I Believe

Someone recently asked me about the convictions underneath my work. This is just that.

Beloved you,

If you have found your way here because you are exhausted, or recently diagnosed with some disease or bodily malfunction you didn't ask for, or an injury that stopped you in your tracks, or perhaps the particular upheaval of menopause or unspeakable loss or just the recognition that what you've been doing isn’t working anymore — I want you to know that I am breathing with you. And, also, I’m not surprised. The body has a way of insisting on being heard. Underneath the inconvenience of that insistence, you might find something else welling up: a longing. A longing to stop managing and pushing through; a desire to find a different way entirely. 

Consider this manifesto my outstretched hand. Your life, and how you choose to inhabit it, matters deeply — to you, to the people around you, and to a future that is being shaped right now by the choices of women like you and me. I want all of us to have the energy and the hope to make the meaningful choices. 

I Believe

I believe the body is a primary source of intelligence — not a vehicle to be managed, or a problem to be solved, and definitely not an object to be optimized. Your body is a living system that knows things the mind has not yet learned to ask. Sadly, we have been taught to override this knowing. I believe we are tasked with the joyful (sometimes frustrating) task of learning to listen to it again.

I believe we are taught to live at a distance from ourselves. The dominant culture is obsessed with the body's size, its health metrics, its appearance, and performance — and that obsession is not accidental when it comes to women. Because women who are busy managing their bodies from the outside are not inhabiting them from the inside. A woman who is not at home in herself is far easier to control, to sell to, and to silence. Coming home to the body is therefore not a personal indulgence. It is, in fact, dangerous — and necessary. 

I believe many in the wellness industry perpetuate this harm. When a teacher tells a woman that her illness is evidence of insufficient practice, wrong thinking, or incomplete devotion — that is not wisdom. That is the oldest story in the world, dressed in spiritual clothing: you are sick because you are somehow failing. I have MS. I have practiced for decades. I do the work with devotion and consistency. And I still have MS. Practice is not a guarantee of any particular outcome. It is a way of being in relationship with your body and your life — with love, care, and steadiness — regardless of what the body is navigating. To collapse that distinction is not just incorrect; it is a breathtaking hubris that causes real harm to real humans. It really pisses me off. 

I believe rest is medicine. It’s not just recovery. Or a reward for productivity. Please don’t let it be the thing you do when everything else is finished (spoiler alert: it will never all be done). Rest is the specific condition under which the nervous system reorganizes, the body repairs what has been held at arm's length, and a woman opens to her own wisdom. We have lost touch with this. Modern culture has so thoroughly colonized our attention and our time that many of us have simply forgotten what is available to us — the resources that were never actually absent, they were just buried beneath the noise of relentless doing. When we rest deeply, we gain access to our own knowing and to the mystery that moves beneath all living things, with more ease and grace than any amount of striving offers.

I believe practice and consistency — not hacks or breakthrough moments — are how a life and a body are actually shaped. This is devotion, not discipline. It is reverential rhythm, not willpower that makes the path we walk. The body already knows: it breathes without being reminded, and the marrow regenerates without fanfare. We are, at our deepest level, already oriented toward renewal. Practice is simply the act of aligning ourselves with what is already true.

I believe in the power of intention and imagination — that a woman who is rested and rooted in her body becomes a vessel for what wants to emerge. Not through magical thinking, but through the genuine human capacity to vision something that does not yet exist and begin, from that deep and resourced place, to move toward it. A body that is inhabited rather than managed becomes an instrument of authentic, aligned creation.

I believe the blame women heap on themselves is suspect. We are taught hyperresponsibility and radical individualism — to look inward at our own inadequacy rather than outward at what is actually harming us. The truth is, we do not experience wounding in isolation, and we do not heal in isolation either. We are harmed in relationship, in systems, in cultures that have long depended on women's self-doubt to sustain themselves. We heal in connection — in circles, in witness, in the steady presence of women who refuse to abandon each other or themselves.

I believe that a woman who is truly embodied cannot help but be on her own side. She knows what is hers and what belongs to others. She knows what belongs to systems that were never designed with her wholeness in mind. This discernment is not aggression: it is clarity. And it is one of the most revolutionary things a woman can develop. When she stops carrying what is not hers, she becomes available for what is hers. Strong choices ripple outward. Her family feels it. Her community feels it. The future is shaped, in ways she may never fully see, by the quality of presence she brings to her own life.

I believe the personal, the political, and the mystery are not separate domains. They live together in our messy human experience, as they always have. To be a student of the body — as a practitioner, as a yogini, as a woman — is to hold all of it at once. The anatomy and the ache. The breath and the rage. The rest and the rising. The cellular intelligence and the sacred unknown. This integration is not a contradiction. In fact, it is the whole point.

Now is the time for return — to yourself, to each other, to the intelligence that has been living in your bones all along.

With all of my love,

Nona

If this speaks to you, I am honored - and, I would be delighted to connect. Schedule a chat.