September 11, 2026

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If you missed part 1, you can catch up here.

A message from Kelly

In December of 2021, I had one of those terrible moments where you realize you got exactly what you wanted.

I was three months back from maternity leave after having my third baby, and I was the Vice President of Communications for the Organic Trade Association, a national food policy organization where I had worked for more than a decade. I had started there as a communications coordinator in my twenties and worked my way up. I got a master’s degree in sustainable development and food systems. I lobbied on Capitol Hill. I worked on national campaigns and alongside people I deeply respected. I believed in the mission. I loved my team. I was good at my job.

I also had three beautiful kids, a great marriage, a beautiful home, financial stability. I had, by every reasonable measure, made it.

And yet the word I kept coming back to for how I actually felt was brittle.

Like I had somehow built this really good life and become so stretched inside of it that if somebody pressed on me in exactly the wrong place, I might fucking shatter.

There was no space anywhere. My husband also had a big, mission-driven job. I worked remotely from Massachusetts but traveled regularly to Washington, DC. I had spent years nursing babies in hallways on Capitol Hill between meetings, sometimes bringing one of my parents with me so they could hold the baby while I went into a meeting and then hand them back to me so I could nurse before the next one. I was on Zoom all day. We were raising three little kids. Our calendars were insane.

And somehow, we were doing it.

Which was part of the problem.

Because nothing was technically wrong.

I wasn’t in some obviously terrible job I desperately needed to escape. I wasn’t miserable in my marriage. I didn’t hate the life I had built. I loved so much of it, which made the whole thing much more confusing.

I just didn’t love how it felt to be me inside of it.

A friend had told me a few months earlier that I should follow this woman named Sarah Jenks on Instagram because she thought I would like her. I downloaded something Sarah had created called the Sacred Start Guide, and around my birthday that October, I started experimenting with having an actual spiritual practice.

I had always been spiritually curious. I noticed synchronicities. I paid attention to weird coincidences. I’d had experiences I couldn’t fully explain. I owned Tarot cards. But I was also the kid who asked Santa Claus for his signature so I could compare it to my parents’ handwriting, so that should tell you something about me too.

I like evidence.

I like knowing how things work.

I am perfectly happy to entertain the possibility that something mysterious is happening, but I also want to know what else could explain it.

So I started doing this little morning practice without really knowing what I expected it to do.

And what it did, almost immediately, was make my life significantly less convenient, because I could hear myself again.

Oh.

Fuck.

I don’t think I like this.

That was the beginning.

It was not some giant revelation that I needed to quit my job. I did not suddenly discover my soul’s purpose. I did not receive a vision of my future life.

It was much smaller and, in some ways, much more destabilizing than that.

I don’t want my life to feel like this anymore.

And once I knew that, I couldn’t unknow it.

A few months later, Sarah announced that she was opening her Temple for Winter Solstice.

It was $500, which seemed like an absolutely insane amount of money to spend on something I didn’t understand, with a bunch of women I didn’t know, to do whatever people did at a Sacred Feminine Ceremony. Also, it was December 2021, and my entire family was about to pile into a rented RV that we had decorated for Christmas and drive to South Carolina, so I was legitimately concerned that I would go to this weird ceremony, get COVID, and ruin Christmas for everyone.

Still, I felt the yes.

And again, this is important. I didn’t know what the yes meant. I wasn’t saying, this will change my life. It was more like a very clear internal pull toward something I could not explain.

So I went.

I don’t need to explain everything that happened inside that Temple here, partly because some of it I still don’t know how to explain. But I remember sitting in an open-eyed meditation and watching the quality of the light in the room change. I remember the face of the woman sitting across from me starting to look different. I remember actually checking that I could feel the ground beneath me because I was like, What the fuck is happening?

And mostly, I remember the grief.

I had created enough space to tell myself the truth: I loved the people in my life, and I did not love the structure of my life. The pace. The pressure. The sheer amount of maintenance required to keep the whole thing moving.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.

I think this is one of the reasons we avoid asking ourselves what we actually want. Because sometimes the numbness is easier. You can stay incredibly busy inside a life that makes complete sense and never have to confront the distance between what you have and what you want.

But once you touch what you want, even for a second, you can feel the gap.

And sometimes the gap fucking hurts.

I went home. We had Christmas. The RV was amazing. Life continued.

Then Imbolc came around six weeks later, and Sarah announced another ceremony.

Another $500.

I had absolutely not intended for this to become a regular expense, but I had opened something at Winter Solstice, and I knew I wasn’t done. My husband basically said, “If you got that much out of the first one, just go back.”

So I did.

At the same time, I had hired an executive coach named Jed because I needed support with some things happening at work. Very quickly, our coaching conversations stopped being about how I could perform better in my existing job and started becoming about whether I wanted the job at all.

Jed gave me an assignment that was embarrassingly difficult.

Make a list of things you like.

That’s it.

What do you like to do?

It took me weeks.

And I kept trying to turn it into a more sophisticated question because apparently “what do you like?” was too much for me.

Does it have to be something I do now?

Does it have to relate to work?

Does it need to be something I can make money doing?

No.

What. Do. You. Like?

What became obvious through that exercise was that I had spent so much time in service to my work, my children, my family, the mission, the calendar, the next thing that needed to happen that I had become strangely disconnected from my own preferences.

Eventually, things started coming out.

I like traveling. I like beautiful dinners. I like gathering women. I like spas. I like dancing. I like managing people. I like interesting conversations with interesting people.

Tiny breadcrumbs.

At Imbolc, something else started to shift. Winter Solstice had been grief. Imbolc felt more like possibility. I could feel the first glimmers of a different life, even though I couldn’t see what it was.

At the end of ceremony, I found myself talking to Sarah.

She was doing everything herself at the time, and because I was a communications and marketing executive, I had thoughts.

Obviously.

I told her I worked in marketing and thought what she was building was really interesting and that I had some ideas.

This was slightly unusual behavior for me. I am not a big hang-around-after-the-event-and-make-friends person. I tend to have my experience and leave.

But I remember feeling my throat tighten before I said it, like the words wanted to come out before I had fully decided whether saying them made any sense.

So I said them.

Sarah asked for my phone number.

We went home.

Nothing happened.

And then came February 22, 2022.

2/22/22.

By this point, I was taking the whole spiritual-practice thing more seriously, and I decided this was obviously an excellent day to conduct an elaborate manifestation ceremony in my house during my lunch break.

I told my husband to come home from work. We set sacred space. We got out our notebooks. And I decided to write about the life I wanted as though it were already happening.

This was surprisingly profound because only a few weeks earlier I had barely been able to tell Jed what I liked.

Now I started writing.

I was hosting incredible dinner parties. The holidays felt magical with my kids. I had deep spiritual friendships. I was taking interesting lunches in Boston with people doing fascinating things, exploring all the different ways I might use my skills in the world.

And somewhere in the middle of that list I wrote that I had relationships with people like Sarah Jenks.

I wrote her actual name.

My husband and I read our lists out loud to each other, closed the space, and went back to our normal day.

That night, my phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

It was Sarah.

She wanted to know if she could take me to lunch in Boston and pick my brain about her company.

I held the phone up to my husband.

He lost his shit.

“NO.”

I was like, “YES.”

Because whatever you believe about manifestation or synchronicity or coincidence or the mechanics of how any of this works, that is objectively hilarious.

And I was paying attention.

We had lunch in March.

I went in with absolutely no expectation that I would work for Sarah. I was starting to explore consulting, and I thought this would be fun. If I was going to keep using my marketing and communications skills, the question of how you reach people who are on a spiritual path and invite them into deeper relationship with themselves and the Divine was at least interesting to me.

Sarah came to lunch and essentially dumped the entire contents of her business onto the table.

I went into consulting mode.

I asked questions. I gave her advice. I started reorganizing things in my head.

At some point I laid out the role I thought she actually needed if she wanted to grow the company the way she was describing.

And as I heard myself describe this unicorn job, I thought:

Fuck. I would like that job.

Again, throat tightening.

Again, that strange little moment where I could have just kept the thought inside.

Instead I said, “I wish it could be me.”

Sarah looked at me.

“Could it?”

I laughed.

“Sarah, respectfully, you cannot afford me.”

And that could have been the end of it.

It wasn’t.

Because Sarah asked me how much I made.

And suddenly I had a number, which meant I had a real question to answer:

If she could pay me that, would I actually leave?

This is the part of following the breadcrumbs that I think gets lost when we tell stories like this.

Because yes, there was magic. There were signs. There were body sensations and synchronicities and nudges and 2/22/22 manifestation ceremonies.

And then I needed to look at the fucking numbers.

I carried my family’s health insurance. I had three children. I had a stable salary. I had spent ten years building a professional identity and reputation inside an established industry.

Leaving wasn’t just an energetic decision, and I did not want to pretend it was.

So I started figuring it out.

What did my family actually need every month? What was my bottom number? What would health insurance cost? If this didn’t work, could I consult? What else could I do?

Sarah and I started seriously exploring whether working together made sense. I looked at her P&Ls. I looked under the hood of the company. I needed to know whether this was an actual business or just a good time.

I was open to magic.

I was not going to abandon discernment.

And this distinction matters to me, because trusting yourself does not mean refusing to look at reality.

If anything, the deeper I have gone into a sacred life, the less interested I have become in using spirituality to bypass the very human responsibility of making a decision.

We have intuition and bank accounts.

We have signs and children who need health insurance.

We can ask the Goddess and also ask to see the P&L.

For me, those things belong together.

For months, I stayed in the question.

Meanwhile, things were shifting at my existing job. We had a new CEO, and as a member of the senior team, I was part of conversations about restructuring and what the organization would look like going forward.

And plans were starting to be made around me.

That was when something became crystal clear.

I was halfway out.

Other people’s jobs and responsibilities were being discussed based on an assumption that I would be there, and I knew I couldn’t keep participating in those conversations without telling the truth.

I also knew that simply getting another impressive job wasn’t going to solve my problem. I wasn’t trying to escape a bad boss or a bad organization. The structure itself no longer fit.

That spring, I went to Washington for Organic Week, the huge annual policy conference that was basically the Olympics of my job.

I had done it for ten years.

Before I went, I quietly decided it would be my last one.

I tried to be completely there for it. I saw people I loved. I did the work. I let myself feel what this career had given me.

And then I walked out of our office with my suitcase to catch my flight home and internally said goodbye.

I still did not know if I was going to work with Sarah.

That part is important.

A few weeks later, I took my husband out to dinner and told him I was done.

He asked the obvious question.

“What’s happening with Sarah?”

“I have no idea.”

I hadn’t heard from her in weeks.

He was understandably concerned, so we did what we do in our marriage, which is talk about the actual reality of the situation. By this point, I had run the numbers.

I told him that worst-case scenario, I could make what our family absolutely needed by waitressing three nights a week. I could consult. I could find clients. I could apply for another job. If I needed to take a lateral move somewhere else just to move the energy, I would.

But I knew I had to leave.

He was scared.

And I was crystal fucking clear.

I remember telling him:

I’ve got it.

When I look back, this more than anything else is what I understand differently now about taking a leap.

I wasn’t certain everything was going to work out.

I wasn’t certain Sarah would hire me.

I wasn’t certain I would find my soul’s work.

I wasn’t even certain what I was doing next.

What I was certain of was that I could trust myself with what happened next.

There is a difference.

The next morning, I texted my boss and asked him to call me. He was on the West Coast, so I waited until a reasonable hour.

The phone rang.

I told him I was leaving.

He was shocked and asked where I was going.

“I don’t know.”

He assumed I had been recruited by another company.

“You’re not leaving without another job lined up, right?”

“Actually, I am.”

He asked if there was anything he could do to convince me to stay.

There wasn’t.

The entire conversation lasted maybe eight minutes.

We hung up.

I still had the phone in my hand. I had not even put it down.

And it rang.

Sarah Jenks.

I hadn’t heard from her in weeks.

I answered.

“Hi.”

She didn’t even really say hello. She launched straight into it.

She was ready. She had figured out how to make it work, how to pay me what I needed to make, how to organize all of the details we’d been sorting out for months.

She wanted me to come work with her.

I started laughing.

“Sarah.”

She kept talking.

“Sarah.”

Finally she stopped.

“I quit my job five minutes ago.”

Silence.

“WHAT?”

I don’t know how any of this works.

I really don’t.

I can tell you the story about 2/22/22. I can tell you about my throat tightening. I can tell you about the strange series of decisions Sarah was making on her side of the story without knowing what was happening on mine.

I can tell you that five minutes after I walked away from a ten-year career without another job, the person whose name I had inexplicably written in a manifestation ceremony months earlier called and offered me one.

You can decide what you think that means.

The part I know for sure is that the phone call was not the leap. I had already leapt.

And I think this is where we misunderstand what it means to follow our Soul’s path.

We wait for certainty. We want the new job before we leave the old one. We want the business to work before we invest in it. We want proof that the relationship will last before we tell the truth. We want to see the whole road before we take the first step.

Sometimes we get that.

Sometimes the next right thing arrives before the outcome does.

The skill is learning how to recognize it.

How do I know when discomfort means don’t go and when it means this matters?

How do I distinguish intuition from impulse?

How do I hear my own desire underneath everyone else’s expectations?

How do I work with fear without handing it the steering wheel?

How do I take a real risk without abandoning discernment?

How do I stay in relationship with mystery while also taking radical responsibility for my actual human life?

How do I trust myself enough to move when I can only see the next step?

These are not personality traits some women are born with.

They are skills.

Sacred Skills.

Skill 9 of 12: Body as Compass

Reframing distaste, friction, and somatic signal as diagnostic data, so you can trust what your body is telling you and translate it into right action.

When I look back now, I can see that I was in the early stages of developing what would later become the methodology of our work.

The morning practice mattered. Ceremony mattered. Learning to identify what I actually liked mattered. My executive coach mattered. The manifestation ceremony mattered. The spreadsheet mattered. My husband’s fear mattered. My own fear mattered. The P&L mattered. The weird tightening in my throat mattered.

Every time I noticed something true and responded to it, I strengthened my ability to hear the next thing.

Every breadcrumb made me more capable of following the next breadcrumb.

Until eventually, I didn’t need to know where they were leading.

I trusted myself enough to walk.

And there is one final detail about this story that I understand much better now.

I am deeply grateful that Sarah did not call me the night before I quit.

Because I needed to leave my job without her.

I needed that decision to belong completely to me.

I didn’t want to leave because Sarah promised me a salary or a title or a beautiful new life. I didn’t want to make her responsible for whether the leap worked.

She was walking her path.

I was walking mine.

And somehow, at exactly the right moment, those two paths met.

I think about the woman I was in December 2021 sometimes. Three kids, big job, great marriage, good life, completely fucking brittle.

She had no idea where she was going.

She didn’t need to.

She needed enough space to hear herself say:

I don’t want my life to feel like this anymore.

And then she needed the skills to stay in conversation with that truth long enough for it to show her where to go next.

That was the leap.

The phone call was just magic.

More tomorrow,

Kelly

P.S. If nothing is technically wrong and you still don’t love how it feels to be you inside your own life — Sacred Skills Training is where you learn to tell yourself the truth about that and stay in conversation with it long enough for it to show you where to go next. Join the waitlist for first access to enrollment 24 hours before the public on September 22 — plus a free seat at our Fall Equinox ceremony, professionally livestreamed from Living Temple HQ.