Kelly and I are in a really intense, really ripe initiation over here.

If you looked at it through normal human eyes, here’s what you’d see. We are writing a book, launching a merch line, reopening the temple on Friday to new members, developing a whole new body of work for 2027, and building the creative for a billboard in Times Square that will do over a million impressions, a piece of creative we have never made before and have no idea how to make, which means we are essentially learning the skills of an entire advertising agency on the fly.

And at the exact same time, regular life is lifing. Kelly’s car is dying and she has to lease a new one, and she has actual mushrooms growing out of her bathroom floor (!!!). I’m cleaning out the basement and the garage, fixing the heat, and troubleshooting a stove that has opinions. Between us we have six kids with very full lives, sports and dance and theater and birthday parties, all the things.

You could look at our lives right now and say, this is too much, you really need to cut some things out.

And if this were me five years ago, I would have agreed with you. I would have collapsed under the sheer weight of it all.

But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re choosing to live this moment through a sacred lens instead. Let’s get into it.

We are tracking all of this overwhelm, and it IS overwhelming, as initiation. Not as a sign that something’s gone wrong, not as proof we’ve overcommitted, but as a gateway that is here to carve us and train us into the women we need to be to hold the next chapter of our work.

Here’s what’s real, women have been condition to meet pressure, and collapse. BUT pressure is not a problem. Pressure is an initiatory gateway, and it is one of the most important ones there is.

We’ve been taught that pressure means something is wrong, that if we’re overwhelmed we’ve failed to plan, failed to protect our peace, taken on too much. But when you look through the lens of the cycles of creation, you see pressure absolutely everywhere, and never as a malfunction. There’s pressure when a seed is pushing up through the soil. There’s pressure that turns carbon into a diamond. There’s pressure in every contraction that brings a baby into the world. Pressure is not the opposite of creation. It’s the mechanism of it.

And here’s what I want you to know, pressure isn’t actually in the tasks. It’s in the thinking. It’s the story we tell ourselves about the thing in front of us before we ever start it. The whole drama of “ITS TOO MUCH” stacked up in our heads, every piece touching every other piece until it becomes one giant unmovable wall. The ruminating is the pressure. Not the basement, not the billboard, not the car.

Because here is what happens the second you actually start. You realize it’s all fine. You realize half the things on the terrifying list take five minutes. You realize you DO have the skills, and the two or three things you don’t, you just take a little time and figure it out, because you’re a smart cookie and you can figure things out. The dramatic wall was never real. It was a story. And you only ever meet the truth, which is almost always smaller than the story, once you’re in motion.

So this weekend, Kelly and I did what we always do. We got sacred and practical at the exact same time.

We started with the sacred lens, tracking the mythic overlay of what each of us is personally being asked to grow into. And then we got ruthlessly practical. We wrote out everything that had to happen, in order, and we got into action. Because this is the real teaching of the sacred feminine, the one that gets left out: it is spirit EMBODIED. It is about taking the vision and the dream, which is the fun part, and actually moving it into form, which is the part where most of us get stuck. Because action requires pressure. And we’ve been told, for a very long time, that women can’t handle pressure. That we’re not strong enough for it.

We are. We just had our tools for it stolen.

When we got into action, we made sure three things were true of every single thing we did, even cleaning out the basement:

1. We were fully present. One thing at a time, everything else put down, completely with the task in front of us.
2. We cultivated the vibes. Good outfits, music on, Diet Cokes in hand, incense burning in the kitchen. Yes, to clean the garage.
3. And we made meaning. We kept asking why. Why this billboard. Why these kids’ activities. Why am I cleaning out this basement. When you know why, the pressure stops being something happening TO you.

Oh, and in the middle of all of it, Jonathan and I left for a night at a hotel, because our marriage needed real tending, and it would have been so easy to slide that to the bottom of the list. We didn’t.

And you know what happened? Everything that needed to get done got done. But more than that, when we looked back on the weekend, it was joyful. It was meaningful. We were connected to our kids and our partners and the work. Life became a ceremony, and in the moving, none of it was as heavy as it looked from the outside.

We finished the billboard creative just hours before the deadline, and it is incredible. We are so happy with it. The Temple is ready for our new members to come in on Friday. We finished our new course, Life Is Mystery School that contains a deep dive on the lessons I wrote about today. Kelly got her new car. My garage got cleaned out, a whole dumpster full, and the basement got organized. Kelly got a handle on the mold situation in her house. We made it to the birthday parties. There was a quick stop at Marshalls. Beautiful dinners on the table, houses organized, marriages connected. And now we’re back at our desks on Monday morning, ready to bring it all to the finish line.

Because here is what I know. Any time you dream something big, there will be pressure. There will be challenge. There will be moments of overwhelm. And we have been so deeply conditioned, the second that pressure arrives, to collapse, to shrink the dream, to decide we can’t handle it.

But this is the exact moment to expand your capacity instead. To see it through the sacred lens. To move through the pressure with intention, not just gritting your teeth to get it over with, but actually letting yourself be IN it, letting it form you and carve you, all the way into becoming the woman you need to be on the other side to hold the dream you dreamed in the first place.

That’s the whole invitation. Come let this season make you, instead of letting it scare you off.

Love, Sarah

P.S. We’re opening the Temple free for 30 days on Friday, the same day we’re launching the billboard in Times Square. Keep an eye out, so you can get our new course, Life Is a Mystery School, inside the Temple, and join us in ceremony for Samhain.