I am so excited to dive into our new series, CAPACITY.

This one was born out of our Emerge retreat last week, where fifty women came to Living Temple HQ for three days of ceremony and we spent the whole time tuning into what they actually needed. What we found was that almost every one of them was standing at a cliff. They knew they had to jump off a life that was known and predictable, a life that for many of them had started to feel tight and out of alignment with their soul. 

And the thing standing in their way was not clarity about the cliff. It was that they did not feel they had the capacity to fully live the new life they were leaping into.

What if they jumped, and they actually could not handle the responsibility?

What if they felt so good and alive they got tired of spending everyday with their low vibe husband?

What if life became too fast paced and their energy couldn’t keep up?

Could they have the life they wanted and be a good mom?

Could they handle the extra visibility? 

So we spent an entire afternoon teaching a workshop on capacity. And because what’s happening for the women at Emerge is almost always happening for this larger community too, we want to walk you through the six ingredients we covered. 

They’ll come to you one at a time over the next six days.

These are the ingredients Kelly and I have been cultivating in our own lives for years. Our capacity to be with the unknown, to take risks, to make quick decisions, to do an enormous amount of creative work while also being present mothers, keeping our marriages alive and deep, and protecting space for the things that matter most to us in our personal lives. 

We are not perfect at any of it. But as we’ve practiced over time, we’ve watched it change everything, and as more lands on our plates (writing a book, building new programs, growing this community fast), we’ve realized this skill set is the foundation underneath all of it.

The first ingredient is where you source your energy.

Picture this. A few years ago, I gathered a group of my girlfriends for a birthday lunch. I was committed to this birthday. I had decided I was going to feel great, be in a beautiful vibe, soak up my day.

I sat down at the table and, one by one, realized that every woman there was really going through it. One had just launched a new program that hadn’t sold the way she’d hoped, and she genuinely didn’t know how she was making rent this month. Another had spent the morning on the phone with her mother, who had taken the opportunity to comment on her weight, as mothers sometimes do under the guise of concern. And a third was convinced her teenage daughter was on the fast track to becoming an actual axe murderer, because the girl had sworn at her in the kitchen that morning over a granola bar.

So I did what I always did. I went into full triage mode. I became the table’s on-call therapist, reframing one friend’s situation, brainstorming revenue ideas for the next between bites of my croissant, mentally scanning my contacts for someone I could introduce to the third. I think at one point I actually pulled out my phone to text somebody a referral. I was going to fix everyone at that table so that we could all finally relax and have fun.

I left my own birthday lunch completely drained. Wrung out. Empty.

And then I came home, where Jonathan had lovingly offered to make my birthday cake. Except when I walked in, he was stressed to the gills, standing over a pot of boiling water, peeling individual hazelnuts by hand and trying to grind them into a paste, because it had not occurred to him that hazelnut butter is a thing you can simply buy at the store.

I went to bed that night on my birthday feeling annoyed that everyone around me was in a bad mood. As though their moods were the weather and I was just standing out in it.

But as a result, I missed one of my favorite days of the year.

Here is what I understand now that I did not understand then. I was sourcing my energy from the people around me. I needed them to be okay so that I could be okay. Which meant that any time someone I loved was struggling, I was drained, pulled off my own path, and quietly resentful about it.

The first ingredient of capacity is this: stop sourcing your energy from other people.

Not your friends, not your kids, not your partner, not your business partner. When you’re running on human energy, you’re in a closed loop, and here’s the part that took me years to see – you don’t even know what the people you’re plugged into are sourcing from. So you end up passing exhaustion and bad vibes around a table like a bread basket.

Instead, you source from the earth and from the divine. That is the well that doesn’t run dry.

What this actually looks like is different for everyone. For me, it’s a felt connection with the earth, a sense that the trees and the land are part of my own body, so I have access to all of that capacity, not just the small amount stored in me. For Kelly, it’s a field that expands the moment she drops in. When she first started sitting in ceremony, she could feel maybe three feet past her body. Then ten. Now, when she settles into it, it opens out past the size of the earth, past the galaxy, and inside that spaciousness there’s access to everything she needs. It isn’t hers. But she’s part of it.

And then there’s the piece that changed my daily life the most: you are a generator. You do not need the room to already have the vibe you want in order to feel it. You generate it. 

If I want to feel like I’m at a party, I am the party. 

If I want calm, I am the source of the calm. 

This is the exact opposite of what I was doing at that birthday lunch, where I needed everyone else to feel good so that I could. Now I generate my own state and let it radiate out, rather than catching whatever’s in the air.

This is also what makes real boundaries possible. 

For a long time I let Jonathan’s mood set mine. What shifted things was a very simple sentence: he is not in charge of my harmony. I am. He doesn’t get to walk into my field and rearrange it. Some seasons that has meant generating my own energy and letting his mood be his. Some seasons it has meant asking for literal space while we did the repair work. Both are available to you.

If this sounds like a lot, here’s the reassuring part. It’s a muscle, not a talent. 

You build it the same way you’d build any muscle, through practice. It’s built most efficiently and most potently in ceremony, but the whole point is learning to plug in without needing the ceremony every time (though I must say, it helps to learn it there). Some days, honestly, it’s as simple as closing your eyes for thirty seconds and saying, guides, I need some energy right now. It really is all right here.

So here’s your question for today: 

Whose energy have you been running on? 

And what would it feel like to unplug from them and source from something that can actually hold you?

We’ll be back tomorrow with the second ingredient.

Love, 

Sarah

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Sourcing your own energy is one thing to read about and another thing entirely to feel in a room full of women doing it with you. That’s what Emerge is for. 

It’s where we build this capacity for real, in ceremony, together.

On Monday, July 20th at noon eastern, we’re opening a group ‘Cliff Jump’ moment — a flash sale on our final Emerge of the year at $500 off, plus two bonuses, the Juicy & Alive Protocol and the Sacred Work Intensive. 

This is our last retreat of 2026, and we won’t run Emerge again until September 2027. We jump together on Monday. Check the dates (September 18-20), read the page, and feel into whether you’re coming.

Click here to learn more.