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A message from Sarah
We were around the dinner table at my house, in the middle of a year-two Council, and the women were starting to get nervous about going home. This was already an unhinged group in the best way, because these were women who had done a full year of the deep work with us and come back for round two, which meant the ceremonies were BANANAS. And one of them, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, turned to me and asked how she could feel at home the way she felt in ceremony.
I gave her some kind of random answer.
And then she asked me a different question. Did I feel the way I feel in ceremony in my regular life, every day?
I looked at her and said, absolutely.
It stayed with me. The next morning Kelly and I were drinking coffee, turning the whole thing over, and that is where this started.
Well, how the fuck do you do that, Kelly said. Not unkindly. She just wanted to know, and so did I.
Here’s the tricky part about my answer… Before I was a priestess, I was a life coach for well over a decade, and I was genuinely excellent at it. And somewhere after my ordination I decided, that the coaching had to go. That personal development and transformation work were somehow beneath the ceremonial work now. Blacklisted. I started building ceremonies that were more choose-your-own-adventure, more purely mystical, because I had convinced myself that a real priestess did not also teach a woman how to set a boundary or run her calendar.
The real reason I did this, was because I was fully entrenched in the old paradigm of purpose that we are meant to look for the one job that is a match for who we are forever. And since I had now decided that I was a Priestess that meant that everything I was before was actually wrong.
But Kelly kept asking me about the how, and I could feel on the inside, that part of my answer was about ceremony part of it was actually about something else entirely, something that I thought I had left behind, but what was actually the secret sauce.
Then it was as if she was reading my mind because she quite literally is…
What is the single thread that runs through your entire career?
Here we go. I dropped in and saw it symbolically first. The integration of material and spiritual. How to take an idea and make it real. The system of energy and the system of grit. My eyes closed I could start to see the thread.
We started talking about the women who take what we teach in Council and go build something enormous with it, and the women who take the exact same material and watch it evaporate the second they get home. Same ceremonies. Same download. Same tears on the same floor. Wildly different outcomes.
What’s the difference? Kelly asked.
Structure, I said. When women come to Council, we build the structure for them. The schedule, the food, the ceremonial space, who’s rooming with whom, when the fire gets lit. We hold all of it so they can just be in the flow and the magic. At home, nobody is holding that for them. They have to build their own container, and building the container is the actual skill. It’s not separate from the magic. It’s what lets the magic land somewhere and stay.
Kelly put her coffee down.
This is what you need to teach today.
So I walked into the Temple with no notes, opened my channel, and talked for three hours without stopping. I didn’t plan a single sentence of it. What came out was a framework that reached back through everything I had ever taught to tens of thousands of clients over the years and used in my own life – the coaching and the ceremony, all of it at once, like the two halves of my career had been waiting years for permission to be in the same room.
We recorded the class.
Kelly took the recording home and, instead of sleeping after leading a five-day retreat, which is apparently not a thing she knows how to do, she stayed up half the night reading about the science of frequency and coherence and what actually happens to a room full of people when energy moves through it right.
Please understand what that means, coming from her. Kelly is the most skeptical person I know. She is, now you know, the woman who asked Santa for a signature. And instead of using the science to poke holes in the sacred, she used it to prove it. She’d text me at midnight with a study. I’d read it and feel something I can only call vindicated, on behalf of every woman who has ever been told her intuition wasn’t data. Goddess, I love it when the science backs up the thing we already knew was true.
Once we saw the science sitting right next to the magic, we could feel the impact of this body of work. This was not a nice add-on to ceremony. This was the actual difference between a woman staying in a mid-level job and becoming the one running the company. Between a teacher staying a teacher and a teacher starting her own school. Between a woman staying home with her kids because the guilt is louder than the desire, and a woman finally launching the organic clothing line she’s been sketching in a notebook for six years.
We had accidentally built a leadership training.
I took seventeen years of my work and ordered it into twelve lessons. Kelly disappeared into astrophysics and psychology and the sociology of how groups organize themselves. There were points where either of us could have said this is too much, let’s slow down. We didn’t. We widened instead. We had planned to teach the course live over a year, and then we looked at each other and said, no, let’s just turn on the cameras.
Five straight days. Twenty-seven hours. It came through so fast that neither of us could have written it alone in twice the time. That’s the part that surprised us the most. When you stop rejecting pieces of your own past, when you let every thread you have ever pulled on move through you at the same time, working next to someone who is doing the exact same thing beside you, you don’t get double the output.
You get something closer to two hundred times the output.
And the making of this course was held in the most incredible structure. Not only did we have the best snacks and our favorite outfits and nature breaks in between long teaching sessions, but we let the work feed us instead of deplete us. We would return to our families at 5 PM every night and make dinner for our kids and dance in the kitchen and sing songs to them and put them to bed. We came home to husbands who couldn’t wait to hear about what we had created that day. Our team ran things so we could disappear into the work. I got good sleeps (I can’t say the same thing for Kelly she never sleeps). We celebrated each other.
We could not have poured out twenty-seven hours of anything without every one of those pieces already in place.
Which is the whole point.
Structure is not the opposite of magic. It’s the riverbank that holds the water. It’s the wires that hold the electricity. Without it the water just goes everywhere and everyone gets electrocuted.
Skill 8 of 12: Sacred Agreements
Establishing the relational rules that hold your field, in marriage, family, and work, so the structure of your life does the work instead of you.
I used to think being a priestess meant leaving the coach behind. What I actually had to do was stop treating one half of my work as sacred and the other half as beneath me, and build a container wide enough to hold both at the same time.
Sacred Skills Training is that container.
One more tomorrow,
Sarah
P.S. If you have been treating one half of your life as sacred and the other half as beneath you, and wondering why the magic evaporates the second you get home — Sacred Skills Training is where you build the container that holds both. Enrollment opens to the waitlist in five days, on September 22, at the lowest rate we offer on Sacred Skills — with a $1,665 bonus for the first 48 hours if you’re on the waitlist. Join the waitlist here.
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