Closing My Books

Several years ago I closed my books after years of working with amazing women in 1:1 mentorships, group settings, and women's circles. It started as an overwhelm to the amount of energy going out and not enough coming in, questions about why I was even sharing this work when the rest of the world didn't really seem to care about going into the depths and wanted to stay on the sugar-coated surface level of healing that only holds fancy words, idealized manifestations, and shiny altars, or about how I didn't want to do the work if it required exploiting the feminine for internet likes without really feeling grounded in the work as I opened a new chapter.

Living Within My Own Rhythms

Whenever I enter a new season, internally or externally within my life, I often have a long pause of integration to really feel like I have anchored and understood the initiation of the life that is now before me. Most of the time, this process is years long, and when you are committed to living within your own rhythms, it can be challenging to run a business through it. As a 1/3 Projector, I found it even harder. As someone on the Priestess path, it was downright confusing.

A New Chapter, A Blended Family

Around the same time, I had met my soon-to-be husband and our family became a blended family of four, with two rambunctious boys, two dogs, and a cat. I changed jobs a few times after being called back onto a clinical path that I had walked away from over ten years ago, and attempted to make sense of being a mom, raising a blended family, moving, taking care of others, taking care of myself, and a new series of priorities that made themselves clear right from the beginning.

Letting Go of Goals

I found that when I was single I really didn't "care for" goals anymore, but once I had a family it radically shifted and they became obsolete. How do you have a successful business when you no longer want to have any goals? No revenue goals, no personal goals, no high overhead or overachieving that got you there in the first place?

For years I have grappled with this, and over time I got to know this new version of myself over and over as it continues to ebb and flow. Dealing with infertility as an option I never considered really added to this inner conundrum.

Living With Infertility

The funny thing about dealing with infertility is that it's always there — always looming in the front and center (or even the background) of your daily life, because like it or not, you need to continue to track and be in response with your own body. There have been days when I have been totally okay, and others when I am a shell of a person wondering why this path is part of my medicine at all. I have nothing but creative energy pouring out of me, and yet none of it seems to want to make a baby.

It forces you out of every sense of self and into something else entirely — except you have the choice to make the everyday living experience of it either a horrible, all-consuming path or something else.

Some days you wake up and the question of "Do I even want this anymore? Can't I just make art and enjoy the life I already am blessed to have?" and live a new adventure, or "How traumatized do I need to become in order to have this life?" comes into play. You are no longer you in the mirror but have somehow become the Dark Goddess staring back at you, asking if you really are here to walk this path, to play this game, to look deeper into the inner depths of your own darkness. Will you be swallowed by it, or will you rise?

From it, I personally have had to channel this energy into something that allows it all to come out. Some days the tears won't come but the rage will, others the tears won't stop but I have a job to do, a life to live, and graduate school to finish each week. Some days it overflows into everything with no logic, just feelings and emotions that don't entirely feel like your own. I can't live my entire life in the overflow.

Remembering I Am an Artist

So after a friend asked the simple question of "Did you create your art studio this weekend?" like I said I might do over the weekend in passing, I realized that while my normal reaction would be to keep this all to myself, it needed somewhere outside of me to live. And with that also came the remembrance that I am actually an artist as well.

It's funny, isn't it — we get so caught up in the titles that we are used to that we forget some of the most important ones. I decided to feed my art with my fear, with my frustration, with the raw wild woman energy that is doing anything but making me a baby. I can't visit my friends in the jungle currently, but I can dance with wild abandon in my living room. I can't go on a women's retreat currently, but I can host monthly women's circles. I can't stray from my schedule too much, but I can go for a spontaneous trip to the museum with a girlfriend to see my favorite art exhibit. I can't burn my life to the ground (nor do I truly want to) but I can use that fire to burn this old version of myself and build something new.

Letting My Art Live

I decided to let my art live, and from it everything else has become more alive. My sketchbook has small daily moments of me in it: my mornings a ten-minute meditation followed by my spiritual practice, instead of just rushing to start my day. My business is taking a new form that feels more like me than it ever has in the 18 years I have been a practitioner. I actually WANT to have clients again, despite having every plate in my life spinning at once —

It's life-giving, and it's also a deeper, more connective, more real version of me.

Maybe if we remember that we are all the artists of our lives, our world would be more of what we want it to be.

I used to think building something meant a plan, a launch date, a five-year projection of who I'd become. But the wild woman doesn't work off a spreadsheet — she works off instinct, off cycles, off what wants to move through her body that day. She doesn't ask permission to grieve on a Tuesday and create on a Wednesday. She just does.

So I stopped forcing a business plan onto a body and a life that were done being planned. I picked up the paintbrush instead of the pitch deck. I let the rage and the tears and the not-knowing become brushstrokes instead of bullet points. And somewhere in that mess, without meaning to, I built something anyway — just not the thing I thought I was supposed to build.

Maybe that's the whole medicine of it. The plan was never going to save me. The art already has.

This is also the energy I'm pouring into my Wild Sovereign Woman Journey, reopening soon — if this stirred something in you, email me at [email protected] and let's connect when it's ready to open its doors.