The Difference Between an Answer and a Choice

The Difference Between an Answer and a Choice

Dear Sovereigns: There is a particular quiet that arrives when certainty stops working. You know the one. The plan was clear, practical, and the answer was obvious. Everyone agreed on what you should do. And then something happened that none of it could hold, and for the first time in a long while, you did not know your next steps. Most of us are taught to fear that silence and fill it fast. To reach for the nearest answer and call it peace. But what if the not-knowing is not a failure? What if it is the first honest moment you have had in years? This is the question at the heart of the Sovereign Women [https://a.co/d/07hVVVBg] triology. Meet the Characters from Book One Her name is Emily Carter. She was raised by her grandmother, Rose, to listen, go quiet and let Love lead. Emily learned to read the sky and feel the unseen mystery of life. Then Emily grew up, went to college, and built a life on the opposite of everything Rose taught her. Her life became one of certainty, of always having the answer. Emily was never caught not knowing. Until she faced a situation that forced her to remember what her grandmother taught her, despite it being impractical, unreasonable, and against everything she though she stood for. Emily was not the only life her grandmother touched. There is Mark Davis, who trained under Rose and learned to listen without flinching. Steady, warm, the kind of presence that accepts you before you have finished explaining yourself. Mark and Emily bond over their desire to step out of certainty and into Love’s presence. There is Natalie Williams, a quieter warmth in the same world, who keeps a room where people are allowed to come undone. The owner of Now and Zen Cafe, Natalie suffered an unspeakable tragedy and with the help of Rose, regained herself. Natalie went on to create Now and Zen Cafe and Coffee, the gathering place for her small town. Her journey through the minefield of deep grief gave her a presence that can hold other’s pain. And finally, there is Sarah Whitmore, the founder and CEO of the Women’s Choice Collective. Smart, articulate, and passionate about her cause, Sarah must face the her own doubts that lie underneath her certainty. Sarah trained under Rose alongside Mark, and stood at the very same source. And then she chose certainty instead. She created the Women’s Choice Collective as the place where certainty meets action. After college, Emily followed Sarah’s philosophy and rejected the spiritual grounding from her grandmother, Rose. For years, certainty was the whole architecture of Emily’s career, work, and life. And then the architecture failed. A question arrived that certainty couldn’t survive, and Emily found herself standing between the two people who had shaped her. The grandmother who taught her to listen within. The mentor who taught her never to. I am not going to tell you what she chooses. I will only tell you this. Fear will always offer you an answer. Love offers you something better. It offers you a choice. If you have ever stood in that quiet, between who you were taught to be and who you are becoming, you already know these people. And you may have spent your whole life longing for someone who simply listens. Come and meet them. They live inside Book One [https://a.co/d/0dtgVNg1] of the Sovereign Women Series. Please come back to learn more about these characters, what they face, and how they survived. If something here met you, stay close. Empowered Way is free, and each week we share new essays on sovereignty and Divine Love for women learning to trust their own knowing. Subscribe, and the first chapter of my novel, Sovereign Women, will be waiting in your welcome note. Many blessings, Kathryn Please Note: The portraits were created with AI to help you imagine the characters as I see them, not as photographs of anyone real. Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. This post is public so feel free to share it. A Second Note: The Sovereign Women trilogy is a work of fiction and explores a third way through difficult conversations and decisions. The entire premise of the series is: Some revolutions begin in the streets. This one begins in the soul. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com [https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

What Happens When You Stop Running

Dear Sovereign: Julia Faire became a famous actress because she never grieved a terrible loss. That is not a criticism. It is the most honest thing I can say about how she built her life. Eleven years before the story of my second novel begins, something happened that should have unmade her. Instead of allowing it, she ran. She left everything behind, moved to Los Angeles, and poured herself into becoming someone extraordinary. And she did. The running was fuel. The thing she refused to feel became the engine underneath everything she built. Until the day she accepted a role she realized she could not play. Until the performance itself, the very thing that had been protecting her, cracked the container open and let eleven years of unfelt feeling come flooding in. Julia’s story is fictional and part of the Sovereign Women [https://a.co/d/04U0C6hd] series, but what happened to her is not. You have your own version of what she was carrying. What We Do With What We Cannot Face Women are extraordinarily capable of functioning through feeling. You learned early that the grief can wait because the children need dinner. When rage is not appropriate, you folded it into something quieter. Fear, if you allow it to be as large as it actually is, will undo everything you have worked so hard to hold together. So you do what Julia did. You run away from these painful feelings. Not always literally. Sometimes you run into achievement so consuming there is no space left for what is underneath. Or you submerge yourself into a spiritual practice that is genuinely real but is also, if you are honest, a way of staying above the feeling rather than inside it. It could be you lost yourself in service, in busyness, in the performance of having it more together than you actually do. The running works. That is the most important thing to understand about it. It is not dysfunctional because it is a survival adaptation. A woman who runs from what she cannot yet face is a woman who found a way to survive something that might otherwise have broken her. The problem is not the running. The problem is what it costs you over time. What Suppressed Feeling Actually Does The body keeps a faithful record of everything the mind refuses to process. This is not metaphor. It is the lived experience of women the world over. The unfelt grief has to live somewhere and your body is the place. The swallowed rage takes up residence in your jaw and your chest that has been tight for so long you stopped noticing. The shame that was never allowed curls into the body who makes you small. The unspoken fear is stuck as low-grade anxiety that you believe is manageable. The identity you built on top of all of it requires continuous maintenance. Because the thing you are running from is not getting smaller. It is getting heavier. The faster you run, the more energy it takes to stay ahead of it. The main character in Book 2 of the Sovereign Women series is Julia Faire. Her container was to repress her grief and use it as fuel for her acting career. Yours might be your professional identity, your role as a mother, or the carefully curated appearance of a life that is working. The thing to recognize is not what you created. It’s when your creation prevents you from ever stopping long enough to feel what is underneath. The truth is that what is underneath never goes away. It waits with extraordinary patience. And it will find a crack in the container eventually, and the grief will begin to seep through the crack. Your carefully constructed persona can’t handle the stress. One morning you wake up and cannot remember why any of it matters. The crack is not failure. The crack is the invitation. “There is a crack in everything.That’s how the light gets in.” ― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968 [https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/152503] What Stops the Running I want to say something honest about healing that the wellness industry rarely admits. You cannot think your way into feeling what you have been avoiding. Understanding your patterns with sufficient sophistication does not make the feeling unnecessary. Understanding is not the same as feeling. And feeling what is underneath is the only way through. What stops the running is not readiness. Nobody who has been running for eleven years, or twenty, feels ready to stop. Readiness is another story the mind tells to defer what the body already knows is necessary. What stops the running is usually this: The running finally costs more than the stopping, and something in you makes a quiet, exhausted decision that you are done. Either way, the stopping is not graceful. It is not a conscious spiritual choice arrived at in meditation. It is usually a woman in some ordinary place, out of argument and out of road, finally willing to feel what she has been outrunning because she has nothing left to outrun it with. That is where Julia finds herself at the beginning of Sovereign Women Book 2. And in my experience, it is where transformation becomes possible for the first time. What Is Waiting on the Other Side Here is what I know about the feeling that has been waiting. It is not as bottomless as you believe it is. The fear that you will fall into it and never find your way back is a fear about the feeling, not a truth about it. Feelings move and change, because they are not permanent states. They are energy that needs to pass through the body, and when you stop preventing that from happening, they do. What is waiting on the other side is not the absence of pain. It is the absence of the weight of carrying pain that has never been allowed to move. And underneath that weight, the self that was there before the running started. The one who knew things before you began running, using competence, achievement, and the performance of being fine as your persona. She has not gone anywhere. She has been waiting, with the same patience as the feeling, for the woman who ran to finally turn around and come home. That homecoming is what sovereignty actually feels like in the body. Not arrival. Return. An Invitation Sovereign Women: Book 2 is the story of Julia Faire finally stopping. I wrote it for every woman who recognizes the running, who has built something real on top of something unprocessed, and who is beginning to sense that the container has a crack in it. You do not have to be ready to stop running to read it. You only have to be willing to sit with a woman who was not ready either, and watch what Love does when she finally runs out of road. The book will be available soon. Subscribe to The Sovereign Voice on Empowered Way and I will share the news here first. And if something in what I have written today has named something you have been carrying without language for it, the first book in the series is available on Amazon. To your presence, Kathryn If you know a woman who may see herself here, please share this article. The more we support each other, the more Love moves through us. That is how the world shifts. P. S. If you haven’t read the first book in the series, it’s waiting for you on Amazon. Sovereign Women: Love is a Revolutionary Choice. [https://a.co/d/04U0C6hd] This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com [https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Prayer that Answered Itself

Dear Sovereigns: For years I said the same prayer and turned away before it could be answered. And then, one day I did something different. I was standing on the fly bridge of a sightseeing boat off the Na Pali Coast of Kauai, holding the metal rails with both hands while the bow rose and fell on two and three-foot waves. The mountains fell into the ocean, lush valleys falling into water. The sea gulls followed our boat and the wind kept things interesting. It was the kind of beauty that makes you reach for something larger than yourself. So I did what I always do in moments like that. I looked out at that impossible green coastline falling into the ocean, and I said the prayer I had been saying for years. God, please make me more like you. I had said those words dozens of times. In cathedrals and on hiking trails, and in the ordinary silence of early mornings. I said them, and then I waited, and the waiting always felt like the truest part, the place where I was most honest about the distance between who I was and who I sensed I could become. But this time something was different. I was not waiting for an answer so much as releasing the need for one. I stayed present. The sea breeze moved through my hair. The boat lifted and fell. And then, in the middle of all of that ordinary sensation, I heard something that nearly knocked me off the railing. Please let me be more like you. I stood very still. And then it came again. Allow me to be more like you. What recognition feels like I want to tell you what that did to me, because I think it is the same thing it might do to you, which is why I am still trying to find the right words for it years later. It did not make me feel special. It made me feel seen. And those are not the same experience at all. For most of my adult life I have operated from a quiet, persistent belief that I was not quite enough. Not broken, exactly. Just perpetually a few degrees short of the woman I was supposed to become, if I only worked harder, prayed better, gave more, needed less. I have done significant personal development work. I read the books and attended the retreats and sat with the learned teachers. Intellectually, I knew I was worthy of love. But knowing something and receiving it are entirely unique acts. What I received on that boat was not encouragement. It was recognition. The sense that the Divine was not waiting for me to improve before engaging with me fully, but was actively, urgently interested in what it felt like to be me, in this body, on this water, on this particular afternoon. The game that changed everything I stood at the railing and something in me went quiet. Not the quiet of absence, but the quiet of a woman who has finally stopped talking long enough to listen. The self I had built to navigate the world, careful, competent, perpetually preparing, stepped back. And in that small interior clearing, I did something I had never quite done before. I simply looked. At the water. At the light on the water. At the green coast rising from the sea like something God threw down to see what would happen. And I offered it. Do you see that? What came back was not words. It was a wave of joy moving through me, the kind that has no origin you can point to, warm and present and entirely real. I asked again, “Do you see that?” The joy returned. We played like that for a few minutes, the Divine seeing through my eyes what I had been too busy to fully see myself. And then I looked down and saw a flash of silver in the water. That is when the dolphins came. A pod of 3, leaping directly in front of the bow. And one, higher than the others, turned and looked at me. I laughed until I cried. A Shift in Identity The experience of interacting with God reminds me of a passage from Richard Rohr’s book, “The Naked Now.” God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes. As I open to the Divine and allow myself to have a personal relationship, something astonishing happens. I am no longer the small, ego-based self. Instead, as Teresa of Avila observed, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God.” This is why I create That is where Sovereign Women began. Not in a curriculum or a concept, but in the experience of being known before I had finished earning it. Of being loved without condition, without agenda, without a list of requirements I had not yet met. My books, meditations, and courses are created from this knowing that God wants to know me through my eyes. He is as interested in me as he is in you, because we are his creations. The why motivating my work is so God is seen. For example, I wrote the book, Sovereign Women [https://a.co/d/0fjfZaB0], because when women listen to their inner knowing, they discover how to navigate their world with wisdom, grace, and love. There is a space between the extremes, beneath the cultural conditioning, where the quiet intelligence of the feminine soul flows and sovereignty returns. I create meditations because the body needs its own path to the center, separate from the mind’s. The body carries its own intelligence and wisdom that is often drowned out by the mind’s continued activity. Meditation allows the mind to settle while the deeper wisdom can be accessed, felt, and embodied. I built the Sovereign Women’s Circle [https://www.empoweredway.com/sovereign-womens-circle]because I watched women receive the teaching intellectually and then walk back into their lives unchanged, and I understood that witness is what completes the circuit. When other women see you in your sovereignty, it changes everything. Where the path leads now The Women’s Circle is pausing right now while I tend to the path that leads to it. When it reopens, it will be ready for the women who have already been walking. In the meantime, the path continues. If you have not yet read the book, Emily’s story is waiting. You can find Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice [https://a.co/d/0fjfZaB0] on Amazon. Read it slowly. She is not a character you observe. She is a woman you walk beside. If you have not yet found me on Insight Timer [https://insighttimer.com/EmpoweredWay], search my name and follow me there. The Divine Feminine Remembrance meditation and the Empowered Wealth Consciousness course will take you somewhere words cannot, because they work in the body rather than the mind, and that is where sovereignty actually lives. The question I asked on that boat, I am still asking. The difference is that now I know the answer moves in both directions. You are being asked the same thing. With love, 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 would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com [https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

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 would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com [https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

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 would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com [https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]