when you already know

Dear Reader,

How many times have you said, “I knew it”? You felt the hesitation, or sensed the direction to go, but talked yourself out of it.

This happens more often than we like to admit, and most of us are quick to override these internal signals. We tell ourselves to be practical, to make the choice that looks best on paper, to take the path others expect of us. We wait for more proof. We give more weight to fear than to trust. And yet, if we’re honest, the sense of what was true was already there.

In the therapy room, this shows up often. Someone will share about a decision that feels impossible, only to realize they already sense what they want, they’re just afraid to embrace the change that needs to be made. It may be the relationship they have outgrown, or the job that continues to drain them.

Intuition isn’t a special skill some people have and others don’t. It’s the accumulation of lived experience, the signals of the body, the pattern-recognition of the mind, and the small voice that doesn’t need to be loud because it already belongs to you.

Living from this place doesn’t make life easier, but it does help you to feel more aligned with yourself. It asks us to listen beneath the fear and pressure, and to honor the gut feelings we carry, even before we can fully explain them.

Yours in the journey,

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the way we notice

Dear Reader,

The way we notice things shapes the way they live in us.

Two people can walk through the same day and carry away entirely different worlds. One gathers frustrations, unmet expectations, and interruptions. The other gathers the same interruptions, but also the warmth of a brief exchange, the color of the evening sky, or the relief of a breath they didn’t realize they needed.

Noticing does not change the facts of a day, but it does change our relationship to them. The frustrations still happen, the interruptions still arrive. Some moments fade into the background, while others take root and influence the way we carry ourselves forward. In that choosing, conscious or not, we shape what the day will mean to us long after it ends.

Often we don’t choose with care. Our attention is pulled toward whatever is loudest, and over time this kind of noticing narrows our sense of life until what remains is mostly strain.

But when we notice differently, the shift is not only in what we see, but in who we are becoming. We grow less defined by what is urgent and more attuned to what is healthy, steady, and sustaining.

The way we notice determines what we carry forward. And what we carry forward becomes the shape of our days.

Yours in the journey,

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where I end and begin again

Dear Reader,

The stories we tell about ourselves are powerful.

Some stories we inherit,
some are given to us,
and others we write ourselves without realizing we’re doing it.

These stories help us make sense of where we’ve been and why we are the way we are. But over time, even the truest stories can become too small and limiting.

You can feel it when a story no longer fits, though it can take time to admit it.

For some, it’s the story of being the reliable one: the person others can lean on, the one who keeps things together. That story may have carried you through many seasons, and there is truth in it, but over time it begins to demand more than it gives. For others, it’s the narrative of not being enough. It runs like a thread through memory, so familiar it’s hard to imagine yourself without it. And yet it, too, begins to limit the ways you can see your own life.

When you are trying to find the new, part of you will want to cling to the old script, if only because it feels familiar. Even a limiting story can feel safer than standing in the uncertainty of what might come next.

To begin again is to live, for a time, without certainty. It is to step into a space where the next story hasn’t yet revealed itself. This can feel like loss, but it is also the raw material of becoming. In that unfinished space, new questions start to form: What else could be true about me? What else could my life hold? What does it mean to end, and to begin again?

Yours in the journey,

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ritual

Dear Reader,

Ritual, at its core, is simply the rhythm we return to on purpose. It might be the way we start the morning, the habit of writing something down at the end of the day, or the choice to pray before a meal.

What makes something a ritual is not the action itself, but the meaning we attach to it. It is the difference between drinking coffee while scrolling through the news and drinking coffee as a quiet moment of arrival before the day begins. The action is the same, but the presence we bring to it changes the experience.

Without these intentional rhythms, life can easily collapse into a stream of tasks. Days blur, and we move from one demand to the next without anything to hold us steady. When we choose to mark certain moments, however small, they create a sense of order and grounding. They remind us of what matters and help us return to ourselves.

Ritual only asks for repetition: the willingness to show up again and again in ways that tether us to meaning. Over time, these small practices begin to shape the way we carry our days, offering a rhythm that we can feel comfortable living inside.

Yours in the journey,

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the space grace creates

Dear Reader,

We all know what it feels like to be measured only by our mistakes. 

A single failure, comment, or reaction can outweigh months of good effort. And if we are honest, we know we have done the same to others: reducing them to the hardest thing we’ve seen instead of holding the whole of who they are. These experiences stay with us because they cut against the truth that people are always more than their worst day.

That is why grace matters.

Grace becomes most important at the moments when it feels hardest to offer. Sometimes it is when we realize we’ve fallen short of our own intentions. Other times it is when someone close to us responds in a way we cannot make sense of, or when an old pattern shows up again just as we thought we had moved past it.

Without grace, those moments easily harden into judgment. A harsh word becomes proof of who someone is. A setback becomes evidence that we will never change. The story shrinks until all we can see is the worst moment.

Grace widens the view. It makes space for complexity. It allows failure and effort to sit side by side without canceling each other out. It does not excuse what matters, but it refuses to reduce a person, ourselves included, to only what went wrong.

When we learn to extend grace inward, the shift is often even more profound. Instead of treating every misstep as evidence against us, we can begin to see it as part of the larger work of becoming. We still hold ourselves accountable, but we also hold ourselves as human.

To give grace is to resist collapsing a life into its most difficult moment. It is to look again, and to see not just what went wrong, but what still remains possible.

Yours in the journey,

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