September 13, 2026

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A message from Kelly

Yesterday Sarah told you about buying the literal Temple before she had become the priestess who could fully inhabit it.

I have my own version of that story.

Mine involves getting the dream job.

If you read my last email, you know how absurdly magical the beginning of my work with Sarah was. I quit a ten-year career without another job lined up, and approximately five minutes later Sarah called to tell me she had figured out how to hire me.

And for a little while, it really did feel like I had landed inside the answer.

Remember that ridiculous list my executive coach Jed made me write of things I actually liked doing? Traveling. Beautiful dinners. Gathering women. Spas. Dancing. Interesting conversations. Managing people.

Within a few months of starting with Sarah, I was standing at one of our Council retreats looking around at a beautiful room full of women who had traveled in from all over the country to eat incredible food, have deep conversations, sit in ceremony and dance together, and I had this almost comical realization:

Holy shit.

I am getting paid for this.

It felt like one more piece of evidence that I had followed the thread correctly.

And I had.

But that did not mean I knew how to live it yet.

I came in as Managing Director, and part of the explicit assignment was to professionalize the company. Sarah had built a very successful business, but she wanted it to feel more like a company, and I knew how to do that. I had spent a decade inside a complex national organization with professional teams and budgets and systems and departments and processes and project management and very grown-up Microsoft Teams communication.

I remember thinking this was going to be a fucking breeze.

Small team. Straightforward business. Great mission. Founder I adored. Work I believed in.

Let’s organize the Google Drive and make an org chart and get to work.

Except it turns out that systematizing a small founder-led Sacred Feminine company is not particularly similar to running communications for a national trade association.

There was a lot more execution than I had anticipated, because I was used to having a full team underneath me. There were voice memos everywhere. Sarah didn’t really use email. Information lived inside conversations. I kept trying to build structures around a person who, as it turns out, does not especially enjoy living inside structures.

We tried.

We really did.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, we started building a version of what I already knew.

More systems. More operations. More people. More layers of communication. More SOPs. A more legitimate-looking org chart.

Some of it was useful. Some of it was absolutely necessary.

And some of it, if I’m being really truthful, was us trying to make the business look and feel important.

Like: See? This is a real company.

Real companies have structures.

Real companies have departments.

Real companies have professional communication systems and processes and all the things.

And there was another layer that took me longer to admit.

I was miserable.

Miserable is probably too strong, because I loved Sarah and I loved the mission and I loved being in the environment of the work. But when I actually checked in with myself after about a year, the day-to-day experience of my job did not feel dramatically different from the one I had just blown up my life to leave.

That realization was extremely inconvenient.

Because what was I going to say?

Sorry Goddess, seems there has been an administrative error?

I followed all the signs. I did the brave thing. I quit the job. The magical phone call came five minutes later. I got the soul-aligned work.

Wasn’t I supposed to be done?

And this is where I think we tell stories about purpose in a way that really fucks people up.

We make finding the right work sound like the finish line.

You hate your job because it isn’t aligned. You discover your purpose. You find or build the aligned thing. Roll credits.

But the right work can only meet the version of you who walks into it.

And I had walked into this radically different company carrying an enormous amount of the same operating system.

I knew how to be useful.

I knew how to be responsible.

I knew how to make things run.

I knew how to anticipate what everyone else needed, carry a tremendous amount, tolerate a packed calendar, and derive quite a lot of my value from being the person who could handle it.

I knew how to be the number two.

What I did not yet know how to do was build my working life around my own authentic expression.

There is a really important distinction there.

Because I had spent plenty of time complaining about the culture of my old job, and some of those complaints were absolutely fair. But from where I sit now, I can also see all the places where I had authority that I did not use. Places where I let people steamroll my calendar. Places where I stayed quiet. Places where I participated in systems that I simultaneously resented.

I had more sovereignty than I knew how to claim.

Changing companies didn’t magically teach me how.

Eventually Sarah did what has become one of the most important things she does in my life, which is notice when I am full of shit before I am quite ready to notice it myself.

She told me she could see that I wasn’t happy.

And because we had made an agreement from the beginning that we would have the uncomfortable conversations, I told her the truth.

I loved the work.

I didn’t love my job.

The company wasn’t really growing, either, which was especially ridiculous because growth, marketing and communications were the things I was actually best at and most excited about, but I had become so consumed by operations and professionalizing everything that I barely had time to do them.

So Sarah asked me a question:

What would have to change for you to spend 80 percent of your time doing the things you actually love?

That question fucked me up for a few days.

Because the answer wasn’t: hire a giant operations department.

The answer was to simplify almost everything.

We would have to cut some projects. Let go of some roles. Stop maintaining systems that existed mostly because I believed a real company should have them. Stop trying so hard to make ourselves legible to some imaginary panel of professional adults and actually pay attention to what this particular business, with these particular people, doing this particular work, needed.

So we did.

We let the original assignment of “professionalize the company” go.

We simplified.

We started building around the way we actually communicated, the way our brains actually worked, the kind of work that actually created results, and the things that gave us energy instead of constantly trying to make ourselves behave like people we weren’t.

And almost immediately, things started opening.

Here is the part I couldn’t fully understand at the time:

While we were changing the structure of my job, something else had been changing in me.

I had been sitting in ceremony regularly for more than a year.

Sacred Start after Sacred Start. New Moon ceremony after New Moon ceremony. Retreats. Council. Practice. Dropping in. Trying to listen. Wondering if I was making it all up. Feeling something. Questioning it. Going back in.

If you have been reading me for any amount of time, you know that I did not enter this world as a person who naturally believed in magic.

I was the first grader who asked Santa Claus to leave a signature as proof of existence.

I was the Catholic-school kid pestering the nuns to explain how Adam and Eve started humanity with two sons because excuse me, are we all just skipping over the incest situation here?

I never liked fantasy. I never read Harry Potter. I wanted to know what was real.

I still do.

So as increasingly weird things started happening to me in ceremony, I mostly kept them to myself.

I would see something, feel something, experience energy in a way I didn’t know how to explain, and then quietly file it under: Interesting. Possibly real. Possibly my brain. We’ll see.

I kept going.

And looking back, I can see that this was part of what I was learning all along.

I didn’t need to decide immediately what everything meant.

I needed the capacity to stay curious.

To practice.

To discern.

To let my body and my experience become sources of information without abandoning my critical thinking.

To tell the truth when something wasn’t working.

To notice my conditioning around success and professionalism.

To tolerate dismantling structures I had personally built.

To make a change without turning the previous choice into a mistake.

To keep showing up long enough for something deeper to develop.

Those capacities sound much less exciting than “follow your purpose.”

They are also the reason any of this happened.

In the fall of 2023, about eighteen months after I started working with Sarah, we were preparing for Emerge, our three-day ceremonial immersion.

I was running A/V.

Which is important.

Because despite all the changes we had already made, I was still, in many ways, doing what I had always done incredibly well: standing behind the scenes making sure everything worked.

The opening ceremony was about to begin. The priestesses had prepared the Temple. Women were starting to come through the gates. I realized Sarah wasn’t mic’d, so I grabbed her headset and made my way through the rows of chairs toward the altar to leave it for her.

And then something happened that I still do not know how to explain in a way that will satisfy my rational mind.

The light changed.

I became aware of what I can only describe as an energetic grid underneath and around the Temple.

I could see it.

And I could feel that there were places in it that needed attention.

This sounds absolutely fucking insane to one part of me even as I type it.

But I knew what to do.

I started weaving.

That is the word I use now. At the time, I did not have a word.

I could feel myself repairing and strengthening this energetic structure as the women entered the Temple, and at some point I became so absorbed in what I was doing that I lost awareness of the physical room filling around me.

When I eventually opened my eyes, I was no longer standing near the A/V booth.

I was at the altar.

And Sarah was standing directly across from me.

She had entered the Temple after everyone else, felt that something was different in the field, saw me standing there, and looked at me like she had never seen me before.

She said:

“Who the fuck are you?”

And because apparently some part of me had a much better answer than my conscious mind did, I said:

“Well, I guess we’re about to find out.”

Then I went back to the A/V booth.

Which remains, perhaps, the most Kelly ending imaginable.

The entire weekend was unlike anything I had experienced before.

And afterward, something had changed.

I had spent the first part of my career learning how to become extremely competent inside systems that already existed.

Then I had spent the first year of this job trying to bring those systems with me.

But now I was beginning to experience another way of working entirely.

One where my intellect mattered and my intuition mattered.

Where the spreadsheet mattered and the field mattered.

Where strategy mattered and energy mattered.

Where I could bring everything I knew how to do as a marketer and operator and leader without amputating the parts of myself that did not fit neatly into those identities.

And I think this is one of the places where “find your purpose” becomes far too small a frame for what actually happens when you follow your soul’s work.

Because sometimes you really do find the right job.

And then the job begins initiating you.

It starts showing you the identities you brought with you.

The ways you still abandon yourself.

The forms of success you inherited without choosing.

The capacities you have not developed yet.

The gifts you still do not trust.

The parts of yourself that have been waiting quietly underneath your competence for enough safety, enough practice, enough repetition, enough honesty to come online.

I did not make one brave decision in 2022 and arrive.

I entered a developmental path.

And that path required skills.

Sacred Skills.

The ability to hear myself underneath conditioning. To discern intuition from impulse. To meet fear without making it the authority. To work with energy. To hold uncertainty. To tell the truth inside relationships. To take responsibility for my own patterns. To let an identity become obsolete. To change structures in my actual life when they no longer matched who I was becoming.

And, maybe hardest of all for me, to allow something new to be true about who I was before I had enough evidence to explain it.

Skill 5 of 12: Wired Design

Identifying your unique nervous system and building infrastructure that holds for the woman you actually are.

The dream job was real.

The magic was real.

And neither of them was the answer.

They were the environment in which I got to keep becoming.

By the end of that Emerge weekend, I had absolutely no fucking idea what a Weaver was, what I was doing with energy, or what any of this would eventually mean for my role in the company.

I just knew something in me had come online.

And once again, my work was going to have to change because I had.

More tomorrow,

Kelly

P.S. If you followed the thread, got the aligned thing, and still find yourself quietly asking why it doesn’t feel like the answer — Sacred Skills Training is where you build the capacities to actually live it. Ceremony is normally for members. Join the Sacred Skills Training waitlist and your seat at the Fall Equinox is free — plus first access to enrollment on September 22, 24 hours before the public.