What the Lake House Taught Me

Stop Asking Permission to Be Loved

Dear Sovereign Sisters: There are two ways to be allowed into a room, and we spend most of our lives confusing them. The first is permission. Someone with authority looks at you, weighs you, and decides you may enter. You followed the rules. You earned the seat. You proved you belonged, and the proof was accepted. The second is presence. The door is simply open. No one weighs your value. No one decides. You are welcomed before you have proven anything, and there is nothing you could do to be turned away, because your belonging was never the question. They can look identical from outside the room. Two women, both seated, both apparently included. But the woman who was given permission is still being measured. She knows it in her body. The woman who knows her value as presence stopped being measured the moment she walked in. What Permission Costs Permission has a price most of us stopped noticing we were paying. It is conditional, which means it can be revoked. And anything that can be revoked must be maintained. So you manage, and perform. You stay pleasant well past the point of self-respect, because the warmth is currency and the verdict is never final. I was trained as an attorney. I know how to build a case. For most of my life, the case I was building was for myself. I presented it nightly to whatever authority I had appointed to judge me, arguing that I was good enough, kind enough, spiritual enough to be allowed to stay. The Approved Experience and the Real One I learned the difference in Chartres, France. I was on a sacred pilgrimage I had crossed an ocean to attend. Toward the end of the retreat, several women got COVID, including me. And a woman who called herself a spiritual leader announced to the group that those of us who were sick were not spiritual enough to be present. I wrote about that night already, the hours I spent arguing my own adequacy to a woman who had no standing to judge it. You can read it here: What I want to show you now is the part I have not talked about. While the approved pilgrims walked the labyrinth inside the Cathedral, in a ceremony reserved for the people who were healthy, the sick women were in a hotel room. One of them, a Reiki Master, spent the very hour she was barred from the ceremony giving healing treatments to the women who had been barred alongside her. That was permission and presence, in two rooms, at the same hour. The sanctioned experience required you to be well enough, good enough, spiritual enough. To pay thousands of dollars and spend several weeks leading to that space. The real experience asked nothing, other than to be open to healing. Sit with that distinction for a moment. The next day, my friend and I walked to the Chartres Cathedral and we found an unmarked door on the outside. Several people were walking through the door, down the thousand-year-old stone steps into the crypt that is the oldest part of the Cathedral. We decided to follow at a distance and what we found was extraordinary. A mass said in French. Rows of pews and people worshiping. We quietly took a seat in the last row, away from those seated at the front. No one knew our names. No one approved our belonging. We didn’t ask permission and we didn’t seek approval. In those moments of worship, Love arrived anyway. As I breathed the smell of incense and opened my heart, Love flowed through me. Not after I proved I deserved it. Before. Without condition or limitation. Love waits on your opening. That is the only way it has ever come. The Decision That Is Yours Between the permission you keep chasing and the presence already offered, there is a choice. It is the only one that was ever truly yours to make. Sovereignty is the decision to listen to the Voice of Divine Love. Not to win the case. Not to argue with the authority that judged you. Not even to leave the room. Only to turn away from the verdict and toward the Love that waits patiently underneath your performance. The woman seeking permission listens for the ruling. The sovereign woman listens to the Voice of Love. It begins in the body. In the breath that returns the moment you stop straining to hear something that was never going to set you free. Why It Matters Which One You Are Chasing Here is the distinction that changes a life. Permission keeps you auditioning. The people granting it have not decided about you. That is the entire nature of permission: a verdict perpetually pending. So, you keep performing for a ruling that never arrives, and you call the performance belonging. Presence has already decided. There is no audition, because there was never a question about your value. You feel it in your breath, which deepens. In your shoulders, which drop. In the thing behind your ribs that finally stops bracing. The tragedy is not that we are denied presence. The tragedy is that we are offered it, often, by people and places that ask nothing of us, and we do not recognize it. We are too busy trying to earn the permission we have mistaken for the real thing. The Question I want to ask you something, and I want it to be specific. Where in your life are you working to earn a seat at a table, when there is an open door you keep walking past? Whose permission are you still seeking, managing, charming, performing for, when their approval was never the thing that was going to let you breathe? You do not need permission to be admitted. Notice where you are already welcome and then make the one sovereign choice that is yours: to stop listening for the verdict, and listen to the Voice of Love. * * * I have been writing toward these truths in a trilogy called, “Sovereign Women.” The Sovereign Women trilogy rests on a single conviction: that women deserve presence rather than permission in their hardest moments. When women are given time and space to grieve, to choose, to come home, their decisions are made from Love, not fear. Sovereignty, as I have come to understand it, is the decision to listen to the presence of Divine Love. The women in these books spend years listening for permission. The story is what happens when they finally turn, and listen to the Voice of Love instead. If that is the door you have been walking past, the first book is here. The second book is still in the drafting phase, and will be released this summer. To your presence, Kathryn This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe [https://empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Most Important Relationship You Never Question

Dearest Sovereigns: There is a voice you have been in relationship with your entire life. You have never questioned its authority. You have never asked where it came from, who installed it, or whether it has been telling you the truth. You have simply obeyed it, argued with it, tried to silence it, or performed for it the way you perform for every authority you have never thought to examine. That voice has opinions about your worth, your body, and your choices. It has questioned your right to take up space in a room, a relationship, a life. And somewhere along the way you made the most consequential mistake a woman can make. You believed it was telling you the truth. I learned the difference between that voice and the Voice of Love for the first time on a motorcycle in West Texas, many years into an IVF journey that was breaking me. But learning it once is not the same as living it. My experience on retreat in Chartres, France taught me that. What Chartres Taught Me About Whose Voice I Was Still Carrying I was quarantined in a hotel room in Chartres, France, sick with COVID, listening to a recording of a spiritual leader telling a room full of pilgrims that the women who had fallen ill were not spiritual enough to be present with the group. I want to tell you what happened in my body when I heard that. The old voice activated immediately. The one I thought I had learned to quiet through meditation, inner work, and the hard-won clarity of a woman who knows the difference between fear and truth. The voice started building a case that I was spiritual enough. It was not my fault I got sick. I have done more inner work than half the women walking that labyrinth. The voice was relentless and insisted on compiling evidence on my behalf. I argued with myself until 3:00 in the morning. And then I saw what I was doing. I was arguing with her voice and her verdict. The argument itself was the relationship. Every defense I constructed confirmed that her judgment had the power to require one. The moment I understood that, something released. Not because I felt vindicated. Because I asked myself the only question that mattered. Whose voice am I actually in relationship with right now? It was not Love’s voice. Love does not require a defense. It does not need you to prove your adequacy before it will speak to you. Love was not in the argument at all. It was in the stillness underneath, waiting with the patience of something that has never once doubted who you are. When I stopped arguing and breathed, Love was there. It had been there the entire time. The Voice You Have Confused for Truth Fear’s voice is sophisticated. It does not always announce itself as fear. It sounds like reason and self-awareness. It’s practical and masquerades as the honest assessment of a woman who sees herself clearly and is simply being realistic about her limitations. But the body always knows the difference before the mind catches up. Fear tightens when it shortens the breath, contracts the chest, holds the throat closed around the words that need to be spoken. It produces the specific physical sensation of a woman bracing against something she believes is coming for her. Love expands, deepens the breath and opens something in the chest that feels, after years of the alternative, almost unbearably spacious. The body has never lied to you about which voice is speaking. It has simply been overruled so many times by the mind’s elaborate justifications that it has stopped expecting to be heard. The Only Voice That Is True The Voice of Love is not the optimistic version of your inner critic. It is not a positive reframe of your deepest fear. It is not something you manufacture through affirmation or willpower. The Voice of Love = Divine Love. The fierce, ancient, radiant kind that does not require your situation to be resolved before it will speak. That does not need you to have healed sufficiently or chosen correctly or proven your spiritual adequacy before it will reach you. It reached me on a West Texas highway, riding a motorcycle as I argued with God. It reached me in a quarantine hotel room in Chartres, France when I was sick, excluded, and building a case for my own worth at 3:00 in the morning. It did not arrive because I deserved it. It arrived because it was always there, and I had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it. Fear’s voice is loud because it is afraid of being seen for what it is. It fills every silence and delivers its verdicts with such certainty that questioning its authority feels almost sacrilegious. But it is not the truth about you. It has never been the truth about you. The truth about you is what Love says. And Love, when you are finally still enough to hear it, does not deliver verdicts. It asks questions that open everything. It sees what is whole in you before you can see it yourself. It waits, without impatience, for the moment you stop arguing long enough to receive what it has been trying to give you all along. Your sovereignty begins the moment you stop treating fear’s voice as the authoritative account of who you are, and recognize it for what it actually is: a very old, very frightened story that was never yours to carry. An Invitation In June, inside the Sovereign Women’s Circle [https://www.empoweredway.com/sovereign-womens-circle], we are exploring the theme of relationships. The most important relationship work any of us can do is not with our partners or our histories. It is with the voice we have been in relationship with longest, the one shaping every other relationship from the inside, without our awareness or our consent. In our June gathering we will sit together with the question the Voice of Love has been waiting to ask you. We will practice telling the two voices apart in the body, in real time, in the middle of ordinary life. If you are not yet part of the Circle, come. Bring the voice you have been arguing with. Bring the verdict you have been living inside. The Voice of Love is already there, waiting with perfect patience for exactly this moment. Your sovereignty waits for you to turn away from the voice of fear and toward the Voice of Love. To your presence, Kathryn Thanks for reading The Sovereign Voice on Empowered Way! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe [https://empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Love is the Most Revolutionary Act

Dear Sovereigns: I was on the back of a motorcycle somewhere in West Texas, holding on to my husband and finally, after many years, letting go of everything else. The grief had been living in my chest so long I had stopped noticing its weight. Three years of IVF. Years of watching my body fail at the one thing women are supposed to do naturally. Many hours of quietly, relentlessly arguing my case to a God who did not seem to be listening. On that desolate highway, feeling the dry wind and the motorcycle below me, something cracked open. Not gently and definitely not with ceremony. It was the particular exhaustion of a woman who had finally run out of the energy for argument. Instead of arguing with reality, I gave it all to God. And in the silence that followed, I heard a simple question. “Do you want to be pregnant or do you want to be a mother?” That question instantly dissolved years of suffering in a single moment. Why? Because it was not fear speaking, it was Love. And Love, I discovered that day, does not offer you answers. It offers you something far more dangerous. It offers you a choice. The Revolution Nobody Is Talking About The world is sorting itself into positions right now. Every conversation, every platform, every relationship is being pressed into a shape that demands you choose a side and defend it. And into that noise every woman is being asked to locate herself clearly, without the uncomfortable admission that real life is more complex than any position can hold. When fear is this loud, certainty feels like safety. But certainty delivered by fear is not safety. It is a smaller cage dressed in the language of conviction. The revolution I am interested in does not begin with a position. It begins with the question underneath the noise. Not “What should I do?” but “What does Love have to say about this that fear has been drowning out?” That question is more radical than any activist or march. It’s more dangerous to the structures that require women’s compliance than anything happening in the loudly contested external world. Why? Because a woman who can hear Love’s voice in the middle of an impossible situation cannot be controlled by fear. And fear has been the primary instrument of women’s compliance for a very long time. What Love Actually Is I am not talking about sentiment or the passive, conflict-avoiding version of love handed to women as a spiritual ideal. That kind of love smiles and accommodates and makes herself small so others can feel large. What I am pointing to is Divine Love. The fierce, ancient, radiant kind that arrived on a West Texas highway as a question that dissolved years of grief. It’s the Love that found me in sitting in a French crypt while I was recovering from Covid and technically breaking the rules. Divine Love does not require your situation to be resolved before it will speak to you. This Love does not tell you what you want to hear. It tells you what is true. And the truth, when you are finally still enough to receive it, is not a verdict about what you should have done differently. It is the discovery that you were never as broken as fear told you. The amazing news is that Divine Love is available to every woman on the planet, regardless of where she stands on anything. Why I Wrote the Book Emily Carter, the protagonist of “Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice [https://a.co/d/08xoAEzw],” faces an impossible situation. Everyone around her has an answer. Her family. Her faith. Her culture. Her fear, loudest of all. What nobody offers Emily is what Love offered me on that highway. A question instead of a verdict. A voice that does not need her to be further along before it will speak. I wrote this book to stand in the vortex of one woman’s impossible situation and show what becomes possible when she stops listening to fear long enough to hear what Love has to say. Instead of arguing a position, this book shows you a woman deciding for herself and trusts you to find your own truth in the watching. I trust your truth. That is the whole premise. Some revolutions begin in the streets. This one begins in the soul. In the stillness before anyone else is awake. In the breath that returns after the argument finally stops. In the moment a woman asks herself, maybe for the first time, “What Love would say about this that fear has been so urgently answering for years?” That moment is the revolution. Not because of what she decides. Because of who is deciding. “Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice [https://a.co/d/08xoAEzw]” is available now. And if you want to walk this path alongside other women, the Sovereign Women’s Circle [https://www.empoweredway.com/checkout/cart] gathers tonight. Please join us and share in the joy of sisterhood. Bring what you are carrying. Love is already waiting at the center. To your presence, Kathryn This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe [https://empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Live with Kathryn Eriksen

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe [https://empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

What the Lake House Taught Me

Dearest Sovereigns: When my husband retired, our financial life quietly rearranged itself in ways I had not fully anticipated. The income that had made a second home feel natural and sustainable was no longer there. The reality of carrying a second home with a different financial footing became something I could no longer defer thinking about. I want to be honest about what that felt like, because the teaching I am about to offer you lives inside of the experience. The fear that arose was not dramatic or consuming, but it was real. It visited me the way financial fear always does, quietly, persistently, with a calculator running in the background of every other thought. The lake house needed to sell, and I was aware, at a level beneath the rational planning, of how much was riding on it. That awareness was the moment of choice. Not a grand spiritual crossroads, but the ordinary daily decision that sovereignty asks of every woman who has done enough inner work to know she has one: I could focus on the need, the urgency, the fear of a house sitting on the market too long, or I could surrender the entire process to Divine Love and remain genuinely unattached to how it unfolded. I chose the second path, and what happened in the weeks that followed showed me something about sovereignty and wealth that I had understood intellectually for years and had not yet lived at this particular depth. Please share this article with another woman who is struggling. You may be the ray of hope she needs. Tosha Silver and the Offering Tosha Silver is a best selling author. When I first read her book, “It’s Not Your Money [https://a.co/d/02W5QuXy],” it opened a new awareness about the source of abundance and true wealth. Silver shares a practice called “The Offering.” You place what you desire, or what you fear losing, into the hands of the Divine and releasing your grip on the outcome. Her central premise is not passive resignation but a radical reorientation of source: when a woman stops relating to money as something she must generate through effort, strategy, and anxious management, and begins relating to the Divine as the actual origin of all provision, the entire interior landscape of her financial life changes. What Silver describes is not a technique for attracting better results, though her readers often discover that results do improve. It is a practice of consciousness, a fundamental shift in the question a woman is living from. The fearful question is: how do I make this happen? The sovereign question is: what is Love already making available that my fear has been too contracted to see? I used her prayers when we listed the lake house. Not as a ritual I performed once and then returned to my anxiety, but as a genuine daily practice of releasing our need to a source larger than my own planning. I pictured the house, offered it to Divine Love, and asked that it find its way to the people it was meant for. I tried, as honestly as I could, to mean it. The peace that came was not the peace of certainty about the outcome. It was the peace of having placed the outcome somewhere I trusted more than my own management of it. What Sovereignty Made Possible Here is where sovereignty consciousness enters the story as something distinct from Silver’s framework, not in opposition to it but as the interior architecture that makes her practice livable rather than merely aspirational. A woman cannot genuinely surrender what she has not first witnessed clearly enough to name. She cannot offer her financial fear to Divine Love if that fear is running her nervous system below the level of conscious awareness, shaping every decision and perception without her realizing it is there. It is the witness self, the capacity sovereignty develops in a woman over time, that allows her to see the fear as fear rather than as reality, to observe it moving through her without becoming it, and to make the offering from a place of genuine choice rather than spiritual performance. When I stood at the threshold of that choice with the lake house, I could feel the fear clearly enough to name it, which meant I could also choose not to follow it. That clarity did not arrive automatically. It was learning to distinguish the contracted feeling of fear from the expanded feeling of Love, of trusting my own inner knowing enough to act from it even when the outcome was genuinely uncertain. Silver gives women the theology and the practice. Sovereignty gives them the inner ground to actually stand on while they do it. Both are necessary, and I have found in my own life that neither is fully complete without the other. The Visualization That Arose on Its Own Something happened during those weeks that I want to describe carefully, because it illustrates the difference between a technique and a fruit of genuine surrender. The difference matters enormously for women who have been through enough personal development work to recognize the distinction. I did not decide to visualize a family falling in love with the lake house as a strategy for selling it. The image arose naturally, without effort, as a consequence of the surrender itself. Because I had genuinely released my own need, there was interior room for something other than my own agenda. What filled my heart was a genuine, warm desire for whoever came next to love the house and the surrounding area as deeply as we had loved it. We had spent years watching other couples retire in that area and settle into the particular beauty of life near the water and golf courses. We knew those people existed, knew they were looking for exactly what our house offered, and because I was not contracted around our need to sell, I could feel the rightness of the house finding its way to them. That generosity of spirit was not something I manufactured. It was what became available when fear stopped narrowing my perception to the width of our own understanding”. This is precisely what Silver means when she describes consciousness widening and deepening through the practice of offering. The widening is not metaphor. It is a perceptual reality. When fear contracts around a financial situation, a woman can only see the problem and the urgent need for a solution. When Love expands through the same situation, she begins to see the fuller field, the people already moving toward her, the provision already forming, the grace already present in a landscape her fear had been too narrow to perceive. The Result and Why It Is Not the Point We received offers in the first week. We had a solid contract by week two. I tell you this not because the speed of the sale is the teaching, but because I am aware that your mind went there immediately, as most minds do, and I want to address it honestly before it becomes a distortion of what actually happened. If the house had taken six months to sell, the teaching would be identical. The peace I felt before the offers arrived was the evidence of what sovereignty and surrender actually produce, not the sale itself. It was the interior freedom that made it possible to move through the process without being consumed by fear. The result was grace, and I received it with genuine gratitude, but it is not the proof of the practice. The proof of the practice was the woman I was during the weeks between listing and contract, the quality of attention I brought to it, the generosity I felt toward people I had not yet met, and the quiet certainty that whatever happened would carry Love’s fingerprints. I name this explicitly because the women I work with have often been through enough manifestation and law-of-attraction teaching to have absorbed, somewhere beneath their conscious beliefs, the idea that surrender is a more sophisticated strategy for getting what you want. It is not. Surrender is a reorientation of who is in charge, and the woman who practices it genuinely is not practicing it because she expects a particular outcome. She is practicing it because she has discovered that living from Divine Love rather than from financial fear is simply a truer and more spacious way to be alive. The financial dimension of her life, like every other dimension, looks different from inside that spaciousness than it did from inside the fear. What This Means for Your Own Financial Life I am not offering you a formula. I want to be clear about that, because the woman reading this who is carrying real financial pressure deserves honesty more than she deserves a repackaged technique. What I am offering is a question worth sitting with, one that sovereignty consciousness and Tosha Silver’s practice both point toward from their different directions: In your current financial situation, are you living from the contracted question of “How will I make it happen?” or from the expanded question of “What does Love make available now?” The answer to that question is not found in the mind. It is found in the body, in the breath, in the felt sense of expansion or contraction that your nervous system registers before your thinking has a chance to explain it away. Fear tightens. Love expands. Your body already knows which one is running your financial life, and it has known for longer than you have been willing to acknowledge it. The practice Silver describes, (offering what you desire or fear losing to Divine Love and releasing your attachment to the outcome) is available to you right now, in your current financial situation, not after you have resolved enough or healed enough or built enough inner ground to deserve it. The offering is the ground. The surrender is the practice. And sovereignty that makes genuine surrender possible. That choice, made quietly and without guarantee of outcome, is where sovereign wealth actually begins. Not in a strategy or a mindset or a carefully constructed plan, but in the moment a woman releases her grip on what she cannot control and discovers that what she releases into Love’s hands is not lost, but carried. To your sovereignty, Kathryn P.S. If this article stirred something in your own relationship with money and fear, Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice [https://a.co/d/02xwOQtE]carries this same teaching into the full arc of a woman’s interior life. P.P.S. And if you are ready to explore how sovereignty consciousness meets your financial world in a more direct and personal way, I would love to introduce you to Flo, the Money Tree AI, [https://www.empoweredway.com/flo-ai] who holds that conversation with care. The Sovereign Voice on Empowered Way is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe [https://empoweredway.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]