September 12, 2026

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A message from Sarah

For the last two days, Kelly and I have been telling you about a leap we took in 2022, when I decided to make my work enormous, Kelly walked away from a ten-year career without knowing where she was going, and somehow our two threads met in the middle five minutes after she quit her job.

But that was not the first time my soul had asked me to build something I had absolutely no idea how to hold.

Years before Kelly and I met, I was handed the single most undeniable piece of magic of my life, an actual miracle.

And I would spend the next several years learning the thing almost no one tells you about a miracle:

Being handed one does not mean you are ready to live it yet.

From 2013 to 2017, I lived a double life in San Francisco, and I was very good at it.

In one life I was building an emotional eating company, and I was nailing it. I had gotten onto Instagram and email marketing early, right as the new-mom, girl-next-door, blogger bubble was inflating, and I rode it like a pro. I was the relatable one. The helper. The woman with the before-and-after photos and the warm, encouraging voice, and I could put her on every morning like a cardigan.

That life paid for everything, which mattered more than I can tell you, because in those years I was the sole earner. My husband Jonathan was deep in a urology surgical residency, working ninety hours a week and coming home wrung out from training that bordered on cruelty, and the stipend he brought home did not even cover the full-time nanny we needed so the two of us could work at all.

I had two babies under two, one in 2014 and one in 2015, neither planned, both adored, both having put me thoroughly and completely under.

It was one of the darkest stretches of my life.

And I want to be honest that my grip on that palatable little persona was a tiny bit of vanity, a healthy dose of conditioning, and most definitely survival. She was holding up the finances of an entire family, and I knew it, and I held onto her accordingly.

In the other life, the one almost nobody saw, I was driving up the hill to lie on the floor of Elayne Kalila Doughty’s living room and come completely apart.

A small group of us would gather at her house for three and four days at a stretch, in deep, soul-churning ceremony, and in those rooms I was becoming someone I had no intention of ever introducing to the woman in the cardigan.

I was getting to know my own soul. I was reading everything I could find on the Sacred Feminine, tracing the long, deliberate thread between colonization and the erasure of women’s spiritual practices, feeling something enormous wake up in me.

Ceremony was the only thing keeping me alive in those years.

It was also a secret I guarded like my life depended on it, because in some financial and social way I was fairly sure it did.

Toward the end of those four years, the secret started talking back.

I would be sitting in circle and out of nowhere it would sound like someone had leaned in and spoken directly into my ear. Firm, a little curt, completely clear.

Sarah. You aren’t who you think you are.

It rattled me every single time.

It is one thing to go to ceremony as a nice hobby that keeps you sane.

It is another thing entirely for the hobby to start talking back to you by name.

And then one day it stopped talking and showed me instead.

We were doing an anointing practice. I was lying on a table with two women’s hands on my body and the smell of sacred oil everywhere, and I dropped down through some floor inside myself into a vision so vivid it was less like dreaming and more like waking up somewhere else.

I do not know what it actually was.

It may have been assembled out of everything I had been reading. It may have been a past life. If you hold that time is not a straight line, perhaps it was simply who I was becoming, shown to me in a metaphor.

The mechanics have never mattered to me as much as what it woke up in me.

I woke, inside the vision, at dusk, into chaos. Women were screaming. Men in armor were coming through, setting the trees and gardens on fire. There was violence I won’t share out loud.

And behind all of it, I could see our Temple.

Ancient, built of stone, two stories tall, ringed with courtyards and low outer walls.

And I knew, with the total knowing you only get in dreams, that I lived there.

It was my home. I had lived there in peace with women for years. I tended the herb gardens. I made the anointing oils. I led the ceremonies. I sat with people who arrived with broken hearts and impossible questions about their lives.

It had been a place of healing, but more than that it had been a protected place where women could be in their magic together. To live together. To cook together. To sleep and wake together. To tend the gardens together.

And I could feel, the bliss of what we had built and the agony of watching it burn.

There was a moment in that waking dream when I understood there was nothing any of us could do to stop it, not in that lifetime. The only thing left was to use what I knew to preserve what I knew.

To pull the soul threads inside myself and hold them.

I felt the wisdom go down into my body and root there, like a seed put away for a season that had not come yet. And I watched myself lie down in the dirt with my priestess sisters, take their hands, drink a potion, and go to sleep.

When I woke up in Kalila’s Temple, in this body, in this life, I woke up a different person.

I came up off that table shaking, and what I felt wasn’t clarity.

It was the chasm of my double life widening to a width I could no longer bridge.

Part of me knew exactly what it had just seen.

This is yours. This is what you came here to do.

And the other part of me, the louder, older, far more established part, wanted to file the whole experience under deeply embarrassing and never mention it again, because that part had a plan.

A good one.

An ambitious one.

That part of me was going to build an emotional eating empire that rivaled Weight Watchers, and she had less than no interest in being interrupted by a vision of stone temples and herb gardens and women drinking potions in the dirt.

So I did not come back from that table with an assignment.

I came back split in two.

A whisper on one side, a five-year business plan on the other, and no idea what to do about either.

After ceremony, I went quietly into the woods and gave the vision a little air. Not much. A few minutes.

I sat under the trees and asked it, gently, nervously, the way you ask a question you are not sure you want answered:

How would I even do this?

How does a woman with a husband, two babies under two, and a business single-handedly holding up her family go and build a Temple, exactly?

What would it even look like?

And what came back wasn’t, a demand, but an invitation, like a gentle offering of how it could be done.

I did not have to copy the way Temples had been built before, and what little we know about them. I could build what we need now.

A place where women could gather for a day or a week and not feel like they were at a retreat center with a staff and a schedule and three other groups down the hall, but feel like they were genuinely living together.

Sleeping under one roof.

Telling each other their dreams over coffee.

Walking out to the Temple to do ceremony, lying in the grass, smelling the rosemary, braiding each other’s hair, grieving, dancing, completely held and completely safe in their bodies, away, for once, from the patriarchal world on the other side of the gate at the end of the driveway.

It was beautiful.

And it frightened me enough that I began, right there under the trees, to shrink it down to a size I could tolerate, and not die of embarrassment for even considering.

Here was the deal I made with myself.

Someday, I would do this.

Not now.

First I would get to be tired. First Jonathan would finish residency and land a normal private-practice job and finally, fully support us, and I would get to be a stay-at-home mom for a while, lie on the couch, maybe have another baby, and rest after four years of motherhood that had very nearly leveled me.

And then, eventually, when I was ready, I would begin something new.

Not emotional eating again. I already knew that chapter was closing.

Something sacred.

But later.

Out far enough on the horizon that it could stay beautiful without ever actually asking anything of me.

For now, I had a cardigan to wear and a business to run.

I did do one thing right, and I want to give the credit to the woman who made me do it.

Her name was Katina.

I had hired her around then, knowing I was at a threshold in my career and my life as I prepared to move across the country. She was the one who noticed that I was funneling every spare hour I had, and I had almost none, into ceremony.

She helped me see that my real work was to remember I am magical and bring it forward, into my motherhood and my marriage and, eventually, my actual job.

And she made me write the vision down.

Fifteen pages of it.

Women gathering in fields. A yurt I would build with my own two hands. Dancing and eating in the grass. Feet in a cold stream.

There were, and I am not exaggerating for effect, some sheep wandering around in it.

That was the absolute max of what I would let myself imagine for my one wild sacred life.

A yurt.

And some sheep.

And then I took those fifteen pages and slid them into a drawer.

I had been avoiding the vision I’d been shown since the moment I came off that table, and the drawer was where I made my relationship to it official. Crazy idea. Might try later.

Maybe someday I would become a woman who could handle all of it.

Two weeks later, I was drunk at my father-in-law’s house in Colorado.

It was Thanksgiving. I had had a heroic amount of wine, and we were six months out from Jonathan finishing residency and house-hunting in earnest outside Boston, where he had an offer.

I had complicated, knotted feelings about going home.

San Francisco had been brutal, but it had been far enough from where I grew up that I had finally met myself out there, even if I was still too scared to let her out in public.

Going back felt like walking straight back into the costume.

But that night, lying in bed with the room spinning pleasantly, I was scrolling Zillow, and because of the wine I forgot to enter our budget.

For months we had been dutifully looking at the same house over and over: a tidy three-bedroom at the end of a cul-de-sac, white picket fence, room for the kids to play with the neighbors, a place where I could be a nice stay-at-home mom and live the idyllic suburban life I had been telling everyone I wanted.

But with the budget gone, Zillow showed me something else entirely.

A funky 1970s house.

On a lake.

Def not the colonial.

I thought, huh, and I clicked.

And as I scrolled, my fifteen pages began coming to life on the screen of my laptop.

Open fields.

A brook running down into a private lake.

Herb gardens.

Woods threaded with trails.

Twenty-three acres.

And then, sitting on the land, a Temple.

Not a yurt.

About ten million times better than the yurt I had permitted myself to dream.

A huge octagonal building with raw wood walls and floor-to-ceiling windows and inlaid wood floors, ringed by ancient pines and oaks.

Oh and I almost forgot, freaking SHEEP. In the Zillow photos.

I knew, the way I had known on the anointing table, that it was mine.

And I knew, with a sinking and soaring feeling at exactly the same time, that the Goddess was not offering me a five-year plan anymore.

She was telling me it was now.

Which was a problem.

Because the house was wildly outside our budget, and the only way to reach it was to never become the resting, couch-lying, stay-at-home mother I had just spent the last two paragraphs of my life fantasizing about.

I would have to be all the way in.

Immediately.

Jonathan, who knew about the fifteen-page vision because I had been slowly letting him watch my magic come online, looked at me like I was a ghost.

We lay there in the dark with energy roaring through both our bodies, whispering the same question back and forth.

Could this possibly be real?

In the morning I did my practice and asked, plainly:

I don’t know how, but this feels like mine. What do I do?

And the answer I got back from the Divine, from the great organizing intelligence of the entire universe, was, I promise you:

Google it.

So I did.

I went back to the listing, saw the place was called Harmony Farm, and searched it.

A homespun little website came up, and the first thing on the homepage was a letter.

A letter to the future owner.

It told the story of Harmony Farm, of land that had been kept as sacred and grown medicinal herbs, of a Temple built for song circles and ceremony, and it said, more or less, we are waiting for the person who can feel what this place is.

I was already crying by the time I reached the bottom, where it was signed, with a photograph.

Love, Dr. Leslie Shore.

My heart stopped.

This was my high school therapist.

When I was sixteen and falling apart with body dysmorphia, I had sat in Leslie Shore’s home office while she walked me, gently and symbolically, through what was actually happening inside me.

On our third or fourth session she had handed me a book she had written, Healing the Feminine, about inviting Sacred Feminine principles into your life.

So the woman who first treated the body shame that would go on to become my entire first career was also the very first person to put the words Sacred Feminine into my hands.

And now, two decades and one anointing-table vision later, she owned my Temple.

I sat on the floor, at my little makeshift altar in my father-in-law’s guest room, with the laptop open and said, out loud, to absolutely no one:

What the fuck.

There is a point at which the synchronicities stack up so high that the rational part of your brain simply sits down on the floor and stops arguing with you.

So I emailed her.

Dr. Shore, you almost certainly don’t remember me, but I was your patient at sixteen, and I think I’m supposed to buy your house. Full disclosure: we have absolutely no idea how we could afford it.

She responded quickly.

Of course, Sarah. Please tell your mother hello. Would you like to come see the house?

And then, because a vision is worth nothing if you will not move your actual body, I got on a plane.

When my car turned up the long driveway, I felt myself slide out of ordinary time into the only thing I know to call a portal.

Leslie met me, and we agreed to leave our real estate agents out of it, just the two of us, because she could feel it too.

The house itself was lovely and would do for now.

But when she walked me into the Temple, I burst into tears on the spot, because it did not feel like a building I was being shown.

It felt like a memory.

A memory of the future.

Nothing about my outer life was remotely arranged to run a place like this (please note, I was only 32 when all of this was happening, and a mother of two toddlers), and yet I could feel my inner life getting ready to hold it, could feel my whole existence pulling me forward faster than I could wake up to keep pace.

So I just kept saying yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

All the way until I said nope.

Back in California, plenty of people said no on my behalf.

That it was too much. That I would miss having neighbors. That I had already worked myself to the bone and should, for the love of God, lie down.

They loved me and they were worried, and they were not wrong that it was an enormous bite to take.

But a few women said something else entirely.

The women I had been falling apart with on Elayne’s floor for four years, the ones who had seen my visions and my real face instead of my persona, said:

Sarah. You wrote the vision. The vision showed up. This is yours. This is not driftwood. Magic like this does not float past twice. Do not you dare back away. We believe you. We believe IN you. Go.

I will be grateful to those women for the rest of my life.

Because they were not plugged into the part of me that performed.

They were plugged into the part of me that was real.

So I brought Jonathan back to be on the land.

And then the craziest thing happened.

The owners offered us a two-part buyout, half now and half on a five-year contract, the one and only arrangement on earth that could have let us afford it.

My real estate agent told me she had never seen anything like it in her entire career.

We moved in.

And I would love to tell you that I walked across the threshold of that octagonal Temple and became the priestess on the spot.

Nope.

I moved onto the literal answer to a vision the Goddess had hand-delivered to me on an anointing table, the single most undeniable piece of magic of my whole life, and within about a minute I was pregnant again and felt the old machinery come grinding back online.

The part of me that still wanted to look normal on the internet.

The part that knew how to run the business I already had.

The part that could imagine being a woman who lived on land with a Temple much more easily than she could imagine becoming the woman who actually stood inside it and said, This is who I am. This is my work.

Because here is the thing no one tells you about manifesting your wildest dream into solid matter:

Building the container does not instantly make you the woman who can fill it.

No drastic life change can do that for you.

That is an inside job.

So I did what I knew how to do.

I took the sacred language that was waking up in me and began weaving it into the business I already had. I led transformational retreats that were not yet ceremonies, because I was not yet trained to lead ceremony. I taught women to decondition their relationships with motherhood and marriage and work and money.

It was not the Temple in its fullness.

It was clumsy in places, the way everything is when you are doing it before anyone has taught you how.

But it was real.

It was mine.

And it was the step that was actually in front of me.

Underneath all of it ran an ache.

For more meaning. More depth. More room to say the things I actually knew.

I kept carrying that ache back into ceremony. I kept flying to California to learn from my mentor. I kept hearing the same voice say the same thing.

There’s more.

There’s more.

There’s more.

I had built the Temple.

I was living on sacred land.

I had the literal proof of the Goddess parked in my own backyard.

And I was not there yet.

For a long time I worried this part of the story meant I was failing.

If the vision was real, why wasn’t I living it all the way?

If I had been shown the work, why couldn’t I just do the work?

If the Goddess had gone to the frankly absurd trouble of putting a literal Temple owned by my high school therapist on Zillow without a price filter while I was drunk, what exactly was I waiting for?

Now I understand the question differently.

The Temple was not proof that I had arrived.

It was an invitation into who I was going to have to become.

And this is one of the things I wish we talked about more when we talk about finding your purpose or following your soul’s work.

Sometimes you know.

Sometimes the thing is right fucking there.

You get the job.

You meet the person.

You receive the vision.

The business starts working.

The opportunity arrives.

You buy the house.

You get the actual Temple.

And then you discover that knowing what is yours and becoming capable of fully inhabiting it are two completely different initiations.

Because your soul’s work is not only asking, Can you hear me?

Eventually it starts asking:

Can you live me?

Can you tolerate being seen differently?

Can you let an old identity die before you fully understand the new one?

Can you stay in relationship with a vision that is bigger than your current capacity without deciding that the gap means you were wrong?

Can you take the piece you can hold today and work with that, instead of either forcing yourself to become someone you aren’t ready to be or shoving the whole thing back into a drawer until some imaginary future version of you finally feels qualified?

Can you be a beginner inside the work you know you came here to do?

These are Sacred Skills too.

And I think this matters because when we tell stories about soul-led work after the fact, we make the path look much cleaner than it actually was.

We say, I received the vision, I found the house, I bought the Temple, I became a priestess.

That is technically true.

It is also completely misleading.

There were years between those sentences.

Years of ceremony. Training. Hiding and coming out of hiding. Trying things. Getting things wrong. Learning what my gifts actually were. Learning how to work with my body and my energy. Learning how to hear the Divine without making every thought in my head a Divine instruction. Learning how to stay in the mystery when I could feel where I was going but could not yet see how I would get there.

I had to develop the capacity to inhabit what my soul had already shown me.

And that development was not a detour from my soul’s work.

It was my soul’s work.

This is why I no longer think of purpose as a destination you discover and then execute.

Your soul’s work is developmental.

It reveals itself at the edge of who you currently know how to be, and then it asks you to grow.

Sometimes the work appears first.

Sometimes the identity does.

Sometimes you can see the Temple years before you can call yourself the priestess.

None of that means you missed the thread.

Skill 3 of 12: Channel Opening

Clearing the static of daily life so high-level guidance can move through you cleanly.

For a long time I thought the ache I felt, to go deeper in my training, deeper in my work, deeper into this person I could feel myself becoming, was evidence that I wasn’t doing enough.

Now I know better.

The ache was not proof that I was doing it wrong.

It was the thread.

And it was pulling me on.

More soon,

Sarah

P.S. If you are carrying a vision that is bigger than your current capacity, and you have been reading that gap as evidence you got it wrong — Sacred Skills Training is where you learn to stay in relationship with it and grow into the woman who can hold it. Hop onto the waitlist for first access on September 22, plus first access to an incredible bonus you won’t want to miss.