To sit among those
who seek not to be right,
but to grow
this is wealth.
This is sacred.

And then, quietly, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.

I began to notice that I no longer needed to convince. I no longer needed someone else to witness it, name it, or give it weight.

Because I could feel it inside of me.

Not as a thought or a concept, but as a presence. A living pulse. A knowing that rested in my body, steady and true.

Because as I witness her openness, I can feel the echo of another version of myself, the mother I once was, stepping into the unknown without the hands I needed to hold. The one who carried questions in silence. The one who longed, in ways she may not have fully understood, to be guided, to be witnessed, to be supported by someone who knew the terrain.

Standing there, I felt a kind of remembering that didn’t come as a thought. It came as a knowing. A connection that stretched beyond this moment, beyond this version of me. Something ancient. Something familiar. A thread that felt deeply tied to shamanic ways of being, of sensing, listening, and moving between worlds both seen and unseen.

There was a time when I would have bristled.
A time when I would have corrected.
A time when I would have needed to assert.

Instead, I observed.

“But… do you want to?”

There was both a subtlety and a directness in the question, and each carried its own medicine. The subtlety invited me to stand more firmly in my desires—to feel them, to claim them, to stop apologizing for wanting what I want. The directness called me into a deeper state of self-awareness and self-actualization, asking me to meet myself without illusion.

For the first time in my life, I understand what it means to be alive—not conceptually, not philosophically, but viscerally. I am no longer observing life from a distance or narrating it through thought. I am inside of it. I am feeling it move through me.

That was the real tension I was living inside. If I allowed the truth of who I am—what I feel, what I know, what my soul is asking for—to lead my life and be fully expressed, I feared people would misinterpret it. I feared they would mistake awakening for instability.

As I attuned to the early morning sunlight filtering through the windows, the playful aliveness of the kittens, the stillness and spaciousness of the mornings, something inside me recalibrated. As I felt the energetics of clean sheets against my skin, the warmth of the shower, the grounding weight of a coffee mug in my hand, the scent of a meal I was lovingly preparing, the glow of the fireplace, the quiet perfection of a single rose—my internal frequency changed.

In that moment, I felt magnetic—fully aligned, fully available. Any experience I wanted felt possible. Every expression of myself was accessible. I could be soft or fierce, creative and abstract or linear and concrete. I could embody the feminine and fluid, or the masculine and structured. I could move freely between all of it. Each expression felt equally true, equally satisfying. There were no limits—only choice.