as it feels important to me to share this widely. Please share.

I don’t know if I can describe to you how deeply I know that each person in this world has value that no one else can bring. It’s inherent and it includes me.

I think I actually knew this my whole life.

The belief system I grew up in told me everything I was, was worthless, owned and created by someone else, usually male, perhaps God or my father, depending on the specific use they had for this all consuming authority at each moment or what sparked their all-present, and all-consuming fear.

“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” Isaiah 64:6

This verse was one I was taught, first, in 5 and K Sunday School. It was one of the five verses to count off on your hand to remember how to lead someone to salvation and, also, to think about obsessively to make sure you had done everything correctly.

“You can never lose your salvation.” they told us. “God loves you more than anything.”

It could have been the graphics of souls burning in flames of hell put on the overhead projector or maybe the reminder that if you died “out of fellowship” with God, you’d miss out on your reward that drove the consistent and all consuming hyper vigilance over every thought, action, word.

There really is nothing like being told you have no where to hide, that everything you are is filthy, and that God himself, who loves you but is willing to burn people without end, can see every thought in your head.

I used to think there were cameras watching me in my bedroom, maybe in the bathroom, anywhere I was alone near people, so prevalent was the idea of always being monitored.

This doctrine of “rewards” in heaven, really took this all the way home. You couldn’t LOSE your salvation, but you could miss out on the reward.

As someone who found shreds of safety in being as good as possible, and received scarce attention and praise as the oldest of six children whenever I was absolutely perfect, it was without question that I wanted to do the best I could and not have a second rate place in heaven simply for not caring enough or trying hard enough.

The theme of proving that I cared enough and tried harder than anyone has carried me through years dedicating myself to volunteering (starting at age 10), stellar grades, graduating college debt free exclusively on scholarships and working 4 jobs, fighting for years to repair a marriage with an abuser, mothering, and even now, the consistent, heavy voice reminding me to make every aspect of my business work perfectly so my family has what they need from me in time and money AND that my community has what they need as well.

I’ve watch another version of this perfectionist fundamentalism manifest as I build this work.

There is a consistent theme of fear running through many of the people I see trying to change the world:

• Of getting it wrong.

• Of impact and intent circling each other with predatory sabotage.

• Of starting or doing what they know must be done, out of hesitation of using the wrong resources, trusting the wrong people, or simply needing to order from Amazon.

Here’s a list of reasons people (myself) could criticize me for in this season of doing the work I’m doing right now:

• Occasionally using ChatGPT to synthesize large amounts of notes or find discrepancies in documents (because I’m one person and I don’t have time to do everything I’m doing)

• Ordering supplies from Amazon (because I’m one person and I literally can’t do all of this)

• Letting my kids watch TV far longer than our agreed upon limit compromising my beliefs on screen time, and undermining my authority and our agreements on limits (this is a season, and I’ve built everything I’ve built being a primary parent).

• Eating chicken nuggets and cookies instead of fueling my body with nourishing food I don’t have time to make (because some fuel is better than no fuel).

A simple truth emerges in my own internal discourse around this and every conversation I have with others about this.

There are defensive ways to detach from the fear of making the wrong decisions and there are powerful, settled, ways to own your own integrity.

No one is perfect. (defensive or ownership)

No one else can make these decisions for you. (ownership)

I’m trapped in this time/place/society/ and can’t own my decisions. (defensive)

I am still making a decision whether I own it fully or not. (ownership)

I don’t have a choice. (defensive)

I’m doing the best I can. (defensive OR ownership)

I am human and inherently not perfect. (ownership)

I am human AND inherently valuable, wise, and powerful.

Actually, the balance you strike with each decision has everything to do with your own integrity and ownership of your decisions and truly does not have anything to do with anyone else’s judgement. They get to make their decisions. You make yours.

You can do powerful work from a place of imperfection. And actually, we must.

I will not tell groups of people who I do not belong to what they need in terms of representation, education, or activism or pretend to know what causes harm in every sphere or not.

I will say this.

We all better be doing what we can AND build our tolerance for being wrong, allowing each other to be wrong, and learning to do it together.

Here’s what I mean:

• What you can do is what you can sustain. That may look like intensity and high output with periods of rest. It may look like slow steadiness so you can care well for your self, people, responsibilities and the work you do in this world. You actually are in charge of your capacity and no one else is. You hold that. There is not a need to defend it. It just is.

• Discomfort or disinterest are not very good reasons to not learn or do work around the impact of your actions AND you get to be fully in charge of ebbing and flowing with your capacity.

• Fear cannot stop us from stepping into the world with community changing and world changing work if we things were different. This includes fear on behalf of others OR ourselves.

• We must build our tolerance for fear, doubt, and discomfort to have the kind of conversations we must have to truly trust each other’s intent and educate/hear each other on impact. Deep relationship and powerful change does not come from lashing out in fear.

• Finally, deep care and healing for ourselves so we can hold our own safety and build it in community, builds our collective capacity and power. And while I’m ending this list with this, this is actually the first step.

It’s exhausting work, it’s exhilarating work, it’s absolutely necessary, and it’s all we really can do with our time here if we no longer want to feel powerless, paralyzed, and small in our lives and world.

The people around us, the world around us, and our own knowing of who we are and who we want to be, now and in the end, need us to live full out, abandoning the fear that keeps us from fullness.

More love, more doing our best, more hard conversations that don’t kill us, more asking questions we are afraid to ask, more invitations to do it together.

And finally, more nourishing of yourself, deeply. Fill the cracks so you can be strong and powerful.

We must celebrate thoroughly the pure sacredness of loving ourselves and each other enough:

To not give up fully on hope.

To be well in the ways you can, in deeply sick systems. (Ask me more about this!)

To refuse despair simply because hope and joy are more fun and more potent.

To view despondency as not inevitable, but a space to flow through on our journey of life.

To fight for each other and our own humanity.

To be gentle enough with ourselves that we can be gentle to each other

To cultivate strategically, our own wellness and agency, so we can float and rise above the crashing waves of chaos, fear, and haphazard, reactive, grabs for control.

A sense of agency is an unbreakable, and useful tool in the hands of people fighting the control of fear.

I’ll leave you with a quote I wrote for the last reflection circle of 2026 that I led by Lake Superior:

“I am not required to be grateful. I practice presence with any beauty around me in order to deeply feel the fullness of my life.”

With so much love,

Michaela

Join me on November 6th for the launch of my new Beneath The Surface Journal 1.0, a guided reflection class, refreshments, a journal to take home with you, connection, and an opportunity to build your own Lake Superior gift bag for yourself or a loved one!

Get Your Ticket

I’m now offering FindingFlow Audits to help you identify what needs to move next to take you to each next step in your life, work, or business. Your pre-call reflections, an deep dive 1 hour call, and your personalized plan for your Next First Steps, plus follow up are included. Start below:

Finding Flow Audit

Here are a few different ways for us to stay connected, together and with the lake:

Join My Email List

Body of Water: Fine Art Prints

Work Together!

Upcoming Events (added when available)

My dearest readers,

When you clicked subscribe to this publication, I got an email notification. You clicked a few buttons and you probably knew I’d see your name and $5/month come into my inbox and account. I want to tell you what it felt like…

I often open my inbox bracing a bit rather than with anticipation, which is, perhaps, an experience that many of us share. On an ordinary Monday, or Wednesday, or Saturday, I opened my inbox to execute tasks or clean up messes or face my anxieties, and instead, I found confirmation of something I spent a long time asking for.

I found confirmation that everything I’d been through meant something, that I had something important to say, that I am valued, and that what we have survived does not disqualify us, but prepares us.

A smile makes the corners of my eyes squinch up, my heart jumps a little in delight, and an exhale loosens my shoulder muscles. I am heard, I am helping, my learning, my devotion to this work, and my care, is not in vain.

I am so grateful to be here with you. Thank you.

I have needed to allow ebb in my life for the last few months. This included some slowness around processing and writing pieces I care deeply about.

Subscribe now

As a thank you for your patience over the last two months (personal crisis has continued to follow us closely), I want to offer you a unique invite and gift.

Read more

This season, somewhat surprisingly to me, has been flowing with grief. The urgency of everything my survival, children, work, and joy, have required in the last 3 years has lessened slightly, replaced by gentle waves of grief that lap at the edges of my happiness and sudden crashing surges that knock the breath right out of me.

I’m feeling the security of the love I live in now, pride over the community connection and momentum I see What We Saw Collaborative and the businesses within it perpetuating, I’m creating work I am proud of, and I’m seeing my kiddos feel lightness we haven’t felt in years.

Then suddenly I wake up one day and feel like I can’t get out of bed. My body will ache: mostly between my shoulder blades, a vise around my heart that’s been there for years, and then sharp pulling pain that wraps around my hips, belly and thighs. The protections that were so necessary don’t know what to do with love, and ease, and the success I have worked so hard for. I don’t know if I even know what success is, sometimes.

By all appearances, I have it. I have accomplished what I set out to do thus far in a way that meets my personal standards and values. It’s literally the definition of success.

But what is success if it’s not enough? How can I know, deeply, truly, for myself, what’s enough? I’m realizing that the turbulent current I’m currently sitting in is this:

Read more

I’m listening to Noah Kahan’s song, The Great Divide, and he says, “I hope you’re scared of all the ordinary shit.” I feel that line, physically.

He’s contrasting being afraid of cancer and ghosts with being afraid of an all powerful but capricious being who could ensure you suffer for literal eternity if you don’t get it right.

I used to love a man who held so much fear. My chest hurts every time I listen to this part of the song. For me mostly, but also for him. We both grew up fully submerged in systems awash with fear and control. I always wonder when it fully filled him and no longer battled with a desire to love and be loved. Or if that battle still goes on. Especially lately, as we all wonder how we get here, to this place where people deny their innate humanity. We wonder how people don’t feel anymore. Where did their connection to their soul, body and the feeling that makes us quite literally human, go?

[His name here],

I know you. And I know where yours is. It got mangled, and deliberately sliced into little pieces, pointed to, and said how ugly and horrifying it was, and how it kept you from God. By people who were supposed to love you, fully and deeply. Then they buried it where you are still unable to find it. And every time it utters its voice trying to remind you of who you are and what you once knew, the fear they taught you stomps it down. Hard and thoroughly and violently.

Read more

“You’re doing amazing things!” someone tells me. “You seem like you have so many good things happening,” another comments at the coffee shop where we run into each other. “I’m so happy you’re happy and safe and succeeding,” my friends say. “You inspire me!” someone else says and my insides squish and squelch and squirm away from that statement and what it means to me. My heart flops and I don’t feel safe or happy or successful. I’m closer than ever to living the full, adventurous, loving life I always dreamed of and yet, here I am.

I’m wearing a Holter monitor while I write this because that is what happens when you tell your doctor you’re having consistent heart palpitations, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, nausea, and other concerning symptoms.

Read more

I enter Lake Superior. It’s January. This isn’t new for me. I’ve spent years throwing my body into the care of the frozen lake. Usually, a layer of thin fabric protecting my body from eyes, but not from the cold. Today, like when I step into the lake to create my work, neoprene wraps around my body.

Today, I enter for fun. The significance of walking out here with a surfboard after years of yearning to do just this, is not lost on me. The sun is rising, turning the water gold and teal.

The first wave crashes into me, washing my face and hair in sparkling, crystal cold. I laugh. The delight feels familiar, but surprising in how quickly it crests.

Later, as I drive, seated on towels, gearing up wrestle myself out of the clinging neoprene in the warmth of my home, I feel the drip drop of water from the hair that escaped my hood. It’s coated in ice, icicles hang from my head. I carry the water with me from wave, to beach, to street, to car, to home. It drips on my thighs, my carpet, my bathmat, and, after a strenuous tussle to separate myself from my wetsuit, it drips, cold, close, and clear, onto my chest, my heart.

It trickles from my head to throat, my shoulders, my heart, easing tightness, fear, and the vast uncertainty of what is next.

I savor the drops, I collect them deep in the vessel of my heart.

I send them in a flow to others I love and others I do not know.

From earth, to stream, to river, to lake, to heart, to friend, to love, to leak, to flow, to surge, to power, to crash and lift and hold and move and ebb and flow again.

I text a friend two nights later: “Can I vent? Can I unload some things with you?”

“Yes,” they answer. “I have this time and this time. When are you coming?”

The fresh joy of remembering I am not alone, that I am allowed to say, “I’m scared. I’m sad. I’m so unbelievably angry. Are you?” washes over me again.

That morning in the lake, another wave crests, carrying all the energy it built from far out, further than I can see, across the lake. It carries oxygen, light, energy, and sparkle in every drop, as it carries me in to shore.

I feel the love and beauty of the water wash over me and later, the rare and precious loveliness of being loved and loving other people.

Maybe, after all, we are in this together.

It all crashes in together, breaking and eddying out into calm: Water and life and suffering and the crystal clear, breathtaking beauty of life.

Explore the organizations my work supports here:

Safe Haven Shelter

Valley Youth Center

Stay connected:

Join my email list!

Work Together!

Instagram

Upcoming Events

Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat 3x. 1, 2, 3…

Good.

Can I remind you of something?

Every droplet literally creates ripples AND become a part of the greater whole. There is nothing that is not affected by the force of the whole when it rises, flows and moves together. The droplets enter and move in different ways: they are swept up in the initial force, are pushed a bit by the water around them, or drop in as the waves surge. Stone, dirt, sand, and even ice, is subject to it’s power.

And there is ebb and flow. Stillness and raging, pounding waves. Darkness and light. There is a time and place for both. It is the nature of the lake and it’s power. That power lies in it’s ability to flow between states — whatever the winds and nature call for.

So, today, I hope you breathe. I hope you take the next step that is in front of you. I hope you know that you do not need to know how to transform it all right here, right now. You are one of many. You are a force. We are a force.

All my love,

Michaela Rai

Book me for photography, workshops, speaking or shop fine art underwater prints.

Work with Me

I do not care what “side” you are on. It is your challenge and responsibility to show your humanity to every person you meet right now.

If you are not able to do that, perhaps you are too far gone down the dark and lonely path of fear that tells you:

That it is sad, but there nothing you can do.

That rules are rules and that enforcement is all that is happening.

How close must it get for you to recognize overreach and abuse of authority for exactly what you have always been warned of?

This time is, unfortunately, a call to choose: Will the way you act be led by intentional choice or will fear have overcome what you truly are?

You are a human being allowed to be afraid: of scarcity, of violence, of what it means to not be able to trust your leaders to fix the problems besetting us all.

I am someone who did not always hold the beliefs I hold very firmly now. I know first hand what it is to question and examine beliefs that felt simple and safe AND caused more harm to other human beings than I could tolerate.

Must we first be united by fear to be united by love?

Perhaps yes.

Now is the time to dip below the surface, to ask questions about what you will be complicit in, to build capacity for doubt and choose your morality and actions with care and intention.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You just need to know who you want to be in this world.

It is time to ask:

Is this who you always imagined yourself to be?

Before we dive in I want to thank you for all the ways you support my work. Here’s are two little gifts for you going into these holidays:

Expansive Breath Underwater Meditation

Joy + Nourishment Mini Prompts

I am carefully walking into purpose. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I haven’t veered off this path much. Very serious, very focused, very intentional.

Now, I’ve done many of the very serious, very meaningful things I’ve wanted or needed to do. I’ve survived the physical and emotional traumas, re-learned enough parts of myself to live in a general feeling of alignment, and attained some level of functional healing after fundamentalism, abuse, medical trauma, child illness, divorce, the loss of my home and extended family, all before year 30. I’ve returned to my work in ways I never thought possible so soon after such loss. I have re-built powerfully and quickly, inviting big love, peace, and healing into my heart and a new home.

I have sat in my grief. I have held all of my very great fears with open and kind hands.

Read more

I love expansiveness, Lake Superior, the mountains, big open spaces, accomplishing big things, not seeing an end in sight, limitlessness. And yet, sometimes, we have to contract. I am in a space of contraction right now, the levels are low, the waves are deep and I just trying to find my footing.

What does the water teach me here?

To flow, as usual. To pull in, eddy out, to surge with power when the time comes.

What do I know now?

I know that for me it feels dangerous to pull in, to put less out. I also know it’s vital in order to continue forward. Stewardship is just as important as drive. We all only have one life, one body, one soul. Our circumstances limit us, for sure. But also, not caring enough to take care of ourselves IN our circumstances, limits us too.

Read more

Hot tears well up in my eyes and I feel that familiar swell surging steadily up through my diaphragm. It’s here again. An uncomfortable, persistent reminder that I am not untouched by my losses:

My former husband, who I trusted deeply, loved with abandon, and almost ruined myself, for.

My home that I knew was mine from the first step onto the land: the maples that gave me their sap in the spring and made my house glow with golden light in the fall; the ground that held my gardens and my kids running feet; the space to breathe that I’d craved for a decade.

My mother and her need for me to be unaffected: by her repeated harm and decisions that leave us further and further from each other with each passing year of my life.

The loss of half of my kids lives and the enormous burden of sharing their physical and emotional well-being with someone I, myself, didn’t feel safe with (Note: This is an always evolving situation with MANY factors at play and I wish for no one to have to make the kinds of decisions that parents in these positions are forced to make).

The loss of so many years of untouched connection with my child due to both of our traumatic illnesses.

And others...

Today the surge comes from this: it should have been my 11th wedding anniversary…

Read more

This is just one of the videos I've created to share the wisdom that Lake Superior has taught me. You can explore working with me or ordering a custom video gift/message, as well as fine art prints, at whatwesawstories.com.

…My nervous system was racked.

I didn’t know how bad it was (or maybe I did), until one very dark night at 4 AM, I was nursing my daughter and thinking about the rest of the pain pills in a small bottle in the cabinet on the other side of the wall. I was so tired and so sad and so alone and in so much pain…

I decided I wanted to live.

Read more

Start a Substack

I remember how tired I was: like my bones were heavy from exhaustion and grief. I could not seem to lift them.

That summer, I started going to the lake to let my daughter play on the rocks, to be outside, to find a shred of who I had been before. I began slipping into the lake: testing how it felt, letting the cold seep into my exhausted bones. It was a start. The cold reached my bones, shocked my body, and made me gasp for breath. I started to breathe again. Deep, long breaths that drew in oxygen and reminded me who I was and that I mattered. That my body mattered. That it needed breath and I needed breath and that we hadn’t been breathing for a long time.

Let’s go back…

Read more