Not Shaming Myself for the Pause.

What it actually costs to live sovereign.

444 IV Lounge. Los Angeles, Ca.

My Body: "Slow down before I give you a reason"

me: ok...

My Body: *gives me a reason...*

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Because I love when my clients share their notes & devotions in session.

For days now, my voice has been hiding in the underworld. *side eye.*

Scratchy, hoarse, hidden under coughs and rivers of phlegm, it refused to carry me forward. And in that silence, I remembered what it means to surrender, not just to the body’s ache, but to the swirl of all I am holding. Two weeks back from Central America, thrusted into one week of a staged strike from my lungs and throat. They would not let me speak until I remembered that my breath belongs to me first.

Because it isn’t just the rainforest I returned from, it’s the frequency of it. The way that jungle air moves slower, denser, saturated with unseen spirit. Then Los Angeles, with its buzzing pace, its sharp edges, its constant ask to be on. My body was translating the difference, trying to bridge two languages of energy at once. I can hear Granny-girl now, “all sickness is initiation.”

Granny-girl giving “Face-time”.

Virgo’s New Moon is here now, reminding me that every purification is sacred. Virgo is the priestess of small details, the one who insists on tending the altar of the body with precision and devotion. In losing my voice, I was stripped of the extra, forced into the smallest rituals: breath, rest, water, herbs, stillness. The very things I tell others to honor, my body demanded of me with no compromise.

And maybe that’s the paradox I keep circling: the themes I carry into retreat spaces are never abstract. They come looking for me first. This weekend we gather under the theme Sovereign Living and Loving. And my body, in its silence, its phlegm, its stubborn refusal to let me keep doing, has been teaching me what it actually costs to live sovereign.

Sovereign living isn’t about controlling everything, it’s about surrendering to the authority of your own body and soul. It means when my throat closes, I don’t bulldoze through with performance. I listen. I sit in the quiet. I let the mucus and the slow, feverish aches have their say. It’s not weakness, it’s devotion.

I feel like my life over the past five years has been a masterclass in all the ways sovereign loving isn’t about showing up perfect. Not for my partner, my children, my family, my clients, my community; no, It’s been a practicum in living and showing up aligned. Some days that alignment looks like ceremony, service, holding, guiding. Some days it looks like tea, sweat, snot, and silence, loving myself enough not to betray my body for the sake of appearances. (* my God! …somebody call my 20-something yr old self in the room…)

The Vibration of Grace: Sound Healing Rituals for Liberation. Gina Breedlove.

This is the edge I’m on: everything and nothing, doing and undoing. The healer who gets sick. The mother who needs mothering. The priestess who’s on her knees at her own altar. The paradox is the practice. And maybe that’s the truest sovereignty of all.

I’m realizing this is the work, the constant dance between being everything for everyone and remembering I am also just a woman with a body that needs tending.

“Hey, Love.” I forgot how much I love being a ‘passenger princess’.

Now my voice is crawling its way back, raspy but alive, carrying a different kind of truth. Not the polished, ready-to-serve truth I’ve trained myself to give, but the kind that comes from being broken down, stripped of all the roles, forced into bed with nothing but breath, tears, silence, and surrender.

This new moon in Virgo is not asking me to perfect anything. It’s asking me to practice devotion to the smallest things: my lungs filling, my throat softening, my voice returning, not as a tool for service alone, but as an instrument of my own becoming.

So as you read this, maybe ask yourself: where is your body recalibrating? Where is your spirit pulling you back to the simplest rituals, the ones that don’t make it onto your calendar but are the very foundation of your survival? What are you ready to offer up on the altar of recalibration?

My prayer is that in our sicknesses, our silences, our unravelings, we stop shaming ourselves for the pause. My prayer is that we let the pause be the medicine. That when our voices return, they return carrying only what we are meant to sing, to say, and to pray.

Love is you.

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Yes, the revised edition of Just Add Water is still underway; as well as my first novel. I am forever grateful for those of you who stop by here every month, freely given and invested in my writing journeys. It means the world to me. I know without question how beloved I am -that the Divine would allow me to teach and write for a living and loving. More time with my pen, in my own energy….and even softer moments of mothering and loving my lover are born from the spaciousness to write. It is indeed, Word Medicine. Here you are, below, an excerpt from the new additions to Just Add Water: Finding Sanctuary in the Untamed Self,

“Beloved body, I arrive.
I place my palms against my own skin and remember that this temple is not built of stone, but of breath, pulse, and water. I do not rush past you today. I do not demand you keep me upright while I abandon your hunger. I bow to you as lover, as altar, as the place where God keeps whispering my name.

I roll my shoulders, arch my spine, circle my pelvis like I’m calling the ocean into me, like I’m making love to gravity itself. I open my thighs the way one opens curtains to let the morning sun in. Not to be seen, not to be taken, but to let life itself kiss me awake. This is the prayer no church could hold. The kind that makes my lips part, my chest rise, my thighs open. It’s not performance, it’s presence.

This is sovereign loving. This is sovereign living. A devotion to the untamed self that does not ask permission, that does not wait for approval, that does not apologize for trembling under its own ecstasy.

And in this moment I realize: the sanctuary I have been seeking is not hidden in the mountains, nor the jungle, nor the arms of another. It is here, in the way I breathe into myself. In the way I touch my own skin until it remembers it is holy. In the way I return, again and again, to the body that carries every prayer I have ever dared to speak.

When I am this present, I don’t have to find God. God finds me….”