Awareness is awesome. Until it isn’t enough. You can rattle off your resistance and describe every inch of how you hold yourself back. You can paint a picture of your patterns and how they keep you stuck. Yet, for how well you see your shadow, you don’t know how to move beyond it to create what feels impossible. You’re stuck IN IT. And all you want is to be free of it. That’s because awareness doesn’t cut it. You have to USE IT. When you’re aware of how you’re blocked, you’re not actually blocked—you’re choosing to be. Where it looks like you have a problem, what if there’s simply a...

This forest is unlike any I’ve ever known. It smells sweet. A scent you’d get from sap and pine needles baking in the heat. The air is clean and cool. The trees are strange—short, scrubby pines, twisting towards the sky. The wind whooshes through their tops, making a sound like ocean waves in the distance. I secretly wonder if they learned to imitate the sea from living next to it. Wandering down the pine needle path, sun spots dance in the grass and moss speckles the forest floor. There’s magic here. It’s palpable and real and I stop to breathe it in, taking it into me. When you’re grounded, you’re...

Pursuing and living your calling is one of the highest forms of WAKING UP. When you’re anchored in the world by your calling, you feel a sense of fulfillment that is no match to what any relationship, any drug, or any amount of money from a soul-sucking job could provide. I know this because I’ve experienced it myself. There was a time in my life when I was anchored in the world not by my calling, but by the men I dated. They WERE MY WORLD and I let my life revolve around them. I let them be my purpose—to the point where I became obsessed. So obsessed that I...