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A message from Sarah

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On the morning of February 22, 2022, a date so absurdly stacked with twos that even the most skeptical person I know was doing a ritual around it, I sat down on the floor of my temple to do a ceremony, and the Goddess told me to text a woman I barely knew.

Let me set the scene, because the instruction is funnier and more important than it sounds. I was mid-ordination, and I was deep in an internal battle about what I was actually here to do with my life. I could feel two futures, and I could not choose between them. In one, I stayed a small local priestess, ran intimate circles, made enough money to cover my share of the family, and flew comfortably under the radar where no one could throw rocks at me. In the other, I made the work enormous. Global. I became a public voice for the Sacred Feminine and tried to actually shift the culture, to make ceremony and a relationship with the Divine as normal as therapy or yoga or book club.

And the thing keeping me up at night was not all of the work. It was that yucky feeling that wanting the big version made me a bad person. I was afraid that underneath all of my lofty language about shifting culture and serving the Goddess, I just wanted attention. I just wanted to be famous. I genuinely could not tell whether the pull I felt was my soul or my ego, and I was terrified in that moment, I could not tell the difference.

So the day before, I had texted my cousin, who happens to be a very well-known voice in exactly this territory, and laid the whole conundrum at her feet. She told me, with the bluntness only family can get away with, that I would always regret not going for it. That I should go all the way. That I could not know what was going to happen, but I needed to move anyways, and that I needed to stop holding myself back and go.

Which is how I came to be sitting on my temple floor on 2/22/22, having decided, finally, to go for it, asking the only follow-up question that mattered: Okay. I’m in. What do I do?

The answer came back immediately, clear and a little anticlimactic, the way the most important instructions often are.

Text that short woman you met at ceremony.

This was not the guidance I was expecting. I was expecting a strategy, a sign, a direction grand enough to match the size of the decision I had just made. Instead I got a directive to text a near-stranger about whom I knew almost nothing, except that she had come to two of my ceremonies, that she worked in marketing, and that something in my body had gone off like an alarm both times I stood near her. I had no concept that we might work together. The thought had genuinely never crossed my mind.

But by then I had just barely learned that when the Goddess hands you something that clear and that strange, your job is not to demand the five-year plan. Your job is to move. So I picked up my phone and texted Kelly.

What I could not see at the time was that Kelly was on the other end of this thread having a completely separate experience. That very day, she had done a manifestation ceremony with her husband, Jadi, and written out what she wanted her life to feel like. This was surprisingly difficult work for her. She had spent so many years in service to her career and her children that she had become genuinely disconnected from what she liked, what she wanted, what she would choose if she had space to choose it.

But on that day, it came pouring out of her. She wrote about hosting beautiful dinner parties, having deep spiritual friendships, and taking interesting lunches in Boston with people doing fascinating things. And on that piece of paper, in her own handwriting, hours before I texted her, she wrote: people like Sarah Jenks.

That night she got my text asking if she wanted to have lunch in Boston so I could pick her brain about my company.

I mean.

Come on.

This is what I mean when I talk about being plugged into the web. When your soul is turned on, when you are in active relationship with the Divine, you begin to notice that something is moving underneath ordinary life. Meetings get orchestrated that no amount of strategy could arrange. A person pops into your mind. A sentence wants to come out of your mouth. You feel a tug in your body before you understand what it means.

The magic of this story is not simply that I followed one thread. It is that two women who barely knew each other were each being pulled along their own thread toward a meeting point neither of us could see.

We had lunch in March. Kelly came in with what she calls consulting energy, thinking she might give me some marketing advice and that it would be an interesting way to spend an afternoon. Working together was not on the table. She had a very established career, an identity built over ten years, a salary, benefits, three children, and a life that did not obviously lend itself to quitting everything to join a priestess on the internet.

I, on the other hand, showed up to lunch, messy, oddly vulnerable and basically dumped all of my business’s dirty laundry onto the table. I told her what was working, what wasn’t, where I wanted to go, and all the things I did not know how to do. I had decided I wanted to make the work enormous, and I knew there was no point pretending I had it all figured out.

Kelly started giving me the best advice I had ever gotten. She wasn’t only talking about marketing. She could see the structure of the entire company, and she started sketching out the role she thought I actually needed if I wanted to grow the way I said I wanted to grow.

Then she said, I wish it could be me.

And I said, Well, could it be you?

Kelly looked at me and said, Sarah, respectfully, you cannot afford me.

As you get to know me, you will probably not be surprised to learn what happened inside my body when a brilliant woman looked me in the face and told me I could not afford her. A voice stood up inside me and said, very calmly, watch me.

But underneath the bravado, I also knew she was right.

And she was not only right about the money.

I could not have held Kelly at that point. I could not have held a woman that strategic, that professional, that powerful inside the company I was running because the honest truth is that I was a bit of a mess. I was disorganized. My finances needed attention. My house was in chaos. There were places in my marriage that needed tending. I was a loving leader, but I was not yet the leader I needed to be to hold the kind of company I kept saying I wanted.

I had this enormous vision for the work, but the infrastructure of my actual life was not capable of holding it yet.

So I got into my car after lunch and asked myself the question that is basically my entire approach to being alive: How could I? How could I pay Kelly’s salary?

The moment I asked it, I felt that rush of energy come into my body again. I closed my eyes, and I saw a fork in the road. I understood that I could keep going exactly as I was, or I could take the other path. And the other path was going to require me to do something genuinely stretchy and frightening.

I was going to have to grow up.

I knew sitting in that car that I might not actually pull this off. I might not make enough money to hire Kelly. She might decide she didn’t want the job. We might realize we were terrible together. I might do all of this work and never get the outcome I thought I was moving toward.

And I decided to become the woman who could anyway.

Because even if I never hired Kelly, I wanted to be the woman who could hold that level of partnership, leadership, responsibility, money, and expansion.

The becoming itself was the point.

I had thought my leap was deciding to make the work enormous. What I began to understand was that the vision was asking something of me. It was asking me to become capable of holding the life I kept saying I wanted.

So I went on what I can only describe as a four-month gauntlet, and I have never grown so much so fast in my life. I got my finances in order. I dealt with the chaos of my house. I tended my marriage. I plugged the places where my energy was constantly leaking out. I started taking much better care of my body. I started making more money.

And I looked very seriously at how I was leading.

That one mattered a lot because I realized I could not keep being casual with my existing team and imagine that the day Kelly arrived I would magically become an incredible leader. I had to become that leader now, with the people who were already there. I had to communicate more clearly, raise my standards, hold people accountable, deal with things I would rather avoid, and create the conditions for really talented people to do really great work.

It could not be about Kelly. It had to be about me.

And this is one of the things I understand so differently now about soul-led work. We love the vision. We love the download. We love the moment where the Goddess tells us where to go. But eventually the vision looks back at you and asks a much less romantic question:

Can you actually hold me?

Because the life you are asking for will require things from you.

It may ask you to become a better leader. It may ask you to be more visible, more responsible with money, more discerning, more willing to disappoint people, more honest in your relationships, more devoted to your body, more capable of holding uncertainty, more willing to be misunderstood.

And sometimes this is exactly where we decide the dream must not be aligned. We thought alignment would feel easier. We thought the right path would flow. We thought the sign would arrive, the door would open, and then we would finally know.

Sometimes the sign arrives and then asks you to become capable of walking through the door.

The whole time I was doing this, Kelly and I stayed in conversation. We were basically interviewing each other, except that mostly she was interviewing me. She wanted to see the numbers. She wanted to understand how I ran things and what I was really like to work with. She needed to know whether any of this was solid or whether I was just another charismatic woman on the internet with a beautiful message and a complete fucking mess underneath it.

Fair.

So I showed her.

The numbers. The systems. The mess. The body of work. The vision.

And the honesty between us became the real foundation, more than any of the magic. The threads may have brought us together, but the trust was built the slow way, through hard and sometimes unflattering conversations.

By late spring, I had crossed some internal line. Everything was not perfect. I had not transformed overnight into some flawless CEO with a beautifully optimized company and color-coded spreadsheets. But I had changed tremendously, felt sure of myself, and became a woman I trusted to meet whatever happened next.

And I think this is where people get confused about capacity.

You do not build the whole thing and then jump.

You build enough to trust yourself, and then you jump.

Some of your capacity gets built before the leap, in the practice and the choices and the uncomfortable conversations. And some of it can only get built in the air.

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So one morning, after Kelly and I had not spoken in weeks, I picked up the phone and called her.

I’m ready. Let’s do this.

I told her I could match her salary. I told her I knew this was a huge thing to ask of her, that she had a major career and would have to give notice and unwind an entire life around it, but I wanted to do it. I wanted her to come work with me.

And Kelly started laughing.

I kept talking.

Finally she interrupted me.

Sarah. I quit my job five minutes ago.

Five minutes.

Five fucking minutes.

I had spent four months becoming the woman who could make the call. And without telling me, on the other end of the thread, Kelly had become the woman who could answer it.

This is the kind of story that can make magic sound like something that only happens to other people, the lucky ones, the unicorns. But what was underneath the magic was not luck. It was that two women each got a series of nudges that did not entirely make sense, and each of us chose to stay in relationship with them without any guarantee of where they would lead.

I rebuilt myself for a partnership that might never happen. Kelly made a leap of her own without knowing whether I would be waiting on the other side.

Neither of us was promised the outcome.

We each just kept walking our own thread to the edge of what we could see.

And because we both did that, separately, the threads met.

When I look back now, I can see that what I was learning was much bigger than how to follow intuition. I was learning how to stay in relationship with my soul’s work as it asked more of me.

How do you know when a desire is coming from your soul and when it is coming from your ego? How do you hear an instruction that makes no logical sense and stay with it long enough to discover where it leads? How do you expand your capacity instead of making the size of the vision evidence that you are not ready for it? How do you work with fear, money, leadership, your body, your relationships, and the practical reality of your life without losing the sacred thread running underneath all of it?

I did not have language for any of this then.

I was just doing it.

Following the thread. Going back into ceremony. Listening. Getting scared. Making changes. Learning to hold more. Taking another step.

And this is a huge part of why Kelly and I eventually built Sacred Skills Training.

Because receiving the vision and becoming capable of living it are two different things.

You can know there is more for you. You can feel your soul pulling you toward a different life, a deeper expression of your work, or something you cannot yet name. But then you have to learn how to work with what you are hearing. How to discern it. How to trust it. How to stay with it when fear shows up. How to reorganize your real life around something that may still be invisible to everyone but you.

Those are skills.

Sacred Skills are the bridge between knowing what is true and becoming capable of living it.

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The Foundational Skill: Following the Threads

The foundational skill of paying attention to the small pulls, signs, and synchronicities that point you toward what is meant for you, and learning to anchor what they reveal.

The foundational skill of paying attention to the small pulls, signs, and synchronicities that point you toward what is meant for you, and learning to anchor what they reveal.

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And sometimes your soul will ask you to expand. Sometimes it will ask you to build. Sometimes it will ask you to take up more space, make more money, become a stronger leader, or finally admit how enormous your vision actually is.

And sometimes it will ask you to leave.

Which brings me back to Kelly.

Because while I was over here interpreting my assignment as become the woman who can hire her, Kelly was receiving a completely different assignment.

She was being asked to walk away from a ten-year career she had spent her entire adult life building, without another job, without a guarantee from me, and without knowing what was coming next.

I knew almost none of this at the time.

I only knew that when I finally became ready to call her, somehow, impossibly, she was ready too.

Tomorrow, she’s going to tell you what was actually happening on the other end of the thread.

And I promise you, it is even wilder from her side.

Sacred Skills Training is the twelve-month training Kelly and I built around the skills that close the gap between knowing what is true and being able to live it. The waitlist gets first access to enrollment on Tuesday, September 22, 24 hours before the public — plus a free seat at our Fall Equinox ceremony, professionally livestreamed from Living Temple HQ.

Love, Sarah

P.S. If you’ve received an instruction that makes no logical sense and you’re waiting to feel ready before you move on it — Sacred Skills Training is where you learn to follow the thread anyway. Join the waitlist here for first access on September 22 and your free seat at the Equinox.