What I Believe
Being human is an extraordinary and mysterious thing, isn’t it?
We arrive in bodies we did not design, into families and cultures we did not choose, on a living planet we did not create. Life changes us. We make choices and live with the consequences. We love, lose, create, grieve, repair, begin again, love some more, and sometimes (a lot, if we listen) we receive a piece of information or grace we cannot entirely explain.
I don't believe our work is to dominate life like a game of Monopoly.
I believe our work is to participate.
To participate fully in our own becoming. To pay attention to our truth, to our body’s wisdom, and to our deepest desires. To notice the patterns shaping our choices and the patterns in nature that look an awful lot like us — because we ARE nature. To learn, with humility, from what has passed without being condemned to repeat it. And always to remain curious about what we cannot know. And to choose, again and again, how we want to live our one wild and precious life (thank you, Mary Oliver).
These are some of the beliefs that shape my life and my work.
I believe your whole self belongs in the conversation. We love to isolate and compartmentalize, don’t we? However, nothing in a life changes in isolation, and I am not interested in reducing a whole human being to the part of her that appears to need fixing. Where we experience the pain is often not where the wound is.
I believe the body is a primary source of intelligence—not a vehicle to be managed, 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. We have been taught to override this knowing, particularly as women: to assess our bodies from the outside through size, appearance, health metrics, productivity, and performance rather than inhabit them from within. Part of our work is learning to listen again. Not because the body always gives us a simple answer, but because she belongs in the conversation, too.
I believe we belong to ourselves. We are shaped by the constellation of people and experiences we’ve had and the thousand subtle messages about who we should be. Some of those influences nourish us. Some teach us to abandon ourselves in order to belong somewhere else. Belonging to yourself means claiming what is true for you—your yes, your no, your desire, your values, your limits—and making choices that align with what you discover. And that discovery is ongoing. I’m not convinced there is a forever-right answer. It means you remain on your own side as you find your way.
I believe practice is a relationship, not a guarantee. I have little patience for the idea that if we meditate correctly, eat perfectly, think the right thoughts, regulate our nervous systems, or devote ourselves sufficiently to healing, life will reward us with the outcome we want. I have MS. I have practiced for decades. I believe deeply in yoga, meditation, energy medicine, rest, movement, nourishment, and the extraordinary capacity of the human body—and none of those practices gives me control over what happens next.
When a teacher tells a woman her illness is evidence of insufficient practice or bad vibes, that is not wisdom. It is the oldest story in the world dressed in spiritual clothing: you are suffering because you are somehow failing. It is breathtaking hubris, and it causes real harm to real humans. It really pisses me off.
Practice is a way of being in relationship with your body and your life—with love, care, attention, and steadiness—regardless of what life brings.
I believe falling apart is not the same as failing. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to hold ourselves and our lives together, even when the old configuration no longer fits. Sometimes something has to unravel. Sometimes you need to cry, rage, grieve, tell the truth, feel your body, and stop trying to make everything okay long enough to discover what is actually here.
We are not Humpty Dumpty. We can put ourselves back together in new, more alive configurations.
I trust the possibility of authentic emergence: not a return to some pristine version of who you were before life happened, but the remembering and becoming of the woman who is emerging now.
I believe you are more capable than you know. This does not mean you need to do everything alone. In fact, knowing when to ask for help is part of that capacity. I believe you can navigate. You can experiment. You can make a choice and discover it wasn't the right one. You can learn. You can repair. And you can always change your mind. You can ask better questions and seek wise counsel. You can meet circumstances you never would have chosen and still make choices about how you will live within them.
I believe rest is medicine, but it is not an escape from being alive. Rest is not simply recovery from productivity, nor should it be the reward you receive when everything else is finished. (Spoiler alert: it will never all be done.) Rest can soften our grip. It can widen the field of our attention. It can make room for grief, pleasure, imagination, and knowing that relentless doing tends to drown out.
And sometimes what restores us isn't stillness. Sometimes it is walking outside, making something, or telling the truth. Sitting beside a fire. Laughing until our bellies hurt. Swimming naked in a lake with our girlfriends while the water holds us and, for a little while, the problem we have been trying so desperately to solve is no longer the whole horizon.
That is rest medicine, too.
I believe in intention, imagination, and our capacity to create what does not yet exist. Everything that humans have created was born in someone’s imagination. The ability to imagine another way is one of our great human gifts. But creation is not the same as control. We bring our attention, choices, labor, creativity, resources, and willingness. Then life joins the conversation.
I believe Mystery belongs in the conversation. I believe spirit is at the pulsing center of life and she whispers to us in many ways. However, mystery without discernment can become magical thinking. Practicality without Mystery can reduce a wild human life to a problem in need of optimization. I am interested in the territory where both are welcome.
I call that practical magic.
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 the relationships, circumstances, systems, and cultures shaping our lives. Not every difficulty is a mindset problem. Not every obstacle is trauma. Not everything that isn't happening yet is evidence that you are blocked.
Context matters.
We do not experience wounding in isolation, nor do we heal in isolation. We are shaped in relationship, and relationship can also become a place of repair.
I believe we belong to each other and to the living Earth. We are not separate from nature, standing above it as masters of a collection of resources created for our use. We are nature. The rivers and oceans, plants and trees, soil and wild creatures are our kin within the same living whole.
I believe in power with rather than power over. In generative relationships and prosperity that do not require someone else—or the Earth—to pay the price.
The Earth is not the backdrop to our human story. She is home.
I believe what we create matters. The point of knowing yourself is not endless self-examination. What you discover needs to change how you move through the world—what you make, what you tend, what you refuse, what you contribute, and how you love.
Big visions and strong choices ripple outward. We rarely get to know how far.
I believe the personal, the political, and the Mystery are not separate domains. Neither are the practical and the sacred, body and soul, grief and possibility, agency and surrender, remembering and becoming.
They live together in our messy human experience, as they always have.
The anatomy and the ache.
The breath and the rage.
The spreadsheet and the synchronicity.
The rest and the rising.
The cellular intelligence and the sacred unknown.
I don't believe we are here to perfect ourselves, master uncertainty, or finally arrive at a version of life where nothing difficult happens.
I believe we are here to live.
To belong to ourselves without forgetting that we belong to each other and to the Earth. To pay attention to what is alive within us and around us. To let life change us. To discern what is ours to do and bring it forward with as much courage, dignity, creativity, and love as we can muster.
We are remembering who we are and becoming someone we have never been before.
There is mystery in that.
Thank goodness.
