If you’re just joining us, this is the sixth and final 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 whole series here.
We’ve covered sourcing your energy, shifting your perspective, being a channel, tending the vessel, and giving yourself permission to make it up.
This last one is the one I feel most fiercely about. I could talk about it forever.
Here it is: your mission is not in competition with your motherhood.
Let me show you what I mean through my own three kids, because I mothered each of them as a genuinely different woman.
When I had my first, I was convinced a good mother presented as a stay-at-home mom. So that’s what I performed. I hid the fact that I was working. I hid that I was the one financially responsible for my family, which I was. And everyone around me cheered it on, I wish you didn’t have to work so much, work is too much pressure, you must be so stressed, why don’t you just stay home. The whole chorus. So I shrank myself into the shape they were applauding.
I got pregnant again when my first was 9 months old. Now I had TWO babies and a secret job. Thanks to my regular trips to sit in ceremony (it was my life line) when my first two were little, I let myself dream. I wrote a fifteen-page document describing a piece of land where women would gather in fields, a driveway winding through the woods and over a hill, a yurt, a river women could bathe in, my kids running around in the middle of all of it. I saw the entire thing. And then I wrote, in effect: I’ll do this in about five years. After I’ve been a stay-at-home mom. After I get the kids through elementary school. Maybe after a third baby. Later.
I took my own soul’s vision and I filed it under someday. Behind motherhood. As though the two could not possibly occupy the same life at the same time.
Then just a few weeks later on Thanksgiving, a little buzzed on too much wine, Jonathan and I got on Zillow. We were looking at small houses, the kind we could afford on his salary alone, because I was still pretending I was going to be a SAHM first. I typed in our towns and forgot to enter our budget. And this funky ’70s house on a lake came up, way outside what we were “supposed” to be looking at. I started clicking through and my whole body went electric.
That was the house. The land from my fifteen-page vision. And in that moment the timeline I’d invented, the whole “after I’ve finished being the mother I’m supposed to be” schedule, just collapsed. It wasn’t later. It was now. I ended up building a retreat center while pregnant and nursing my third child, because it turned out the dream I’d exiled to “someday” had never actually been in competition with my children at all. I’d just been told it was.
This is why I get so feisty about this.
The belief that our dreams and our creative work and our soul’s path take something away from our kids is not true. It’s a lie manufactured by an oppressive system, and it’s one of the most effective ever built, because it weaponizes our love for our children to keep us small.
And here’s the reframe that not only helped me tolerate my choice to not half-ass my work, but actually celebrate it: my actual job as a mother is to help my kids discover exactly who they are and build lives where they get to fully express their gifts and their dreams. How do I teach them that? I model it. I let them watch their mother refuse to file her own life under someday.
Because what’s real is that you can’t teach what you don’t know.
Notice, too, that this isn’t one fixed formula I finally got right. I mothered three babies three different ways, across three different seasons, and all of them were valid.
Which brings me to a piece of conditioning I want to name directly, because I hear it constantly: I’m in a season of rest right now.
And rest is sacred, truly. But so often what we mean is – I’ve put my purpose away until I’ve earned the right to want it again.
So I’ll ask you what I ask them:
What if you could be rested for the rest of your life… and on mission?
What would have to be true about the way you work, that you don’t have to quit in two years just to take a nap?
Rest and purpose aren’t enemies, they need each other, everyday, on repeat.
And this is the thread that runs through all six ingredients: We’ve all been brainwashed to believe we have to choose…
Your energy versus everyone else’s.
Feeling it versus moving through it.
Your body versus your ambition.
Your rules versus the “right” ones.
Your purpose versus your people.
Every one of those is a false choice we were handed, and capacity is what you build when you can finally see that all parts of you, everything you need and want and care about, are each unique ingredients that make up who you are.
And when you learn to be you, all the time, everywhere, that’s the best capacity builder of all.
So the final question of this series:
Where have you filed part of your own life under someday, in the name of the people you love?
And what would it cost them, really, to watch you take it back?
Kelly will beam in to weave it all together, next.
Love,
Sarah
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
This is what we build at Emerge.
Not more things to carry, but the capacity to stop splitting your life into competing halves and finally live all of it at once. Everything in this series becomes real in that room, in your body, with a circle of women doing it beside you.
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.
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