September 14, 2026

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A message from Kelly

Yesterday I told you about getting the dream job and discovering, rather inconveniently, that changing jobs had not magically changed me.

I had left a ten-year career, followed a string of signs and synchronicities into a completely different world, landed in a job that included travel, beautiful dinners, gathering women, deep conversations, ceremony and dancing—and within about a year had somehow managed to recreate many of the same patterns that had made me unhappy in the first place.

Which was humbling.

But there was another pattern I had not seen yet.

I had always been number two.

I don’t mean that in a sad way. I was fucking excellent at being number two.

I knew how to walk into an organization, understand the vision, see what was missing, build the strategy, manage the people, fix the systems, anticipate problems and make enormous things happen. I could hold a tremendous amount of responsibility and influence without needing to be the person whose name was on the door.

And honestly, there are beautiful things about that role. I like collaboration. I like being inside something bigger than myself. I like helping ideas become real. I have never had a secret desire to become the lone empress on the mountain.

But what I couldn’t see yet was that I had spent most of my professional life being incredibly powerful inside other people’s containers.

When I came to work with Sarah, this was completely appropriate.

It was her company. Her audience. Her intellectual property. Her body of work. Her vision.

I was hired as Managing Director to help professionalize and grow it. I wasn’t planning to become a spiritual teacher. I wasn’t planning to be visible. I certainly wasn’t planning to become a founder.

My job was to help Sarah Jenks do what Sarah Jenks was here to do.

And then reality started getting blurry.

At first, I was taking Sarah’s ideas and figuring out how to disseminate them. I was a communications person. This was familiar territory. Sarah would have an idea, and I would help turn it into an email, a program, a campaign, a strategy.

Then I started shaping the ideas.

Then I started bringing my own ideas.

And when you’re working inside a traditional company, this isn’t necessarily a particularly existential problem. People collaborate. People ghostwrite. People develop strategy for executives. I’ve done some version of that my entire career.

But when the product is someone’s personal spiritual work, and integrity is one of the highest values of both people involved, it gets weird pretty quickly.

Whose idea is this?

Is this Sarah’s thought that I’m putting into words?

Is this something we arrived at together?

Did I think of this?

And if I did, why am I writing it as someone else?

To be very clear, Sarah was not trying to keep me behind her. If anything, she saw what was happening before I was ready to fully claim it. As soon as the edges started getting blurry, it was incredibly important to her that we get into integrity around what was actually being created.

And at the exact same time, something else was happening that made the whole thing even harder for me to explain.

The spiritual gifts I told you about yesterday were coming online.

After the experience at Emerge when I left the A/V booth, walked to the altar, started moving energy around the room and had Sarah look at me afterward and say, “Who the fuck are you?”, I did what I tend to do when something inexplicable happens.

I got curious.

I kept going to ceremony. I kept practicing. I kept paying attention.

Council became something of a laboratory for Sarah and me. These were small groups of women doing some of the deepest work we offered, many of them founders or leaders trying to figure out what they were building next. Sarah could see things about their inner journeys that I couldn’t see. I could see things about their businesses, work, leadership and systems that she couldn’t see. And increasingly, I could also feel what was happening in the room.

I started doing something I eventually called weaving, which is still the best word I have for an energetic thing I see and do when people gather.

I started scribing—opening my channel and writing things that did not feel like they were coming from the same part of my brain that writes a marketing email.

I would receive messages from archetypes and energies and write them down.

I studied dream work.

Sarah and I started having experiences together that I can only describe as happening on another plane.

And I remained, through all of this, exactly the person who once inspected Santa’s handwriting for inconsistencies and demanded that Catholic school nuns explain the reproductive logistics of Adam and Eve’s children.

So this was inconvenient too.

But one Council retreat at a time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the story that Sarah was the spiritual person creating the work and I was the business person helping her execute it.

That wasn’t what was happening anymore.

We were co-creating.

And then we decided to put hundreds of women inside Old South Church.

It was early 2025, a politically charged moment in the United States, and Sarah and I were in deep conversation about what the restoration of the Sacred Feminine actually meant in the context of the world we were living in.

We wanted to create something big.

We came up with an event called Remember, built around weaving women back into the stories and structures they had been erased from. We rented Old South Church in Boston, this extraordinary historic church where Sarah had gone to preschool and where she had once fantasized about someday being invited to speak as a priestess.

Eventually she realized: fuck waiting to be invited.

We could rent the church.

So we did.

Five hundred women signed up.

And in the months leading up to it, we started writing a series called Threads of Remembrance together.

This was different.

My name was on it.

We were writing about power. Hierarchy. Collective responsibility. Sovereignty. Women’s leadership. The ways we internalize systems of domination and then unconsciously recreate them. We were asking what it would actually take to build new structures instead of simply trying to become more powerful inside the old ones.

And because this is apparently how our work works, we then had to live every fucking thing we were teaching.

Sarah and I have both taken vows around integrity, and one of the annoying things about being deeply committed to integrity is that when something is out of alignment, it gets harder and harder to pretend you can’t see it.

As we built Remember, every wobble became visible.

The wobbles inside me.

The wobbles inside Sarah.

The wobbles between us.

And the places where the structure of the business no longer accurately reflected what was happening inside it.

We were going to Old South Church regularly before the event, sitting inside this enormous sacred space, opening our channels and listening.

I was scribing transmissions from Eve and Mary Magdalene and Salome and women I sometimes barely knew anything about intellectually.

I wrote the opening prayer for Remember.

I wrote the closing prayer.

I wrote and delivered a piece about collective care and the relationship between individual healing and the whole.

And I was standing there writing things like:

“Her power was always relational.”

“Who we are together is greater than what any one of us can hold alone.”

“Our lives are the living temple.”

Meanwhile, I was having to look directly at the structure of my own relationship to power.

Because Sarah had floated the idea of deeper partnership.

And I had been interested.

And then, for reasons I don’t even remember perfectly now, we had sort of walked it back.

Which is when I realized:

Oh.

I actually want this.

And that scared me.

Being number two is safer.

There is protection in being the person behind the person. You can be incredibly influential without having to fully claim authorship. You can be powerful without having to say, publicly and privately:

This is mine too.

And there were very real reasons that scared me.

Sarah had built this company before I arrived. People were there because of her. She was a trained and ordained priestess. I was a former trade-association executive who had recently discovered she could see energetic grids floating over rooms.

What if people thought, Who the fuck is this woman?

Some people did.

I remember someone replying to one of my emails to tell me, “Brevity is a gift, Kelly.”

Which, in case the length of this email has not made it clear, is feedback I have chosen not to integrate.

I also had ideas about systems, collective liberation, business, money, leadership and the responsibility of spiritual people to participate in the world. I knew some of those ideas would challenge people who had originally come into Sarah’s world primarily for personal transformation.

There was a very real possibility that people would think I was ruining her company.

And then there was the part that was harder to admit:

I wanted it anyway.

I don’t remember the conversation word for word, but I remember sitting outside Old South Church and having to take a very big gulp and tell Sarah that I thought I was ready to step into more partnership.

I had to say the desire out loud.

That mattered.

Because Sarah could invite me forward all day long. She could tell me she saw me. She could give me authority. She could put my name on things.

But she could not claim authorship for me.

I had to do that.

Looking back, I can see how old this initiation actually is for me.

I’ve since learned to use my birth chart less as a description of my personality and more as a map of the particular terrain I seem to keep getting initiated through. And one of the loudest tensions in mine sits between individual creative expression and collective contribution, between concentrated power and shared power.

The lesson isn’t that I am supposed to stop collaborating and become number one.

It is almost the opposite.

My work is learning how to be in deep partnership without disappearing inside the partnership.

Collaboration without self-erasure.

Full authorship without needing sole authorship.

And this is where I think we sometimes misunderstand what it means to follow our soul’s work.

We imagine the moment of realization.

I want to do this.

I’m meant to create this.

This is who I really am.

And then we dramatically walk into the sunset.

But recognizing what is true is only the beginning.

Sarah and I did not sit outside Old South Church, declare ourselves partners, hug, and instantly become enlightened non-hierarchical co-founders.

We spent the next six months figuring out what the fuck that actually meant.

We talked about money.

Titles.

Decision-making.

Creative authority.

Public positioning.

The intellectual property Sarah had created before I arrived.

How to compensate her fairly for what she had already built.

What belonged to the new work we were creating together.

What would happen if one of us wanted to leave.

What would happen if our relationship fell apart.

Who carried which risks.

And I want to be precise here, because integrity still matters: our risk is not identical. Sarah is still technically the owner of the business because changing the legal structure did not make financial sense. She owns the property where much of our work happens. She is the primary guide and priestess inside the company and carries a level of public visibility that I do not.

We worked with a lawyer. We created a contract. We changed compensation, titles, decision-making, public positioning and creative authority. We created agreements about what happens if we separate.

We went all the way into the extremely unsexy logistics of making the external structure reflect what had become internally true.

Today, Sarah and I operate in 50/50 co-founder energy. She is our primary priestess and guide. I am CEO. Our roles are distinct because we are distinct. And the work we are creating now is being built to hold both of us.

That feels in integrity.

It also continues to initiate the shit out of both of us.

Because non-hierarchical relationships are no small feat.

I can see versions of this pattern in my marriage too, and that is probably another email for another day. But I am increasingly convinced that one of the great developmental challenges of my life is learning how to stand in full sovereignty while remaining deeply relational.

How to be fully myself without needing to separate.

How to collaborate without disappearing.

How to hold power without needing power over.

How to let another person be extraordinary without using their extraordinariness as an excuse to make myself secondary.

And I think this is one of the places where “finding your purpose” language becomes painfully inadequate for what actually happens when you begin walking your soul’s path.

Because my soul’s work was never just waiting somewhere for me to discover it.

It has been initiating me.

It has made me look at my patterns.

My conditioning.

My relationship to power.

My attachment to being useful.

My ability to tolerate being misunderstood.

My willingness to take responsibility for what I create.

It has asked me to develop gifts I did not know I had, use my voice in ways that feel increasingly like mine, open my channel while maintaining my discernment, have brutally honest conversations with someone I love, negotiate money, hire lawyers, change organizational structures, and become more sovereign inside my own life.

Those are skills.

Sacred Skills.

The ability to recognize a pattern while you are still inside it.

To discern what is actually true underneath fear, ego, conditioning and fantasy.

To stay in relationship while telling the truth.

To hold discomfort without immediately retreating to the structure that used to make you feel safe.

To receive information through intuition, the body and the unseen without abandoning critical thinking.

To take responsibility for your gifts instead of perpetually locating their source and authority somewhere outside yourself.

To allow your identity to change when reality has already changed.

And then to do the very practical work of rebuilding your actual life around that truth.

That last one matters enormously to me.

Because I don’t think sovereignty means doing everything alone.

I don’t think authorship means being the only author.

I don’t think leadership means being at the top.

And I definitely don’t think soul-aligned work means abandoning contracts, spreadsheets, lawyers, money conversations and all the other deeply human infrastructure required to make something real.

I think the work is becoming conscious enough, skilled enough and brave enough to build structures that actually reflect what you believe.

Skill 12 of 12: Visibility, Not Vulnerability

Distinguishing the discomfort of being seen from actual danger, so you can walk into any room as your full self without contracting.

At Remember, I stood inside Old South Church and read a closing prayer I had written.

Near the end, I said:

“We are becoming it.

Our lives are the living temple.”

I don’t think I fully understood what I was saying yet.

Because the Temple we were talking about wasn’t going to be something Sarah built and I supported.

And it wasn’t going to be something I took from her and made mine.

We were going to have to learn how to build it together.

My path was never from number two to number one.

It was from number two to founder.

And there is a difference.

More soon,

Kelly

P.S. If you have been incredibly powerful inside someone else’s container and you are starting to feel the pull to put your own name on the work — Sacred Skills Training is where you build the capacity to be seen doing it. Join the waitlist for first access to the Equinox Enrollment rate — the lowest investment we offer on Sacred Skills, held only for this window.