We modern women are born with a mountain of rules and expectations coded into us. 

Our families, our culture, the media, our religion, capitalism, the patriarchy…

So many of us think we “know” ourselves, but what we know is our conditioned selves; or “who we are supposed to be”. We are trapped by limiting beliefs, near-impossible lists of “shoulds” and internalized ideals of being a “good” woman / wife / professional / mother/ daughter / sister. 

Centuries of both stated and silent “guidelines” of who a woman should be, of how a mother behaves, and of how we must show up at work to be respected. 

The rules are rigid and often enforced. 

We are praised for being selfless moms -- but also expected to be. 
We receive relentless societal messaging about what a perfect, ageless woman should look like, and we think this is normal.
We have to adopt masculine energy to manage all the shit that needs to get done in our lives -- and then we are lionized for it.
We are sexualized, stalked, bullied, touched,, marginalized, dismissed, “bitchified”, silenced, ignored…

It’s no wonder we have lost sight of who we actually are! How could we, given all the masks we wear to stay safe, to belong and to succeed?

But all this noise - from literally every facet of society - this noise isn’t TRUTH.

We aren’t who the world says we are. We are a kaleidoscope of traits, feelings, experiences, ideas, yearnings and complexity. 

But until we can learn how to separate this external noise from our internal truth, we will stay trapped in this destructive cycle of pressure, discontent, performing and incongruence. 

To change our lives, we must start with knowing ourselves.

Why Inner Knowing Is The Path To Authenticity, Freedom, and Feeling Fucking Good

When my clients come to me, they are all longing for “a better way,” but they don’t know what better looks like, or how to get there.  

They did all the things they were supposed to do to be happy.

Whether that’s the job or the partner or the kids or the house or the money or the accolades… they’ve checked all the boxes they wanted to check and they’ve accomplished all the things they were promised would make them happy. Life is “good.” Some might even say “great.”

But they still feel a sense of yearning… of something is wrong-ness that they don’t understand and didn’t expect.

This feeling constantly crops up in small moments (when she says yes to something that she absolutely doesn’t want to say yes to) and in large ones (when she stays in a job she hates because she feels responsible for her team, or when she feels so alone in her marriage yet doesn’t want to rock the boat).

And the more she tries to “fix” the feeling, the bigger it seems to grow. 

Because the typical way of “fixing” this inconvenient feeling is by doing MORE, performing better, silencing her intuition and trying harder and harder to conform to this standard of womanhood that absolutely no woman on earth can or should meet. “Achieving” this standard has devastating consequences no one warned us about and fewer still are willing to acknowledge.

And all this fixing? It pulls her farther away from her truth and aliveness. She trusts her soul’s wisdom less and less. She dismisses the signs in her body that she’s on the wrong path or needs a little more space and time for herself. She loses sight of who she is, and the confusing feelings grow and metastasize into anger, resentment, disappointment, fear, confusion.

The antidote?

Inner knowing. 

Inner knowing is trusting yourself enough to take steps, make changes or walk a different path than expected because you know it’s right for you.

You know when you aren’t on the right path in your career, relationship, health, friendships, or life. And you know what you need to do to fix it (even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else but you.)

It’s trusting the intuition about what to do next and trusting that you get to evolve and change … and then believing in yourself enough to actually make the shift. 

It’s having your own back when you wobble and feel the ocean of emotions inside of you that are necessary to move from an existence of doing what you thought you should do to doing what you actually want to do. 

It’s being able to mine even more wisdom and next steps from every wave of emotion that comes to clear away all the junk and things that aren’t you.

It’s feeling safe in your body and flexible in your nervous system, so that you can welcome the changes to your relationships, career, love life and womanhood that will inevitably follow. 

With this inner felt sense of safety, you will trust and believe in yourself enough to shift your own paradigm 100 times over. #thephoenixway. Your new normal becomes an inside out approach to living, loving, relating, healing and choosing. Because all of these big and little changes will happen inside of you first, then manifest outside of you as you’re ready.

Inner knowing is like feeling the sun on your skin and allowing it to feel so good you fall asleep into a blissful dream state because of it.

It’s your head hitting the pillow every night with your soul and body thanking you for every hard and easeful thing you said yes to, because you knew, inside, it was the right next thing for you.

It sounds like thank you, I’m proud of you. I knew it. I did it. I’m doing it. I love you.