Before I tell you how I ended up at a seventy person retreat, sitting at dinner right next to Dr. Joe Dispenza and asking him my questions, I have to take you back to where I was.

A little note before we go. I’m going to share some things about Dr. Joe’s retreats that you may not love. This is only my opinion. If you’d rather not know it, this is your moment to close the tab. If you’re staying, come with me.

I'm a seeker to the core of my being. It's who I am. It's how I operate. And I will continue to seek like my life depends on it, because in this lifetime, it really does.

So if you're a seeker like me, welcome. If you love depth like me, welcome. Depth fuels my soul. The intensity of my depth is something I ran from for a long time.

But I seek it out. I seek out truth. I have an interesting ability to find my truths and tell them, to myself and to you, in the most vulnerable way, no matter how icky and dark they feel. Radical ownership of my life has changed my life.

Back then, I had already done so much spiritual work.

And I was still drinking.

That’s the part I want you to really hear. When Joe’s work found me, I was right in the middle of it. I was seeking, desperately, for something to fill a hole in my heart that nothing had been able to touch. Not the wine, not the ceremonies. I’d pour something in and feel it drain right back out.

Then a friend posted about Dr. Joe. I looked him up on YouTube, pressed play, and my first thought was: who is this quack? His voice drove me crazy. The pacing, the tone, the frequency he stays in. I could barely sit through it.

And yet I kept listening.

I think something in me recognized something in him before my mind could catch up. My soul resonated. My heart resonated. Underneath all the eye rolling, there was a quiet yes.

So I did what I do with everything, what you’ve watched me do over and over here. I made a deal with myself. Thirty days. Every single day. Just do it and see what happens.

So I did the research. Thirty days, every single day.

And something started to move. I felt more connected to my heart. I felt spaciousness where there used to be tightness. Things around me started to soften, like someone had turned the lights down from fluorescent to candlelight. I could feel the effects of sitting in his meditations so deeply, in my body, in my chest, in the way I moved through my days.

I was doing his breath work too. and I was doing it incorrectly. It wasn’t for lack of effort. I was trying so hard. I just wasn’t good at it yet. And Joe says that himself. Sometimes you’re just not good at it yet. That’s part of it.

I’ll tell you something else. I loved that people hated him. I still do. He presses a button in people, and he always has. He’s so bad, he’s so culty, it’s all so much. Everyone has such deep, visceral opinions about him. Meanwhile I was sitting on my floor every morning, having the most unbelievable energetic shifts, just from listening to the man.

Joe has such an interesting reputation. You either understand because you've been, or you don't, and you judge. I like that. I like doing the things people judge the most, and really opening my mind to a different experience. Because when I think I know, when I have deep opinions about something, I'm usually wrong. And I love being wrong about things and people. That curiosity is what brings in massive opportunity, and a real identity shift.

I want to pause here, because this is the part that matters most, maybe more than anything I’ll tell you about the dinner.

The problem with manifestation culture, and honestly the problem with all of us, is that we give up way too soon. We just do. We think it should be easy. We think we shouldn’t have to try. We take every no as a sign to stop. If I had stopped at every no I’ve received in my life, I would not be here writing to you.

You have to keep going. No matter what.

If there is a desire in you to feel better, to find joy, to find peace, to find yourself again, to rise into a bigger life, you must keep going in spite of yourself. In spite of your mind. In spite of your old patterns and that old frequency.

Because that’s what it is. An old frequency. It’s the voice that says it’s everybody else’s fault. I hired the coach and it didn’t work. I did what they said online and it didn’t work. I tried meditating and nothing happened.

So find a different way. Then find another one. Keep going.

Read Dr. Joe with me

These are my favorites of his books. Becoming Supernatural is a game changer. Study it like a text. And all of his meditations are online, so you can start sitting with him tomorrow morning.

And then I found myself booking a retreat.

Cancun, Mexico. By myself.

I talked to my husband about it, and that was it. I didn’t ask anybody to come with me. I didn’t gather my people. I didn’t post about it or tell my friends. I just quietly booked it. I was both excited and scared.

I want to be really honest about where I was. My marriage was rocky, my life felt rocky because i was.

But somewhere deep down, underneath all of it, I knew. I knew this work was going to help me take ownership of my life in some way. I couldn’t have told you how. I had no idea how huge the experience would be once I got there.

All I can tell you now, looking back, is that booking that trip opened the door to the rest of my life. Literally. It dropped me so far back inot my heart, i jumped many timelines while there.

On the way to the airport, my husband looked over at me and said, “I bet you’re going to meet Dr. Joe. I bet he’s going to come right up to you.”

I laughed in his face. I wish you could hear the tone of my voice in that moment. I said, “That’s absolutely insane. There are like three thousand people at these retreats. There’s no way I’m meeting him.”

I believe we create our own reality, and the people around us are a huge part of that. Be careful who you surround yourself with. Better yet, be strategic about it. If the people in your life aren’t cheering for you, aren’t helping you, aren’t wanting you to grow, change it. That’s a whole other post, and I will write it. But hold onto it, because my husband, in the middle of our hardest season, saw something for me that I couldn’t see for myself.

He has always been my biggest supporter. (I wrote about him here just recently, in When I Changed, He Changed.) He's on this path with me. We walk it together. And maybe part of him knew, even then, that this work was meant to be for the good of our relationship too.

He dropped me off at the airport, and I was scared. I didn’t even fully know why. I was living in a frequency of fear back then. Afraid of my life. Afraid of who I was. Afraid to travel on my own. Afraid to walk into a giant auditorium in Mexico by myself and let something happen to me.

I think our souls know when something big is coming.

Every ayahuasca journey, every big decision, the decision to take alcohol out of my life, I was afraid every single time. I never once felt ready.

I’m putting this here because so many of us are waiting. Waiting until we feel ready. Waiting until we feel better. Waiting until we feel like going. And every time my soul was ready to rise, every time I was in forward motion toward the thing that would change me, I did not feel ready. Not once.

The thing about me is that I just do the hard thing.

I don’t love giving advice, but if I could give you one piece, it would be this. Just do the hard thing. Do it in spite of not feeling ready.

I’m not talking about anything dangerous. Safety first, always. I’m talking about the uncomfortable thing. The thing that makes your stomach drop. You just do it, and you see what happens.

So I flew in.

I got to my hotel, and it was gorgeous. My room was absolutely beautiful. I had my own little spa. I could see the beach from where I stood, and I remember thinking, okay, this is going to be the most incredible beach vacation retreat of my life.

Then I walked into the auditorium.

Huge. No windows. Nothing. Just a giant room and a sea of people. So much for the beach.

This was a while ago, back when his retreats still had tables. Now there are just rows and rows, because so many people come. But back then you sat at a table, and I found mine and sat down.

I remember the moment he walked in. I remember watching him, listening to him, and nodding to myself. And I made a quiet promise right there. I’m going to stay as present as I possibly can. I’m going to receive everything I can while I’m here.

That was my intention for the whole week. To soak up as much of him and his knowledge and the work as I possibly could. And that meant placing myself in that room, in whatever way I could, as close to him as possible.

I did not fly all the way from LA, feeling the way I felt, to sit in the back.

Don't sit in the back. Stop sitting in the back of your life. Get up and walk yourself to the front row. Do whatever it takes to take a front row seat in your own life, and say that you matter enough to sit there. Stop hiding.

If I was going to fly all the way to Cancun and spend nine days away from my family and my kids, I was going to do everything possible to get as much out of it as I could.

So I stayed at my table, close, and he walked us through the breath. That deserves a whole post of its own, and it will get one.

But here’s something you might not know about me. I’ve been an athlete my entire life. I played water polo at the junior national level when I was young, and I was really good. Good enough to earn a full ride scholarship to play Division I in college. Then I built an exercise studio, and not just any studio. A vibration studio.

I know the body. I really know the body. I’ve been moving energy through mine for years, literally standing on vibration every day. I had been moving energy for the entirety of my life.

Move energy with me

People ask me about vibration plates all the time. I don't talk about it much, because it's just a part of my life. But it's a huge part of my life. So I want to quickly offer you the plates I've found.

I own many Power Plates. I think they're the best in the game, but they're pricey, and Amazon has some really good ones. So I'm leaving them here.

On demand classes

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Then he taught us the breath.

It starts at the root. You squeeze your pelvic floor, the same muscle you’d use to stop yourself from peeing, and you pull that energy up. It’s a sexual energy. I want to be clear about what I mean by that. It isn’t sexual, but it has that same charge. Powerful. Sensual. Alive. You ignite that muscle and you draw it upward.

I started practicing. Pulling up from the root, into the second chakra, into the third, the solar plexus, right underneath the V of your ribs. I imagined the fluid moving up the back of my spine, and up the front of my body too. Joe explains it going up the back, but I imagine it moving through both. Then I pressed down through my breastbone and opened my chest. This is the area where the vagus nerve lives. If you don’t know the vagus nerve, it’s the longest nerve in your body. It travels from your brainstem down through your neck, your heart, your lungs, and your belly, and it’s the main line of your rest and digest system. It’s how your body learns it is safe.

So I opened my chest, pulled my shoulders all the way back like I was cracking the middle of my upper back, and it felt so good. Then I lifted my chin and drew my head back so my whole spine made one long line, and I pulled the energy all the way up.

And I moved so much energy that I passed out.

I came to on the floor, shaking. I have no idea how long I was gone. The first thing I noticed was the noise. It was so loud. It was scary. I was lying there trembling, and Joe was still talking, and no one was looking at me like I was crazy. No one rushed over. And I was thinking, what is going on here?

What happened, I understand now, is that I left my body. I moved so much energy that I got a taste of what had been stuck inside me. How much I had been holding. How dark it was. How loud it actually was in there when I came back.

Joe talks about coherence and incoherence. Coherence is harmony. Coherent energy is calm. It’s beauty, love, gratitude. Incoherent energy is anger, resentment, fear, all the heavy things we carry, and they show up in the body. Joe teaches that incoherence is where disease lives as well. His team measures this through research on heart rhythms and brainwaves.

What I felt when I came back into my body was pure incoherence. Chaos. I didn’t have the words for it then. I have them now.

Someone next to me leaned over and said, “Do it again.”

F no. I was not doing that again. That was terrifying.

But I knew I had to do it again.

And here's the thing about me. I want to give you some insight here. I didn't want to do it again. It was scary. Anyone who wants to stay the same, anyone unwilling to do the hard thing, would have walked right out and never tried it again. But something in my soul knows that I have to go do the thing I don't want to do.

Joe talks about this all the time. Most of us are living on autopilot. He teaches that by the time we're around 35, about 95 percent of who we are is a set of memorized behaviors, emotional reactions, and unconscious habits, running like a program. We wake up and think the same thoughts as yesterday. Those thoughts lead to the same choices, the same behaviors, the same experiences, and the same feelings. So every single day, we're living in the past.

To change, you have to make the choice to overcome. To become more conscious than the program. To do the thing your body doesn't want to do, and choose differently, again and again.

If you listen to his meditations, you'll hear him say it right at that moment, when every part of you wants to go back to the program. Cross the river with me. Literally. Do it again. One more time.

So the next time, I sat myself down on the floor. I wasn’t going to fall off my chair a second time and hurt myself. And I did the breath over and over and over again, for the entire meditation, until I started to learn how to work with it. I put myself as close to him as I possibly could.

We did the breath over and over again for the entire nine days. And I was really bad at it. I was a little afraid of it too, because it's so powerful.

People were having massive experiences in that room. Screaming, yelling, shaking. It all sounded very insane. But when your soul knows where it needs to be, it stays. Trauma leaves the body. Healings happen.

While I was there, I took part in a coherence healing. So much energy moved through me. It shook me open into a new dimension. I had never felt that much energy pour through my body that wasn't mine, for the sole purpose of healing another human being. All I did was stay open, open my heart, and send that person love.

That's what happens here.

That week had one purpose for me. Overcoming myself, again and again and again, so I could become someone new. The woman I had always wanted to be. A woman with grace. With dignity. With success. All of it.

And I just kept going.

Joe asked us to be in the auditorium by 4 a.m. I made sure I was there by 2:30.

I know how that sounds. But I was convinced that if I got the seat I wanted, it meant I was serious about my healing. More serious about my healing than about my sleep. So when that alarm went off at 2 a.m., I got myself up, brushed my teeth, and went.

That's what it means to overcome yourself. You do the thing in spite of not wanting to do it. You override the brain. Most of us are running on autopilot, and overcoming yourself means interrupting that autopilot and making a different choice.

And every single time you choose it, that choice creates a new reality. Believe that it's in motion.

It's like a freight train. Or a big ball rolling down a hill, collecting more and more, going faster and faster, until one day you arrive and you think, oh my God. It happened. It happened because of the choices I made to become a different version of me.

I rehearse that version of me in meditation. I get so crystal clear on who she is that I'm not chasing her out there. I'm just becoming her. One action, one thought, one decision at a time.

A lot of people would wander in whenever. Many of them had been to plenty of these retreats, and they were happy sitting in the back. But this was my first one, and I was going to sit as close as possible and learn everything I could.

I want you to take notes here, because this is the whole thing.

That frequency, those actions, that is what adopting a new identity looks like. My desire to become someone new was greater than my desire to stay the same. And I proved it with my actions.

Write that down.

I did not feel like getting up at 2 a.m. Not once. I gathered my things every single morning anyway, and I made sure I was first in line. And by the way, plenty of people had the same idea, so some mornings I was second or third. But people take their healing seriously.

And I did, over and over again.

And by the way, every retreat I go to, I sit in the front. I always try to be as close as possible. I want to soak up as much as I can, because I mean business.

I just sat in a four day retreat with High Priests from Bali. One of the wildest four days of my life, and a whole other post. And something one of them said has stayed with me. The universe is serious. Take it seriously. Take your healing seriously. And also, have some lightness about it. Don't take it all so seriously.

The password to your heart is a smile.

Okay. Back to the story.

Then came the second to last walking meditation. I was on the beach. When I finished, I was so deep in my heart.

I need to tell you, by that point in the week my heart had opened in a way it never had before. When you’re away from your phone, away from all the structures of your everyday life, and you’re asked again and again to come back into your heart, to rest in the nothingness, your whole body changes. It feels like it changes all the way down to the molecules.

I come home physically different every single time I go. I look different leaving than I did walking in. And it isn’t just me. Look at people’s before and after photos from these retreats. It’s wild. Some of them look like they’ve had a facelift.

I had a huge experience on that beach. My body was flipping and flopping all over the sand. You go out before the sun comes up, so you’re there in the dark when the light starts to break. By the time I was walking off the beach, the sun was rising and I was completely in my heart.

And Joe Dispenza walked right up to me.

He looked at me and said, “You’re doing a great job.”

I actually thought, is he talking to me? He came right up to me. And then he said, “Keep doing the work. You’re getting there.”

I knew exactly what that meant. You’re not that good yet. Keep going.

So of course I called my husband. “Oh my God. You were right. He came up to me.” We laughed so hard. The man I had laughed at in the car on the way to the airport had called it.

And I decided right then: I’m sitting even closer.

At the same time, something else was quietly happening in the background.

My husband’s family is from Mexico City. His dad is from there, and my husband speaks Spanish. I do not. But his cousin had added me to a WhatsApp group for the Spanish speaking attendees of the retreat. The whole chat was in Spanish, all day long, and I couldn’t follow most of it.

I didn’t meet up with a single person from that group. Honestly, I barely met anyone that week. I was so deep in my own thing.

That changed as I kept going back. With every retreat, I met more people. Lifelong friends. People who will be in my life forever. I love these people. They are my life and my soul.

If you ever decide to go, you’ll understand. You’ll be surrounded by people who believe they are the creators of their own lives. And once you’ve been in a room like that, you want more of those people around you. So many more.

Surround yourself with people who believe they create their lives. It changes everything.

Work with me

If you're ready to stop sitting in the back of your own life, I would love to walk with you. Everything I offer lives here, from private sessions to coaching.

Work with me →

And then the retreat ended.

I didn’t talk to him again. I flew home, I was still on that Spanish WhatsApp group, and I kept going. I continued my meditations every day.

Before I give you the key, I have to back up a little.

During that retreat, Joe mentioned his smaller retreats more than once. He’d done an intimate one in Costa Rica and another in Italy. Small groups. Long dinners. Wine. Time to sit with him and ask him questions.

I was still drinking then, so of course the wine part caught my attention. But what really stayed with me was the picture of it. Sitting at a table with him. Being close enough to ask anything.

And every time he brought it up, something happened inside me. I’d drop right into it, almost like it was already happening. Oh my God, I’m having wine with Dr. Joe. This is so cool. I was there. I could feel myself there.

Here’s what I need you to notice. I had zero attachment to it. None. It felt so far out of reach that I never even thought, I want that, or that’s only for other people. It wasn’t longing. It wasn’t wanting.

It was curiosity.

What would it be like to sit with him? To be in a small group, close enough to ask him my questions?

That feeling of curious, unattached presence is where it all starts.

Now here’s the key.

Read more

And every single time I talk about it, something tightens in me. A little wave of guilt. A quiet shame. Shame about having a marriage that works. Shame about loving my husband out loud, about honoring him, about being honored back.

There’s another layer too, and it’s the one I flinch around the most. When I changed, our relationship changed. When I changed, he changed.

I’ve been sitting with why that’s so hard to say. I think we live in a culture where speaking your truth can feel like taking something away from someone else. Like if my marriage made it, I’m somehow saying something about yours. I’ve watched it happen. I bring it up and someone goes quiet. Goes cold. And I walk away feeling like I did something wrong.

So I want to begin here, as clearly as I can.

Me staying married has nothing to do with you not staying married.

Your path is yours. Your love story, your ending, your beginning again, all of it is sacred. And so is mine.

Mine looks like this. My relationship changed the moment I changed. That may not be your experience. It’s mine. He changed when I changed. That’s what happened.

And I’m not sorry that this is my truth.

I am so incredibly, wildly grateful that I didn’t have to get divorced. That we’re still here, still growing together, more in love than ever, in a way I’ve never known love before. There’s a deeper peace between us now. A deeper honoring of each other, and of the paths we’re each walking.

So I’m going to write about it. Because I think this is one of the most important conversations we’re not having.

And I’m going to tell you how I got here.

My history with men has been my history.

It goes like this. I meet a man who is unavailable. He’s unavailable from the very first moment, and somehow he always likes me. He always falls in love with me. I think a part of each of them wanted to be available. They just couldn’t be, because I wasn’t available either.

I didn’t know that until I was 35 years old.

Every single person I dated cheated on me in some way, early on. And then I would spend one year, two years, three, four, five years trying to solve that piece. Trying to fix it, understand it, earn my way out of it. Or I would cheat to get out, because I couldn’t get out any other way. I couldn’t simply leave.

Those relationships were exhausting. They were thrilling. And they matched every part of the identity I was living in at the time, perfectly.

What I’ve come to unravel, slowly and honestly, is that every one of those men was a mirror. A mirror of exactly who I was in that moment of my life. They were an identity match. Each one brought up everything I needed to see, and I couldn’t see it yet.

So the destruction was great. For both of us, and for everyone around us.

I remember meeting Jesse. That’s not his name, but let’s call him that.

Jesse was the man I dated right before I met my husband. He was a producer, a very successful Los Angeles producer, working alongside a director at the very top of the industry. And he was so incredibly unavailable.

I hate writing this about myself, but he didn’t want to kiss me. Nothing about him was available. Nothing.

And somehow that little girl, that 35 year old girl, accepted it as okay.

I always believed I could change them. If I could just shape them into what I wanted them to be, then they would love me exactly the way I wanted to be loved. What I couldn’t see was that every single one of them was asking me to love myself.

I had to go through what I had to go through. They had to go through what they had to go through. We were deep teachers for one another.

I knew early on that Jesse was a player. I knew. And I did what so many of us do when we want something badly enough. I painted every red flag green. I looked right at them, knowing exactly what color they were, and painted them anyway. Because I so desperately wanted him to be my husband. My person. The relationship that would finally give me the thing I was aching for. myself….

Luckily, at the time, I was in a 12 step program, and I was instructed to write an inventory.

That inventory was eye opening.

I want to pause here, because inventory is something almost no one talks about online, and I think it’s one of the most important keys to manifesting the life you want.

The partner you want. The love you want. Anything you want to create.

If you’re holding any resentment, any fear, any delusion or denial about what happened to you, if you’re still pointing the finger outward, it is almost impossible to call in something new. The old story keeps taking up all the room.

When I sit down and write an inventory, I get to uncover the things in me that are blocking what I truly desire. I get to see my part. I get to see the pattern. I get to see the exact place where I keep abandoning myself.

I’m sharing the exact inventory worksheet I use, every question, at the end of this post for my paid subscribers. If you’re ready to do the work, it’s there for you.

If you want to get free, you do the deep work.

And I’ll tell you something. No one I know, other than my 12 step people, is doing this level of work.

It is the biggest truth finder, the biggest truth teller I have ever met in my life. Maybe next to ayahuasca. But we’re not doing ayahuasca journeys every single day around here.

Inventory has been a gift.

So, back to the story.

I wrote an inventory. I wrote one on every single relationship I’d ever had.

I was so willing to stop being in pain in my relationships. That willingness was everything.

And here’s what I saw.

My desire to find a husband and have children was far greater than my desire to stay in a relationship with someone unavailable.

I saw that every man who had ever shown up in front of me was me, zipped up. My deepest fears. My deepest resentments. My unavailability. My unwillingness to love myself. All of it, zipped up inside a different bodysuit. The same unavailable Rachael, wearing a new face, showing me exactly what I needed to heal.

I had never picked myself. Not once. I had never walked away from a relationship before trying to make it work first. For years, I dragged myself through them. And I knew, the second I met each of these men, every single one of them, that they weren’t lifers.

When I could finally look at that, when I could see that I was creating the same unavailable story over and over and over again, I could also see that I had the power to change it.

So I did the thing I didn’t want to do.

Everything in my body screamed no. Don’t. This is your only chance. Your only chance to have a baby, to have kids, to have a husband. You’re 35 years old. You are so dumb. Do not leave this guy. Make him your guy. Make him your guy. Make him your guy.

And I couldn’t make him my guy, because I knew he wasn’t my guy.

I also knew, because I’d seen it on the page, that I was living inside a delusion. The delusion said that if I walked away, I’d never have children. The truth was the opposite. If I stayed, I would stay far too long. I would miss the window. I would keep doing the same thing, over and over, with the next one and the next one.

When you see your pattern and you see your truth, and then you turn away from that truth and walk right back into your pattern, it gets you nowhere.

When you see your truth and you do the thing, the thing that is always, no matter what, the thing you don’t want to do, everything begins to move.

For me, the thing was leaving. Right then and there.

I knew Jesse was on a trip with another woman. I didn’t have proof. I had the proof in my heart.

And I had another kind of proof too. I knew, first and foremost, that my desire to meet my husband, to have kids, to have a loving relationship, far outweighed my desire to stay in an unloving one. I was finally ready, for the first time in a very, very long time, maybe many lifetimes, to pick myself. To say I would rather be single and alone than ever again be with someone who doesn’t want to be with me, who doesn’t want the same things I want.

I became so willing to be with myself.

I became so willing to fall in love with myself. That’s how you fall in love with yourself. You become willing.

I became willing to be my own husband. To take care of my own needs. To love myself so deeply that I could finally let go.

What it asked of me was to do the opposite of what I had always done. My old story went like this: prove he’s cheating, make him chase me, then leave. Every time.

This time I did something completely uncharacteristic of me. I sent an email. I kept it short and simple.

This relationship isn’t working for me. I wish you the best.

Then I blocked him. From emailing me back. From texting me. From every social channel. Because I knew that if I left even one window open, I would climb right back through it. The drama would continue, and I would stay in the same frequency, the same identity I’d been living in for so long.

If you’re having trouble manifesting or creating something, look at the frequency you’re living in. My identity was tuned to unavailable.

So I decided to become available.

And what does an available woman do?

She becomes unavailable to anyone who is unavailable.

And my actions lined up.

That’s how you quantum leap. You do the hard thing. You do the inventory. You become so willing to see yourself clearly that you can’t look away anymore.

This is the work I do with my clients, and it’s the work I keep doing on myself. I don’t always want to see the truth. Some days I’d rather leave it right where it is. And still, I keep inviting it in. Seeing the truth underneath things, underneath the patterns, is a gift I’ve been given. And once you see it, you can’t go back.

I changed the entire course of my life with that single decision. The decision to become available for me.

And with one single acceptance. I was the one keeping the thing I wanted away from me. No one else was going to give it to me. Only me.

The woman I wanted to become, a woman with a family, with children, with a loving husband, was never going to be found dating an unavailable man who was on a road trip with someone else and lying to me about it. That woman wasn’t available for that.

So I chose differently.

I want to say something about manifestation culture here.

I was talking with a friend about it the other day, and here’s where I’ve landed. Marketing is marketing. Get used to it. Instagram and TikTok are marketing. They’re going to market the shit out of you. They’re going to tell you that you do one, two, three, and your whole life will change.

I’ve fallen for it too. And I’m part of it too, because I believe that when you find me, I can help you do the real work of figuring out what you need to do to create a different life.

But the real work is the real work. People reach out to me when they’re ready to tell themselves the truth. That’s the doorway. There isn’t another one.

So here’s what happened.

My husband walked into the gym the next day. Or maybe it was a week later. I don’t remember exactly, and I want to be honest with you about that.

The moment I chose myself, the energy shifted.

Because here’s what I believe. You make the decision, and the universe gives you another opportunity to make the same decision. Sometimes it gives you many opportunities, again and again, until it’s truly yours.

Our relationship became another one of those opportunities. Another chance to stay grounded in my choice to love myself first. To become so available for me, and for what I deeply desired, that I was willing to walk away again.

I’ll be writing another post on how I met him, and how I knew, deep down, that he was probably my guy. I wasn’t afraid. It was different. But he was unavailable for what I was available for.

To be continued.

Here’s what I know. The people who find me are the ones willing to actually do the work. The ones willing to go into the shadow, look at their part, and tell themselves the truth. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

The exact inventory worksheet I use, every single question, is waiting for you below. It’s the same process that changed the entire course of my life. I still use it, and it’s the one I walk my clients through.

If you have any questions on the worksheet, let me know in the chat. I love doing this stuff. I love diving in. I love helping people get radically free, so they can actually create the life they want to create.

Happy manifesting, everyone.

Love you,

Rachael

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I knew if you liked me. I knew if you didn’t. I knew if you liked my parents, and I knew if you didn’t. I knew when my dad said the wrong thing. I knew we didn’t have the money other people had. I knew I was different.

I still do. I walk into a room and I feel everything. The undercurrents. The intentions underneath people’s words. What people want from each other, and what they want from me. There’s a little bit of psychic in it. Okay, a lot.

In Human Design, I’m a 4/6 Projector. They call me the regal authority. Projectors are the seers. We’re here to see people.

In astrology, I’m a Cancer sun, a Taurus moon, and a Sagittarius rising. I feel everything, my body just knows, and I can’t help saying it out loud.

And my writing code? Per limitless course is, The Radiant Undertow. I carry the light into the places people don’t talk about.

And I’m finally ready to tell my story. Slowly, and with time.

Writing has always been hard for me. Speaking is where I come alive. Put me in a room and I can take you somewhere. So bear with me while I try to do that here. I’m not the best writer, and I don’t always have the right words. But I have a deep wisdom that is meant to be shared.

I came into this world with that knowing. I’m sure of it. I see the web of my life, how every thread connects, how every single thing that has happened is here to serve me.

But I started numbing that very sensitive little girl when I was six years old.

That was the year my rock fell apart. My solid foundation. My dad left.

I remember feeling so scared. He was leaving us. What I didn’t understand then was that my mom was being left too.

So I did what any six-year-old would do. I made up a story. I decided it was her fault. If she had just been nicer, he would have stayed.

She was never the soft, snuggly mother I thought I needed. She always seemed angry. Always upset. Now I understand she was stressed. She was worried about money, and she was doing everything she could to give us every opportunity. She was also so loving, in her own way. I just couldn’t see it until much later.

That was when I started putting on the masks. The masks of who I thought I needed to be for everything to be okay. For my dad to come back. For my mom to be happy. For us to go back to the way it was.

And he did come back. That part of the story may get told one day, or it may never be told.

Here’s the interesting thing about me. I know what you need from me so that you will be okay. I know who I need to be. In any situation, I know exactly what you need in order to be okay. So I started there.

It is a terrible curse. And it is a gift I was given.

Because when you were okay, I felt okay. And just like that, a belief was planted: I don’t matter. My needs don’t matter. Your needs matter more than mine.

Perfectionism was born. The denial of who I was. The masks kept pouring on. The chameleon was born. And from that point forward, I started numbing my soul.

So let’s go back to the first time I felt like I didn’t fit in.

It’s the ’80s. I walk into school and everybody is wearing neon. I look down and think, Oh my God. I’m in brown corduroy.

I need to look like everybody else.

I didn’t have the tools for that feeling. I don’t think I ever felt comfortable in my skin. I watched. I observed. I knew what everyone was thinking and feeling, and I had no words for any of it. I was a good girl. And I was really uncomfortable.

I bit my nails all the way down, so far they filled with pus and had to be cut open. My parents painted them with that bitter polish so I would stop. It was the topic all the time. I was so nervous. I was sure I was going to mess up, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. I was sure I wasn’t smart enough. But I was always told I was pretty.

I was the pretty girl. And that had to be enough. (That’s a whole other story, and I’ll tell it soon.)

And all I wanted was to be like everybody else. I wanted to feel normal.

But what even is normal? Let’s define it right here.

Normal: the invisible rulebook we absorb as children, written by everyone around us, that tells us who to be so we will be loved. It is the shape we squeeze ourselves into so no one notices how much we see, how much we feel, and how much we know.

So I learned to fit in. And when you learn to fit in, when you learn to be like everybody else, it costs you a little bit of your soul. Or a lot of it.

I think everybody knows that feeling. Wanting to be normal. Wanting the intensity of who you are to be softened.

This one’s for my intense girls out there.

I wore masks. A mask for my dad. A mask for my mom. A mask for my friendships. Whatever would make everyone happy. The only person I didn’t wear one for was my sister. She’s a whole other post.

Becoming who everyone needed me to be was how I handled the intensity in my body.

And I forgot that I existed.

And when you live your whole life for everyone else, you lose yourself. I lost myself.

Isn’t it funny how we decide things at such a young age, with no real context, and then make them true for the rest of our lives? Those little decisions quietly run the show. They stay in charge until we’re willing to look at what did or didn’t actually happen. So much of it is interpretation, shaped by everyone’s opinions and misunderstandings, including our own.

Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches that so much of our past is made up. We make up stories. We hear stories. We add things in, we take things out. Every time we remember something, we rebuild it.

So how many of my beliefs are actually true? When did I decide them? And am I willing to unlearn them for my freedom?

This is where Byron Katie’s work changes my life, every single day. Her question cuts straight to the truth of everything: Is it true? And then: Who am I with this thought? Who would I be without it?

Very few people are brave enough to keep answering that question with a no. Because when it’s a no, the finger points back inward. It asks you to remember differently.

Am I willing to renegotiate with my six-year-old self? My seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old self? My teenage self, my twenty-one-year-old self, all the way to my twenty-seven-year-old self?

“Your problem is you are too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” — Ram Dass

The journey back home to myself has been about remembering.

“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it!” — Ram Dass

It’s been the journey of my soul. My soul came here to recognize that being myself is the greatest gift. My soul came here to love myself so deeply that it’s okay for other people not to like me.

It’s okay.

Somebody once asked me, “Where did you learn that everybody had to like you? Where did you learn that everybody had to be okay with every decision you make?”

Because the real question was never, are you okay?

It was always, am I okay?

That’s the thing about me. I share myself very, very vulnerably. As I write these words, my heart is wide open, it’s the only way I know how to be.

I hope it unravels everything you are not, and exposes and expands what you are.

As painful and as liberating as all of this is, it’s just life. It’s what it means to be human.

And here’s what I know. I don’t sit in the story. I see the root of things. I go all the way down to the root, acknowledge it, and pull it up.

And I’m going to teach you how I do it. How I find the root. How I heal it, grieve it, and let it pass through me, so I can level up and create the life I want to live. How I’ve expanded my own life this last year, and how I keep expanding.

Look at my face with my kids. That’s absolute joy. Joy from the inside, from the small things, from being me, from living the life I always wanted to live.

Thank you for following along. I’m taking you with me on this ride, and I’m going to keep telling my stories as they come up.

Next might be the pretty girl. Or perfectionism. Or what happened when I stopped trying to fix myself and learned there was nothing to fix. Maybe my ayahuasca journey. My health journey. My love of fashion. We are multifaceted human beings, and we get to talk about all of it.

So let’s expand together. Feel together. Get real together. Tell the truth together.

And for my paid subscribers: below, I’m walking you through how I did Byron Katie’s work on the belief about my mom that shaped my whole childhood, and how it changed our relationship. Then I’m giving you the worksheet I use, so you can do it any time, with anything you’re struggling with in your life.

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The other day I was sitting in a circle, sharing with women, and I watched a story land. I watched shoulders drop and eyes fill. And I had this realization. The things that make an impact in those rooms belong here, too. My story can be helpful. I tend to be careful about sharing the success of my marriage. I worry that I might offend someone. But today’s story feels like a success story, and if it helps anyone, that’s all I wish for.

So take this one. I hope it lands for you.

It’s a story I’ve told so many times. In circles, over long dinners, on the phone with women who are right in the thick of it. The story of my husband and me, how we came back to each other, and the little tools that helped us get there. Some of these practices are so simple and so profound. They fit on a single page of a journal, or a quiet walk around the block, and they can change the whole direction of a life. Maybe they meet you in something you’re struggling with right now. Maybe they meet you in someone.

I’ll be honest with you. It takes courage. It takes courage to see things from a different perspective. To let go of needing to be right. To literally stop pointing the finger. Even when it’s a breakup. To turn the finger around and point it inward. That’s real courage.

There was a season when I was unsure about everything. My life. My marriage. The whole shape of what I had built. My identity. And I was pointing the finger outward. He did this to me. He never does that. It’s his fault. If he would just change, I could finally breathe. I was a victim of Covid. It happened to me. The business lost, the income lost, the identity lost.

Back to my husband… I could feel it in my body, too. The tight jaw. The sigh before he even finished his sentence. My annoyance with everything in the room. The way I’d walk into a room already braced. Braced for what I knew was coming. The roles we had assigned to one another.

I was desperate to feel better. I knew from all my past 12-step work that it had to start with me. “Let it begin with me” was one of my most loved and most hated slogans in the program. As painful as it is to take ownership first, it’s the only way I know to create the life I really desire. So I went first. There’s so much more to share on “going first,” but for now…

In the middle of all that, I was handed a tool. Gifted it, really. And I can tell you with my whole chest, it works every single time.

Take out a journal. Write that person’s name at the top of the page. Then find three things you’re grateful for about them. Three things that are good.

It can be anyone or anything. A parent. A business. An institution. Politics. Whatever has your finger pointed at it right now. Write the name. Find the good.

So I did. I wrote three things I loved about my husband every single day for a year. A whole year! Things I admired. Things I’d forgotten I was grateful for. A cup of coffee left on the counter for me. His laugh from the other room. How he thinks. How he smells. How great he is with others. His wholeness. I chose to stop caring about the clothes left on the bathroom floor and the many other things he did “wrong.”

And my entire perspective shifted.

I started to see the pattern I’d been living in. An identity, really. A frequency. I had become someone who woke up looking for all the ways he wasn’t who I wanted him to be, and I had gotten very, very good at finding them. You will find what you look for. It’s the way the brain works. Literally science.

When I started looking for what I loved, the things that used to drive me crazy got quieter. Less glaring. Some of them almost disappeared.

What ultimately happened for us, though, was that he mirrored my actions. He mirrored my appreciation. He was doing his own internal work, too. It takes two to tango.

I want to say that here, because you can be as grateful as you want, and somebody could still be digging in their heels. Not mirroring. Not wanting to level up their frequency.

But he mirrored my appreciation. My gratitude. He stopped as soon as I stopped. And our relationship got better, and it grew in appreciation.

The walk

Around the same time, someone offered me another tool, and I still use it.

Picture zipping your mouth shut. Lock it with a little key. Then throw that key out into the universe, so far you could never find it again. And take yourself on a walk.

So that’s what I did. Anytime I felt the words rising, the thing I was so sure he needed to hear, I zipped, locked, threw the key away, and walked.

I took myself on so many walks.

And when I walked and stayed quiet, when I didn’t insert myself, something beautiful happened. Every single time, I was met with so much grace. A softness would come over me, and with it this quiet realization. Oh my God. It wasn’t even about him.

It was about me. My day. My stress. The emails, the to do list, all of it still buzzing in my body. He was just a projection. Someone I was laying it all on.

The less I did it to him, the less he did it to me. It’s a mirror. It’s wildly beautiful.

This kind of work takes real responsibility. It asks you to step into a different position. To say, I’ll go first. I’m going to go first. Always. Because who else is going to do it?

More journals

The journaling worked so well that I started a second journal. This one was for my business.

I wasn’t sure about it anymore. I didn’t know if I still loved it. I didn’t know if I still wanted to be in it. And whether I closed it or kept it open, I wanted to leave it in a good place. I wanted to see what I had built. The people. The community. Years of women walking through those doors and feeling something shift. So every day, I wrote three things.

Then came a third journal. A fourth. A fifth. One for each person or thing that had my finger pointed at it.

Journaling has been one of the most instrumental practices of my life. The Artist’s Way is one of my favorite things in the world, those morning pages where you just dump everything onto the paper and let it go. And these little gratitude journals sit right beside them. Three things every morning. Morning is what works for me, and you can also do it midday, or at night before you sleep.

Both timelines

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. Writing the good, even just three small things, opens a window. It opens a different perspective. It opens a different timeline.

And both timelines can be true.

You can tell me how wronged you are, how sad you are, how no one pays attention to you, and all of it can be real. And you can also tell me a different story. We get stuck in the loops of our stories. I challenge myself on mine all the time. Sometimes I catch myself and think, wow, I’m telling myself a story about a story.

I’m a big believer that we create our own realities. So when you change your perspective on somebody and start looking for the ways they are good and helpful, magic literally happens. Sometimes overnight. Sometimes gradually. Sometimes slower. And it always moves toward the good.

The radio station

I know how this sounds. Just make a gratitude list and everything changes. It sounds almost too cheesy to say out loud.

But literally. Make a gratitude list, and everything changes.

I’m also going to write another Substack very soon about writing your “best case scenario” every single day. Because when you’re actually prepared to do the thing, the writing, the journaling, the journal speak (I’ll talk about that one too), The Artist’s Way morning pages, the meditation, your life literally changes.

It’s just choosing a different timeline. It’s choosing a different frequency. That’s it.

It’s a willingness to shift into a different frequency. My dear friend Cathy Heller talks about it like a radio station, and I love this so much. When we were younger, and a lot of younger people won’t know this, you used to tune the dial by hand. If you landed on a station you didn’t like, you’d turn the knob and hear all that static in between until you found one you loved.

Same with a song. You put one on and it just doesn’t make you feel good, so you turn it off and find a different frequency.

It’s the same with your relationships. Sometimes it really is that simple.

It’s the willingness to do the thing. The willingness to take responsibility. The willingness to go first. The willingness to say, I don’t need to be right. The willingness to see things from a different perspective, which is really just telling a new story. The willingness to jump identities. The willingness to stop keeping yourself safe by saying it’s his fault.

Coming home

Here’s what I want you to know.

When you zip your mouth and throw away the key. When you sit with your journal and do the quiet, unglamorous internal work. When you take responsibility for your own stuff. Something starts to shift.

Your heart changes.

And I’ll be honest, that doesn’t promise every relationship works out. Some do. Mine did. Some reach their natural end.

What it promises is that you come back to yourself. Again and again. You come back to yourself. You come back to you.

And from there, whatever comes next, you meet it whole. Maybe you stay and do the work together. Maybe you walk away from the relationship. Maybe you walk away from the job that has stopped serving you. Whatever it is, you move through it in service. In love. In calm. In peace. In grace.

That’s the gift of three little things on a page. They bring you home.

Who’s with me?

For the next 30 days, I’m inviting you to choose the relationship you’re struggling with most right now. The one that keeps you up at night. The one your mind keeps circling back to in the shower and the car and the quiet moments before sleep.

Every day, write their name at the top of the page. Find three good things. And when the words start rising, zip it, lock it, throw away the key, and take yourself on a walk.

Thirty days. Three things. One name. You go first.

There are so many more stories I want to share with you. How I met my husband. Who I had to leave in order to meet him, when I finally walked away from the unavailable, and the very next day, he walked into the gym. Our surprise wedding, the one I didn’t know about until a month before it happened. And the saving of our marriage, and how it grew into a relationship built on deep, real love and trust. Two human beings who truly want the other to succeed.

If you’d like to hear more of these, tell me. I’ll keep sharing them here.

Three things.

With love,
Rachael

Good morning, love.

How is your promise going?

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We've told the truth. We've let go of resentment. We've named our fears and found our expanders. Now we find the magic that's been underneath the whole time, and then we let ourselves dream.

Grab your journal and a pen. By hand, always.

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Good morning, love.

If Days 1 and 2 stirred things up, that's exactly what's supposed to happen. Telling the truth and letting go of resentment loosens things. Now we look at what's underneath: fear, and its favorite disguise, perfectionism. Then we turn toward what's possible.

Grab your journal and a pen. By hand, always.

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she had just taken my nails off.

and i was in a full blown panic.

how did i get here?

as a kid i was so crazy uncomfortable in my skin that i bit my nails to ease the discomfort of everything. i bit them so bad my ring finger got infected and they had to cut it open. i still have the scar.

i was nervous all the time. so inward. i couldn't express emotion. i never felt like i fit in. i never felt like i belonged. i always felt different.

so when i grew up, i covered it. acrylic, dip, gel, whatever. perfect nails. all together. nobody could see the uncomfortable girl underneath. after a while, neither could i.

those nails kept me safe. until this week.

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* * *

At 42, I had everything.

A husband. Kids. A successful career I built with my own hands. Friendships. Trips. Adventure. The whole life. The one you're told to want. The one you work so hard to build.

And I felt dead inside.

I was pouring alcohol on it just to numb the ache. Bored. Flat. Going through the motions of a life I should have been grateful for. I couldn't say any of it out loud, because what right did I have to be unhappy?

So I kept moving. Kept doing. Kept smiling at dinners and filling the calendar, because if I stopped long enough, I might have to feel it.

Then I sat in a circle with twelve women.

They didn't give me advice. They didn't try to fix me. They didn't judge. They just listened. They reflected me back to myself. And for maybe the first time in my entire life, I felt seen.

I told the truth. All of it.

And something in my soul cracked open.

* * *

What I understood in that circle is that I had spent years performing a life instead of living one. Judging myself. Worrying what people would think. Staying on the path I thought I was supposed to be on.

The thing I was missing wasn't more. It was visibility.

Not the Instagram kind. The real kind. The kind where you stop hiding from yourself first. Where you finally ask: am I actually fulfilled? Who am I not being? What have I been pretending is fine?

And then, slowly, you let the right people see you too.

That's what changed everything for me. And it's what I want to give you.

I let go of the idea I had ti be anyone but me

And I got my life back.

* * *

For fourteen days, every other morning, I'll share questions, prompts and practices here. I'll be doing every single one of them right alongside you, and sharing my own answers, the messy ones too. We'll meet live on Zoom three times along the way.

To join the challenge, you'll need to be a paid subscriber and sign up here: https://stan.store/Rachaelblumbergchiprut/p/transformational-breathwork-ceremony-

I didn't know visibility was what I needed until I felt it.

Maybe you don't either.

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Midlife asks something of a marriage that the first years never did. You are no longer the people who fell in love. You have changed, both of you, in ways you did not choose and could not have predicted. And somewhere in there, every marriage arrives at the same quiet fork. You can grieve the person your partner used to be. Or you can get curious about who they are becoming, and choose them again.

I choose him again. On purpose, over and over, especially now.

I also want to quickly state I understand than divorce is the solution for some. This is just my experience.

This is the real story behind the reel I posted in white, the one with the little rules. People assumed those were quirky habits. They were not habits. They were the practice of choosing, built one small moment at a time.

Here is what actually helps you keep choosing your marriage through a body, a brain, and an identity that keep changing on you.

The mistake almost everyone makes

They think the goal is to get back to who you were. Back to the early years. Back to the effortless chemistry, the version of sex you had at twenty five, the person your partner used to be so easy to read.

That version is gone. It was never coming back, and chasing it is what actually kills a marriage. The couples who last do not recreate the old marriage. They build a new one, one their younger selves could never have imagined. One marked by trust that has actually been tested. Depth that has actually been earned. And a kind of desire that looks nothing like the first year, because it does not need to.

The weird little rules, and why they work

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If you’ve ever whispered to the universe, “why isn’t this working faster for me,” this is for you.

Manifestation was never meant to live on a vision board, cut from magazines and pinned to a wall, waiting. It lives in the vessel. In the wiring. In the exact place where the divine and the biological meet, because they were never separate to begin with. Joe Dispenza spent decades proving in the lab what mystics have always known in the body: your personality creates your personal reality. Change the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that make up who you are, and you change the frequency you broadcast into the field, and the field always answers.

This is the true mechanics of quantum leaping. Every version of you already exists, right now, as a living potential in the quantum field. The healed one. The abundant one. The one already walking through the life you’re praying for. You don’t summon her by wishing. You summon her by becoming, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, the person whose entire nervous system already matches her timeline. Rewire the pattern, and you stop chasing a future. You start remembering one.

In Kabbalistic terms, this is vessel work. Before the light can pour in, the vessel has to be shaped to receive it. Your brain, your body, your nervous system, this is your vessel. These eight techniques are how you widen it.

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There is a version of spirituality that has very little to do with God. It has to do with who was invited to the retreat, who was tagged in the story, who has the right crystals in the frame and the right amount of suffering. Enough to be relatable, never enough to be inconvenient.

I have watched rooms that were supposed to be about healing become rooms about hierarchy. Sometimes it feels like middle school with sage.

This is not an attack on spirituality. It is one of the deepest, most meaningful parts of my life. But real spirituality is not how many modalities you have collected or how spiritual your life looks from the outside. It is your connection to yourself and to the Creator. And so often what I see instead is a spiritual world running on the same currency as everything it claims to reject. Status. Exclusion. Comparison.

I have spent a lot of my life longing to belong. Not always to be popular, though if I am honest, sometimes that too. I wanted to feel chosen. Included. Safe inside a group of women. Looking back over the last nine or ten years, I can see this has been the real work underneath all of it. Stepping out of the constant search for recognition and into my own heart, into my relationship with the Creator, with the oneness that already is.

And then this eclipse season arrived, asking me to finish what that work started.

On August 12, 2026, a total solar eclipse crossed Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain at 20 degrees of Leo, conjunct the South Node, the point of release. On August 27 here in Los Angeles, a deep partial lunar eclipse arrives at 5 degrees of Pisces, nearly the entire Moon sliding into shadow. Leo asks to be seen. Pisces asks us to surrender. Together they are asking me to release my attachment to being seen by people who were never going to see me. Not to hide, not to shrink, but to stop performing my light in the hope that someone else will confirm it exists.

Here is what I know about myself underneath all of it. I have clairvoyance. A deep sense of knowing I have worked hard to root myself in. It is not about being right about people, I have worked just as hard to release that need too. I can feel the inner workings of someone's subconscious before they have named it to themselves. I can feel their motives underneath the words they choose, whether they are attached or already gone. This is not the same as being psychic, I cannot tell you the future. But I can read a person in five seconds. I can feel where they have been, the pain they are still carrying, the joy that is available to them if they would only reach for it. And almost every time, I know intuitively what would take them to the next level.

It is a gift, and sometimes it feels like a curse, because I feel the shift before anyone admits something has shifted.

I am genuinely happy when the people around me grow. No performance in it, nothing gritted underneath. What I am learning to admit is that I do not always feel that same happiness coming back toward me, and that this is not bitterness, it is simply true.

I have never wanted to be cliquey, not once, not in any version of my life. My support runs deep and consistent, whether or not it is returned. But I am starting to see something underneath that. I am the support woman. I show up, I hold space, I champion. And some part of me, quietly, subconsciously, has been waiting for that to come back to me the same way. Looking for the people I support to support me too, and calling it friendship when it never arrived.

I am done with that. Not done supporting people, that is who I am. Done waiting for it to be reciprocated as proof that it mattered. Done overriding the knock of my own intuition, the quiet signal that already knows what is true, in favor of staying in rooms a little longer to see if this time it will be different. I am going to start listening to that knock. Every time.

I am a Projector. I wait. I wait to be asked, to be invited, to be recognized before offering what I have. That is part of my design. But waiting to be invited by people who were never going to let you all the way in is not patience. It is a trap dressed as humility.

Here is the vulnerable part. I get invited into these circles. I show up. And almost immediately I can feel that I do not belong. Underneath all the knowing, the boundaries, the detaching with love, there is a simpler truth. I want to belong. I want it deeply. So deeply that I keep walking back into rooms hoping this time it will be different, hoping that if I support enough, stay soft enough, make myself easy enough, I will finally feel fully included.

That part is mine to look at. Not theirs. Mine. I have been asking circles to give me something I have not fully learned to give myself.

Nine years ago, in 2017, the North Node moved into Leo and the South Node into Aquarius. The Great American Eclipse that August was a North Node eclipse in Leo, and that chapter was about stepping forward. Becoming visible. Finding the courage to say, *I am here.* Now the nodes have reversed, North Node in Aquarius, South Node in Leo. Same axis, different direction. What I was learning to step into in 2017, I am now being asked to hold differently. Nine years ago the work was stepping into the center of my own life. Now the work is understanding I do not need to be at the center of every room to remain at the center of myself.

And there is a thread that reaches even further back. On August 28, 2007, there was a total lunar eclipse at nearly the same degree of Pisces as this one, nineteen years to the date. The sky is returning to almost the exact place it occupied then, and I do not have to guess who I was in 2007. I know exactly who I was. That was the year I turned twenty seven and the year I decided to get sober, to leave a life of turmoil behind. It was the actual beginning of my spiritual life.

Ten years after that, in 2017, I had my daughter, my last child, and stepped fully into motherhood and into the material world. That was also, energetically, when I left sobriety. I came back to it later, but that chapter was real. So this Pisces eclipse is not an abstract echo for me. It is the exact same degree of sky that was present when my spiritual life began, returning now, nineteen years later, at the start of a new one.

Lunar eclipses illuminate what has been living in the shadows. This one is showing me a belief I have carried so long it feels older than this lifetime. That I must be chosen in order to belong. That if I heal more, give more, stay softer, I will finally be allowed inside. That someone else gets to decide whether I am worthy of being seen.

I am ready to shed it. And the shedding feels catastrophic in the best possible way. Not because my life is falling apart, but because an entire internal structure is collapsing, one that taught me to wait outside closed doors and call it patience, to accept partial invitations and call them belonging.

This does not feel like rejection anymore. It feels like I am being called back inward. Maybe loneliness is not always proof that something has gone wrong. Maybe it is the sacred space between who you were and who you are becoming. Maybe unbelonging is not the punishment. Maybe it is the portal.

I am not stepping into circles that are not welcoming anymore. I am just not doing it. I deserve to be in circles where people celebrate me, where my light is not treated like a threat, where I do not have to become smaller or quieter to make everyone else comfortable. This is not about doing more work on myself so I can tolerate spaces that do not honor me. The work now is allowing myself to be seen by people who actually want to see me.

This eclipse is quiet. It is not asking for a performance. I am letting it unravel me, and I hope you let it unravel you too.

Go back to your own 2007. Go back to your own 2017. Let it ruminate inside you, not as an answer, just as a question sitting where it needs to sit. What is being asked of you right now to release? What are you being asked to step back into? What is being asked to reorganize? And underneath all of it, what kind of belonging are you actually being asked to find?

I belong to the Creator. That’s enough.

For a long time, I dated the same man in different bodies. Unavailable. Emotionally closed. Someone who never really chose me, and who I would later realize had never truly been mine to begin with. Here’s the part I didn’t want to admit for a long time: I knew. Some part of me always knew. My intuition was speaking the entire time. I just didn’t trust it, because I didn’t trust myself.

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I didn’t know my soul needed to be seen. But I think we all need it. I think it’s the thing underneath most of what we’re actually chasing.

It started in a circle. I walked into a room and sat down amongst 12 women. It was called the reflection circle. As I sat there listening to other women share, I understood something. I was very, very bad at letting myself be seen. That’s a whole other essay, one I’ve written before and will probably write again, because it keeps deepening the more I sit with it.

Sharing in that circle, and having it reflected back to me, having 12 women actually see me in that vulnerability, it changed me. It shifted my life. I still sit in those circles. I still offer them. If you’re curious, leave me a message. There are very few things I’ll say will change your life. This is one of them.

Sitting in that circle healed me. It always does. There is something in the simple act of being seen by another human, and seeing them back, that reaches places nothing else can touch. I have watched countless women be seen and healed in that same way, and somewhere along the line it sparked something in me too. It nudged me forward enough to step back into my own life. To share.

That is scary to do on social media. But I wanted to share it anyway. To be seen.

I have always known I had a message. I have always wanted to use my voice. I have always been a teacher in some capacity. And stepping into content creation, sharing my gifts publicly, has blown any inner journey I have ever done out of the water.

I have never felt so raw. I have never been in so much pain. And I have never felt so expanded, so connected, so completely in purpose.

The choice to be seen is a beautiful choice for yourself. It just is. Everyone should be seen. If it’s not on social media, I hope you have something, someone, some room that seats you and listens to your soul. And here’s the beautiful part about social media. If you can stay authentic to who you are, if you can stay grounded in that, being seen becomes radically fun. Because you reach so many people. And being in service, helping other people step into being seen, has been one of the most beautiful gifts I’ve ever been given.

Let yourself be mediocre

I want to say this because nobody said it to me clearly enough.

Let yourself be mediocre. Let yourself be not great. Let yourself suck. It’s so important.

When you allow yourself to not be great, to be new at something, a beginner, a learner, teachable, you get access to the same curiosity a kid has when they’re learning something for the first time. That’s what this is supposed to feel like. You’re not supposed to be good right away. Some people are just naturally great at things. That hasn’t been my story. Mine has been about repetition. Building a muscle. Consistency. Building an inner sanctuary of strength inside myself, one rep at a time.

There is so much stability in doing it badly. In thinking, oh god, everybody’s going to judge me for this. And they probably did judge you. And then people just moved on. And you got through it. And you got up the next day and did it again. And again. Until you were rock solid. Until the muscle was simply there.

There’s no magic pill

I built this following from a little over 5,000 people at the beginning of last August. I had been sitting at 5,000 for a long time, stuck there. It’s now at 46,000 and growing. And I need you to know that’s not because I took a magic pill. Everybody wants the magic pill.

People ask me all the time what I did. So I tell them, exactly, step by step. And half the time the response is disbelief. Like, wait, that’s it? That’s the whole thing? It doesn’t happen overnight. You have to actually work at it. You have to actually do the thing, every day, and let people learn who you are over time. Sometimes someone does blow up overnight, I’m not saying it never happens. But that’s not the story I’m here to teach. I want to learn from someone who’s been in the trenches. Someone who built their own brand with their own hands, who never hired anyone to create it and launch it for them, who was the one actually doing the work. That’s me. I’m doing this myself.

So if you’re doing this yourself too, I need you to know it’s completely possible. I’m still doing it. I’m still learning. I’m still curious every single day about where this is going and what it could actually lead to.

I play water polo, so here’s the analogy I always come back to. You don’t pick up a water polo ball and score in the net without learning to swim first, for years. You have to be a really strong swimmer before you can be a good water polo player. These 11 practices are your swimming. Stay consistent, and the rest comes.

So here’s what I actually want you to do. Not just think about, not just nod along to, actually do. Eleven practices. Simple on paper, not always simple to live. Do them in order, or don’t, but do them.

The 11 practices

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in august 2017, there was a total solar eclipse at 29 degrees leo, conjunct the north node. my daughter was born days before it, august 13, 2017. she was an expander. her whole arrival cracked me open into a bigger version of my life

i was in expansion mode that year too. building, doing, becoming visible. i stepped into owning a business. i stepped into drinking more. i stepped into a life that looked right and felt wrong. i was losing connection with God on the inside while everything on the outside looked like growth

four years ago i chose to step away from that

why nine years. the lunar nodes, the points where eclipses happen, take about 18.6 years to complete a full circle around the zodiac. half of that cycle, roughly 9.3 years, brings the nodes back to the exact same axis, just reversed. north becomes south, south becomes north. that’s why 2017 and 2026 are landing on the same degree of leo, nine years apart, same door, opposite direction. one cycle opened something. this one closes it

and this year the eclipse isn’t just symbolic for me. it’s landing almost exactly on my natal jupiter and mercury, the same planets having their return this year. this isn’t just a portal. it’s mine

so what is an eclipse actually for. a regular new moon is a quiet reset, a whisper. an eclipse is that same reset turned up to maximum volume. the sun and moon align so completely that the light gets cut off entirely, and in that darkness something gets revealed that daily life usually keeps hidden. eclipses don’t create your issues, they expose what was already there, running quietly in the background. that’s why they can feel intense, disorienting, even a little destabilizing. you’re not falling apart. you’re being shown something

a south node eclipse specifically is about subtraction, not addition. it’s not asking you to manifest something new yet, it’s asking you to release what’s already expired so there’s room for what’s coming. that’s why this week might bring up old anger, old grief, old identities you thought you’d already dealt with. they’re not coming back to punish you, they’re coming up because the door is open and they finally can

what tends to surface during a window like this: relationships that have quietly run their course, a version of yourself you’ve been performing out of habit, resentment you’ve been calling justified, or a truth you’ve known for a while but haven’t said out loud yet. none of that is random. it’s the eclipse doing exactly what it’s built to do

it’s almost like the eclipse is asking us, if you could’ve made different decisions in 2017, what would the upgrade be now. for me the upgrade is being myself. it’s not losing myself. it’s staying connected with God. it’s coming from the light instead of from proving. it’s being in co creation with the creator instead of white knuckling my own life. it’s creating certainty in people instead of just chasing visibility

what was becoming loud in your life in 2017 that’s about to get its final upgrade

paid subscribers get the full breakdown below, the five things i’m actually doing to work with this eclipse, the prayer i’m using to pray it in, and a picture of the girl who started it all

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they're not. underneath almost everything we're calling in, there are really only two prayers. let me be safe to receive money. let me be safe to receive love. everything else is a costume those two prayers wear.

lion's gate opens every year when the sun in leo aligns with sirius, the brightest star in our sky and the one ancient egypt tracked as a marker of renewal. it peaks on 8/8 because eight on its side is infinity. eight is the number of abundance, of cycles completing and starting over in the same breath. mystics have called this window a portal because it's said to be when the veil between what you're rehearsing internally and what shows up externally gets thin. i don't think the date does the work. i think the date gives your nervous system a marker it can organize around. a reason to actually sit down and rehearse the identity you're trying to become instead of just thinking about it.

that's what these rituals are. not requests to the universe. rehearsal for a nervous system that already believes it's allowed to have what it's asking for.

and there's a difference between asking and demanding. asking is polite. asking is small. asking still has a question mark hiding inside it, still leaves room for maybe. demanding is different. demanding is stating what you know is already yours with certainty, not desperation. it's not aggressive, it's rooted. you say it once, with love, with forgiveness for every version of you who didn't believe it yet, and then you release the outcome trusting the universe can hand you something bigger than anything you could have thought up on your own. get specific on the number. get specific on the feeling. then let go of exactly how it arrives.

paid subscribers, this is for you. two rituals below. one for money, one for love. each with the reason it works and the exact words to say.

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august 12. the sun goes dark at 20° leo.

i have to tell you what that degree means for me before i tell you what it means for you, because i can’t write this one from the outside. my natal mercury sits at 14° leo 25’. my natal jupiter sits nineteen arcminutes away, at 14° leo 06’. this eclipse lands at 20° leo, about six degrees further into the sign, same sign as both of them, close enough that it’s lighting up the whole stretch of leo they’ve been sitting in my chart since the day i was born.

so when i say an eclipse doesn’t do subtle, i’m not quoting a caption i saw. i’m describing my own chart getting lit up like a switchboard, in the same year i am already mid jupiter return. two forces hitting the same two planets, months apart. i have never had a year point at me this directly.

here’s what i know about eclipses after watching my own life move through several of them. a solar eclipse is a new moon. a lunar eclipse is a full moon. what turns an ordinary moon phase into an eclipse is the nodes, the two points where the moon’s path crosses the sun’s path. in your chart the nodes are where you came from and where you’re headed. so a new moon that lands on the nodes isn’t just a fresh start. it’s a fresh start sitting directly on your timeline. what normally unfolds over six months arrives in a day.

the last time the sun went fully dark in leo was august 21, 2017. think back to who you were that month. what ended without asking your permission. what began that you never saw coming. that eclipse sat on the north node, the point of opening. this one leans on the south node, the point of closing. whatever opened for you back in 2017 is now up for release.

i think about who i was in the summer of 2017 and i almost don’t recognize her. because two days after that eclipse, on august 13, 2017, i had my second daughter. i had taken castor oil that week, knowing, somehow, that she was coming on the 13th. my body already had the date before my mind caught up to it. and then my baby girl came into the world two days after the sky went fully dark in leo, right on the timeline i had already sensed.

i didn’t know any of this astrology back then. i just knew i was cracked wide open, in the most literal way a body can be cracked wide open, at the exact moment the sky was doing the same thing. new chapter opening, north node eclipse, and a whole new human arriving through me into it. i wasn’t watching the eclipse that august. i was becoming one.

so when i tell you the last leo eclipse sat on the north node, the point of opening, i’m not telling you a concept. i’m telling you my daughter. and now, nine years later, the sky is closing the loop it opened the week she was born. south node this time. release instead of arrival. i don’t think that’s a coincidence i get to witness quietly. i think it’s mine to say out loud.

eclipses don’t ask if you’re ready to let go of who you were. they just turn the page and wait for you to catch up. mine turned the page and handed me a daughter. this one is asking for something back.

leo is the sign of being seen

this eclipse falls in the sign that rules light, performance, and being witnessed. and it’s asking a very specific question. the light you generate versus the light you perform. if the version of you that holds the room is exhausting to carry, this eclipse is pointed directly at the act.

i know this one in my body. jupiter has been transiting my leo mercury jupiter conjunction all year, which means i have felt myself get bigger in every direction at once, more visible, more asked of, more watched. jupiter return will do that. it expands whatever it touches, including the parts of you that were never meant to be a performance. this eclipse is the sky’s way of asking me, and maybe asking you too, which parts of your visibility are actually yours.

the body already knows

if the last few weeks have felt off, you are not imagining it. decisions won’t land. sleep goes strange. something feels like it’s ending and you can’t point to what. that is the run up to an eclipse. your body reads the sky before your mind does.

what to actually do with it

the week before an eclipse is a closing week. finish things. rest. clear space. don’t force the big conversation at the peak. if a decision can wait three days, let it wait. get quiet and watch what leaves on its own.

this is the piece that took me the longest to learn, and it’s the one i keep coming back to. the people who grip through an eclipse get dragged. the people who open their hands get room. your only job this month is to stop holding what is already leaving, whatever job you’ve outgrown but keep showing up to, whatever relationship is running on habit instead of choice. eclipse season pulls the plug on what’s already on life support. what leaves was already gone. the eclipse just makes it visible.

why this season is the one i’m not letting pass quietly

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we make manifestation complicated because complicated feels safe

if it’s complicated we get to study it forever instead of doing it. buy the course, read the book, listen to one more podcast. never actually stand at the edge and jump

i did this for years. journals full of vision boards and frameworks stacked on frameworks. meanwhile my bank account said one thing and my mouth said another

the truth showed up the day i stopped researching the leap and just took it

so let me strip this all the way down

the whole thing here.

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