Vulnerability.

Just the word alone can make people flinch.

Some of you reading this just felt something tighten in your chest. Others felt a familiar urge to skip ahead, or close the tab, or suddenly remember you have laundry to do.

That reaction? That is exactly what we are going to talk about today.

Because vulnerability does not mean what most of us were taught it means. And once you see what it actually is, you cannot unsee it.

What the dictionary gets wrong

The standard definition describes vulnerability as exposure to the possibility of being attacked or harmed. Physically. Emotionally. Financially. You name it.

No wonder we run from it.

If that is the operating definition living rent-free in your nervous system, then of course vulnerability feels like standing in the middle of an open field in a thunderstorm.

Of course you have built structures around yourself.

Of course you have learned to be strategic about what you show, when you show it, and who gets to see the full version of you.

But here is what the dictionary misses completely.

It captures the risk. It says nothing about the reward. And it says absolutely nothing about what happens to you when you spend your life avoiding it.

How I learned this the hard way, in motion

Since November I have been traveling full time. No fixed address. No lease. No routine that looks the same from one month to the next. Just me, my work, my research, and whatever city I happen to be in on any given Tuesday.

What I did not expect is that full time travel would become one of the most intense personal development experiences of my life. Not because of the places. Because of what the constant movement stripped away.

When you are at home, in your city, with your people, your routines do the heavy lifting of keeping you comfortable. You know which coffee shop has the right energy. You know which friend to call when you are in your feelings. You know how to move through your days in a way that requires very little of you emotionally.

Take all of that away and you are left with yourself. Just yourself. And then you have a choice. You can isolate, which is always an option. Or you can open.

I chose to open.

The hostel experiment

I have been traveling solo internationally since 2017 and have tried a fair share of hostels all around the UK and branched out into ones during my recent trip to the Yucatan too.

The travel I do now since November has felt different and for good reason because I gave up the house I was renting to curate my life down to a small storage unit and a backpack and a small rolling suitcase to travel full time for at least a year.

I enjoy the social level by choice that you can have when you stay at ones geared more to traveling digital nomads and not to the spring break all year crowd. I enjoyed the occasional conversation especially to learn more about how and why people end up in a more nomadic lifestyle to share with my readers.

About a month into this chapter I spent a week at a social hostel in a country new to me. For those who have not done it as an adult, it is exactly what it sounds like. Communal spaces. Shared kitchen. Coworking areas. Strangers becoming temporary companions by virtue of proximity and circumstance.

I will be honest. My first instinct is always to be pleasant but contained. Warm but boundaried. Present but not really fully open. The first weeks had honestly become a place where I needed to release and process a ton of information, emotions and old mindsets.

But something shifted. I got more curious instead of just careful. I started actually talking to people. Asking real questions. Sharing real answers when they asked me things back. Not performing openness. Actually being open.

And the Tulum moment crystallized it for me perfectly.

I was at an hostel in Tulum and struck up a conversation with a fellow guest. I offered some thoughts on something she was navigating, just genuine input that felt relevant. Easy. Natural. No agenda. We talked again over the next few days and several minutes into the conversation I realized I recognized her online name because I had subscribed to her Substack just weeks before because her writing genuinely resonated with me.

She was someone whose work I admired. Whose voice I had found inspiring and meaningful. And here we were, having a real conversation at a table in an open air dining area in Tulum, because I had chosen to show up instead of stay small.

That is vulnerability. Not the dramatic kind. Not the falling-apart kind. The quiet, unglamorous, everyday kind. The kind that says I am here, I am real, and I am willing to let this be an actual moment between two actual people.

The performance problem

Here is where it gets interesting and a little uncomfortable.

There is a version of vulnerability that is not really vulnerability at all. It looks like it. It sounds like it. In fact it has become so common, particularly online, that we have mistaken it for the real thing.

It is performed vulnerability. And it is everywhere.

You know it when you see it. The carefully worded confession that reveals just enough to seem relatable but not enough to actually risk anything. The “raw and honest” post that was edited seven times. The oversharing of surface level struggle while the actual tender thing stays perfectly protected behind it.

Performed vulnerability is strategic. It uses the language and the gestures of openness to create connection without actually requiring you to be exposed. It is armor dressed up as authenticity.

For empaths especially, this is a deeply familiar pattern. Because we are so attuned to the emotional landscape of the people around us, we become extraordinarily skilled at calibrating how much to reveal based on what we sense the other person can handle. Or what will land well. Or what will keep us safe. We have usually learned this because real openness got us hurt somewhere along the way. So we created a version of vulnerability that felt safer. A measured dose. A controlled release.

The problem is that performed vulnerability creates performed connection. And performed connection, no matter how warm it feels in the moment, leaves you lonelier than if you had said nothing at all. Because you were there but nobody actually met you.

What real vulnerability actually is

Real vulnerability is not about how much you share. It is about whether what you share is unfiltered you.

It is the moment you say something and you genuinely do not know how it will be received.

It is telling someone something honest about yourself without first calculating whether they can handle it. It is letting a moment be a real moment instead of a managed one.

It is also, and this is important, knowing when to choose it. Real vulnerability is not the same as having no discernment. You do not owe everyone access to your tender places. Not everyone has earned that. But when you are choosing to stay closed with someone who has earned openness, that is worth looking at.

For me this has shown up most clearly in the non-romantic spaces first. In the hostel conversations. In the Tulum dining area. In the friendships that deepened this year because I stopped performing fine and started saying what was actually true.

That is where I learned that vulnerability is not exposure to harm. It is the willingness to be genuinely seen. And those are not the same thing at all.

The bridge to love

All of that, every bit of it, is the foundation for what happens in romantic connection.

Because you cannot be truly available to another person if you have not practiced being available to yourself and to people in the lower stakes moments first.

Stepping back into dating after more than two years away taught me this at a level I could not have predicted. Not because of any one person or any one moment, but because the whole landscape of it asked me again and again:

Are you showing up, or are you managing?

That is a question worth sitting with for a long time.

I also did an exercise I give my clients called the Open Letter to the Universe, where you get very clear on only one thing: how do I want to feel?

The reframe

Vulnerability is not a wound you manage. It is not a weakness you work around. It is not a liability in a world that can be unkind.

Vulnerability is the mechanism through which real things happen. Real connection. Real intimacy. Real belonging. Real creative work. Real life.

The risk is real. I will not pretend otherwise. Sometimes you open and the moment does not hold you the way you hoped. Sometimes people cannot meet you where you are.

Sometimes it is tender and awkward and imperfect and then opens up into a beautiful wide open field blossoming with possibilities and reflecting back to you the relationship with yourself.

But the alternative is a life where nothing really lands. Where connection happens in the shallows. Where you are technically present in every room and genuinely absent from every moment.

That is the actual harm. Not the vulnerability. The avoidance of it.

Before you go: sit with these

These are not questions to answer quickly. They are questions to carry with you for a day or a week and see what surfaces.

1. Where in your life are you performing vulnerability rather than practicing it? What would the real version look like in that same situation?

2. Think of a relationship, friendship or otherwise, where you consistently reveal less than what is true. What are you protecting? Is it still serving you?

3. When was the last time you said something honest without knowing how it would land? What happened? How did it feel afterward?

4. What would you do, say, create, or pursue if you were willing to be genuinely seen doing it?

The bravest thing you will ever do is not dramatic. It does not require grand gestures or public declarations or perfectly worded confessions.

It is just being real in a moment when you could have been managed.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

With love and zero pretending, Crystal

Soul Greenhouse is where empaths come to stop apologizing for how deeply they feel. If this resonated, share it with someone who needs permission to be real today.

A call for authenticity in the dating world but when you show up they either trigger like a fireworks show or ghost you like a haunted house?

There was a line in a movie years ago that had Jack Nicholson saying “you want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” No truer words have been spoken in the dating realm. Where the desire for connection on a deep level is a hunger driving the pursuit, why is it that if you have the audacity to show up with that energy you trigger them more than a fireworks show ending on the Fourth of July? It doesn’t mean you need to pull back or water down your you, if anything it’s time to be even more bold in your own sovereignty and if it triggers someone be grateful it’s now in the beginning stages and not months or years down the road when the mask begins to slip.

So let’s talk about what that looks like for you and how to coax your inner unique goddess, and I say goddess not as a gender specific term but energetically, because that energy lives in all of us.

When I work with clients on anything as big as manifesting a partner I have them really sit with one question. “How do you want to feel?” Because I have found in 35 years of working with clients that the way we love is how we wish to be loved. You don’t need a complicated chart to figure out your love language because you have been moving in that energy throughout your life.

I can remember being 3 years old and newly living with my mother after the first 3 years spent with my grandmother. I went from laughter and love to cold silence and anger and frustration. I have been painfully aware since then that I carry a beyond human level of feeling and emotion and even then with no outlet for what stirred in me to give, I did the only thing I could think of which was to put my hand on my heart and one on the soft green grass and lay with one cheek against that grass and pour out the energy overflowing my heart. My whole life I have never stopped. I just for a long time was always craving an outlet for that level of love and would manifest relationships, both love and friendship, that were craving to be loved deeply but I was never on that list.

In the past few years, now fully understanding what I want to feel, I can love freely and openly but first with myself and then pour from that place to others. I know I have the tendency to over compensate for others and I need to hold compassion and care for myself to have a healthy boundary, to hold space and energy for someone, but I cannot grip the handlebars so tightly while I help them learn to ride the bicycle themselves because they will never truly be able to and I will burn out.

So moving forward in my quest to manifest the right resonance with another I build that foundation from within by learning how I want to feel and how I love others. So yes, there is alchemy in this.

Do I think there are only those looking to deceive out there in the dating pool swimming like sharks after the scent of blood or weakness?

Most definitely that is possible but overall I think that people’s desires and what they are willing to show up for are not in alignment. The dating world has advanced in the age of technology to give us a wider reach than the matchmakers or public events of yesteryear but it has also made it all too easy if not alluring to window dress profiles harder than Macy’s or Harrods in the holiday season.

So yes, the common day profile is honestly many times just that, a window display to entice you inside and the store is never as magical as its window display by design. They want you to get lost among the aisles searching for that elusive alchemy that drew you in so you will find yourself investing in way more than you bargained for.

Getting more clear on how you want to feel and how you love is a start, then as you move through reading profiles take note of how reading them makes you feel and why, and literally take notes because this is another layer of self discovery and a way to clear the static of poor matches. And yes some may be pursuing you and on the surface seem appealing and there is nothing wrong with feeling good about other singles feeling drawn to you.

Being attractive though is sustainable through how you feel from the inside out.

I teach my clients to explore their own energy by doing exercises like playing songs like Buddy Guy’s “What Kind of Woman Is This” and moving their hips to it and enjoying being in their own bodies, not waiting for someone to give them permission or inspiration to feel attractive.

Putting on perfume or scented oils to sit home and spend the day with yourself is sexy AF and that is what will build the confidence, but most importantly someone can’t dim a light you lit from within like this. Also finding out what turns you on mentally and in the movement of your body is important, that is what makes you magnetic, but to the right frequency for you, not one you have to conform to. Now that is when things get downright delicious.

Also in the discovery phase is a time to discover yourself so talk and have conversations with others on the dating site but be open to everything and attached to nothing. You will start to notice patterns and responses that you have instinctively that will be treasure in getting your frequency accurate because ultimately that is how you find your fit. Is this asking too much? No, actually it should be the bare minimum. You deserve to dance in your now and a partner should be able to meet you where you are and both of you feel the desire to personally rise side by side.

That desire to expand, to step fully into potential unapologetically, is where the alchemy is.

Now in no way am I saying you both have everything figured out or need to be fully healed because healing is a journey not a destination. But when two people focus on loving and nurturing their soul self and they choose to take the journey together, well that is alchemy that no slickly produced profile can fake.

So can you show up unapologetically you and stand out from the sea of complacency and facades?

Most definitely, and if you are like past clients of mine that express concerns on filtering so well it knocks almost everyone out of the running? Well that is the plan dear, to get all the bullshit out of the way and leave the one that is the most in alignment with how you want to feel and matches your authenticity.

If you find yourself on an emotional roller coaster with the attention bombing that happens frequently in the direct messages then take a few steps back and love and nurture self because there is nothing wrong with you dear soul, you are just experiencing a wobble as you clear years of bad programming out. It’s kind of like the smell of burnt popcorn in a microwave, it won’t disperse instantly but it will clear the more room and movement you give it.

I will be including some exercises at the end of this article to help you clear through the BS and help you craft an authentic profile and conversation starters to get out of the awkward initial BS and get into the delicious part of putting yourself out there and enjoy the discovery phase of not just others but most importantly yourself along the way.

I want to help empower you to find your way home dear soul, not through another but within self and attract the kind of connection that will not only meet you where you are at but fan your flames and share time with, share a life with, not an IKEA project level fixer upper. You have worked too long and too hard on yourself to start shopping for love on a clearance rack.

So yes take a moment and close your eyes and think about how lit up you have been at times in your past, like when you bought something sexy to wear or got a text out of nowhere that makes you blush and laugh. That was not someone else’s attention bringing that to you, that was your inner goddess rising and reflecting back to you what is already within. There is nothing more attractive than when someone is finding their inner rhythm and allowing themselves to embrace all those facets without limits or judgement.

That isn’t an impossible thing, it is the journey you are on right now and one we are going to help you learn to dance to in your now. Not more fit, more financially stable, not more brave, not more happy, not more confident. No, the beautiful complex tapestry you are, with every thread from everything you have been through, makes you Kinetic Art. Not something to deal with or handle but to be appreciated and savored, and that starts with you on the inside.

I promise no matter how it feels right now, after all the not right fits there have been in your heart space, there is a connection that will be as easy as breathing and as playful as the spring breeze through the new blossoms.

Because we did come here as a soul in this body to experience all of the possibilities, and love in a human body and mind is at the top of the list.

So back to what to do if you have shown up so authentically as yourself and have triggered or even been ghosted or had them pull back. First off let’s look at stepping back to know there is a message here. If you show up authentically and they have been triggered or retreated it’s not what you did but what you reflected back to them and what they need to work on. YOU DID NOTHING WRONG. If anything dear you did everything right.

You do not need several suitors in the end but yes in the beginning after not feeling seen that can feel intoxicating and that is perfectly normal my dear, just don’t stay in that energy with no movement.

We want to craft a space of frequency that is so perfectly you and so deeply you that only the right match to that will come through.

I want to share a secret with you. When you get your alchemy in alignment the one who will show up to match that is already walking that way with the same desire to connect in the exact way you desire. No compromises just clarity, no doubts of self because you both will be aware and desire the same alchemy.

One of the biggest messages my guides have been channeling to me for months is that we are headed into the largest reconnection and connection of soul matches in over 12 thousand years. It’s part of how we will be healing humanity across the planet and raising the vibration. I know it doesn’t feel that way yet because we are still shedding the layers of old varnish we have been struggling under heavily for hundreds of years so yes it’s a rough ride but what is coming is more of this, deep connection and vibrational resonance.

I will include an exercise to recalibrate and process that if it happens so you don’t spend one more minute being accountable for other people’s work my dear. It is a gift and yes it might smart when it happens and it may bump into some old wounds that need more love but I will have an exercise for that too. I got you dear.

So let’s head down to the exercises below and

get your chakras in line and readjust your crown my dear, because one person’s inability to handle your fire just means they don’t belong in your kitchen, not that you need to adjust the menu or drop your spice level because you showed up to be met fully.

And trust me when we help recalibrate your frequency and not drop your vibration to help them feel more comfortable you will attract in a much better fit and that is when things get delicious.

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Nobody warned you that the deeper you go into yourself, the more complicated it becomes to invite someone else in.

That is not a flaw in your design. That is the design working exactly as it should.

Here is the question that keeps surfacing in my sessions lately, asked in different voices but carrying the same weight:

How do you date successfully when you are still mid-becoming?

How do you open a door to another person when you are still renovating the house?

How do you move more fully into yourself and navigate the dating waters at the same time, when the current of one seems to pull against the tide of the other?

The honest answer is that you cannot fully pre-plan your way through it. There is only so much you can place into a profile. There is only so much that early conversations, however thoughtful, however intentional, can reveal.

The nuances of who you are, the specific texture of what you need, the particular frequency you carry when you feel safe and when you feel threatened, so much of that will not come into focus until you are sitting across from someone and your nervous system has an opinion.

That is not a failure of self-awareness. That is what self-awareness actually looks like in real time. It is not a meditation. It is a practice.

The Pre-Screen Question

One of my clients came to me recently sitting with exactly this tension.

She is intuitive, self-aware, genuinely doing the work, and standing at the threshold of re-entering the dating world after significant time spent healing and integrating.

She wanted to know: how much of her empathic nature, her sensitivities, her spiritual framework should she lead with? What can she reasonably expect to attract if she is fully herself? And where, honestly, does she draw the line, knowing she can only pre-screen so much before the rest has to happen on the actual playing field?

I told her what I believe to be true. The most accurate clarity you will ever find about yourself does not live in the preparation. It lives in the day to day unfolding of the journey itself. The profile is the invitation. The conversation is the lobby. But the real information, the stuff that actually recalibrates your understanding of what you want and who you are, that comes from showing up and letting it move through you.

What you attract is a direct reflection of the frequency you are genuinely broadcasting, not the one you are performing or the one you aspire to. When your frequency is authentic, what begins to come toward you becomes more accurate. Not perfect. Not painless. But honest. And honest is workable.

She also needed to hear this: the process of dating while awakened is not just about finding a match. It is a stripping away. Old ideas about what love should look like. Old patterns dressed up in new people.

Pretense you did not even know you were carrying.

It will peel back layers, and if you are expecting the gentle unfolding of a delicate croissant, I want to be straight with you. Some of it is going to feel more like an energetic Brazilian wax.

That got a laugh. And then a long pause. Because she knew it was true.

The uncomfortable feelings that arise are not a red light. They are not a sign to turn around. They are an invitation to turn within.

When the wobble comes, and it will come, resist the reflex to flee from it. Instead, pull up a chair. Ask it to sit down. Ask it its who, its what, its why. The wobble is not your enemy. It is the most honest teacher in the room, and if you let it speak, it will tell you more about your readiness, your edges, your healing, and your desires than any conversation on an app ever could.

The Bullhorn and the Garden Hose

Then there is my other client. And her situation stopped me in my tracks the first time she described it, because it is more common than people realize and almost never talked about openly.

She is highly sensitive. Deeply intuitive. The kind of person who can walk into a room and within moments have a read on the emotional landscape of everyone in it. She has spent years honing this, learning to work with it, learning not to be consumed by it. It is her gift and it is very real.

But here is what happens when she is the one standing in the emotional landscape. When it is her own feelings on the line, her own heart leaning toward someone, her own vulnerability sitting out in the open on a first date. Suddenly, all of that exquisite sensitivity goes quiet. She reaches for the signal and gets crickets.

I want you to understand what is actually happening there, because it is not a malfunction.

For most empaths who are highly tuned to others, the energetic channel they use is calibrated to receive outward. It is built for reading what is beyond the self. When the source of the signal is internal, when it hits too close to home, something shifts. It is not that the gift disappears. It is that the instrument changes. What was a bullhorn becomes a garden hose.

And in the middle of a date, when you are trying to read your own feelings in real time, the garden hose can feel like a betrayal.

It is not. It is your system protecting you from being overwhelmed by your own emotional data at a moment when you are already stretched open. It is actually a form of grace, even when it feels like static. What it is asking you to do is something that does not come naturally to the highly intuitive: to slow down, to be present in the body rather than the field, to feel rather than read.

This is where I introduce something I call the WTF principle. What the Frequency.

Your frequency when you are dating is not a fixed thing. It shifts based on proximity, vulnerability, history, and hope. The work is not to get a perfect read on every date in real time. The work is to come home to your own signal afterward. To sit with what the experience stirred. To notice what lit up and what went flat. To trust that your system is gathering data even when it is not delivering the instant intel you are used to.

The clarity comes. It just comes in layers, not in a single transmission.

The Wobble Is the Work

Here is what I want to leave you with, and I am not going to dress it up into something more comfortable than it is.

Re-entering the world of dating as someone who has done real inner work is not easier than it was before. In some ways it is harder, because you can no longer numb yourself to the parts that feel misaligned. You feel everything more precisely. The hope is louder and so is the hesitation. The longing is clearer and so is the fear.

But here is what is also true. You are not the same person who last did this. You have spent time alone with yourself in a way that most people never do. You have asked questions of yourself that most people avoid. You have sat with your own discomfort and come through it. That is not nothing. That is the whole foundation.

The wobble you feel when you step back onto the playing field is not evidence that you are not ready. It is evidence that you are present. That you have something real at stake. That this matters to you in a way it perhaps did not before.

So I am not going to tell you to push through it or rise above it or power past it with your manifesting intentions pointed forward like a compass.

I am going to ask you to do something harder. Stay in it. Let yourself feel how strange and tender and strange again it is to be seen by someone new. Let your senses come back online slowly, the way a limb wakes up after it has been still too long. Let the wobble mean something instead of running from what it is trying to tell you.

Because on the other side of the wobble is not certainty. It is something better. It is a clearer, truer version of what you actually want, what you will actually accept, and who you are actually becoming.

And that person deserves to be met. Fully. In person. Not just in theory.

Soul Greenhouse is a space for empaths, intuitives, and deep feelers navigating the inner life with honesty and intention. If this landed for you, share it with someone who needed to read it today.

What comes next is the part we actually do together.

Reading about the wobble is one thing. Moving through it with intention is another. Below, for Soul Greenhouse members, I have put together two somatic practices to help you come back into your own body and signal, five journal prompts designed to move you through the crickets and the wobble toward genuine clarity, and a personal manifestation script you will record in your own voice to play in that soft threshold moment just before sleep, when your subconscious is most open and most ready to receive.

This is where the work gets real. I will meet you on the other side.

The following content is available to Soul Greenhouse paid members.

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By Crystal Bella Ambrose | Soul Greenhouse

The Goddess Rising Era — and Yes, I Am In It Too

I want to get personal with you first. Because I think the most useful thing I can do here is not just hand you a framework, but it is to stand next to you inside the experience.

I am 55. I have been in an intentional pause for just over two years and not by circumstance, not by lack, but by deliberate choice after my last almost 5-year relationship became my greatest teacher.

My book Soul Hangry rose from the ashes of that chapter of my life and I chose me.

I made a decision to stop, turn inward, and do the deep work of becoming someone I genuinely love being. And somewhere in the middle of that and between the travel and the writing and the shedding of everything that no longer fit and something extraordinary happened.

I started enjoying just being in my own body. Fully present. Not performing. Not managing. Not bracing. Just here, in my own skin, and genuinely happy about it.

That is the Goddess Rising moment. And once you arrive there, something shifts in what you want and how you pursue it.

I am not looking to fill a vacancy. I do not have a help wanted sign in my window. But I will absolutely interview the right candidate.

Because here is the truth about this era that no one talks about loudly enough that a woman who has done this work, who has crossed over into genuine self-fulfillment, who is living in her full expression, she is a hot commodity.

She knows it. And she is not about to spend her energy or risk her peace choosing in haste.

I want the full expression now. I have stepped well past curious.

What I want is someone who can ride this energy with me and someone who can hold my fire without trying to douse it, who fans the flames and keeps the fire extinguisher up to date.

Someone who meets me in my fullness without shrinking from it or needing to manage it.

That is not too much to ask. That is the minimum bid.

I do not want to try choosing my next life partner in this fire — but I also do not want to settle for less than everything I deserve to honor this.

The Old Train Station

Before I became a full-time nomad, I had a studio. Decades of one, actually — layered over years like sediment. Shelves of reference books. Tools with their own muscle memory. A collection of textile “necessities” that only a hardcore thread nerd could truly appreciate. I will never deny the heady sense of discovering a new method to do impossible things with fabric. There is real joy in that.

But somewhere along the way I had started to feel like an old train station that hadn’t seen a remodel in thirty-plus years. Grand bones. Dusty corners. The trains of my former life still pulling in and out on schedule, but something in me knew the schedule needed to change.

Long-form travel has a way of doing what therapy sometimes cannot. When you strip away the accumulated architecture of your daily life like the studio, the familiar routes, the objects that quietly define you.

You find out fast what was actually yours and what you were simply maintaining out of habit.

What you miss. What you do not. What you were carrying for other people without ever being asked.

It was out there, somewhere between a lesser-known Maya ruin and a café in London in the middle of the afternoon with Rick James playing in my head, that I understood something fully for the first time.

We are not bolted to the seats in our inner theater.

We are the screenwriter and the director in one.

Everything showing on the screen in front of you is a reflection of something inside. A fear. A wish. A doubt. A desire. A curiosity. A hunger. An expression of soul light trying to find its way out. That is not blame. That is power.

Because if you wrote it, you can rewrite it.

The Wooly Mammoth in the Corner

Before we go any further, I want to name something directly because I respect you too much to tiptoe around it.

Yes. There are absolutely people in this world who will demonstrate their capacity for heavy contrast through their choices and their behavior toward you. Toxic. Abusive.

A full spectrum of harm that I am in no way minimizing or dismissing. I have been on the front lines of that battle and I have the scars and the wisdom to prove it.

Here is what I know from that place… No apology, no closure, no satisfying answer to why is going to be what heals you.

Waiting for any of those things keeps you locked in a loop that serves only the loop.

So with my whole heart I say this — let’s give ourselves permission to quit karma watch duty.

Not because they don’t deserve accountability.

But because you deserve freedom more than you need their confession.

The most radical act available to you right now is to redirect your magnificent attention back to your own feed.

You Are the Algorithm

Here is the metaphor that changed everything for me.

Your For You Page does not show you random content. It is not luck. It is a precise reflection of what you have engaged with, lingered on, returned to, and rewarded with your attention.

The algorithm learns you from your behavior, not your intentions and your life works exactly the same way.

Where your focus goes, energy builds. What you keep engaging with and what you linger on, return to, give your precious attention to, that is what your life learns to bring you more of.

Not because the universe is punishing you. Because that is simply how the system works.

The question that cuts through everything is this —

Do I own this and embody this, or does it own me?

Sit with that one. Apply it to everything.

The Curation Framework: Three Layers of Your Inner Feed

Layer One: What You Consume. The content, the news, the conversations you let play in the background. Ask yourself — does this inform and inspire me, or does it colonize my nervous system? Do I own this input, or does it own me?

Layer Two: Who You Allow In. Energy is the most precious commodity you have. Not time. Energy. Some people add to your energy bank every time you connect and others have you overdrawn before you have hung up the phone. An honest audit of your relationships through this lens will tell you everything you need to know. The goal is not to villainize anyone. It is simply to get clear on the exchange.

Layer Three: What You Repeat. Your thoughts. Your internal narratives. The story you tell about why things are the way they are. These are the habits of your inner feed and they are the most powerful and the most overlooked layer of all.

At each layer the question is the same… do I own this, or does it own me? Is it adding to my energy bank or leaving me overdrawn every month?

Here is the secret hiding in plain sight — when you start removing what drains you and balancing it with what fills your tank, you begin to become magnetized. You stop broadcasting static and start broadcasting signal. And the universe, bless it, is a very responsive receiver.

A Quick Reset When You Need It

Before you can curate anything you need a clean palette so here is what I want you to try. It takes less than a minute and it does five things at once.

Place one hand over your heart. Take one slow breath in. One slow breath out. And as you exhale, say quietly or in your mind — I release and realign.

Then, and this is non-negotiable, put on one song that makes your body want to move. Not think. Move. I am currently writing this in a London pub in the middle of the afternoon listening to Rick James and I will not pretend I am not fighting the urge to stand up and dance. Music is energy and the kind that moves your hips is telling you something important. That there is stuck energy in your body ready to become motion. Let it.

Do this in the morning. Do it before bed. Self-nurturing does not have to be elaborate or painful to begin and learning to love yourself that consistently? That is the most attractive thing you can do.

The Landing

Now let’s talk about what happens when you actually do this work… because it does not just clean up your daily life. It completely rewires how you show up in love.

Too many women have spent so long tuning their frequency to everyone else’s needs that when they finally step back into the dating world they go in starving. And we all know what happens when you go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. The decisions are not great. You reach for what is familiar and fast, not what actually nourishes you.

I have watched women come out of a long emotional retirement — especially in their 40s and beyond — and the way they reenter varies beautifully. Some ride the full intensity of their goddess energy with a younger partner who can match that current. Others gravitate toward someone with enough experience and self-possession to meet them fully without ego. Neither is wrong. Both are valid. What matters is that you know what you are bringing and what you actually need — not what you have been conditioned to think you can have.

And here is the truth that nobody says out loud enough — your type up until now may have been dialed into an older version of you. The one who needed different things. The one who did not yet know what she was capable of. You have upgraded, love. Your criteria get to catch up.

Couples that start in the goddess era can absolutely build something deep and lasting but that should not be the limiting goal out of the gate because you are still discovering what your real type even is in this version of yourself. So do not go grocery shopping starving and do not go into the dating world depleted hoping someone else will fill the tank.

Going into a jewelry store and browsing is not desperation. It is discernment. You are not there because you cannot live without a piece. You are there because you have a specific sense of what fits you, what complements where you are in your life right now and you are simply looking for the one that is exactly right.

Remember — what you ping to the universe is how your experience order is placed. Get clear on how you want to feel first. Build that internally. Then let the universe receive your signal clearly.

Take stock. Realign. Do the breathing. Dance in public if you have to. Ask yourself at every layer — does this own me, or do I own this? Fill your tank first and watch what you magnetize.

Nothing is more attractive than a woman who knows exactly what she wants and has the audacity to fully embrace it.

You did the work to get here. Now let’s ride this energy in its absolute fullness.

Crystal Bella Ambrose is a spiritual practitioner, intuitive coach, and author of the Soul Series. She writes from wherever in the world she happens to be.

You know that feeling.

The one where you are putting in everything you have, showing up, doing the work, following the advice, trying the strategy, and it still feels like you are trying to roller-skate uphill. In the rain. Backwards.

That frustration is so real. And for empaths especially, it hits different.

Because we are not just tired in our bodies.

We are depleted at the soul level.

We start questioning ourselves.

We start wondering if abundance is even meant for us. If love that actually nourishes us is even possible. If maybe we are the problem.

Here is what I want you to sit with for a moment: what if you are not doing something wrong? What if you are just going in the wrong direction for you?

Most of the advice out there about building income, attracting love, and creating a magnetic life is built on someone else’s Venus blueprint. And when you, an empath who already feels everything more deeply and gives more freely than most, keep pushing yourself into approaches that were never designed for your energy, burnout is not a failure. It is a love letter from your soul saying honey, this is not the way.

Venus is the planet of love, beauty, pleasure, values, and abundance. She governs how we attract, what we are naturally magnetic to, how we create, and how we receive. Your Venus sign is your personal energetic signature for drawing in what you desire in your work, your relationships, your money energy, and your creative expression.

Living against your Venus sign does not just feel hard. It slowly drains the very frequency that makes you magnetic in the first place.

This article is your invitation to stop fighting the current and come home to yourself. Because that is where everything you have been working so hard for is already waiting.

First, How Do You Find Your Venus Sign?

Your Venus sign is not your Sun sign, the one most people know from their birthday. Venus moves through the zodiac on her own timeline, so your Venus sign depends on your exact birth date and sometimes the year too.

Here is how to find yours in about two minutes:

Go to astro.com, which is free. Click “Free Horoscopes” then “Extended Chart Selection.” Enter your birth date, your birth time if you know it, and your birth location. Look for Venus in your chart, she is marked with the symbol ♀, and the sign she falls in is your Venus sign.

You can also simply search “Venus sign calculator” and enter your birth date into any reputable astrology site. If you were born close to the first or last few days of a month, knowing your birth year helps since Venus can shift signs mid-month.

Once you know your Venus sign, come back. Your blueprint is here.

Your Venus Sign: The Full Picture

Each sign below covers your natural gifts, your shadow tendencies (the sneaky places burnout likes to hide), and how your Venus energy wants to move in love and money. Read yours slowly. Let it land.

Venus in Aries

Your magnetic gift: You are bold, pioneering, and electric when you are in motion. You attract through your courage and your fire. People are drawn to your directness and your beautiful refusal to play small.

In love: You thrive when there is chemistry, a little chase, and genuine aliveness between two people. You need a connection that feels exciting and that respects your independence without making you beg for it. When you settle for slow or passive, you start to dim without even realizing it.

In abundance: Your money energy lights up when you are first, launching, leading, initiating. The empath shadow here is over-giving at the very start of something, a business, a relationship, a collaboration, and burning out before it has had a chance to actually build. You are not meant to sustain at sprint speed forever. You are meant to ignite, then breathe.

Shadow side: Impatience and people-pleasing that disguises itself as passion. You can say yes too fast because you get excited, and then feel quietly trapped when reality does not match the spark.

Alignment practice: Let your yes mean something again. Move fast, yes, but build in spaciousness so your energy stays electric rather than empty.

Venus in Taurus

Your magnetic gift: You are deeply sensual, grounded, and magnetic in the most embodied way imaginable. You do not attract through hustle. You attract through presence. When you slow down and fully inhabit your own life, people and opportunities genuinely come to you. This is not a metaphor. It is just how your frequency works.

In love: You need safety, steadiness, and beauty. You thrive in relationships that feel like coming home, consistent, warm, sensory-rich, and real. You do not do well with hot and cold energy, no matter how exciting the person seems at the start.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by quality, patience, and building something that lasts. You are not a sprint person. You are a compound interest person. The more you trust slow growth, the more your abundance actually compounds. Trying to copy fast-launch culture goes against your entire energetic design, which is why it feels so exhausting every single time.

Shadow side: Stubbornness that keeps you in something far too long, a relationship, a business model, a belief about money, because it feels familiar even when it stopped feeling good ages ago. Security can become a very comfortable cage if you are not paying attention.

Alignment practice: Your body is your oracle. When something feels genuinely luxurious and right in your nervous system, not just comfortable but truly nourishing, that is your Venus signal. Follow that.

Venus in Gemini

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your mind, your wit, your curiosity, and the delicious variety of you. You are magnetic when you are stimulated, learning, and communicating freely. Trying to make you pick one thing and stick to it forever is like trying to make the wind choose a direction.

In love: You need mental connection first. A partner who can genuinely keep up with you intellectually and who finds your ever-evolving nature a gift rather than a flaw. Boredom is your relationship kryptonite.

In abundance: Your money energy flows through multiple streams, storytelling, teaching, writing, connecting, and conversations that open doors in unexpected directions. Trying to do only one thing, one offer, one platform, one approach, goes against your energetic nature. You are beautifully built for range.

Shadow side: Scattered energy and surface-level commitments. You can start ten beautiful things and finish none of them, then wonder why nothing is quite building the way you imagined. Freedom is wonderful. Follow-through is where the abundance actually lives.

Alignment practice: Give yourself full permission to have range, and then choose your core platform and show up there with some consistency. Gemini abundance is built through connection that deepens over time, not just connection that sparkles and disappears.

Venus in Cancer

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your warmth, your emotional depth, and your extraordinary ability to make people feel genuinely held and seen. You are magnetic when you feel safe enough to be soft. Which, if we are being honest, is not always easy for an empath who has been burned before.

In love: You need emotional security and real intimacy. You thrive when love feels like a sanctuary. You are one of the great nurturers of the zodiac, which is a beautiful thing, but you must be nurtured in return or you will empty out so gradually you almost miss it happening.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by work that feels meaningful, that creates safety, and that connects to your values on an emotional level. Your gifts, holding space, creating sanctuary, intuitive wisdom, are genuinely precious. The empath wound here is undercharging and over-giving because something in you still believes it is wrong to put a price on care.

Shadow side: Emotional withdrawal and caretaking as a way to feel needed rather than truly loved. You can give from fear of abandonment rather than from genuine overflow, and the two feel very different even if they look the same from the outside.

Alignment practice: Receiving is not selfish. Practice letting abundance in, in love, in money, in praise, without immediately deflecting it or quietly giving it back before anyone notices you had it.

Venus in Leo

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your radiance, your generosity, your creative expression, and your unapologetic aliveness. When you are lit up, everyone in your orbit feels it. You are basically a walking sun and that is not a small thing.

In love: You need to be seen, celebrated, and genuinely adored. And you give that same energy back in return tenfold, which makes you one of the most generous partners in the entire zodiac. You wither quietly in relationships where you are taken for granted.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by visibility, creativity, and leadership. You are meant to be seen. The empath shadow here is performing for external validation rather than expressing from genuine joy, and then feeling crushed when the response does not match the effort you put in.

Shadow side: Tying your worth to what other people think of you. When the views are low or the launch is quiet, the spiral can feel so much bigger than the situation actually calls for.

Alignment practice: Create from love, not from need for applause. Your abundance genuinely expands when you are performing for the version of you who already knows she deserves to be celebrated, not for an audience you are hoping will finally agree.

Venus in Virgo

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your discernment, your skill, your reliability, and the exquisite quality of everything you touch. You are magnetic when you trust that your attention to detail is a rare and beautiful gift, not an inconvenient personality flaw.

In love: You show love through acts of service and through the thousand small ways you make someone’s life genuinely better without being asked. You need a partner who notices those things and brings their own integrity to the relationship. Someone who shows up the way you do.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by mastery, thoughtful systems, and service that genuinely improves people’s lives. You build wealth through refinement and reputation. The empath wound here is perfectionism that keeps you from ever launching, ever charging what you are worth, ever deciding your work is ready enough to be seen.

Shadow side: Chronic self-criticism and analysis paralysis dressed up as high standards. You can spend so much energy making something perfect that it never actually gets to reach the people it was made for. Which is a quiet heartbreak, when you think about it.

Alignment practice: Done is a form of love too. Your Venus wants to serve, and she needs you to release the work into the world so it can actually do what it came here to do.

Venus in Libra

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your grace, your beauty, your ability to create harmony around you, and your genuine delight in partnership. You are magnetic when you are in balance, when you are giving and receiving in something resembling equal measure.

In love: You are one of the great romantics of the zodiac and you deserve to be celebrated for that rather than apologizing for it. You thrive in relationships that feel elegant, equitable, and deeply connected. The shadow is staying in relationships well past their expiration date because you would rather keep the peace than face the discomfort of honesty.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by beauty, aesthetics, collaboration, and environments that feel genuinely harmonious. Trying to hustle alone in chaotic or ugly circumstances drains you faster than almost any other Venus sign. You need beauty around you to think, to create, to attract.

Shadow side: People-pleasing that quietly erodes your sense of self over months and years. You can give everyone around you exactly what they need while slowly losing track of what you actually want.

Alignment practice: Your opinion is not the enemy of harmony. Knowing what you want and asking for it is how you create the kind of partnership in love and in work that actually sustains you over time.

Venus in Scorpio

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your depth, your intensity, your beautiful mystery, and your extraordinary capacity for transformation. You are magnetic when you are fully in your power and not when you are shrinking to make other people comfortable.

In love: You need total, soul-level intimacy or honestly you are not that interested. Casual does not satisfy you and you have never quite understood why anyone would want it to. You thrive in relationships that transform both people. The shadow is giving everything to someone who simply cannot meet you at that depth, and then feeling devastated when they cannot hold what you offer.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by depth, research, transformation, and working with what is hidden or taboo. You are often drawn to healing work, investigative work, or fields that most people are afraid to enter. That is not a coincidence. That is exactly where your power lives.

Shadow side: Control and withholding as self-protection. When you have been burned, you can shut down your magnetism entirely, which cuts you off from both love and abundance at the same time without meaning to.

Alignment practice: Vulnerability is not weakness for you. It is actually the most magnetic thing you can offer. True power for a Scorpio Venus is staying open even when every part of you is convinced it is not safe to do so.

Venus in Sagittarius

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your freedom, your expansive philosophy, your adventurous spirit, and your ability to make people feel like the world is bigger and more possible just by being near you. You are magnetic when you are in motion, learning, exploring, and genuinely expanding.

In love: You need a partner who is also a companion. Someone to explore life with rather than someone who holds you in place. You wither in relationships that feel like confinement, even beautiful, loving ones. The shadow is commitment-avoidance that disguises itself as a love of freedom.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by expansion, travel, teaching, publishing, and anything with a reach that goes beyond the room you are sitting in. You are genuinely not designed for small. Trying to play it safe and stay contained quietly cuts off your energetic flow.

Shadow side: Overcommitting to too many directions at once, or running from depth just as something is about to get beautifully real.

Alignment practice: Freedom and depth are not opposites, even though they can feel that way. The most abundant version of your Venus commits to something meaningful and then discovers the infinite possibilities that live within it.

Venus in Capricorn

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your ambition, your integrity, your quiet authority, and the sense that you genuinely have your life together in a way people instinctively trust. You are magnetic when you own your expertise without apologizing for it.

In love: You need a partner who is actually going somewhere, someone with ambition, reliability, and genuine respect for what you are building. You are not particularly interested in potential. You want to see what someone is actually doing with their one life.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by long-term strategy, clear structure, and reputation that builds over time. You build slowly, but what you build tends to last in a way that other people genuinely envy. The empath shadow here is denying yourself pleasure and rest in endless pursuit of worthiness, as if you still have to earn the right to simply receive.

Shadow side: Emotional unavailability and workaholism worn as armor. You can be so focused on building abundance that you are not fully present to enjoy it or to let love find its way in.

Alignment practice: Success is not the destination where you finally get to receive. Receiving is available to you right now, today, in this exact season of your life. Practice it like it is a skill, because it is.

Venus in Aquarius

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your originality, your vision, your ability to see what others cannot yet see, and your genuine care for people on a collective level. You are magnetic when you stop trying to fit yourself into spaces that were not made for you and fully commit to being exactly who you are.

In love: You need a partner who is also a real friend. Someone who respects your mind, your independence, and your need for breathing room. You thrive in relationships that feel like a meeting of two whole, interesting people who also happen to adore each other.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by innovation, community, social impact, and doing things in ways that have genuinely not been done before. Copying what everyone else is doing is the fastest way to turn your Venus frequency completely off.

Shadow side: Emotional detachment as self-protection, and a tendency to be so focused on the future that you miss the beauty and the abundance that is already present and asking to be noticed.

Alignment practice: Your uniqueness is not a liability to manage around. It is your greatest asset. The more fully you lean into what makes you genuinely different, the more magnetic you become, without trying.

Venus in Pisces

Your magnetic gift: You attract through your empathy, your creativity, your spiritual depth, and your rare ability to make people feel understood at the soul level. You are magnetic when you are connected to your own inner world rather than constantly attending to everyone else’s.

In love: You need a love that feels like poetry, deep, tender, and a little transcendent. You thrive in relationships where your sensitivity is treated as the gift it is. The shadow is dissolving so completely into another person that you eventually lose the thread back to yourself.

In abundance: Your money energy is activated by creativity, spiritual work, healing, and art. You are often one of the most gifted intuitives in any room, and one of the most likely to undervalue that gift simply because it comes so naturally. If it feels effortless for you, it does not mean it is not extraordinary.

Shadow side: Escapism and martyrdom. You can give until there is genuinely nothing left, and then feel quietly resentful that no one is giving back, when in reality you needed to stop long before you reached empty.

Alignment practice: Your sensitivity is worth more than you are charging for it. Your creativity is worth more than you are charging for it. Abundance for a Pisces Venus begins with truly, fully believing that and not just saying it.

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There is a kind of love that does not arrive softly.

It doesn’t politely knock, introduce itself, and settle into something manageable. It ignites. It consumes. It rearranges the entire landscape of your inner world, and once it has touched you, nothing else quite feels the same again.

And then it changes.

Not into something lesser, but into something quieter. Something harder to understand.

This is where many of you are sitting now.

In the quiet.

In the space where the fire that once roared between you has softened into something else, something dimmer, but not gone. Never gone. Just beneath the surface, like embers glowing in the dark.

You feel it constantly.

The pull. The craving. The full immersion in the longing itself.

It’s not just that you miss them. It’s that the feeling of missing them has become its own presence in your life. A rhythm. A companion. A fire that refuses to fully go out, no matter how much time passes or how far apart you drift.

And it’s exhausting.

Because part of you keeps waiting. Waiting for the spark. Waiting for the wind. Waiting for something to reignite what you know is still there.

But here is the truth that often gets missed in this space.

The fire hasn’t disappeared.

It has transformed.

What once burned as a full, consuming flame between two people now lives as a sacred ember within each of you.

And embers have a purpose.

In nature, fire doesn’t only exist to blaze.

It also exists to clear, to reset, to make space for something richer to grow. After a wildfire, the soil becomes more fertile. After a volcanic eruption, the land, though destroyed in the moment, returns more abundant, more alive.

But in those in-between phases, it doesn’t look like growth.

It looks like loss. It feels like absence. It hurts like something is missing.

This is the stage where so many people get caught.

And part of why they get caught is because the information available about these connections is overwhelming, contradictory, and often more confusing than clarifying.

You’ve probably seen the lists.

20 signs you’ve met your twin flame. 33 signs it’s a twin flame connection. The ultimate checklist.

And you read through them, nodding at some, uncertain about others, and you still walk away not actually knowing anything more than when you started. Because those lists are pulling from multiple completely different types of soul connections and lumping them all under one label.

Here’s what most people don’t know.

Every soul connection has a formula.

Core Element + Relationship Dynamic = Your Soul Connection

There are three Core Elements that define the fundamental nature of a soul bond:

A Soul Friendship, a deep non-romantic connection that is no less significant for the absence of romance. A Romantic Soul Connection, the bond most people are trying to decode when they land on those lists. And a Soul Match Hybrid, a connection that carries both elements simultaneously, which is often the most disorienting of all because it refuses to be categorized neatly.

Within those three Core Elements, there are 12 distinct Relationship Dynamics, 12 specific archetypes that define how the connection unfolds, what pattern it runs, and what it is designed to teach.

When you try to apply a generic list of signs to a connection without knowing your Core Element or your Relationship Dynamic, you’re not getting clarity. You’re getting noise.

That’s not a failure on your part. It’s a gap in how this has been taught.

Because the instinct when you’re caught in this space is to reach outward.

To fix. To reconnect. To do something to bring it back to life.

But this phase, the ember phase, is not asking you to reach outward.

It is asking you to turn inward.

The sacred fire between two souls cannot remain in full flame at all times. If it did, it would burn everything down without allowing anything new to take root. The intensity that draws you together is the same intensity that requires space, healing, and integration.

Separation is not punishment.

It is preparation.

But when you don’t understand that, the longing becomes a loop.

You start feeding the ember not with presence, but with depletion.

Overthinking. Checking. Replaying. Reaching energetically, emotionally, sometimes even physically, over and over again.

And instead of gently tending the ember within you, you exhaust yourself trying to turn it back into a wildfire before the ground is ready.

This is where the burnout begins.

Not because the connection is too much, but because the direction of your energy is misaligned with what this phase is asking of you.

The ember stage is sacred because it is intimate.

The fire is no longer something happening between you.

It is something living within you.

And that changes everything.

Because now, the question is no longer “How do I get back to them?”

It becomes “How do I tend to what this connection has awakened inside of me?”

The longing you feel is not just about another person.

It is a signal.

A doorway.

An invitation into the parts of you that were activated by this connection, your depth, your sensitivity, your capacity for love, your wounds, your patterns, your power.

If you only chase the reunion, you miss the transformation.

If you only focus on the absence, you overlook what is being built.

The ember does not need you to force it into flame.

It needs you to protect it. To honor it. To sit with it without trying to control it.

Because when the time comes for that fire to rise again, whether in reunion or in a completely different expression of your path, it will not come from grasping.

It will come from alignment.

From wholeness.

From two individuals who have allowed the fire to refine them, not consume them.

So if you are here, in this quiet, aching space,

If the longing feels constant, the absence feels heavy, and the questions feel endless,

Pause.

Not to give up.

But to redirect.

Let the fire rest.

Let it breathe.

Let it do what sacred fire has always done, transform what it touches into something stronger, deeper, and more true.

You are not losing the connection.

You are being asked to become someone who can hold it differently.

And that begins here.

In the ember.

If you’re ready to move out of the exhaustion and into real understanding, I created something built for exactly this space.

My two-book Soul Series bundle brings together Soul Hangry, focused on nurturing yourself and rebuilding your inner foundation, and Soul Connections, where I walk you through the full Soul Connection Formula, including how to identify your Core Element and your Relationship Dynamic so you finally have a map, not just a feeling.

Inside Soul Connections you’ll also find a guided quiz that reveals your personal soul-to-soul connection equation, giving you clarity on the purpose, path, and process of your specific connection, so you can heal, mature, and move forward with understanding instead of confusion.

Both eBooks together, as an instant download bundle, for $22.

This is for the part of you that’s ready to stop chasing the flame and start becoming the one who can hold it.

Click here to purchase as an instant download

I am two days away from the end of my first visit to the Yucatán and I am finding that this past month has been as wonderful, crazy and fly-by-the-seat-of-intuition as any of my adventures yet.

I flew into Cancún with the goal of starting in Playa del Carmen to be close to the ocean I missed after growing up in Miami and a 35-year absence of having it so close.

What I found out quickly was that you don’t know how resourceful or how brave you can be until you walk into a country that is completely new to you, with a language that is very rusty after 35 years -- let alone accidentally tangled with Italian. * I gave up feeling embarrassed that I naturally said Grazie instead of Gracias and just decided that if it happens, smile.

Something else I discovered quickly was how easy a daily rotation of fresh local food could be ….and I mean cantaloupes so good you could cry, Greek yogurt, local cheeses and freshly baked goods not loaded with sugar and preservatives.

Not only did that make up the majority of what I reached for every day, but wonderful things I had always loved became so accessible, like hibiscus iced tea.

It wasn’t just my body that relaxed and felt nourished my soul felt like it could breathe.

I stopped reading labels because 98% of what I ate was local and farm to table, purchased at farmers markets and roadside stands.

Being creative with my meals and opting out of restaurants for the most part, I also found I stopped reaching for coffee or tea because I simply didn’t need them anymore let alone the Tylenol PMs at night.

My sleep cycles eased out. My mornings stopped starting with dread or that low hum of panic they used to carry.

I found myself waking into a peaceful, neutral place.

And it is from that space that I am writing this.

I think when we chase happiness, we are trying to hit a high note and sustain it.

Any great opera singer can do that better than any of us but even they know it isn’t sustainable.

And honestly, who would want it? One long, loud, high note with no end?

Well, that is the secret.

It is not about chasing happiness.

It is about seeking that neutral, peaceful place where we can actually nurture our soul.

So many of us… myself included … have spent time in some form of therapy struggling because we don’t know how to be happy.

We chase so many things: love, amazing food, travel to exotic places, the latest gadget.

Not for what those things actually are when they arrive, but for what we believe the chase will bring us.

What I found during this trip is that yes, happiness rose many times but not like a dopamine hit.

More like running into an old dear friend.

I also found that so many things I thought I needed to feel comfortable were things I had been holding onto because I believed they would fill the happiness basket … or at least plant the seeds.

What I didn’t realize was that I was planting seeds for vines that, once they grew, would choke out the sunlight and drain my emotional resources dry.

So, what is that neutral, peaceful place?

Funny enough, when I tried to describe it to myself, I found myself sitting right inside the title I gave this publication … the Soul Greenhouse.

I created this space after years of coaching clients on how to become master gardeners in their own greenhouse. And I want to challenge you to look honestly at what you are trading in the pursuit of happiness and instead begin to create and nurture a space for peace.

Because that is actually where happiness blossoms.

I am so grateful for the wonderful souls I met along the way this month from the smiling faces that sold me wickedly delicious produce, to the fellow travelers I crossed paths with at hostels, people from all walks of life and all corners of the world.

I originally came to the Yucatán to visit a few of the lesser-known Mayan ruin sites, and I did that too.

That also taught me how to navigate the amazing transit system here, since I travel with just a backpack, a carry-on and good walking shoes.

The sites recalibrated me emotionally and energetically in ways I cannot begin to fully express … but some of my most poignant moments came from completely impromptu, unplanned flashes of everyday life caught in a photo or a pause.

So yes … let’s learn to create and nurture the space for peace within.

Here are two practices and three journal prompts to help you cut through the clutter and get clear on what truly lights your path.

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What a difference a month makes when you choose you.

Nothing fancy just been eating local produce like crazy and drinking tons of Hibiscus iced tea along with writing and exploring.

I don’t stay in fancy hotels and I’m actually in an awesome hostel in the Yucatan in the ac coworking space working on my next book.

I’m going to be 56 in May and I cannot wait. 🪷

I want to address a big issue that holds so many people back from creating lives that truly feel like living.

It’s not about big bank accounts or waiting till everything lines up.

The biggest speed bump, and yes not a roadblock, is what keeps us stuck in the energy of not being able to get past the vision boards.

Everything you are wanting is literally right on the other side of your comfort zone. Every freaking thing.

I know because I am literally writing this from a table at a hostel in my fourth city in the Yucatan. I don’t know one soul in this whole country and my Spanish is rusty AF after 35 years away from growing up in Miami. The funny thing is I was also fluent in Italian at the same time and every time I go to say Gracias, I say Grazie. But instead of being embarrassed I smile and I am kind and generous with my appreciation and the message still gets across.

Before I took this trip I am on and I wanted to make at age 5 by the way, I was scared and nervous. I’m 55 and until last year all my international trips were UK based.

Not everything went my way even with careful planning, but many things were freaking amazing. I just found out I am so close to Chichen Itza that in a few days at the Spring Equinox I can be there to witness it myself. Totally unplanned and epic AF.

This is the alchemy that starts happening when you push past the fear and doubt like big uncomfortable curtains. Yes! That is the secret. They are not a brick wall.

And the comfort zone looks different for everyone.

Maybe yours is the job you have stayed in for ten years not because it serves you but because leaving feels terrifying. It stopped being a job somewhere around year three. Now it’s a sentence you keep showing up to because at least it’s familiar. Maybe it’s the relationship you already know is past its expiration date but the idea of being alone feels worse than being slowly hollowed out by staying.

Or maybe your version is something that looks crazy from the outside, like wanting to spend a year driving a camper van through national parks, and you keep talking yourself out of it because who does that, right?

And then there’s the loneliness of wanting something different in the first place. When you look around and nobody in your circle is doing the thing you want to do it can make the want feel wrong. Like maybe you’re broken for wanting it or naive for thinking it’s possible. You’re not broken. You just outgrew the room you’re standing in.

And here’s the part nobody warns you about. When you actually do the thing, some people leave.

Not because you did anything wrong but because your boldness held up a mirror they weren’t ready to look into.

That’s not your fault and it’s not yours to carry. That’s their comfort zone talking.

The ones meant to travel with you into your next chapter will still be there.

The ones who go quiet were never really cheering for you.

They were just comfortable with the version of you that stayed small.

The comfort zone isn’t protecting you. It’s just fear with better furniture.

A year ago this month I was crying on my ten minute breaks at a job that wasn’t just testing my nerves it was draining my soul battery dry. It took me five months to get past the comfort zone I was hiding in but I finally said let’s do this messy and uncertain and just do it. I quit. I built my online business into my full income.

I curated my whole life down to a small storage unit and became a full time traveler.

And now I am here. Nervous and figuring out local bus schedules in a country where I barely speak the language. Same person. Completely different life.

That’s the jump. That’s all it was.

Now you will hear a ton of noise about how unsafe it is for women to travel solo. And I will say yes there are very specific places where that deserves real attention. But it’s not the sweeping truth they want you to believe.

I have not felt unsafe once in a month and I am intentionally in the non tourist spots. I am here to commune with these sacred hot spots, to recalibrate myself and to recalibrate for my clients through my one on one work and my books.

So back to the main message. If I had stayed scared just looking at my comfort zone and let it keep me in the waiting stage and out of the doing stage I would still be in that bathroom on my ten minute break. I want to help you move from wanting to doing.

Look at it this way. You can stay scared and not doing the things or you can be scared and doing the things. The fear doesn’t have to leave first. You just have to move while it’s still in the room.

I say go for it and watch just how hard the universe will chase you down to woo you. I am about to witness the Spring Equinox at Chichen Itza where thousands gather every year and ride that wave, and I didn’t even plan it. The universe just lined me up because I was already moving.

You got this. And if you are still reading this you are already moving from wanting to doing. Keep going.

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The question in that title hit me last week on a walk. I was thinking about what to write next, at the tail end of editing my book about Soul Connections, and when the clarity came it felt blinding, then so vast that it has woven through my thoughts even this morning.

Because here is what I know to be true after decades of working with women on their souls and their stories: a woman’s sensuality, her hunger, her erotic aliveness.

It was never his to give.

It was always hers.

She just needed a loophole to access it. And the bad boy has historically been that loophole.

Let’s talk about why.

The Good Girl Conditioning

As a society, women are conditioned to believe that doing anything purely for the pleasure of it is somehow dirty, or at the very least, not good girl behavior. We have been so thoroughly trained to be useful, to be appropriate, to be palatable, that we can’t even relax in a bubble bath without running through our to-do list or quietly kicking ourselves about something.

Pleasure for its own sake? That requires justification. And desire, the deep, embodied, unapologetic kind, that gets locked in a box. The box only opens under very specific conditions. Namely: someone else’s wanting.

Women are taught, subtly and relentlessly, that their sensuality exists as a response system. Not a source. A response. Her beauty, her hunger, her erotic nature. These things are only valid in relation to male desire. She does not inhabit them. She activates them when called upon.

The result is a woman who has no clean relationship with her own wanting. Who has catered so hard and so long to what is outside of herself that she genuinely does not know how she wants to feel. I see this in my practice constantly. When I teach classes on attracting a soulmate, I begin with one deceptively simple question:

“How do you want to feel?”

Most women struggle with it. What comes up first is almost always how they don’t want to feel. Which is valuable to release, but it speaks volumes about how disconnected a woman can become from her own inner landscape when she has spent a lifetime orienting toward everyone else’s.

I had a woman attend one of my classes with a fully built Excel spreadsheet of specifications for her future partner. When I told her she wouldn’t need it. We would be focusing on her own needs and desires, on calibrating the signal she was transmitting rather than curating the recipient, and she short-circuited. It took real convincing. I told her she could keep the list, but only if she could honestly answer one question first: how was the carefully written list working out for her?

She set it down. And got curious instead.

That is how deep this goes.

Enter: The Bad Boy

He walks in and he doesn’t care about the box.

He is bold enough to have his wants and desires not only spoken but catered to. He doesn’t ask permission to take up space. He is unapologetically alive in his own wanting. And something in her, her soul, her body, the part of herself she has been disciplining for years, exhales.

Because with him, the good girl rules don’t seem to apply.

She finds herself wandering through the lingerie section, picking out something sexy. She wears the dress. She says the thing. She lets herself want, loudly, unapologetically, without asking if it’s too much.

But here is the subtle tragedy inside that awakening: the sexy underwear she slips on under just jeans and a sweatshirt isn’t because it feels sexy to her. It’s because she hopes it will turn him on. Her desire becomes tethered to his. Her blossoming is oriented entirely outward, toward him, shaped unconsciously by his preferences. She thinks she is channeling her inner goddess. But she has handed the goddess over.

This is not empowerment. This is awakening in service of someone else. Concubine energy dressed up as liberation.

And it creates depletion. Because she is not renewing from the source. She is a water pitcher poured endlessly outward, never into her own cup. The intimate connection that should restore her ends up in a deficit, because she brought her awakened self to the altar of his desire, not her own.

One look at what women are consuming tells the whole story. The top spicy books, the Fifty Shades phenomenon and everything that followed, reveal a hunger that goes bone-deep. Women are craving permission to explore themselves. They just feel they need to receive that permission through a partner’s hands rather than their own.

Hathor Doesn’t Bloom for Anyone

In Egyptian cosmology, Hathor is the goddess of love, beauty, music, and pleasure, but she is also sovereign. She is not beauty in service of the observer. She is beauty as a state of being. She does not turn her radiance on when someone worthy enters the room. She simply is.

The Lotus is the same. It rises from the mud, toward the light, complete in itself. Not for the pond.

Women are not taught that this kind of sovereign, inside-out sensuality is available to them. They are taught the concubine version: beauty and desire as offerings, not birthright.

The artist who understood this completely, and lived it so visibly that it rewrote what we thought was possible, was Prince.

From his very first televised performance, Prince walked onstage in thigh-high heeled boots, a tiger-print speedo, and a matching vest, and he did not look like someone asking for permission. He was not performing his sensuality for the audience. He was not calibrating himself to what anyone expected or desired of him. He was simply, completely, unapologetically himself, and the music, the style, the erotic sovereignty were inseparable from who he was.

All the way through his life. Not just in his most well-known work. Always.

Prince didn’t bloom for the audience. He was already in full bloom. The audience just got to witness it.

That is what it looks like to embody your unique soul signature. That is Hathor. That is Lotus energy. And that is what women are not being shown is possible for them, not just in their bedroom, but in their whole life.

And while we are talking about music, let’s talk about anthems.

The song so many women have been handed as their empowerment soundtrack is Beyoncé’s Dance for You. Beautiful song. But listen to what it is actually saying. She is thanking him. Thanking him for what he brings out in her. Her own sensuality, her own aliveness, her own awakening handed back to him as a gift of gratitude.

The conditioning is so complete it got set to a melody and sold to us as empowerment. *eye roll* I want to replace it with something that will do something entirely different to you:

Buddy Guy’s What Kind of Woman Is This.

Notice the difference. Buddy Guy is not being offered anything. He is being undone by a woman who is not performing for him at all. She is simply fully inhabiting herself, curves, bounce, sway and all, and her presence is so unapologetically sovereign that he can barely stand it.

The sway of her hips is not an invitation. It is a personal statement of ownership.

She is not moving for anyone in that room. She just happens to be moving near him. That is the whole difference. That is the whole article.

I actively encourage my clients to put it on, alone, and move to it. Not for anyone watching. Not as practice for anything. Just for the pure, sovereign pleasure of feeling their own body move. To celebrate the curve of their hips. To enjoy the feeling of moving them for the sake of movement itself.

Because here is something that does not get said enough: women carry grief in their hips. Sadness, loss, unexpressed longing, years of contraction, it lives there. The hips are not just a physical structure. They are a storehouse. And the simple, sacred act of moving them with pleasure and intention, just for yourself, just because it feels good, is its own form of healing. It is not performance. It is not seduction. It is a woman coming home to her own body, on her own terms.

That is a sacred practice. Full stop.

You Were Already the Music

Here is what I want you to sit with:

Women come fully equipped with the kinetic art of foreplay for themselves, within themselves.

It lives in them as an intrinsic quality of being, not as something that switches on in the presence of the right person. The sensuality, the hunger, the creative erotic aliveness. It is not a gift he activates. It is a state of being she has been taught to suppress.

The bad boy isn’t magic. He’s chaos. And chaos is just disruptive enough to knock the good-girl conditioning sideways for a moment, creating a gap she briefly slips through to touch her own aliveness. She mistakes the relief of that access for love. For chemistry. For fate.

But the aliveness was never his. It was always hers.

How a woman is emotionally and physically intimate with others is a direct reflection of how free she secretly desires to be within herself. And until she turns that mirror inward, until she asks not “what does he want” but “how do I want to feel,” she will keep outsourcing the key to her own kingdom.

What she actually needs is not a bad boy. What she needs is an inner kitchen stocked with self-rising flour, not all-purpose, waiting to be activated by someone else’s recipe.

She needs to learn to write her own menu, regulate her own heat, and tend her own fire. The right partner, when they arrive, doesn’t take over the kitchen. They bring their own ingredients, help keep yours stocked with your favorites, and know to keep the fire extinguisher current.

Because the fountain doesn’t need a reason to flow. It just flows.

An Invitation

My purpose in writing this is not to indict the bad boy, or the women who loved them. It is to trigger a conversation within yourself, regardless of which side of the bed you sleep on. I know this will ruffle some feathers. Good. Ruffled feathers mean something landed.

If this piece cracked something open in you, if it sparked even a flicker of curiosity about what lives in your own inner kitchen, stay with me. The exercises below are where the real work begins.

It’s time to take the help wanted sign out of your window. Not because you don’t want partnership, but because you’re done outsourcing the sun.

— • —

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Those words didn’t walk into the room softly and caress my attention patiently.

They bitch slapped me in the third eye with a blinding light of clarity.

That wakeup call I had hit the snooze button on so many times it was finally time for a time out.

Those words weren’t something I read in an intentional post somewhere.

They came out of my own mouth at the end of a long, exhausting road with my ex. The same conversation on repeat. Me trying to translate my soul and they... well, let’s just say that after two years of healing and detoxing from it, that relationship was my single greatest lesson.

But back to the conversation. I was trying to find yet another way to express what was wrong, why I couldn’t do that cycle anymore. When those words came out of my mouth it was my raw soul pleading with me to finally let go.

It would take several more months after that including moving out of the home we had shared for four years, unwinding from an engagement that in hindsight was a carefully spun sugar castle before I was truly free.

Here is why I’m sharing this today.

After 35 years of doing readings for clients and the majority of them about soul-to-soul relationship dynamics even I had misread my own soul two years before I even met him.

After my divorce was filed, after the best friends who got married and ended up as roommates finally separated, I decided I needed to learn to love with an open heart.

So, for two years I committed to a continuous 80-day cycle of mala bead meditation, chanting to open my heart to love.

Silly me. I thought that meant I was scared to love someone else with an open heart.

All along it was me.

That is why that one sentence held the entire essence of the lesson that relationship came to teach me. Because the way I loved him with the patience, the tenderness, the endless translating of my soul trying to be understood was exactly how my own heart was asking to be loved.

I was pouring outward everything I was starving for within.

And that is the key for you too.

The way you love others is your soul broadcasting what it is hungry for.

Every quality you pour into your connections like the loyalty, the presence, the depth, the care that is not just generosity outward.

That is your heart writing you a love letter and handing it to someone else to deliver.

The quest for love and connection begins within. Not as a consolation prize. Not as the thing you do while you wait for the right person to arrive.

As the actual destination.

Because here is what I know after 35 years of sitting with people in their most vulnerable moments of longing and confusion is that what we choose to broadcast from our heart center is what the universe matches and sends back to us.

We don’t attract what we want. We attract what we emit.

And what we emit is always, at its deepest level, a reflection of our relationship with our own soul self.

So, the real question is never “why won’t they love me the way I need to be loved?”

The real question is “am I loving myself that way yet?”

You get to make that mix tape. You get to write that playlist.

Here is how we start.

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Let’s start with the truth nobody’s putting on a motivational poster: courage is not the absence of fear. It never was. Courage is looking fear dead in the eye and saying, “Thanks for your concern. I’ve got shit to do.”

I know this because fear and I have been in a long-term relationship. It shows up in the form of scarcity thinking, in the pull of nostalgia for a life I deliberately chose to leave, in the moment before I hit send on something that matters deeply. Fear is not the enemy.

It’s the uninvited passenger who wants to narrate the whole road trip.

This article is for everyone carrying an unfinished symphony.

A book that’s been in your heart for ten years, a YouTube channel you keep almost starting, a life reset that’s sitting in the draft folder of your soul. It is for the creative, the wanderer, the world-changer who almost gave up right before the moment that was always meant to be theirs.

Because right now, the Karmic Tide is turning. And the universe is waiting on you.

The Two Months That Held a Lifetime

After my first journey as a full-time nomadic traveler, I found myself back in my hometown for two months between trips. On paper it was a soft landing being close to the waterfront, the library as my office, walking distance to everything. In reality, it was a spiritual pressure cooker.

Those two months held more emotional weather than most years. Grief for the life I had deliberately released. Nostalgia dressed up as doubt. Fear of scarcity as my income streams were shifting. A very loud, very persuasive inner voice that asked whether I had lost my mind.

I had not lost my mind. I was shedding a skin.

Here’s what I did with those two months anyway, despite the noise:

I took the big first step on a book project I had stumbled into just weeks earlier in London and research that felt too important to just sit in the ‘wanting.’ I submitted a request for a professional consultation. I dove into the annotations, the calculations, the deep work.

I taught myself an astronomical dating system using Mars retrograde patterns and software I had never touched before. Seven hours of focused learning later, I could do what I had previously thought I would need an expert to do for me.

I also opened myself to friendship in a new way. I allowed people in. I let myself be seen. I spent my last week before departure in real, present, unhurried conversations all still a little scary, completely worth it. And I left knowing that two book projects are now pulling me back to England and Egypt this year.

None of that happened because fear went away. All of it happened because I stopped waiting for it to.

The Traffic Jam Called ‘Allowing’

‘Manifesting’ is one of the most overused words in the spiritual community — and I say that as someone who lives and breathes this work. We talk about intention, visualization, frequency alignment. All valid. But we gloss over the place where most people actually get stuck.

Allowing is where the traffic jam is.

Opportunity will knock. It will knock loudly and repeatedly. But if your porch light is off and you’re tangled up in the wanting, the needing it to look a certain way, the obsessive checking for signs, you will never taste the doing. You will stay in rehearsal for a performance you’re too afraid to give.

My own fear of scarcity had its grip on me during those two months. My TikTok income had shifted. My entire life structure had shifted. And there is a very particular kind of dread that lives in financial uncertainty when you’ve chosen a non-traditional path. But I had to look at that fear honestly and ask it: what are you protecting me from? And is the thing you’re protecting me from worse than staying small?

It wasn’t. It never is.

The moment I stopped trying to control the shape of what was coming and simply made myself available to it and the porch light went back on.

The new doors found me.

The Cage With No Walls

Here is something I need you to hear clearly: your comfort zone is not your friend. It is not a healthy boundary. It is a cage with no walls outside of your own mind.

A healthy boundary is a line you draw to protect your energy, your values, your wellbeing. Your comfort zone is the line your fear drew for you a long time ago to keep you from the thing you actually want. They are not the same thing. Do not confuse them.

So much of the good stuff … the real stuff, the life-changing stuff .. lives just on the other side of that invisible line. Your book. Your channel. Your reset. Your

“yes” to the terrifying invitation. None of it is as far away as the fear wants you to believe.

And here’s what I know about you, reader: you are limitless. Not as a platitude. As a literal description of what becomes possible when you bring enough audacity and enough curiosity to the table.

We are not only capable of pushing the envelope.

We can redesign it.

The Cosmic Alignment You’ve Been Sleeping Through

Let me tell you what the universe just did, in case you missed it.

In the span of a few weeks at the start of 2026, Neptune moved from Pisces into Aries for the first time in over 160 years. Days later, the Chinese New Year shifted from the Year of the Snake into the Year of the Horse. And just after that, a Snow Full Moon rose — illuminating a sky that was essentially Aries, the God of War, on a powerful charging horse, under a blazing full moon.

If that is not the cosmos saying ‘get some epic things done,’ I genuinely don’t know what is.

Neptune in Aries dissolves the old illusions and lights a fire under bold, pioneering energy. The Horse brings momentum, freedom, and the kind of forward-charging vitality that doesn’t wait for permission. The full moon illuminates what has been hidden — including the gifts you’ve been sitting on.

The scales of Karmic justice are genuinely trying to rebalance right now. But here is the thing about karmic rebalancing: it requires participants. The universe is like an angel investor at this moment in history, and there are very few people even submitting an application.

The light in you is being asked to join the fight. Not the fight against the darkness and the fight for the beautiful thing you are here to bring into the world.

On Grieving What You’ve Left Behind

Before I give you the exercises, I want to say something important about grief.

Big change, even the change you chose, even the change that’s exactly right for you and comes with grief attached.

I felt it in those two months at home. Nostalgia for a structure I had outgrown. A specific kind of loneliness that arrives when you have made yourself unfamiliar to your own life. An ache for the version of things you can no longer go back to.

Grief is not a sign that you made the wrong choice.

Grief is what happens when something real ends. It is respect for what was. And it deserves a proper container.

Allow it. Name it. And then release it intentionally, so it doesn’t quietly become the anchor that holds you back from the new.

Exercise One below is specifically designed for that release.

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There’s something the spiritual texts don’t quite prepare you for about turning 55.

They tell you about the Crown Chakra opening. They describe the thousand-petaled lotus in full bloom. They speak of wisdom, of embodied knowing, of becoming an anchor point for divine light on Earth.

What they don’t tell you is that sometimes, right before the grand awakening, you find yourself crying in a bathroom on your 10-minute breaks from a job that feels like it’s slowly suffocating your soul.

The Breaking Before the Blooming

In early November 2024, a few months before my 55th birthday, I took a job I didn’t want out of fear. I wanted enough money saved enough for at least six months. I had a plan: rebuild my business while working, stay just until my birthday in May, create security.

What I didn’t anticipate was how intensely toxic the environment would be. Or how it would test every ounce of spiritual strength I’d cultivated over 35 years.

I would hide myself in the bathroom on my 10 breaks and cry. Not the gentle tears of release, but the desperate silent crying of someone who knows they’re betraying their own soul and doesn’t yet know how to stop.

I had been reading energy, guiding souls, and walking between worlds since I was 20 years old. I’d traveled internationally since 2017, collecting sacred experiences like pearls on a string. I had drawn Egyptian hieroglyphs since I was three years old without knowing what they were.

And there I was, in a fluorescent-lit bathroom in early March, crying on another break, wondering how I’d gotten so lost.

The Moment Everything Shifted

But this time, something different happened in that bathroom.

Through the tears, a realization broke through: my business had already surpassed the monthly goal I’d set for myself. I had enough. The security I’d been working toward? I’d already created it.

The only thing keeping me there was fear. Fear of trusting. Fear of letting go. Fear of believing that the Universe would actually support me if I chose my soul over safety.

I finish my shift that day and after I left work, went home, emailed management my resignation, and never went back.

The lotus can only bloom when it finally stops apologizing for reaching toward the light.

Sacred Sites and Soul Hunger

Early April brought a gift I’d been longing for: a trip to Mt. Shasta, a sacred site that had been on my bucket list for decades. I was traveling with my best friend, ready for whatever transformation the mountain had to offer.

A few days before we left, I found myself without cell phone reception and no wifi stuck waiting on a ferry. In that forced stillness, I opened the notes app on my phone and started outlining a book I’d been wanting to write for years.

In 45 minutes, I outlined the first four chapters of Soul Hangry.

Then came Mt. Shasta itself. Eight hours of climbing mountain trails with my best friend and our Shaman guide. The intensity. The beauty. The way the mountain strips you bare and rebuilds you with every step upward.

That trip shifted everything.

I came home and the very next day sat down to write the rest of that book in a 8 hour stretch that started with a hope to get a few more bits done. By July 2025 and just two months after my 55th birthday, Soul Hangry: The Hunger Beneath the Hustle was finished and self-published.

But the Universe wasn’t done.

I followed my intuition to attend a conference for a publishing company. Answered their call for contributing writers. Was accepted to write for their new anthology about past lives. By November, my story “Ember and Soul” about my past life regression as a Mongolian Shaman was published in their collection.

After a decade of stops and starts I had my name on 2 books published

The Radical Rebirth

And then came the biggest leap: in November, I chose not to renew my lease.

Instead, I curated my entire life down to a tiny storage unit and committed to full-time travel.

My first journey as a nomad? Six weeks. Costa Rica to visit my best friend who had moved there. Then England. Then Scotland. The back to England.

When the Universe Orchestrates a 6am Arrival

But here’s where the story gets even stranger—where you can see the hand of the divine arranging things that my logical mind would never have planned.

During that November trip to England, I took an impulsive overnight train ride from Penzance into Paddington Station. I arrived in London at 6am with a 3pm Airbnb check-in stretching ahead of me like an eternity.

I grabbed breakfast, stored my luggage, and started wandering the streets of London through google maps in that peculiar twilight state that comes from overnight travel that is not quite awake, not quite dreaming, suspended between worlds.

That’s when I found it: the Sir John Soane Museum. It looked like a time capsule from the description and photos, frozen in the 19th century, calling to me from my screen.

I had no idea what was inside.

I got in line so when it opened at 10 am I would be one of the first ones in, and there it was after several min or exploring I would find it: an Egyptian artifact that would crack my world open. I can’t tell you what it was yet because that story belongs to the book I’m writing. But I can tell you this: standing in front of it, I felt every cell in my body recognize something it had been seeking without knowing.

The hieroglyphs. The energy. The knowing that flooded through me.

In that moment, barely past dawn, jet-lagged and disoriented, I received a download so clear it felt like remembering rather than learning: this artifact would become a book. And the woman who helped bring it to England in 1821, the explorer’s wife who has been ghosted from most historical accounts, she would become another.

Two books. Both rooted in Egypt. Both calling me to dive deeper into the connection I’ve carried since childhood. Both born from an “impulsive” overnight train ride that delivered me to exactly the right museum at exactly the right time in exactly the right state of consciousness to receive what was waiting there.

This is what living with an open Crown Chakra looks like: you follow an impulse to take a train, and it leads you to your life’s work. You arrive somewhere “too early” and discover it was precisely on time. You think you’re lost, and you’re actually being guided with extraordinary precision.

The Universe had been preparing me for that moment since I was three years old, drawing hieroglyphs I couldn’t possibly have known. Thirty-five years of spiritual practice. Decades of saying yes to sacred sites. All of it was building toward that November morning in London when I would finally understand why Egypt has always lived in my bones.

I returned to the Seattle area mid-December, landing just long enough to catch my breath before the next chapter.

Now, as I write this in mid-February 2026, I’m three days away from flying to the Yucatán to explore Maya ruins and write my next two books. From there, back to Costa Rica. Then England to finish research for those same books. I won’t return until June.

And in October and November? I’m going to Egypt for the first time—the final piece of research for books that have been calling to me, rooted in both Egypt and London, in ancient wisdom and my own inexplicable connection to hieroglyphs I’ve been drawing since I was three.

This is what the Crown Chakra’s grand awakening looks like in real life: not just spiritual experiences, but radical, embodied trust that reorganizes your entire existence around soul alignment.

The Teaching Hidden in the Darkness

Here’s what I understand now, from the other side: that bathroom was my cocoon. That toxic job? My chrysalis.

The Crown Chakra’s grand awakening in the fifties doesn’t arrive like a gentle sunrise. It comes like a forest fire that burns away everything that isn’t aligned with your soul’s true purpose. Every compromise you’ve made with fear. Every time you’ve chosen safety over sovereignty. Every moment you’ve dimmed your light to make others comfortable.

The fire consumes it all.

Those months were my dark night of the soul and the darkness was necessary. Because you cannot truly embody divine consciousness while still clinging to the illusion that you need to earn your right to exist, that you need to prove your worth through suffering, that your spiritual gifts are somehow less valuable than a “real job.”

The Rebirth: From One Book to an Entire Life Reorganized

On May 25th, 2025, I turned 55.

But looking back now, that birthday wasn’t the grand awakening, it was the gateway. What followed in the months after was a cascade of yeses to the soul that completely restructured my reality.

July: Soul Hangry published. November: “Ember and Soul” published in the past lives anthology. November: Chose not to renew my lease. Entire life curated into a storage unit. November-December: Six weeks traveling Costa Rica, England, Scotland. February 2026: Flying to the Yucatán for weeks of Maya ruins and book writing. Then Costa Rica again. Then England for research. June: Return. October-November: Egypt for the first time and the land whose hieroglyphs I’ve been drawing since age three finally calling me home.

This is what the Crown Chakra’s grand awakening actually looks like.

Not perfection. Not constant bliss. Not never feeling afraid.

But a complete willingness to follow the soul’s intelligence even when it makes no logical sense. To trust that the Universe that guided me to draw Egyptian symbols at three years old knows exactly where I need to go at 55.

I’m writing this now as someone who has been doing one on one sessions with energy readings and coaching. Who maintains two Substack publications. Who wakes up in different countries and asks not “what do I have to do?” but “what wants to move through me today?”

Living as a transmission. Being the lotus in full bloom. Trusting the divine guidance that has never once abandoned me, even when I abandoned myself.

What the 50s Teach Us About Spiritual Mastery

The texts talk about the Crown Chakra opening in your fifties bringing embodied wisdom, and they’re right. But here’s what that wisdom actually is:

It’s knowing that your spiritual gifts aren’t separate from your survival - they ARE your survival.

It’s understanding that serving your soul and serving the world are the same thing.

It’s recognizing that the Universe will absolutely support you when you stop trying to prove you deserve support.

It’s the deep, bone-level knowing that you are not here to fit in - you’re here to anchor divine light in your own unique way.

At 55, with the Crown Chakra in full bloom, I finally understand what I’ve been doing all these years. Every tarot card I’ve pulled. Every energy reading I’ve given. Every sacred site I’ve visited. Every hieroglyph I’ve drawn.

I’ve been building a transmission tower.

And now, in this grand awakening, the tower is complete. The signal is clear. The light flows through unobstructed.

For Those Standing at Their Own Threshold

If you’re in your fifties, or approaching them, and you feel the pressure building - the sense that something monumental is trying to break through - trust it.

If you find yourself crying in bathrooms, questioning everything, wondering how you got so far off track, trust that too.

The lotus doesn’t bloom in the shallow end. It grows in the muck and the darkness, sending roots deep into the unknowable depths, before it finally breaks the water’s surface and opens to the sun.

Your dark night isn’t a mistake. It’s the final clearing before the grand awakening.

The pressure you feel? That’s the thousand petals trying to unfold.

The fear that wants you to play small, to stay safe, to keep compromising? That’s the old pattern making its last stand before consciousness burns it away.

And that voice calling you toward something greater - toward full alignment, toward embodied truth, toward living as a transmission of divine light?

That’s your Crown Chakra, fully opened, finally free to do what it’s been preparing for your entire life:

Let you remember who you actually are.

The Invitation

At 55, I’m not done unfolding. The lotus continues to open, each day revealing new layers, new capacities, new ways of being in service to the light.

But I am done apologizing. Done compromising. Done pretending my spiritual gifts need to fit into boxes designed by people who’ve never felt what I feel, seen what I see, or walked between the worlds the way I walk.

This is the grand awakening: the moment you stop living for permission and start living as permission itself.

The Crown Chakra in full bloom doesn’t ask if it’s allowed to channel divine wisdom.

It simply opens. And lets the light pour through.

And the world - the world that so desperately needs what you carry - recognizes the transmission and comes to drink.

This is Year Two of my rebirth. Year One was the shattering and the initial blooming with quitting that job in March, Mt. Shasta in April, turning 55 in May, publishing Soul Hangry in July, becoming a nomad in November.

Year Two is the embodiment and living this truth across continents, writing the books that have been calling me for lifetimes, finally going to Egypt, the land whose language I somehow already knew at three years old.

Everything before March 2025 was preparation. Everything since has been practice. And everything ahead? That’s pure possibility.

I’ll be sharing this journey here at Soul Greenhouse and the unfolding of a life lived in full alignment with soul, the practical magic of trusting divine guidance, the real and raw experience of what it means to anchor light while traveling the world.

If this resonates, you’re not reading by accident. Your Crown Chakra knows something your mind doesn’t yet.

Welcome to the blooming.

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Last night, during a live TikTok reading, I witnessed something profound unfold. A woman’s question appeared in the chat, her words hovering on my screen like a held breath: Had she healed enough to pursue her dream of starting a nonprofit to help others?

She typed about her mother—the one still battling herself, still unable to let go of the control she had to have in place as the grownup “Mother” role with all the angst of a teenager rebelling against the world that they don’t feel they fit in.

The familiar weight of the mother wound pressed through her words as she described struggling to establish healthy boundaries, about feeling guilty for even trying.

And then the words came through, channeled with a clarity that made me pause mid-sentence:

”Just because a mother carries a child does not mean the child must carry the mother.”

I felt those words land in my own body like a stone dropping into still water, sending ripples through decades of my own healing.

My mother has been gone twenty years, and still…still….I find knots rising to the surface that need untangling.

As I spoke those words aloud on the live, I watched the chat light up with hearts and “yes” reactions. I know I’m not alone in this. Millions of women carry this particular weight, this legacy of the mother wound that binds us to emotional labor we were never meant to bear.

The Invisible Contract We Never Signed

There’s an unspoken contract many of us inherit, that because we were carried in the womb, we must carry our mothers through their emotional landscapes for the rest of our lives.

We become emotional sherpas, navigating their unprocessed pain, their unmet needs, their inability to see themselves, and by extension, us.

Even as grown women, we regress into our inner wounded child state in these relationships, still craving to be seen, still hoping that “this time” our care will earn us the love and recognition we’ve always needed.

We carry them at our own cost, driven by duty, by guilt, by the stubborn hope that maybe if we just try hard enough, they’ll finally be able to give us what we need.

But here’s what I’ve learned through my own decades of healing and through witnessing thousands of readings: They cannot give what they do not have for themselves.

Boundaries Are Not Walls. They’re Mirrors.

When we talk about healthy boundaries with our mothers, we often frame it as something we’re doing *to* them. This is where we get stuck. We set a boundary hoping they’ll honor it, respect it, understand it. When they don’t and they often won’t and we feel defeated, angry, or worse, like we’ve failed somehow.

But boundaries aren’t for them. They’re for Us.

Boundaries are the place where we stop. They’re the line we draw that says, “This is where my responsibility ends and yours begins.” They’re not about controlling another person’s behavior since that’s impossible, especially with someone who hasn’t done their own healing work.

Boundaries are about what “We” will and won’t accept, what “We” will and won’t participate in.

When your mother can’t honor your boundary, that’s not a failure of your boundary. That’s information. It’s showing you exactly where you need to stop engaging, stop explaining, stop hoping for something different.

The boundary isn’t there to change her. It’s there to protect the sacred space of your own healing.

Breaking the Cycle of Emotional Inheritance

The mother wound operates in cycles, passed down through generations like a family heirloom nobody wanted but everyone feels obligated to keep. Your mother likely carries her own mother’s wounds. Her inability to see you clearly is often because she was never seen clearly herself.

Understanding this doesn’t mean you have to keep carrying her. Compassion for her pain and responsibility for your own wellbeing can coexist.

You can hold space for her humanity while refusing to collapse your own boundaries. You can love her from a distance that allows you to breathe. You can honor what she gave you life itself without sacrificing your own life force to fill the void in hers.

This is not abandonment. This is survival. This is choosing to break the cycle so that the wounds stop with you.

The Permission You’re Waiting For

If you’re reading this and feeling the familiar ache of recognition, here’s what I want you to know: You don’t need your mother’s permission to stop carrying her. You don’t need her to understand why you’re setting boundaries. You don’t need her to validate your experience or acknowledge your pain.

The only permission you need is your own.

Setting down the weight of your mother doesn’t make you a bad daughter. It makes you a woman choosing her own wholeness. It makes you someone brave enough to say, “I will heal what you could not.”

Your nonprofit can exist. Your dream can unfold. Your life can expand beyond the confines of this relationship. Not because you’ve healed “enough”—healing isn’t a finish line—but because you’re willing to stop waiting for her to change before you allow yourself to grow.

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I am sitting in my current favorite place, the public library two blocks from where I’m staying, and the rain is relentless in its dance on the roof while this desire to help shine a light on what you can do right now to help shift things pulses through me.

I know there are incredibly big emotions and feelings rising in the current climate, and I want to take you on a little journey into a shift you can choose right now to help reset your frequency.

Sacred Space Is Not a Place. It’s a Practice of Sovereignty.

We’ve been taught to think of sacred space as something outside of us. A meditation room with the right cushions, a perfectly curated altar, a quiet corner that stays undisturbed. And while physical sacred spaces are beautiful and valuable, they’re not the source of your peace.

You are.

Sacred space is first and foremost an internal orientation. It’s the conscious decision to focus your own energy, to create boundaries around what you allow into your field, and to actively cultivate the qualities you want to experience, regardless of what’s happening in the world around you.

This isn’t putting your head in the sand or pretending everything is fine when it’s not.

This is reclaiming your agency in the one realm where you actually have complete authority: your inner landscape and your immediate environment.

When you create sacred space, both within yourself and in your physical surroundings, you’re making a radical declaration:

I get to decide what energy I allow in. I get to choose what vibration I strengthen. I get to be the keeper of my own peace.

What I’ve Learned About Sacred Space While Living Out of a Suitcase

I’ve been solo traveling internationally for almost a decade, and here’s what ten years of constant movement has taught me:

Sacred space isn’t about controlling your environment. It’s about bringing your centered self to whatever environment you’re in.

Some of my most profound moments of peace have happened in the most unlikely places, busy hostels, unfamiliar cities, spaces that were decidedly not set up for contemplation.

One of my core practices is mindful walking.

Not hiking. Not power walking with a destination in mind. Just walking with the specific intention of being fully present to my body, my breath, and the energy moving through and around me.

On good weather days, this might mean wandering through a park or along a waterfront. But on cold, rainy, or simply uninspiring days? I take my mindful walking practice into museums, shopping centers, libraries, any indoor space where I can move and breathe and come back to myself.

The point isn’t the setting. The point is the practice of bringing sacred awareness into ordinary moments.

Because here’s the truth: if you can’t find your center in the chaos, you don’t actually have a center. You have a preference for certain conditions, and those are outside of you and your control.

Real sacred space, the kind that actually sustains you, travels with you. It’s available in your living room, your office, your car, even in line at the grocery store when you remember to drop into your breath and reconnect with what’s true.

Your Inside World Reflects Your Outside World (And Vice Versa)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting: while sacred space starts as an internal practice, it absolutely extends into your physical environment. In fact, the two are in constant conversation.

Everything holds energy. Your home, your objects, even the spaces you pass through casually, they all carry vibrational signatures. And as someone who’s sensitive to energy (which, let’s be honest, if you’re reading this you probably are), your environment has a profound impact on your nervous system, your emotional state, and your capacity to stay centered.

When your external space feels cluttered, heavy, or chaotic, it’s nearly impossible to maintain internal clarity. And when you’re carrying unprocessed emotions and anxiety in your body, your space will begin to reflect that back to you.

This is why tending to your environment isn’t superficial or frivolous, especially right now.

It’s a direct way of supporting your nervous system, creating actual felt safety in your body, and building a foundation of peace that can hold you steady when everything else feels uncertain.

You’re not rearranging furniture while the world spins. You’re creating a sanctuary that allows your nervous system to downregulate so you can think clearly, feel fully, and respond to life from groundedness instead of reactivity.

Energetic Hygiene: Your Daily Acts of Sovereignty

Just as you brush your teeth and shower your body, your energetic field needs regular tending. This isn’t extra. This isn’t “nice if you have time.” This is foundational maintenance for anyone navigating a sensitive system in an overwhelming world.

Morning Ritual: Setting Your Energetic Tone

Before you reach for your phone or dive into the day’s demands, take three minutes to establish your energetic foundation.

Begin with a heart gratitude practice. Place your hand on your heart and bring to mind three things you’re genuinely grateful for, not just performative gratitude, but the real stuff that makes your chest warm.

Then set an intention for the day. Not a to-do list. An energetic intention: “Today I choose peace.” “Today I move through my life with grace.” “Today I trust my resilience.”

Finally, visualize fresh energy flowing into your space, golden light, or whatever color feels right to you, clearing out anything stagnant and filling every corner with renewed vitality.

Evening Reset: Releasing What You’ve Carried

At the end of your day, before you collapse into scrolling or screen time, give yourself permission to energetically complete the day.

Return to your heart gratitude practice. What actually went well? What small moments held beauty or kindness?

Then use sound vibration to shift the energy in your space. This could be as simple as playing instrumental music (lyrics carry their own energy, so choose wordless sound for this), chiming bells, or if you have them, singing bowls. Sound moves energy in ways that physical cleaning can’t touch.

If you have a salt spray (sea salt dissolved in water with a few drops of essential oil), mist your space, especially doorways and corners. Or use a simple body scrub of salt and oil in the shower, visualizing the day’s accumulated energy washing away.

This isn’t about erasing your experience. It’s about completing the energetic cycle so you’re not carrying today into tomorrow.

Quick Energy Checks Throughout the Day

Several times a day, pause and do a body scan. Not to judge or fix anything, just to notice: How does this space feel? How does my energy feel in this space?

If something feels off, you have options. You can step outside for two minutes. You can open a window. You can place your hand on your heart and take three conscious breaths. You can mentally reinforce your energetic boundaries.

These micro-adjustments are how you stay sovereign instead of reactive.

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Winter is usually a time of slowing down if we like it or not with more uncomfortable weather outside and the strong desire to stay cozy inside the house we can be left alone with our thoughts of the past year.

I have found over the years that no matter that I have spent 30 years in the Seattle area I still haven’t grown a fondness for the winter weather. I find myself looking for ways to enjoy the great indoors and this year as I do that I am finding that this is the perfect time to do a little winter refresh.

Winter outside the Greenhouse can be cold, grey and damp but inside we can indulge ourselves in the slow season to do some soil prep with weeding out the remnants of the experiences of the past year and start nurturing yourself from the inside out.

This is the season to slow down but not to hold us back but for a sacred pause to reflect, release and renew and is essential during the busy sessions ahead.

The first faze of this is to Reframe.

This is the act of taking a new fresh look at the past year and the relationship we are building with ourselves.

We are going to start by grounding ourselves in the reframing by thanking our heart for the journey the past year and this is how we will reclaim the energy it seem to take from us.

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So many of us sit in the uncomfortable place striving to stay one step ahead of the next “Oh shit” moment we are not just burning ourselves out we are literally burnt toast.

Don’t get me wrong I still struggle this even this morning as I prepare to head out again for a few months on my first year traveling solo, slow and soul lead.

I keep trying to circle back to the words I give with my whole heart to my clients… it’s not only okay to not have it all figured out its a good thing!

We are taught from a young age through focused efforts with fire drills to the unintended ways by watching what the grown ups did around us that we need to be prepared!!!

Funny thing it took me to 55 to realize what we need to do is nurture ourselves by helping keep our clarity (intuition and discernment ) sharp and let life unfold.

Being in a constant state of alert is so painfully common with many of us having navigated a childhood that was anything but. Many of us grew up raised by grown ups that were ill equipped themselves.

So if that is the case what do we do then if not prep for the inevitable disaster?

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We never hear about this part of the process.

The place in between.

This is where the actual transformation take place, in the darkness of uncharted waters without light or sound just waves of energetic emotions and yet this is the part of the tale that needs the most to come to light.

The path begins with the caterpillar, so full of desire for change they wrap themselves tightly in that energy and that becomes the cocoon itself.

It can feel constricting tightening with each thought that arises in its wake, not because of its restraint, but because of the growth and expansion within, pure soul hunger straining against the sheer will for more.

We talk endlessly about wanting change.

We celebrate the caterpillar’s brave decision, and we marvel at the butterfly’s emergence.

But we rarely speak of what happens in between—the breakdown, the dissolution, the sacred darkness where transformation actually occurs.

I’m writing to you from inside that darkness right now.

The world’s energy is shifting dramatically and on the personal front it has never been so profound, yet so much is written about wanting and starting change, and about the glorious end results but never the in-between desire and flight.

But I want to talk about the cocoon part. When we are wrapped so tightly in that dance we cannot be anything but painful aware of the breakdown of the old self and the rebuilding of the new.

The sacred pause without the candy-coated shell that the Instagram reality airbrushes away and leaves you feeling as if you are somehow doing it all wrong.

This is the part no one wants to linger in, yet it’s where we all find ourselves when real transformation begins.

The Shock of Spaciousness

That untethered feeling you might be experiencing?

It’s not floating along without grounding. It’s repotting in unfamiliar soil.

At first, it shocks the roots.

Roots that only knew constraints in a too-small pot. But when the nutrients start to call the roots from their shocked state, they offer growth in uncharted ways.

This can leave the plant feeling frightened at first.

But when the roots begin to unfold and reach toward the potential felt in the seed but never truly allowed till now, it can be hard to catch your breath sometimes.

Like all the air left the room.

And that’s okay.

That breathlessness isn’t failure. It’s your system encountering the reality of what it asked for. You can simultaneously be getting exactly what you longed for and feel completely undone by it. Both are true. Both are valid.

Moving Through the Dark

The roots grow in time toward the call of potential, moving through the dark on sense and hope alone following the heart homeward through unfamiliar roads.

It is only when we truly allow the delicate dance of the unfolding within that we come to know the edges of our soul.

This is the work.

Not the having-it-figured-out.

Not the clear five-step plan.

But the staying present to the becoming, even when we cannot yet see what we’re becoming.

So do not stay in the fear of the uncertainty first felt. Do not judge the journey by the first steps.

Allow your soul to breathe into the birthing of this next facet and just follow your heart it knows the way home.

Permission to Feel It All

I want you to know it’s okay to be feeling all the feelings right now.

Give yourself the grace and space for those energies to rise without judgment, because it’s only in their freedom that we find the peace we seek.

This is messy and overwhelmingly beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

It’s okay to not know where the next step will lead.

We are being asked to focus on one breath, one thought at a time.

Not to limit us, but to help us become limitless when we release the need to structure the very process of rebirth itself.

The constriction you feel isn’t the cocoon punishing you.

It’s your own expansion pushing against the edges of what once contained you.

The disorientation isn’t evidence you’re lost. It’s your roots learning to reach in ways they never could before.

It Is Darkest Before the Dawn

That old saying? It’s not a platitude. It’s a map.

It’s darkest before the dawn not because something went wrong, but because you’re in the transformation. In the cocoon. In the soil. In the sacred messy middle where the old form is gone and the new form is still becoming.

The darkness is not the obstacle. The darkness is the generative space.

The dawn is coming because of this darkness, not in spite of it.

So if you’re in the cocoon right now and if you’re in the dissolution, the uncertainty, the beautiful terrifying not-knowing…you’re not alone.

You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re not lost.

You’re becoming.

And that requires the dark.

Breathe. Trust. Unfold.

Your soul knows the way home.

*What are you sitting with in the in-between right now? I’d love to hear what this brings up for you in the comments.*

This morning, I’m sitting with a clarity that rose recently—one that really challenged me to recalibrate my current journey. So many others are feeling the desire rise for more real connection and experiences but have held back because they too are on a solo path.

The clarity came while reading a note someone posted about how hard it was to feel comfortable doing things alone, like even dining out or visiting a museum. The words she used were: I am not comfortable going by myself.

By myself.

That term used to feel like a loud gong struck when I would walk into a café and was asked how many were in my party. That awkward feeling, as if I was being judged for my lack of company.

It was the same uncomfortable feeling and the lack of belief I could do things by myself that kept me waiting a decade in a marriage that kept my desire to explore London on a shelf.

I remember standing in my shop—part of a business I spent 15 years building—at the beginning of a divorce and thinking again about how much I wanted nothing more than to spend hours lost in the museums, drinking tea, and exploring buildings that are still standing hundreds, if not thousands, of years later.

I got frustrated that it never happened. Then I got angry, and as I walked around after closing, I really looked at what I had built completely on my own. I had spent years learning all of what it took to make it happen—why couldn’t I just take myself?

The funny thing is, I was 47 at the time, and honestly, it never dawned on me that I could truly stop focusing on everyone else for once and just book the trip and go.

It was 2017, and that moment changed everything for me. Not only did I book that trip, I got my passport and all the details done myself, and I not only went—I had the first true taste of what is possible when you shift your thoughts from wanting to doing.

But the struggle internally would take another detour. In 2019, I met someone new and spent over four years backpedaling. I gave up my solo traveling because I thought at the time I couldn’t have both.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a place of soul deficit when we lose sight of ourselves.

I have spent 2 years since recovering and rediscovering, and the bigger hurdle was the “by myself.”

But something really cracked open when I read that woman’s words and felt the struggle echo from my past.

This time, something different happened. I didn’t reminisce about past times with past partners—I thought of the joy I felt spending hours wandering a museum or walking a city following my soul, as it whispered for more.

I thought of the pleasure of giving my 100 percent focus to a music performance or a film and the intoxicating feeling of hours lost in a book.

I hadn’t chosen to be alone in those times—I had chosen to be by myself, with myself, as I cultivated that relationship with my true soul-self.

The relationship we have with ourselves is the most important relationship we will ever have, and every relationship we have—from money, career, friends, family, and yes, love—is a reflection of it.

So yes, I dine by myself and travel by myself, not as a lack of company but as a happy companion taking the time to discover myself fully unfiltered. It has been the love story my soul has been asking for all along.

I have come to discover that the real purpose in connecting with another soul is to first learn to love and nurture self and then be able to share that deeply with another.

So yes, there is a whole world out there and within, just waiting to be discovered. It is the biggest adventure yet to step into, and it is a lifelong relationship, so treasure it, savor it, and immerse yourself in the dance.

The one who can dance with you and meet you fully can only find you if you first find yourself.

If you want some guidance on where to even start, I put my heart and soul to paper and wrote a book full of more than just tips and tricks—it’s titled Soul Hangry.

I created this Soul Greenhouse to plant seeds of inspiration, laughter, and tales from my travels, so if you want some company on this road, please subscribe and let’s learn to Dance in our Now.

Order your copy here!

I found myself today among my thoughts and this uncomfortable feeling that I recognized and I made the comment that I didn’t want to be dwelling on it and it hit me how that word is two separate things and many ways worlds apart.

Dwelling means a place—a home, a shelter, a structure.

But it also means an action, the act of staying, lingering, returning.

On the surface, it means a place, a home, a shelter, a structure meant to hold a life. But as a verb, it becomes something else entirely. Its an action of staying, lingering, returning again and again.

And that dual meaning matters more than we realize.

Because many of us are not just thinking about things. We are dwelling in them.

The Architecture of Attention

To dwell is not to visit.

A visit is brief, conscious, and bounded. You arrive, you observe, you leave.

Dwelling implies residence.

It suggests repetition, familiarity, a kind of settling and even when the place itself is uncomfortable.

We dwell in memories that haven’t updated in years.

We dwell in conversations that ended long ago but continue in our minds, still unresolved.

We dwell in imagined futures, old identities, unanswered questions that loop like songs we can’t stop humming.

And eventually, what we dwell in starts to feel like where we live.

Here’s the subtle truth that changes everything: the nervous system doesn’t distinguish well between physical residence and psychological residence.

Where your attention returns consistently begins to register as “home” and regardless of whether it actually supports life.

That porch you keep sitting on, the one made of an old argument.

Your body starts to recognize it.

That room you’ve been renting in a moment from five years ago.

It begins to feel familiar, almost comfortable in its discomfort.

When Dwelling Drains

This is why dwelling can exhaust us in ways we don’t quite understand.

Not because reflection is harmful because reflection is absolutely necessary to help us process it all but like Harry Potter in front of the mirror where he saw his parents looking so full of life it was an experience worth having but he could not make it his home.

We need to return to things, to circle back, to understand what happened and why.

But there’s a difference between reflection and residence.

Unconscious dwelling turns movement into stagnation.

It’s the difference between visiting your childhood home and never leaving your childhood bedroom.

A dwelling, after all, is meant to have infrastructure.

• Light that lets you see clearly.

• Support that holds you when things get heavy.

• Flow, so energy can move through instead of pooling and stagnating.

• Safety, so you can actually rest.

When we dwell in places be it mental or emotional that were never designed to sustain us long-term, something strange happens.

We begin adapting to conditions that were supposed to be temporary.

We

• Normalize the lack of windows.

• Make meaning out of cramped spaces.

• Learn to live without nourishment and call it strength, call it loyalty, call it depth.

But here’s what we forget: some structures were built as shelters for a storm, not homes for a lifetime.

Scaffolding and Foundations

Think about scaffolding for a moment.

Scaffolding is essential. You can’t build or repair anything significant without it.

It holds you while you work and it lets you reach places you couldn’t reach from the ground and its temporary infrastructure that makes transformation possible.

But scaffolding was never meant to be lived in.

Sometimes we dwell in a new idea, turning it over and over until it reveals its shape and other times, we dwell in a question that’s genuinely alive, one that shifts and deepens each time we return to it.

We can dwell in a memory not because we’re stuck, but because each visit shows us something we couldn’t see before.

A pattern, a gift, a previously hidden thread.

We can dwell in

• Possibility when we’re imagining a future we’re growing toward.

• Creative concepts while they’re gestating, before they’re ready to be born into the world.

• New understanding while it settles into our bones, while we’re learning to live from a different center.

And yes, we dwell in grief, in heartbreak, in the careful examination of old wounds but not as avoidance, but as the actual work of integration.

These are temporary structures that serve a vital purpose.

The dwelling itself isn’t the problem. Productive dwelling is how we actually digest experience, how we integrate learning, how we allow new ways of being to take root.

The trouble comes when we forget they’re temporary.

Think of it like a cast on a broken bone. The cast is essential and it holds things in place while healing happens.

It protects what’s vulnerable. It creates the conditions for mending. You wouldn’t shame yourself for needing it, and you wouldn’t try to heal without it.

But the cast was never meant to become permanent. It’s a tool for a season, a necessary support structure while deeper repair takes place.

Or think of it this way: when you’re in a relationship that’s hurting you, romantic or otherwise you often need to build a list.

A mental inventory of all the reasons why leaving is necessary, why staying would cost too much, why this isn’t what love or friendship or family should feel like.

That list is protective. It helps you see clearly when confusion wants to cloud your vision. It strengthens your resolve when guilt tries to pull you back. It holds you steady while you find the courage to choose yourself.

And for a while after you leave, that list continues to serve you. It reminds you why you’re not going back. It validates your decision when doubt creeps in. It’s the cast that protects your healing heart.

But here’s what happens if we’re not careful: that list can become the dwelling itself.

We can find ourselves still living in that inventory years later, still reciting those reasons, still organized around what we left rather than what we’re moving toward.

And when we’re ready to open our hearts again to new love, new friendship, new trust we don’t want that list to be what we’re broadcasting.

We don’t want our energy to still be shaped by the architecture of that old pain.

The list served its purpose. It was the scaffolding that held you while you healed. But it was never meant to be the foundation of everything that comes next.

The trouble comes when the scaffolding starts to feel like the building itself.

When we’ve been living in the middle of construction for so long that we’ve hung curtains on the framework, arranged furniture on the platform, and called it home.

When we’ve worn the cast so long we’ve forgotten what it feels like to move freely. When we’ve recited the list so many times it’s become our introduction to the world.

You can feel the difference in your body, if you’re paying attention.

Productive dwelling has a quality of movement to it, even when you’re still. There’s a sense of processing, of digesting, of slowly understanding. It might be painful, but it doesn’t feel stuck.

Unproductive dwelling feels like wearing yesterday’s clothes to sleep and then wearing them again the next day, and the next. It feels like sitting in the same chair, in the same room, watching the same moment on repeat, and calling it memory.

Calling it honoring the past.

Calling it staying true to yourself.

But growth often begins with a simple, honest recognition:

Just because I’ve been staying here doesn’t mean this is my home.

The Practice of Discernment

Leaving a dwelling doesn’t require drama or anger or a violent rejection of what was.

It requires discernment. That quiet, steady capacity to distinguish between what still serves and what has served its time.

You can acknowledge that a place mattered without continuing to live there.

You can honor what was learned without making it your permanent address. You can appreciate the view, be grateful for the shelter it provided, and still choose to move on.

This is especially important in times of transition, when life is asking you to expand in ways that feel both thrilling and terrifying. When identity shifts, when paths diverge, when you’re becoming someone your younger self wouldn’t quite recognize that the old dwellings can start to feel heavy.

Not because they were wrong. But because they were designed for a different season, a different version of you, a different set of questions.

The mental apartment you lived in during your twenties, when you were figuring out who you were apart from your family and that was a good dwelling. It served you. But you don’t have to keep paying rent there.

The emotional framework you built to survive a difficult period, that was necessary shelter.

But survival architecture and thriving architecture are built differently.

Where Are You Actually Living?

So the question isn’t: Why do I keep thinking about this?

The better question is: Is this a place I want to live or just a place I passed through?

And then, perhaps more importantly: What am I dwelling in instead of dwelling here, now, in the life I’m actually living?

Because here’s the truth that’s both difficult and liberating.

Attention doesn’t just rest. It always dwells somewhere.

The question is only where, and whether we’ve chosen it consciously.

When we’re dwelling in the past, we’re not dwelling in the present. When we’re dwelling in someone else’s opinion of us, we’re not dwelling in our own knowing. When we’re dwelling in the safety of old stories, we’re not dwelling in the risk of new ones.

Awareness changes the function of the word entirely.

Dwelling, when conscious, becomes a practice. A choice. A temporary residence you enter for a reason, with intention, and then leave when the work is done.

Dwelling, when unconscious, becomes a cage you’ve decorated so carefully you’ve forgotten it has bars.

Building New Homes

You don’t have to evict yourself harshly from where you’ve been living.

You don’t need to burn down the old dwellings or pretend they never sheltered you.

You simply have to choose, with clarity and kindness, where you want to reside now.

Because attention is not neutral. It’s generative. It builds homes whether we’re aware of it or not.

Every time you return to a thought, a story, a question, a memory, you’re adding another brick, another beam, another layer of familiarity.

You’re teaching your nervous system: this is where we live.

And you deserve to live somewhere that can actually hold you. Not just hold you in place but hold you the way good architecture does—with space to breathe, light to see by, and room to become.

The dwelling you choose to inhabit with your attention might be the most important real estate decision you ever make.

So where do you want to live?