finding your tribe

Dear Reader,

When we’ve spent time alone listening inward, sitting with ourselves, and understanding what we need, the next step can feel both hopeful and uncertain. We want to find the people who understand what matters to us and who remind us that life is meant to be shared.

The search for that kind of belonging begins with small movements outward. Sometimes that means entering spaces where people care about what you care about such as joining a cooking class, the book group, the volunteer project, or the community event at church. The idea here isn’t to find instant belonging, but to place yourself in the kinds of environments where connection can eventually take root.

Belonging grows in places where our care meets the care of others. Shared interests help, but shared presence matters even more. It’s when a conversation deepens beyond small talk, when you both realize you’re interested in more than being polite. These moments are how people recognize each other, even before they have the words for it.

But finding each other also requires risk. It means initiating, following up, and reaching out again. It means risking disappointment for the chance at something real. Belonging doesn’t happen without that courage.

The good news is that connection has a way of gathering. When we show up where we feel most aligned, we begin to attract others who are doing the same. And slowly we will find ourselves part of something larger than what we could have built alone.

Yours in the journey,

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preparing to be known

Dear Reader,

Belonging is one of the most ordinary human needs, and one of the most complicated. 

We long for people who understand us and make us feel less alone in our inner world. Yet for many, that longing is unmet. Life feels full of acquaintances and obligations but thin on true connection.

In therapy, people sometimes ask how to find that kind of belonging. It is not a simple answer, because belonging cannot be forced. But it can be cultivated both in how we live with ourselves and in how we make space for others.

Often, the work begins in solitude. Learning to sit with ourselves without constant distraction. Practicing honesty about what we want, what we fear, and what we hope for. When we can extend presence inward, it becomes easier to recognize and receive it from someone else.

From there, belonging is about noticing where small signals of resonance already exist. The colleague who listens with genuine attention. The neighbor who lingers in conversation a little longer than expected. The one person in a room where you feel less need to perform. These are the beginnings of being known.

Finding where we are known grows slowly, from moments of honesty, attention, and care. But even in seasons of aloneness we can cultivate the soil, so that when connection does arrive, we are able to recognize it, and ready to let it take root.

Yours in the journey,

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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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