If you’re just joining us, this is the fifth 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 first four here.
We’ve talked about sourcing your energy, shifting your perspective, being a channel, and tending the vessel.
Today’s ingredient is quieter than the others, but it might be the one that frees you the most.
When Kelly and I created the Living Temple, we knew what we wanted: a modern temple for the sacred feminine. A real place where women could gather and worship and remember, the way they did in the ancient world, but built for 2026.
And early on, we got very caught up in making it “authentic.” We wanted to honor the temples that came before us, to do it the way it had really been done.
Then we ran into a wall that turned out to be a doorway.
We don’t actually know exactly how those temples were run. Almost no one does. Because that history was deliberately erased, it’s the very erasure our whole book is about. We know a few breathtaking fragments: that temples once stood at the center of community life, that priestesses and healers lived and served inside them, that some were literally built in the shape of a woman’s body. But the day-to-day, the how, most of it was burned, buried, and written over centuries ago.
So there we were, wanting to follow a rulebook that no longer exists. And we had a choice. We could keep grasping at an “authenticity” we could never fully verify. Or we could give ourselves permission to make it up.
We also did what everyone does, we looked around at other business models, other people’s ways of doing it, trying to find the template. But here’s the thing about building something that doesn’t really exist on the planet yet: there is no template. There are no clear rules for inventing a new way for women to connect with the divine, because inventing it is the whole point.
So now, all the time, Kelly and I say to each other: look, no one has done this before. We are making it up.
Which means the only real question is, what is the most creative, alive, fun thing we could possibly build?
That is the fifth ingredient of capacity: you get to make it up.
Here’s what’s so freaking great about this world: everything you see around you, every structure, every institution, every “way it’s supposed to be done,” someone made it up. Every rule you’re straining to follow correctly was invented by a person, at some point, who was just doing their best guess. There is no original, God-given rulebook you need to follow. At some point in history, people simply got to make things up. That permission never expired. It’s still yours.
And notice what chasing “the right way” actually does to your capacity. Measuring yourself against someone else’s invented standard is completely exhausting. It’s a slow drain, always wondering if you’re doing it correctly, always trying to impress an authority that doesn’t really exist. But the moment you realize you get to make it up, something opens. It gets lighter, more playful, more ALIVE
This isn’t only for the big, founding-a-temple decisions. It’s just as true at the smallest domestic scale. You get to make up how your mornings go, how your home feels, what your family does at the end of the day, what counts as a good enough dinner. You are allowed to invent the structure of your own ordinary life instead of taking on a version that never fit you.
So today’s question:
Where are you exhausting yourself trying to follow a rulebook, at work, at home, in how you’re “supposed” to do any of it, that you could simply put down?
What would you build if you fully believed you got to make it up?
Because you do.
Love,
Sarah
❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
The whole Living Temple exists because we gave ourselves permission to invent it. Emerge is where you get to feel that same permission in your own body, to stop following the template for your life and start building the version your soul actually wants.
That’s what Emerge is for.
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.
We’ll be back tomorrow with the final ingredient.
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