I didn’t even realise how much I’d handed away. My power. My knowing. My softness. It wasn’t some grand surrender—it happened in the tiniest moments. The times I said yes when my body was screaming no. The times I smiled to keep the room comfortable. The way I’d check his face first before deciding how I felt. The way I would ask—always ask—for permission to be, to feel, to want.

Not because I didn’t know better. But because I’d been taught not to trust the knowing inside me. Conditioned from my first moments on this earth to put others before myself, to value their comfort and their peace more than my own.

I don't know if it is getting older, becoming a mother, leaving an abusive marriage or finally demanding what I demand for my daughter, for myself, but I just cannot put myself last anymore. Those are the teachings of my mother and my grandmother, but they are not mine. And they will not be what I choose to teach my daughter. So, something, or everything changed in me.

And yet, it didn't change at all—it actually always lived beneath the surface, and I spent too much time, energy and attention keeping it there, hidden, tamed and respectable. I just finally let it rise. The ache got too loud to ignore. Or more importantly, the reason I was ignoring it no longer made sense. It wasn't my reason, and it was never explained to me anyway.

I am not talking about the big and obvious stuff that 15 years of healing hadn't seen, reversed and liberated. I am talking about these deeper parts of me. Ancient. Buried but never forgotten. They were the parts of me that felt completely destined. It was why I always had these crazy high levels of self-esteem in these microscopic parts of me, after all the false esteem had been ripped away and I should have crumbled. No, it was this ember, this flicker.

This part of me that had been patiently waiting to be reclaimed began stirring, growing, opening. At first a gentle knock. Then a pounding. Then a roaring. I thought I was breaking, and as my life crumbled around me—not for the first or the tenth time, but in a list of crumbles I couldn't even keep count of any longer—I was half excited. I know how much can happen after a break, a destruction and an implosion. But I was half terrified. How would I go through this all again, and this time with a child?

But this one was different. It was slow. It was steady. I didn't feel rushed. But I felt more shattered than I had ever been. I could get out of bed. I could live, I had joy. But I felt every illusion, false belief and relationship I had that didn't serve my ultimate truth just literally couldn't remain.

Broken? Maybe, but I wasn’t about to waste this opportunity to reset. I was remembering.

I stopped outsourcing my authority. I stopped accepting treatment, relationships, beliefs, connections, opportunities and everything that was below this standard of pure truth. I turned inward. I stayed isolated and alone for as long as it took for me to remember the sound of my own voice, my own knowing and my own rhythm.

How many times did I think I had been here before? Only to step back out into the world and resume people pleasing and bending to accommodate. I put up boundaries only to take them down. Not all at once. But in microscopic actions that all added up to tumble my fragile strength. Realising fragile resolve is no resolve at all, I was once again at the behest of someone else's agenda.

An innocent inquiry regarding what I wanted to do this weekend may as well have been a double jeopardy question. Drawing blanks, desiring to be easygoing, low maintenance and therefore loveable—chosen—all remaining imprints of a life where I was taught to earn my love. To validate my presence with usefulness. To work for friendship, family and love.

I started mothering myself the way I needed, and the way I was being there for my daughter. I didn't flinch from that realisation that I was jealous of her mother, and therefore of her childhood. I dove into that awful feeling, and sat with it until my frozen heart thawed. Until I could actually feel myself again. And long after the tears gushed and then dried, I sat longer still. Holding her in her discomfort. How hard it was for my younger self to receive love just for being. I hated every minute. Wanting to get up and get someone something. But there was no one there. Just me, and the ghosts that kept me silent, small and disconnected. So we stayed. And stayed and stayed. It took three months.

For two of them I had an inner ear infection where I couldn't hear anyone. I always appreciate the irony and the blunt delivery. So I stopped listening to anyone else. Stopped trying to tune into that noise. I disconnected, stayed alone and stayed inside—literally—inside of me. It was incredibly clear at first that the nervous system felt fearful of being in my body. Years of abuse at tender ages would do that. But, I wasn't moving until my body felt safe again. I used my oils as medicine and sat. Allowed and accepted.

When we moved beyond my life to others—past, future, alternate, whatever—things started to become much clearer. I had been doing this work for myself and clients for years, I wasn't unaware of the depth and permanency of these kinds of changes, but these specific kinds of life-changing, quantum-leaping opportunities are so supported by a calm and functioning nervous system that actually receives it and accepts it. The unfolding was simple and the world I was leaving and its collapse felt tangible, physical.

Every time we quantum leap it feels strange at first. Like learning a language I was born speaking but forgot somewhere in childhood. And yet when the words are spoken again, you understand without cognitively recognising any of the words. The calmness that seemed maintained now had a different vibratory tone than other peace I had found before when guided by others. This one was mine, now no one could take it. I made it from my own nervous system coherence, and my own connection to my body.

After years of knowing this deep desire to be successful or that I was here for more, all of a sudden, that feeling was both amplified and sedated. As if it was destined and guaranteed. I could relax. I could work at my own pace. I could tune out all the other noise, distraction and rhetoric and simply create, share and transmit.

And that was enough. I was enough. And I think I finally felt it. Not just spoke the words.

I would still catch myself reaching for approval like a habit, like an addiction. Until one day, I didn’t. Until one day, I spoke and didn’t wait to see if anyone clapped. I cried without rushing to fix it. I moaned without muting it. I said no without an explanation. I said yes without shrinking the joy.

My body became a sanctuary again. I stopped treating her like an inconvenience. I wasn't annoyed to eat or sleep or exercise or rest. I let my blood come without dread. I bled onto sheets that loved me back. I gave up the shame of stains and moods and bloats. My two-year-old understands exactly what happens and it is normalised—neither celebrated nor dreaded—a neutral, accepted act of womanhood that occurs in cycles with the moon. We track both and she accepts this as life.

Pleasure became my compass. Not a guilty indulgence, not something I had to earn with productivity or perfection, but a daily practice. I started looking in the mirror again. I touched my face with reverence. I anointed my skin with honour. I rewired my nervous system to want to be seen—by me—and eventually others too. I moved very slowly in my relationship back into myself. I brushed my teeth and my hair. I took long baths and enjoyed them. I turned my evenings into spa nights and started acting like my sovereign self, feeling her and knowing her. Realising hey, I am becoming her. Again.

I let my breath move all the way into my belly, feet, chest. Just realising that I had stopped breathing. I became my breath. I became my own flame.

And oh, the language. I reclaimed that too. I stopped saying vagina when I meant so much more. I said yoni. I said womb. I said cunt, with the reverence of a woman who knows the word’s true history. I said it and felt my ancestors nod. I stopped cringing at the sound of my power. I stopped using language that made me smaller, easier to digest. I want my words thick with meaning. I want them ancient and wild and alive.

There’s no going back. Once I touched that thread inside me—the one that hums with remembering—I couldn’t unfeel it. I couldn’t unknow myself. And I no longer wanted to.

I don’t need them to tell me who I am. I don’t need a man, a mirror, a magazine. I don’t need the applause. I need my breath. I need my knowing. I need the ground beneath me and the pulse within me. That’s where my authority lives now.

And I don’t always get it right. Some days I forget. Some days I still reach. But the difference is—I come back. Faster. Softer. Stronger. I come back to me. Always.

Because I am the altar. I am the authority. I am the crown. And I remember.