September 15, 2026

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A message from Sarah

All of the ordained priestesses of my lineage were gathering, from all over the world, forty of us sitting in ceremony together in one room.

At one point we were each asked to bring an offering to the circle.

Before I get into it, I want you first to know that one of my gifts, maybe my strongest one, is that I can see everybody’s fullest potential.

When I look into another person’s eyes I can feel their authentic frequency, the part of them that makes them completely unique and able to change the world, and whenever I’m with someone my whole intention is to reach in and pull that out of them, to help them feel the greater-than-imagined possibility of who they actually are.

So in my offering, that’s what I did. But I brought too much fire and too much shaking into a field that was soft that day. And one of my priestess sisters called me in for it, in front of everybody. That was her job. Attuning each other’s gifts is part of what we do for one another in this lineage, and she was doing exactly what she was supposed to do.

And I collapsed.

Here’s what I wish I’d done in the moment, I wish I’d looked at my fire and felt the nuance.  I wish I had taken a moment to see that instead of pouring gasoline on it, I could have just placed a few logs, and found the exact right level of heat the moment was asking for.

Because there’s a whole art embedded in fire, in finding the temperature that transforms instead of scorches. But that’s not what I did. What I did was go get a big ass bucket of water, and I put it out.

It was right around then that we were building the Living Temple, and I wanted so badly to build something in integrity with my role as a priestess, something any woman could walk into and hear her own soul.

So I created the container I thought I “should” create.  Built a “good” Temple. I made the ceremonial field gentle. I decided not to initiate anyone, not to call anyone forward, not to hold anyone’s feet to the fire.

My own fire had started to feel dangerous to me. I wanted to be good. I wanted so badly to be a good priestess that, without even noticing it happen, I started following the rules instead of my own soul.

And it was good, but it wasn’t me.

At the same time, I was walking through a whole stack of personal initiations. Building a new house, and every nightmare and problem you could possibly imagine happening. Massive challenges in my marriage. And learning, after fifteen years of standing completely alone, how to stand right next to another woman who was fully in her power, insanely brilliant, opinionated, sure of herself, and clear.

For most of my career I’d stood alone on purpose, because standing alone meant no one could ever challenge me or catch me being wrong.

Looking back, I can see how the Goddess was setting up a beautifully orchestrated mystery school that was closing in on me from all angles and hit my most painful wound with a precision that would be impressive if it weren’t so painful.

When the initiations start, this is the moment most people think, I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have bought the house, quit my job, ended that relationship. And I definitely did have my version of that, but the Priestess in me knew, when you make big moves, when you step into leadership, when you meet an initiator, the challenges are evidence that you nailed it.

I hadn’t fucked up my life (though it reallllly felt like it at the time), the Goddess was initiating me through my life.

And she stuck her finger right in the place it hurts the most, my wound around feeling wrong, broken, and just completely unlovable.

And I remember, thinking, ugh again? What’s wrong with me that I have to continue to revisit this terrible place. This feeling is so familiar to me, and I think it might be a familiar feeling for all of us, but when you are down in the trenches of it, it is almost impossible to believe you are not the only woman on earth who feels broken, and like a fraud, and less than, and unfit to lead. It was excruciating.

Because here is what happens when you stop loving yourself. You start to become certain that everyone you love has stopped too, that they cannot see your value either, and that all of them would be just fine, maybe better, without you.

But I have learned that every single underworld journey, no matter how dark it gets down there, is always the path to our greatest expansion yet.

So I went all the way in.

I sat down with the parts of me that carry real shame, the humiliation of being imperfect, of saying the wrong thing or having the wrong idea, of not being a good enough wife or partner or friend or priestess.

We are taught, all of us, that our worth is held entirely inside our roles. So when the roles get challenged, and the world stops feeding you the reassurance that you’re doing it right, and nothing around you is reflecting back that things are working, you get handed something that does not feel like a gift and absolutely is one. You get to find out what is actually left when every external thing is stripped away.

And what I found, down there on the floor of my own psyche, in the insecurity and the shame and the humiliation, was love. A strange, weird, devotional love. The love of a woman who so often sees the worst of herself and the best of everybody else.

Because that is the shape of my particular gift, and I had to turn it around. I had spent my whole life aiming it outward, and I had to point the seeing-of-souls back at myself, and feel, maybe for the first time, real compassion for my own insecurity and my own shrinking and my own smallness and all the ways I have failed to see myself.

I will be the first to admit that I usually just want to grab every woman I work with by the shoulders and shake her, because her beauty and her gifts are such an outrageous treasure, unlike anything I have ever seen on this planet, and I have sat in real frustration watching the world not receive them, only because she is telling herself a story that she does not matter, that she holds no value, that she needs someone out there to choose her and validate her and tell her she is doing a good job every five minutes of every day before she will finally give herself permission to hand her gifts to the world.

And sitting there in my own underworld, I could feel, from the inside, how complete and how heavy and how all-consuming the forgetting really is.

What’s real is that I had moments where I thought about quitting. Kelly could lead without me. Any of the other priestesses could just step in. I could quietly step back and slip into a small life, a life spent walking on eggshells, stuck in comparison, holding still.

And I could see exactly why that was tempting, because going small is safe. If I made myself small, I would never again risk being called out for my fire being too big, or my vision being too much, or my energy getting misread as out of touch, or my joy getting labeled as spiritual bypassing, or my beautiful, intentional life getting seen as vapid. I could just hide. Hold back. Never once risk being called up, or being told I was wrong.

And then I looked at the wound itself, and it called me straight back to my vows.

Because I took a Priestess vow, after years of initiation and training, at the White Spring in Avalon, to walk as love. I decided, standing there, that my relationship to the Goddess and to love was more important than any alliance or relationship I would ever have with any other being on this planet. Including the one I have with the version of myself who just wants to be human and hide.

So I sat with myself in love. Only love. And I looked directly at my shadow and I asked it the one question that turns a wound into a gift. What are you here to teach me?

I see souls.

I see souls underneath the fancy titles. I see souls underneath the shame. I see souls in the fog of confusion. I see souls in the middle of the performance. I see souls hiding behind the personas. I see souls in the wreckage of the abuse and divorce.

And I was not going to let anything distract me from or obscure my own.

So I met her again, right when it was hardest, because that is always the exact moment we get to know ourselves the best. When we are willing to walk through the whole forest of confusion and humiliation and deep pain, our soul finally feels wanted. Chosen.

Not by anybody else. Not by all the people we keep wishing would do this work for us, who would reach in and find our soul and hold it up and tell us how great we are. It has to be you. It was always going to have to be you.

So I sat with her, this strange, feral, devotional, love-drunk, completely delusional soul of mine. In quiet moments, out by my tree, in the middle of the night and early in the morning and in ceremony, and I did not tell a single person (except my Mentor) I was doing it until right now.

Because some journeys have to be taken alone. And as a woman who has traveled all over the world looking for herself, I can tell you the most arduous and most miraculous journey of my life has been the one that went straight into me.

And then the work is to let her come back out.

Not to be seen. Not to be celebrated or validated. But because I have a job, and my job is to come sit with you, in your pain and your obscurity and your confusion and your messiness and your shame and your humiliation, and to remember out loud that your soul is still in there. And that she also has a job.

My job, in this moment, is to see the greater-than-imagined possibility. My whole role as a priestess is to see past the perceived constraints of reality, to break every rule, to know in my bones that we exist outside of every box, no matter how fringe that box already is, and to forge a path that has never been walked before and could never be walked by anybody else but you.

This is one of the sacred skills we teach women, when we teach them how to step into leadership. How to sit in the shadow. How to understand it mythically. How to walk all the way through the underworld and let yourself unravel completely, How to go into the darkest tunnel you have and feel for what is still shining down there in all that dark.

And then how to take that darkness and actually use it. We ask the shame what it came to teach us. We ask the humiliation how it intends to be an ally. We take the mistakes and we turn them into tools, and we put all of it into a medicine bag and we hang it around our necks and we carry it as wisdom.

All while still getting up in the morning, doing what needs to be done, trying, in every moment to cultivate joy, to do your very best work, not to get over it, but to hold it.

While I was sitting in the underworld I was also having some of the best moments of my life, I laughed uncontrollably, was in awe of my kids, moved us into our forever home, led ceremonies I am incredibly proud of, did some of the most incredible creative work of my life.  And it wasn’t a distraction, it was transmutation, it was fuel, it was tending.

Nobody ever said the path was easy. It is rich, though, once you decide to walk it, because it is the way we become who we are, it is the way we birth a life.

And there is a second gift hiding inside the first one, which is that you do not only get the honor of finally knowing yourself. You also get the deep satisfaction of knowing your job. Because the thing we are all out there hunting for, the being chosen and validated and seen and valued by other people, turns out to be the exact feeling we receive when we do our own soul’s job, and then do it again, and again, and again, until it is anchored and practiced and ours.

And if you’re reading this, I’d put money on you being someone who thinks you have to hold it together all the time. That you have to be perfect to be taken seriously. That you’re not allowed any flaws or any mess, and that a good life is one clean upward line toward finally having it all figured out. It is not.

And if you lead anything, a team, a company, a whole community, I need you to hear that your initiations are going to be bigger and faster and more intense than other people’s, not because something is wrong with you, but because you have to go through the hardest things your people are going through in order to be any use to them when they arrive there themselves.

Skill 10 of 12: Archetypal Leadership

Accessing the specific (and intentionally erased) wisdom of ancient feminine archetypes to solve modern problems.

So these days I am in the deep practice of fire tending for my work. Finding the right amount of heat for the moment, the right number of logs, the right kindling, the size the moment is actually asking for.

A fire that pulls a woman into the center and helps her remember who she is, and initiates her at exactly the level her soul is asking for. I watch for it being too overpowering. I watch for it being too light.

And it is in that attunement that I do my truest work. Helping you see who you really are.

And holding you to the fire when you forget.

More tomorrow,

Sarah

P.S. If you’ve made your own fire smaller because someone once told you it was too much, and you’ve been calling that being good — Sacred Skills Training is where you learn to tend it instead of putting it out. Join the waitlist here for first access on September 22, the Equinox Enrollment rate, and our Reinvention Collection — a $1,665 bonus if you enroll in the first 48 hours.