A Word Before We Begin
Essay 01
The first essay from The Remembering
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I began writing this while sitting in a bubble bath. You may want to read parts of it in one.
Picture it for a moment. Warm water. A closed door. Spa music playing softly somewhere nearby. Lavender and vanilla candles. No one calling your name. No one asking what is for dinner, where something is, whether you remembered the appointment, or whether you handled the thing that somehow only you know how to handle. For the first time in what may be years, the only person asking anything of you is you.
That is where this began. Not on a mountaintop. Not at a retreat. Not after some grand spiritual revelation. In one small room where one woman was, finally, alone with herself.
If you are reading this, I suspect you know something about that feeling. Or maybe you are only beginning to.
For a long season, you may have been the one who carried things. You carried children, careers, aging parents, a marriage, grief, a household, a team, a business, or some combination of all of it at once. You cooked the dinners, cleaned the kitchens, made the appointments, solved the problems, paid the bills, built the career, remembered the birthdays, and anticipated what everyone would need next.
You became very, very good at it.
Your love language for quite some time may have been caring for other people, and maybe you found real purpose in that. I did. I still do. There is something beautiful about being capable. There is something deeply satisfying about being the person people can count on. I do not regret becoming that woman.
But I have begun to understand that something can happen when we become extraordinarily fluent in everyone else’s needs: our own voice can grow faint.
It does not disappear. It simply becomes harder to hear, like a song you once knew every word to and now can only half remember.
And then something begins to shift.
Maybe the children become more independent. Maybe the career that once consumed you does not hold quite the same power anymore. Maybe you lose someone you love and discover that grief has rearranged your understanding of almost everything. Maybe your body begins asking different things of you. Maybe you can finally leave the house for a workout without coordinating the movement of six other human beings first.
Or maybe absolutely nothing on the outside has changed. Maybe you have.
There are suddenly pockets of quiet where there used to be noise. Time to think. Time to question. Time, finally, to hear yourself again. And when you first hear your own voice through the silence, it may sound unfamiliar.
Listen anyway.
Because underneath all the roles you have performed and all the versions of yourself you have built in response to what life required of you, I believe there is something quieter. Older. More instinctive. Something that has been there all along, even when you could not hear it beneath everyone else.
I have come to think of that as the primordial self.
I do not mean some primitive version of us that existed before civilization, and I am certainly not suggesting that we abandon our lives and disappear barefoot into the woods (as nice as that might sound some days). I mean the self underneath the performance. The self beneath the résumé, the title, motherhood, marriage, expectations, productivity, obligation, and all the identities we collect along the way.
The part of us that seems to know something before we can completely explain why we know it. The part that recognizes what is true before the logical mind has finished constructing the argument.
The part that remembers. That is what I am interested in here.
Let me also tell you what I am not interested in.
This is not therapy, although parts of it may feel healing. It is not religion, although some of what we explore may become sacred. It is not a prescription for how to eat, work, exercise, meditate, fast, love, parent, age, grieve, heal, or live.
And it is most certainly not another self-improvement program. We are not a project that needs to be fixed. Nothing about us is broken.
I have spent much of my life turning things into goals. I know how to measure things. I know how to optimize, execute, achieve, improve, and win. Those abilities have served me extraordinarily well, and I have no interest in pretending ambition is suddenly beneath me. I like building things. I like difficult problems. I like winning. I like what money allows me to do. I like creating a life intentionally.
But I have also begun to recognize the shadow side of all that capability. Give me something that is supposed to make me freer and there is at least some chance I will eventually create a KPI for it.
So I have no desire to turn this into another thing for either of us to accomplish. I don't want to hand you a program, a prescription, or some better version of yourself to chase. I want to make room for something quieter.
Remembering. A collective remembering.
Many of us have spent years, sometimes decades, turning our attention outward. We learned the rhythms of our children, our partners, our work, our families. We became practiced at anticipating what everyone else needed before they ever had to ask. Yet we did not forget ourselves all at once. I do not think we remember ourselves all at once either.
Over time, I have begun to recognize a movement in my own life. It is not a formula, and it certainly is not four steps to enlightenment. It is simply a pattern I seem to return to again and again:
Remove. Reveal. Remember. Return.
We remove what is no longer ours to carry: the noise, the obligation, the expectation, the identity, the habit, sometimes even the thing that once helped us survive but no longer belongs in the life we are building.
And when we remove enough of the noise, something begins to reveal itself underneath. A desire. A grief. An intuition. A fear. An old wound. A forgotten joy. Something that may have been waiting quietly for our attention for years.
Then we begin to remember what still belongs to us: our instincts, our questions, our bodies, our curiosity, our capacity for wonder, our own authority.
And then we return.
Not to some fantasy version of life where everything is suddenly easy and we have become enlightened beings floating three feet above everyone else. We return to the same life—the work, the people, the dishes, the obligations—but perhaps we inhabit it differently.
Perhaps we are more conscious of what belongs to us. Perhaps we are less willing to carry what does not.
I do not believe this movement happens once. I think we may move through it again and again throughout a lifetime. We release something. Something underneath it becomes visible. We recognize ourselves in what remains. And then we go live our lives until life asks us to look again.
There is no schedule for remembering, and that matters to me because the moment we turn remembering into another program, some of us are going to do what we have always done.
We will set the goal. Buy the notebook. Create the morning routine. Track the streak. Measure the progress. Finish ahead of schedule.
Some of us may even build a dashboard.
I know this because I am one of those women. And I have begun to understand something that has changed the way I think about discipline, ambition, wellness, spirituality, and freedom:
The discipline that frees you can become another form of control if you aren’t paying attention.
The more I sit with that, the more places I see it.
Exercise can make us stronger and then become punishment. Fasting can create remarkable clarity and then become another metric. Minimalism can simplify a life and then become its own form of superiority. Meditation can create space and then become another box we feel guilty for not checking. Productivity can masquerade as purpose.
Even healing can become another project.
The ego can appropriate almost anything.
Give it a spiritual practice and eventually it will probably figure out how to compete there too.
So there will be no transformation plan here. No spiritual finish line.
Instead, I want to explore seven areas of life that I have come to think of as the Seven Acts of Devotion: Silence, Body Sovereignty, Purification, Essentialism, Presence, Consciousness, and Stewardship.
They are not commandments. They are not seven stages to master before you graduate into a more evolved version of yourself. They are simply places I have found worth looking. Places where I have learned to become quieter, more attentive, and more honest about what still belongs to me and what does not.
Along the way, I will tell you stories from my own life. Not because I think you should live as I do. Please don’t. I am still figuring this out too.
I will tell you what I have tried, what I have released, what has surprised me, what I believe today, and what I am still questioning. I will introduce you to people and ideas that have changed the way I think and, occasionally, to science that has helped me better understand something I was already experiencing.
Some of it may resonate deeply with you; some of it will not. Keep what belongs to you. Question what doesn’t.
There are things I believe deeply that I cannot prove. There are questions about consciousness, death, synchronicity, the nature of reality, and what exists beyond this lifetime that I may spend the rest of my life exploring.
I hope I do.
One of the things I like most about getting older is that I am becoming increasingly comfortable with curiosity and mystery. I do not need every question answered in order to find the question worth asking.
You do not have to share my beliefs to walk beside me. You only need to be curious about your own.
Increasingly, I find myself thinking about all of this in the context of the feminine.
For a very long time, femininity has been closely associated with what women give: care, nurture, patience, beauty, accommodation, sacrifice. Some of those qualities are beautiful. Some may even be sacred.
But I do not think they are the whole story.
I am interested in another expression of the feminine too: creation, intuition, discernment, embodiment, power, stillness, sovereignty, wisdom, and the ability to nurture others without abandoning ourselves in the process.
When people speak about the divine feminine, I am interested in that idea—not as another ideology to join, and certainly not as a rejection of men. I am interested in what might happen when women begin listening to themselves again.
I am interested in what might happen when women begin listening to themselves again—when, after years of asking What does everyone need from me?, we begin asking a different set of questions.
Maybe the rise of the divine feminine is not something arriving from somewhere outside of us. Maybe it is something for all of us to remember.
I do not know exactly where these essays will lead, and I am surprisingly comfortable with that. For most of my life, I have liked knowing where I am going before I start. I like a plan. Preferably a good one. Ideally with measurable outcomes.
Not this time. For now, I am writing. I am paying attention. I am seeing what reveals itself. And for once, not knowing exactly where something will end does not feel irresponsible. It feels alive.
There is no failing this. There is only you becoming quiet enough to hear yourself again.
I will be here along the way—not as an expert standing in front of you, but perhaps as an older sister sitting beside you at the fire, sharing what I have learned and reminding you to listen for what you already know.
Nothing is missing. Nothing is broken.
You already know.
Welcome home.
— The Remembering
Before You Move On, Sit With This.
What is true for me? What is actually mine to carry? What can I release now? What is asking to be created through me?
