If you’re just joining us, this is the second email in our CAPACITY series, six ingredients for building the capacity to jump off the cliff into the life your soul is actually asking for. You can catch the first one here.
Yesterday we talked about where you source your energy.
Today: what you do with your own mind when everything feels like too much.
About 48 hours into writing our book, I had a moment of panic.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet and extremely convincing. I looked at everything on my plate, the book, recording our new Sacred Reinvention Series, developing the creative for a Times Square billboard, planning a three-day retreat, one of my kids having a hard time at summer camp, and I felt my whole system contract.
What the fuck did I get myself into.
But when I slowed down enough to feel what was actually underneath the panic, it wasn’t really about the length of the list. It was a story. The story went like this: writing a book is hard. And if I’m going to spend all day, every day, doing this hard thing, then all of my days are going to feel hard. Which means I’m going to grind through my entire summer, and I’m going to miss it.
I let myself actually feel that. The dread of a joyless summer, the heaviness of it. I didn’t skip past it or slap a positive thought on top of it. I sat in it long enough to feel how real it was.
And this is the part I want you to hear, because it’s the part everyone wants to skip: you have to feel it first.
You cannot reframe something you haven’t let yourself feel. If you jump straight to “everything happens for a reason” while your body is still braced and panicked, that’s not a perspective shift. That’s spiritual bypass wearing a cute outfit, and your body knows the difference. It doesn’t actually build anything.
So I felt it all the way. And then, once I had, I could see the story for what it was: a story. Just one interpretation, not the truth.
So I shifted it. I have wanted to write a book my entire life, and it is here, right now. Don’t miss it. And underneath the panic there was something else I hadn’t let myself feel yet, which was the sheer aliveness of letting creativity and divine messages move through my body and out through my fingers onto the page.
The moment I made that shift, everything started to flow. Within two weeks we were two chapters away from a finished first draft. (I’m probably finishing it right now, as you read this.) The course is in the process of being made. The retreat was led (and it was fucking incredible). All of it moved, and none of it felt like the grind I’d been so sure it would be.
Here’s what’s real: writing this book has been the most fun I’ve had in ages. It’s a genuine blast. Not a drag in sight. Kelly and I trade off reading each other chapters we’re writing and just alternate between laughing so hard diet coke comes out of noses, and crying in public.
And I don’t think it’s because I got lucky, it’s because I shifted my perspective. The hardness I was so certain about never actually showed up.
This is the second ingredient of capacity: constantly shift your perspective.
But you have to do it in the right order.
- Feel it first. All the way. Cry if you need to cry, get in the bath, let yourself be confused and scared for as long as it’s real. Kelly and I go dark when we need to. We are not positive people performing serenity. We feel the hard thing completely, because the feeling is what lets it move.
- Then reframe. Once you’ve actually felt it, you get to ask a different set of questions. How else could I see this? What if this thing I’m dreading is actually here for me? What’s the gift hiding inside it? Wow, aren’t I lucky to get to figure this out. The reframe isn’t a lie you tell yourself to feel better. It’s a truer, wider story you can only reach once the feeling has cleared the way.
- And don’t let it linger. Here’s why the timing matters. When you leave a hard feeling unfelt, it doesn’t disappear. It sits in the background like a rock in your shoe. One rock, you can walk. But if you keep collecting unfelt things, pretty soon you’ve got ten rocks in there and you can barely move. The practice is to deal with what’s up when it’s up, even when the timing is wildly inconvenient, so it never gets the chance to accumulate.
So today’s question:
What’s one story you’re currently telling yourself about how hard something is going to be?
Feel whatever comes up when you look at it honestly.
And then, only then, ask yourself if there’s a truer story available.
Love,
Sarah
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
Building this capacity for real, letting yourself feel the hard thing all the way and then choosing a truer story, is so much easier in a room full of women doing it alongside you.
That’s what Emerge is for.
On Monday, July 20th at noon eastern, we’re opening a group ‘Clif 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.
We’ll be back tomorrow with the third ingredient.
This is so good!!! Sarah and Kelly, thanks for being a living demonstration of how to apply the skills you are teaching to step FULLY into the life of our dreams.
Love you both so much! Thanks for being such an inspiration and such great embodied guides 💗
This part right here is the piece I can seldom put to words when I tell people they have to sit in the dark bits fully and let the ugly be ugly and sometimes that is the medicine. And it’s the part I am still mastering, failing at and relearning all the time. Big LOVE on this one.