Final Emerge Retreat Until 2027! Reserve your spot for $500 off July 20th-22nd

If you’re just joining us, this is the fourth 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 up on the first three here.

We’ve covered where you source your energy, how you shift your perspective, and how to be a channel instead of a holder. 

Today’s ingredient is the one I learned the hardest way possible.

Two weeks after I entered the ordination path with my mentor, Elayne Kalila Doughty, I was sitting in urgent care being told I had a complete heart block, and that an ambulance was already on its way to take me to the hospital.

For years leading up to that moment, I’d had a complicated relationship with my body. But not the way you might think. It was never about my health. It was about what I looked like. And because I considered myself a good feminist, I had decided after I ended my emotional eating career, that I wasn’t going to waste my one wild life worrying about my appearance. Which was true, and also became the story I hid behind while I quietly stopped taking care of myself at all. I had thrown out the obsession with looks and thrown out basic care right along with it, as if those were the only two options.

It turned out my heart block was caused by a fast-moving case of Lyme. I’d been running so depleted, so overloaded, for so long that my body had nothing left in reserve when it hit. Going to the hospital was, of course, wildly inconvenient. I was in a huge moment at work. I did not have a week to lie in a cardiac unit while they got my heart to start conducting properly again.

But I had a week anyway, so I made it a ceremony. And in those seven days, what came through was this: the goddess was telling me I could not do this sacred work if my vessel could not hold it. I was being asked to channel an enormous amount of spiritual energy through a body I had stopped tending. And a body that depleted simply cannot conduct that current.

So I spent the following year deep-diving into healing my body. Not to shrink it and definitely not to discipline it into some culturally perfect shape. Actually caring for it. I repatterned how I ate and moved and rested. And, the part that made it stick, I built a whole new identity: I am a woman who takes care of her body. Not because of how it looks. Because my sacred work, my full life and my big dreams require a vessel that can keep up with them.

Here’s what I want to be really clear about (because a lot of people get it twisted): tending the vessel is not diet culture. It is not restriction. It is not earning your worth through what you eat or how disciplined you are or whether your body matches a magazine. That is the exact conditioning we’re here to dismantle. Being too restrictive with your body will shrink your capacity just as fast as neglecting it will. 

This is about one question only: is my body tuned enough to hold the life and the work moving through me?

Because when the vessel isn’t tuned, everything downstream suffers. Your brain is the instrument your creativity and your deep knowing move through, and a depleted body means a foggy instrument. I used to hit a wall at two o’clock every single day, done, unable to finish my work, let alone show up as the mom I wanted to be by dinnertime. That wasn’t a character flaw or a willpower problem. That was a vessel that couldn’t keep up with the size of my dreams.

After that year of healing is when everything opened. It’s when I started working with Kelly. My anxiety lifted. I became more grounded, more creative, steadier, happier. The business grew in ways that genuinely blew me away me. I’m not telling you that caring for your body will hand you a specific outcome, it works differently for everyone. What I am telling you that once my vessel could actually hold the current, the work I was already meant to do finally had a clear channel to move through. The block was gone.

Now I have energy from the moment I wake up until my head hits the pillow. I can do deep, sustained, creative work without burning myself to the ground. And yes, I still rest, I still take breaks, I take them on purpose. But that’s completely different from the old exhaustion, where my energy and my brain and my body simply could not keep pace with my own brilliance (tra la).

So here’s what tending the vessel actually looks like:

Nourish your body without turning it into a rulebook. What you eat and drink affects your capacity, and so does being so strict that food becomes another cage. Find your own honest middle.

Move in a way that moves energy. Not punishment, not earning anything. My preferred workout is “lift weights and cry”. I build muscle, resilience, and move emotional energy blocks.

Get outside. It’s the highest-leverage, lowest-cost thing on this whole list, and most of us do it the least.

And let pleasure and beauty count as care, because they are.

Today’s question: 

What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy, or too committed to not caring, to hear? 

You don’t need an ambulance to start listening.

Love,

Sarah

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

Tending the vessel is a practice you build, and there’s no faster way to remember what a truly resourced body feels like than three days of ceremony, rest, movement, and real nourishment with a circle of women doing the same.

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.

Click here to learn more. 

We’ll be back tomorrow with the fifth ingredient.