You've Done the Healing. Now Go Live Your Life.

This is written for the woman who has already done a lot of work on herself.

You've read the self-help books. You've probably been to therapy or maybe done so much therapy that you are tired of hearing yourself talk about the same old thigs. You've journaled. You probably know your attachment style, your nervous system patterns and your childhood wounds…

And yet.

There's still this feeling.

It's hard to explain, because your life might actually be pretty good. You have people you love. Maybe a good job, a house, kids, a partner, friends. You take vacations. There isn't necessarily some giant crisis happening.

But every once in a while, usually when things get quiet enough for you to actually hear yourself, there's this little voice.

Is this it?

Is this what I'm going to do for the next twenty years? Work all week, get everybody where they need to go, pay the bills, do the laundry, squeeze in a workout, maybe go out to dinner Saturday night. Then Monday comes and we start over…

And somewhere along the way, you started telling yourself: someday.

I’ll make myself a priority when the kids are older. When I have more money. When work settles down. When I retire. When I lose the weight. When I have more time.

Then I'll travel. Then I'll write the book. Then I'll start the business. Then I'll take the class. Then I'll figure out what I actually want. Then I'll live.

I think there comes a point for a lot of us when we realize: I don't actually want to wait until I'm 65 and retired to enjoy my life.

And then immediately comes the guilt. Because you look around and think, but I should be happy. I have a good life. I should be grateful. Other people would love to have what I have.

I want to say something important here. You can be grateful and still want more. You get to have both. 

“Gratitude and desire are not opposites. You can deeply appreciate your life and still want something more from it.”

You can deeply appreciate your life AND still want something more from it.

You can love someone AND recognize you've outgrown the relationship.

You can be grateful for a job and know you're meant to do something else.

You can love being a mother and also still want to pursue your own dreams.  You get the point. 

That doesn't automatically mean you need to blow up your life, or start analyzing every area of it. But I also don't think that feeling of wanting more, or something different, is bad. That feeling is just information. It's your soul's way of communicating.

And here's what I invite you to sit with. That information probably didn't come out of the blue. You've probably heard this whisper before and shut it down at some point, because fear was louder than your intuition.

When Healing Becomes Another Job

I think a lot about self-improvement. I'm obviously a huge believer in it. I've spent years doing this work.

Little known fact… My first real dabble into personal development was becoming a Beachbody coach back in 2015. One of the requirements was reading ten pages a day of a personal development book. Honestly, that habit alone was life changing.

I've evolved a lot since then, but I'm still doing this work, and now I coach other people through it too. I've been to therapy. I've done EMDR. I've done energy work. I've read the books. I meditate. I share all of that so you know I'm not coming at this from some perfectly healed place looking down at you. I'm still very much in it too.

And I think there's a point where all of that awareness can become another trap.

Because we start believing that if we just understand ourselves enough, eventually we'll become this perfectly healed version of ourselves who finally knows exactly what to do.

So we keep learning. Another book. Another podcast episode. Another journal prompt. Another explanation for why we do what we do. We may realize - Oh, that's my attachment style… That's my nervous system ‘flight’ response... That's my abandonment wound…

And those realizations can be incredibly powerful; understanding why you do something can give you compassion for yourself.

However, Knowledge does not equal change.

I wish it did. Because if knowing better automatically meant doing better, I'd have my entire life figured out. I'm a coach. I know that when I'm stressed, going outside and moving my body will probably make me feel better. And there are still nights when my brain goes, or wine and Instagram? I know. what I should do. I still have to choose.

There comes a point where you don't need another explanation. You need an experience of doing something differently.

You can read ten books about boundaries. Eventually you have to say no to someone.

You can spend two years understanding why you don't trust yourself. Eventually you have to make a decision without polling five people first.

You can understand exactly why you're afraid of failure. Eventually you have to do something you might fail at.

And you can spend years understanding why you aren't happy, but eventually you have to ask: what would I actually have to change to experience my life differently?

That's a much scarier question. Because information is safe. Action changes things.

What Taking the Leap Taught Me

A few years ago, we decided to take our kids and travel the world for an extended period. Multiple countries, homeschooling along the way, no fixed return date.

I want to be honest with you. Almost nobody thought this was a good idea!!

People had real questions. What about insurance? What about visas? What happens to your house? How will you socialize your kids? What kind of Mom let’s their kids miss standardized testing in school?! And plenty of people who weren't asking questions were just quietly convinced we'd lost our minds.

If we had waited until we had a clean answer for every single one of those questions, or waited until everyone around us agreed it made sense, we would still be waiting right now.

We didn't have it all figured out. We had a decision, and then we figured out the rest as we went.

I can tell you, without hesitation, it was one of the best things we've ever done. No regrets. Not one!

I'm not telling you this so you go book a one-way ticket tomorrow. (Although you should definitely consider it!) I'm telling you this because of what it taught me about fear.

Fear is really good at sounding like practicality.

Fear will hand you 47 seemingly responsible reasons to stay exactly where you are. And sometimes those reasons are legitimate. But sometimes what we're calling "being responsible" is just plain ol’ fear, and the only way to find out which one you're dealing with is to actually move and see what happens.

We don't get guarantees before we act. We get them, if we get them at all, afterward, once we're already living the answer.

Maybe You're Not Broken. Maybe You're Bored.

We spend a lot of time talking about healing from pain.

“Humans don’t only need the absence of pain. We need meaning. We need connection. We need novelty. We need play. We need things to look forward to.”

There's a concept in psychology called hedonic adaptation. Basically, humans are really good at getting used to things. The thing you once desperately wanted becomes normal.

I'll give you a real example. When my kids were in preschool, we didn't live in the greatest area, and I used to drive through this one neighborhood dreaming about living there someday. I actually wrote down the exact street in my journal, every day, like I already lived there. Free manifesting tip for my law of attraction readers!

I wanted that neighborhood so badly. I told myself if I ever lived there, it would mean I'd made it. My life would finally be good.

Five years later, we got the house. Moved into that exact neighborhood, on a cul-de-sac, with a hiking trail nearby, the bus picking my kids up right in front of the house. It was everything I wanted.

And then, years later, I lost that feeling completely. Suddenly we weren't happy with the backyard, or the basement, or the dining room. We wanted more land.

You already know where this is going.

That's not because you're ungrateful. It's because you're human. We adapt.

Which means a meaningful life can't just be one long pursuit of finally acquiring enough things that we'll permanently feel satisfied.

There's another distinction in psychology I love. The difference between happiness that comes from pleasure and happiness that comes from meaning. Those aren't always the same thing.

A meaningful life isn't necessarily comfortable all the time. Raising children isn't always pleasurable. Building something you care about isn't always pleasurable. Having a hard conversation isn't pleasurable. Leaving something you've outgrown definitely isn't pleasurable.

But those experiences can still create a deep sense of: this matters to me.

Take a second here, if you can. When's the last time you felt that? Not happy exactly. Not comfortable. Just, this matters, this is real, this is mine. Maybe it was a conversation. Maybe it was something you built or finished. Maybe it was a hard moment with your kids that somehow still felt meaningful in the middle of being hard.

Hold onto that.

I think that's what some people are actually craving when they say "there has to be more." Not necessarily more money, more vacations, more success. Maybe you're craving more of that feeling. More meaning.

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What If Your Purpose Isn't a Job?

This is where I think we can get really hung up on purpose, especially in the spiritual world. We talk about finding your purpose as if somewhere in the universe there's one perfect career assigned to you and your job is to figure out what it is.

Maybe. But I don't think purpose always has to be that grand.

Your purpose might not be quitting your corporate job and starting a spiritual business. Maybe your purpose right now is raising emotionally healthy kids differently than you were raised. Maybe you are the person in your family who finally learns how to have boundaries. Maybe you break the cycle of women abandoning themselves to keep everyone else comfortable.

I think of a woman I've worked with who grew up in a house where things weren't handled well, and somewhere along the way she made a quiet decision that her kids were going to grow up differently. Not perfectly; just differently. That's her purpose. It doesn't have a job title, but she broke the cycle.

Or I think of another woman, a high school teacher, who told me her actual purpose has nothing to do with the curriculum she's supposed to be teaching. It's making sure her students feel seen. Some days that looks like a lesson plan. Some days it looks like putting the lesson plan down for ten minutes because a kid desperately needed a healthy adult to connect with and talk.

I believe we're here to learn. We're here to experience. Relationships teach us. Challenges teach us and our patterns teach us.

And yes, I believe sometimes there is an energetic or intuitive pull toward something more. Call it your intuition. Call it your higher self. Call it the quiet part of you that knows. Whatever language works for you.

Sometimes something keeps whispering: there's more for you.

I don't think the answer is always to immediately act on it. But I do think we should listen.

The Gap Between Knowing and Living

So here's the nuance. Sometimes you don't need a new life. You need to actually be present for the one you already have.

Maybe you've been waiting until retirement to travel, and you realize, why don't we take the trip now?! Maybe you're waiting until you have more money to have fun with your kids, when what they actually want is to make pancakes with you on a Sunday morning. Maybe you've turned everything that brings you joy into something that has to be productive.

But sometimes you are present. And you still know that the life you are living is not fulfilling you. That's different.

I knew that feeling for years before I left healthcare. I always felt this pull to work outside the norm, to connect with people in a deeper way than a thirty-minute appointment slot allowed. For years, I reasoned my way around it. All the responsible reasons to stay exactly where I was. (And I was still paying off student loans, which is a very convincing reason to stay employed)!.

That's one of the things I find fascinating about intuition. Intuition often isn't loud. Fear is loud. Fear gives you a PowerPoint presentation of 47 reasons this could go terribly wrong. Intuition tends to be quieter. It's often just: I know.

And then our mind spends six months explaining why we shouldn't know what we know.

So if you've done all this work and still feel stuck, maybe you don't need another realization. Maybe you need to start creating evidence that you can live differently. And that does not mean quitting your job tomorrow. Start much smaller.

Ask yourself: what do I keep saying I want that I keep postponing until some imaginary version of my life begins?

That's a different question than "what's wrong with me."

Maybe you keep saying you want deeper friendships. Okay. Who are you actually calling? Are you having the vulnerable conversation, or waiting for someone else to go first?

Maybe you want more purpose. What are you doing that feels meaningful?

Maybe you want adventure. Does adventure really require $20,000 and three weeks in Europe? Or could you go somewhere you've never been this weekend?

Maybe you want to write a book someday. Are you writing anything at all?

Open a blank Google Doc and just start. You don't need a book deal. You don't need an official blog. You just need a first sentence.

My aunt is in her 70s. She just started a Substack, just her own ideas and musings. She's having a blast, and it's been incredible healing for her.

You don't need a plan. You just need to begin.

Because this is where personal development gets very unsexy. Eventually you have to do something. Messily. Before you're certain. Before you're perfectly healed. Before you have enough money or enough time or everyone's approval.

And I think that's where self-trust actually gets built. Not from understanding yourself perfectly, but from experiencing yourself showing up.

An Energetic Way of Looking at This

From an energy perspective, I think we can spend years clearing, releasing, healing, processing. And those things can be beautiful.

But there's another side of energetic work we don't talk about enough. What are you creating space for?

If I'm constantly releasing but never receiving. If I'm constantly healing but never experiencing. If I'm constantly analyzing my past but never creating my future. What exactly am I doing all of this work for?

There has to be an expansion phase. There has to be a point where we say, okay, I've learned something from this, now how do I want to live?

And this is actually where I see the line between healing and coaching most clearly. So much of the healing work, therapy, Reiki, energy work, journaling, is genuinely built for establishing safety, exploring your patterns with compassion, and honoring and releasing what you're ready to let go of. That's real, necessary work, and I'm not discounting a single hour of it.

But there's a difference between understanding who you are and actually living inside that every day. And a difference again between living it and expanding into whatever comes next. That gap, between knowing and living, is exactly where my coaching framework, EXHALE, picks up. It's built for the two things healing on its own doesn't always finish: actually practicing your new way of being in your real life, and then expanding beyond it. That's not a knock on healing. It's just a different tool for a different part of the job.

Sometimes Reiki and meditation and spiritual practices help because they give us enough quiet to hear ourselves underneath all of the noise. Not because Reiki is going to tell you to quit your job. But because sometimes when your brain finally shuts up for five minutes, you realize you've known what you want for a very long time.

Your Life Isn't the Waiting Room

Your life isn't the waiting room for your real life. This is it. Not in a depressing way. In an incredibly freeing way.

You don't have to wait until you're retired. You don't have to wait until you have enough money. You don't have to wait until the kids are grown. You don't have to wait until you've healed every childhood wound. And you definitely don't have to wait until you're completely fearless.

You are allowed to create meaning now. You are allowed to enjoy what you've built. And you're allowed to admit that some parts of what you've built don't fit you anymore. Both can be true.

You can be grateful for your life and still want to expand it.

Because the point of healing was never to become the most self-aware person in the room. The point was to become free enough to live.

So maybe the question isn't "what do I need to heal next." Maybe the question is, "what am I finally ready to experience?" And then go do one thing that gives your life an answer.

I recently jumped out of a plane. I was terrified. My legs were shaking while we waited to go. I did it anyway because I was tired of it sitting on a list forever.

So what's on your list? What's the one thing you keep saying "someday" about? It doesn't have to be a plane. Maybe it's something smaller, and maybe it's just as scary to you.

Not when you're ready. Not when you're completely confident. Messy counts!

If what you're realizing right now is that you're done just understanding yourself and you're ready to actually build the life underneath all that self-awareness, that's the bridge my coaching framework, EXHALE, is built for.

My one-on-one program doesn't stop at insight. It picks up exactly where a lot of healing work leaves off, taking everything you already know about your nervous system and your beliefs and helping you actually practice and expand into it in your real, current life.

You can learn more about EXHALE here. And if you're not sure where to start, you can always reach out.

Because knowledge can change the way you understand yourself. But action changes the way you experience your life.

And I think eventually, we have to stop studying ourselves and go live!!!