The World Will Hold Her Too: On letting go, trusting people, and the grief we forget to name

She borrowed the car last week and I watched the tail-lights disappear around the corner and stood in the driveway longer than I needed to.

She's seventeen and a half. She's been driving for over a year. She is, by every reasonable measure, fine.

And still. I stood there.

There is a particular kind of grief that doesn't have a clean name. It's not loss exactly, she hasn't gone anywhere yet. It's not fear exactly, I'm not convinced something bad is about to happen. It's something more like practicing. Like my body rehearsing, over and over, the reality that she is becoming someone who will move through the world without me as her first point of contact.

That's a kind of grief. Even when nobody has died. Even when everything is okay. Even when you'd be embarrassed to bring it up in a room full of people with real losses.

I know something about grief. I sit with people in it for a living, through diagnosis and dying, through the end of marriages and the end of dreams and the end of
lives that mattered deeply. I help people cross thresholds they cannot cross alone.

And here I am. Standing in my own driveway. Discovering I am not immune to the very thing I've spent decades accompanying in others.

Growth is not graceful

We talk about growth like it's an upward arc. A clean line moving in one direction. But that's not what it looks or feels like, not for the person growing, and not for the people who love them.

Growth is rupture. It's a seed splitting open underground, in the dark, where no one can see it and nothing looks like progress. It's a teenager who is simultaneously the child you held and the stranger you're just beginning to know. It's a parent who thought they were done with certain kinds of heartache discovering new rooms in the house of it.

One of the things I have learned, from the people I've walked with, and from my own body carrying things I couldn't yet name, is that growth almost always feels like loss before it feels like anything else.

You lose the version of things that was familiar. You lose the role you knew how to play. You lose the illusion that love means protection.

These are real losses. They deserve to be grieved, not hurried through.

Thresholds don't only run in one direction

This part I really did not expect. (Or rather I chose to ignore that it could happen)

At the same time I am watching my daughter move toward a bigger life, I am watching our parents move toward a smaller one. Choosing smaller homes and communities with more support around them, proximity to help over the familiar rooms they built their lives inside.

What strikes me…what has quietly undone me, more than once…is that they are doing this willingly.

They have watched what happens when people don't have the choice. When the body or the mind makes the decision before the person is ready, and the weight of managing that fall lands on their children without warning, without preparation, without the grace of having been asked. They have seen it in friends, in siblings, in the people ahead of them on the path. And they are choosing differently - choosing early enough that the choice is still theirs to make.

That is an act of love. Arguably one of the most generous ones I've witnessed.

They are letting go of the lives they built - the square footage, the gardens, the address that meant something - because they love their people enough to spare them the weight of an unplanned landing.

And in doing so, they are also trusting. Trusting that the smaller life will still hold meaning. Trusting that the people around them will show up. Trusting that letting go of what they carried doesn't mean losing who they are.

My daughter is practicing leaving. My parents are practicing release. And I am standing in the middle, watching both, being asked - from both directions simultaneously - to trust that love is not the same as holding on.

But I also believe that people are GOOD

I believe people are good.

Not naive-good. Not pretend-the-world-is-safe good. I've sat at enough bedsides and held hands in too much darkness to be naïve about what human beings are capable of.

But I've also watched something else, over and over: people show up for each other.

The neighbor who appears with food before you thought to ask. The stranger on the trail who pauses when you look like you're struggling. The friend of a friend who turns out to have been through exactly this and calls, unprompted, because someone thought you might need to talk.

People are woven for one another. Not perfectly. Not always. But more than the fear tells us.

I think about the adults who held me when I was seventeen and a half and moving through the world without the traction I thought I had. Teachers. Mentors. Strangers who were kind at the right moment for reasons I'll never fully understand. People who weren't mine and didn't owe me anything and showed up anyway.

My daughter will meet those people. She already has.

And our parents - who spent decades being the ones who showed up, who held things together, who watched over the people they loved - are now on the receiving end of that same instinct in others. And it turns out the world has been paying attention. It turns out people are ready.

I keep seeing this. I keep being surprised by it, even though by now I probably shouldn't be.

What it means to trust the world with someone you love

I come to trust easily. Almost too easily, if I'm honest - I've extended trust in directions that didn't deserve it, believed the best about people past the point where the evidence was still with me. This is something I've had to learn to hold carefully. Trust as a gift, not a reflex. Discernment as the thing that keeps it from becoming a wound.

And yet. I keep coming back to trust.  Even after it's been broken. Even knowing it will probably be broken again somewhere, by someone, in ways I can't anticipate. I look at the evidence of my life - the people who showed up, the kindness I didn't earn, the hands extended at the exact moment I needed them - and I cannot arrive anywhere other than this: people are, more often than not, trying to be kind.

But trusting the world with myself is a different thing than trusting it with her.

When I am the one in the room, I can read it. I can adjust. I can extend trust and stay alert at the same time, recalibrate if something shifts. I know my own signals. I've learned, sometimes the hard way, when to lean in and when to step back.

When she is the one in the room - and I am not - I have none of that. I cannot watch the room. I cannot read the people in it. I cannot catch anything if it starts to fall.

That is the specific ask of this season. Not whether I trust the world. I do. It's whether I can trust it on her behalf, without being present to manage how that trust unfolds.

And so I keep returning to this: the instinct I have to watch out for her - to notice, to show up, to extend myself toward someone who needs something - that instinct is not mine alone. It lives in other people too. I have been the recipient of it more times than I can count, from people who had no particular reason to care and cared anyway.

She will be the recipient of it too.

And so will our parents - who spent decades being the ones who showed up, who held things together, who watched over the people they loved. They are now on the receiving end of that same instinct in others. And it turns out the world has been paying attention.

That's not certainty. It's not a guarantee. It's a choice - the same one our parents made when they chose the smaller home, the same one made by everyone who has ever loved someone they couldn't follow.

You trust the world with them. And you trust that the world has people in it worth trusting.

That is one of the braver things I know how to do.

A word if you're in this too

Maybe you're a parent at this particular threshold - watching someone you love practice being gone. Maybe you're watching your own parents navigate the wisdom of letting go before they have to. Maybe you're in the middle place, held between two kinds of love that both require something from you.

Maybe you're grieving something else entirely: a relationship, a season of life, a version of yourself you thought you'd get to keep longer.

Whatever the threshold is, I want to say this:

Grief is real. You're not being dramatic. You don't have to hurry it up.

And the HOPE is also real - not as a bypass around the grief, but as something that grows alongside it, sometimes slowly, in the same dark soil.

People are good. Not all of them, not all the time, not in ways that make the world safe in any simple sense. But in the ways that matter for the long haul - the ways that hold us when we are more tender than we expected to be - I have seen it. I keep seeing it.

I am choosing to trust that my daughter will be held by more than just me. I am choosing to trust that our parents will be held by more than just us.

Those beliefs don't erase the ache of watching the taillights disappear, or of watching someone choose the smaller room because they love you enough to make it easy.

But they mean I can go back inside.

And some days, that's enough.

Erin Martinson is a grief coach, spiritual director, and certified Healing Touch Practitioner. She helps people cross thresholds they cannot cross alone — including the ones they didn't know were coming. Learn more about working with Erin at EMBody Wisdom.

Anticipatory Grief

Before the Loss: Why Anticipatory Grief Is Still Real Grief

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from grieving something that hasn't ended yet.

The diagnosis is in, but the person is still here. The relationship is fraying, but no one has said the final word. The season is visibly closing - a child leaving home, a body changing, a role you've held for years slowly dissolving - and you are already mourning, already aching, even as life continues around you as if nothing is wrong.

This is anticipatory grief. And it is real. Completely, quietly, exhaustingly real.

The Grief No One Names

One of the cruelest things about anticipatory grief is that it often goes unnamed. We reserve our comfort for after… after the death, after the diagnosis reaches its conclusion, after the door finally closes. We bring casseroles to funerals. We send cards when the marriage ends. We check in after the job is lost.

But what about the long weeks before? The appointments that feel like countdowns? The ordinary Tuesday nights when you look across the room at someone you love and feel the future loss like a weight already settling in your chest?

That grief is just as real. It is just invisible, unnamed, intangible.

When we can't name what we're carrying, we often assume something is wrong with us. *Why am I this sad when nothing has happened yet? Shouldn't I be grateful for the time we still have?*

The truth is: you can be grateful AND grieving. The love that makes loss so devastating doesn't wait politely until the ending arrives. It lives right alongside the loss as it approaches.

What Anticipatory Grief Actually Is

Anticipatory grief is the mourning that begins before a loss is complete - the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual work of preparing for something that hasn't fully arrived yet.

It was first named in 1944 by psychiatrist Erich Lindemann, who observed it in the spouses of soldiers heading to war. But this kind of grief shows up in many forms:

- Watching a parent's memory fade, piece by piece

- Living with a terminal diagnosis … your own, or someone you love

- Preparing for a major life transition you didn't choose

- Feeling a relationship, a community, or an era of your life drawing to a close

Anticipatory grief doesn't follow a clean timeline. It moves forward and backward. It can lift for a moment - a good day, a moment of laughter - and then return with unexpected force. It can feel like dread, or numbness, or hyper-vigilance, or a strange urge to memorize everything: the sound of a voice, the particular way someone laughs, the feeling of a familiar place before you leave it for the last time.

You Are Not Grieving Too Early

There is no "too early" in grief. Grief moves according to love, not calendars. (Dang it)

If you are already mourning - if you are already feeling the weight of what is coming - that is not a problem to fix. That is your heart doing what hearts do: holding what matters, even when holding it hurts.

What you may need is permission. Permission to feel what you're already feeling. Permission to say *I am grieving this* before the world recognizes it as a loss. Permission to tend to yourself - to rest, to be gentle, to seek support - even when the loss is still unfinished.

You are allowed to be sad. You are allowed to need help. You are allowed to say to someone who loves you: *I am carrying something heavy right now, even if no one can see it yet. (Even yourself)*

A Place to Begin

If you are in an anticipatory grief season, here are a few gentle invitations:

**Name it.** 

Even quietly, to yourself.

 *I am grieving this.* 

The naming alone can release something.

**Find a witness.**

 Anticipatory grief is harder to carry in isolation. A trusted friend, a grief coach, a spiritual director, a therapist -  someone who can hold the weight with you without rushing you toward resolution.

**Honor the love underneath.** 

Anticipatory grief is grief because something matters.

You are not weak for feeling this. 

You are someone who loves.

**Release the pressure to be further along.**

Grief is not a performance. 

There is no right way to do this, and no timeline you're supposed to be keeping.

Finally

You don't have to wait until after to grieve. You don't have to earn your sadness with a completed loss. What you are carrying now is real, and it deserves to be tended.

If you are navigating a season of anticipatory loss and find yourself needing support - to name it, to process it, to find your footing in it - I would be honored to walk alongside you. That is precisely the kind of threshold work I do.

You don't have to walk this path alone.

- - -

*Erin is a grief coach, spiritual director, and Healing Touch practitioner. Through EMBody Wisdom, she supports people navigating grief, loss, and life transitions. To learn more or connect, visit www.embodywisdomca.com

A way of life - rather than a destination

Somewhere along the way, many of us started treating purpose like a destination. A single realization. A perfect fit. A thing we were supposed to figure out once and then spend the rest of our lives executing correctly.

But I don't think purpose works that way.  I think purpose is actually much more alive than that;  More relational, more cyclical, more human.  It is probably less like finding the hidden answers and more like learning how to stay in the conversation with your own life - and your people…

Bringing It All Together.

Over the course of this series, we've explored purpose from different angles - identity, embodiment, meaning, spirituality, healing, values, inner knowing. And if there's one thing I hope has become clear, it's this:

Purpose is not separate from your actual lived experience.

Purpose is not floating somewhere outside of you, waiting to be discovered by becoming more productive, more enlightened, or more certain.

Purpose is already woven through your life.

 - In the things that move you.
 - In the things that drain you.
 - In the things your body relaxes toward.
 - In the griefs you carry.
 - In the moments that make you feel most alive.
 - In the people and places that call forth something true in you.

Purpose leaves clues everywhere….And often the work is learning how to notice it.

Alignment Changes Everything

One of the clearest signs that we're moving toward a more purposeful life is a growing sense of alignment.

When your inner life and outer life begin speaking the same language.

What you say matters starts matching how you spend your time.
What your body feels starts becoming information instead of inconvenience.
What you deeply know stops getting overruled quite so quickly by fear, obligation, or performance.

There is less fragmentation.
Less pretending.
Less living against yourself.

And this kind of alignment isn't only mental or spiritual. It's whole-person work.

Body.

Emotions.

Mind.

Spirit.

And    Relationships,  Environment,  Values,  Action.

They all speak to each other.

When one part is chronically ignored, the rest eventually start compensating. The body tightens. The nervous system overloads. Motivation disappears. Meaning gets harder to access. We lose our sense of connection to ourselves and to life.

Purpose isn't just an idea you think about.
It's something you inhabit.

Purpose Evolves Because You Evolve

This evolution matters more than we often want to admit.

Who you were at twenty may not be the same person you are at forty or sixty. The things that once mattered deeply can gradually shift, sometimes so subtly you only notice in hindsight. Roles that once felt like a natural fit can begin to feel constraining, as if they were designed for a version of you that no longer exists. Life has a way of reshaping us through experience. Loss alters our sense of what is essential. Healing changes what we are no longer willing to carry. Parenthood expands and reorganizes our priorities in ways we could not have fully anticipated. Burnout strips away what is unsustainable. Love softens and reorients us. Grief reshapes the inner landscape, sometimes permanently. Even survival alone changes the way we move through the world, what we tolerate, and what we can no longer ignore. Over time, these experiences do not just add to who we are; they transform us.

And none of that means you failed your purpose.

It means YOU ARE ALIVE.

There can be so much pressure to identify one calling and stay loyal to it forever, even long after it stops reflecting who we actually are. But purpose isn't static. It moves with us. Expands with us. Sometimes dismantles us before rebuilding us into something more honest.

Life is not lived in a single steady rhythm, but in shifting seasons that ask different things of us at different times. There are periods where striving feels necessary, where effort and forward motion are the language of survival or growth. There are seasons for healing, when the work is quieter and more inward, focused on repair and integration rather than expansion. At other times, creativity takes the lead and something within us wants to be expressed, shaped, brought into form. 

There are also seasons of caregiving, where attention is drawn outward and life becomes about tending to others with steadiness and presence. Inevitably, there are seasons of letting go, when what once belonged in our lives no longer does, and release becomes its own kind of wisdom. And there are seasons of beginning again, when something new emerges and asks for our willingness to start over. None of these phases is superior to another; all of them belong to a full human life.

Small Purposeful Living Matters

I also think we've accidentally made purpose too grand.

We imagine it has to become a mission statement or a public legacy or a career with impressive language attached to it.

But some of the most purposeful people I know live very ordinary-looking lives.

They care for aging parents.
They make art quietly.
They show up consistently for their friends.
They create safe spaces for others.
They teach children.
They plant gardens.
They listen well.
They offer kindness in places where kindness is disappearing.

Purpose is not always dramatic.

Sometimes purpose is simply the way you inhabit your life.
The way people feel around you.
The way you choose to love.
The way you remain present in a world constantly trying to pull you away from yourself.

And honestly, I think that kind of purpose matters enormously.

Questions for Reflection

You don't need to answer these quickly. Let them unfold over time.

Where in my life do I currently feel most aligned?

What parts of myself have I been neglecting or overriding?

What season am I actually in right now — not the one I think I should be in?

What experiences make me feel most alive, grounded, connected, or fully myself?

What would it look like to stop forcing purpose and begin listening for it instead?

A Simple Embodiment Practice

Try this once this week - preferably slowly.

Sit somewhere comfortable and place both feet on the floor.

Take a few deeper breaths than usual.
Nothing dramatic.
Just enough to arrive.

Notice where your body feels tight.
Notice where it feels open.
Notice what emotions are present without trying to fix them.

Then ask yourself gently:

"What in my life currently feels life-giving?"

Don't analyze immediately.
Just notice what arises.

Then ask:

"What feels out of alignment right now?"

Again, no fixing required.
Just honesty.

Stay there for a moment.
Breathe.
Let your body participate in the conversation.

Sometimes clarity arrives quietly.

A Different Way of Living

I don't think purposeful living means waking up every day full of certainty and inspiration.

I think it means learning to stay connected to yourself even while life changes.

It means paying attention.
Adjusting when something feels off.
Allowing your values to become visible in your choices.
Trusting that meaning is often found in small moments rather than dramatic revelations.

And maybe most importantly:

It means understanding that you do not have to earn your worth by constantly proving yourself.

Your life already matters.

Purpose is not a reward for becoming someone else.
It's what begins to emerge when you become more fully yourself.

An Invitation

If this series has resonated with you — if you're in a season of transition, reinvention, grief, burnout, healing, questioning, or simply wanting to feel more connected to your own life -  this is the kind of work I love walking alongside people through.

At EMBody Wisdom, I offer life coaching, grief coaching, spiritual direction, Healing Touch, workshops, and group experiences that support people in reconnecting with themselves with honesty, compassion, and embodiment.

Not by forcing answers.
But by learning how to listen more deeply.

You don't have to have everything figured out before you begin.

You just have to be willing to pay attention to what your life is already trying to tell you.

Meaning, Connection & Inner Knowing

Some things are hard to put into words. And yet they are often the things that matter most.

The moment a conversation shifted something in you and you couldn't explain why. The walk where something quietly settled. The decision you made that didn't make logical sense but turned out to be exactly right. That feeling - fleeting but real - of being held by something larger than your own effort.

Most of us have had moments like these. And most of us have learned to mention them carefully, if at all.

But I think these moments are some of the most important data we have about who we are and what we are here for.

There's More Going On Than We Can Measure

We live in a world that values what can be proven, optimized, and explained. And there's real good in that. But it also means we've become a little suspicious of the things that can only be felt.  Like the quiet nudge, the unexpected synchronicity, or the sense of rightness that arrives before the reasons do.

Spirituality, in its broadest sense, is simply the practice of paying attention to that dimension of life that is (at least at first) beyond any scientific proof. It doesn't require a particular tradition or a tidy set of beliefs. It just requires a willingness to stay open to the possibility that meaning runs deeper than what's visible on the surface.

And when it comes to purpose - that is exactly where some of the most important information lives.

Silence Knows Things

We don't talk enough about silence. Not the uncomfortable silence of an awkward room, but the kind you have to choose - the early morning before everything starts, a walk without your phone, a few minutes of stillness before the day pulls you under.

Silence has a way of returning you to yourself. The noise of daily life - the demands, the notifications, the performing and producing - creates a kind of static that drowns out the quieter signals. Purpose among them.

I've noticed that the things I know most deeply, I rarely think my way into. They surface. In stillness. In the shower. On a walk. In that strange half-awake space before sleep. The mind gets quiet enough that something truer can come through.

This isn't mystical for the sake of it. It's just honest about how inner knowing actually works - for most people, most of the time.

Interconnectedness as a Clue

I am trying to be open about where I actually struggle with this one - and it might not be where you'd expect.

The spiritual dimension of life has never been hard for me. It's been present and natural for as long as I can remember - a kind of inner knowing, a felt sense of connection, a trust in something larger that I didn't have to argue my way into. It just... is. It has been my whole life.

What I wrestle with is how to talk about it in a world that wants the proof.

Which is a little awkward, given that I am a pastor. You would think I would have the language sorted out by now. But the reality is - even in church, even among people who believe in prayer and will tell you with complete sincerity that prayer changes things - there is still a quiet caution about really putting all your eggs in that basket. We believe it. We just also want a backup plan that's a little more... quantifiable.

And I get it. I'm not throwing stones. In a science-based, consumer-driven world that values data and measurable outcomes, saying "I just know" or "something in me felt called" can sound either naive or evasive - even to people of faith.

And yet. The inner knowing is real. The felt sense of connection is real. The moments of synchronicity that defy tidy explanation are real.

So I've made a kind of peace with this: I can't always give you the proof. But I can invite you to notice your own experience. Because most people, if they're honest, have had moments they can't fully explain - where something clicked, or opened, or arrived just when it needed to. Where they felt, however briefly, held by something larger than themselves.

That's not nothing. That's data too. Just a different kind.

And the dependence part - really depending on other people, letting them be part of how my life unfolds - that's the work. It is more than a concept. This is the actual practice. And even when you've lived it, even when you know it in your bones from experience, you find yourself having to re-orient. Again. And again. Finding ways (and people) on which you can depend.

Turns out it's not a lesson you learn once and file away. It's a direction you keep choosing. A practice you have to keep tending to - like brushing your teeth. Unglamorous, a little repetitive, and absolutely necessary.

What Feels Sacred to You?

This is a question worth taking seriously, even if the word "sacred" feels unfamiliar or loaded.

Sacred doesn't have to mean religious. It just means: the things you treat with a kind of reverence. The experiences that feel set apart from the ordinary. The moments where time slows down and something in you goes quiet and pays attention.

For some people it's nature. For others it's music, or deep conversation, or the act of creating something. For others it's service - the particular aliveness that comes from giving something of yourself to someone who needs it. For others still, it's prayer, or contemplation, or simply being present to what is.

What feels sacred to you is a window into your deepest values. And your deepest values are where purpose tends to live.

Three Questions to Sit With

These are slower questions. They don't want to be answered quickly.

What gives my life meaning? Not what I think should give it meaning. What actually does - the things that make the hard days bearable and the good days feel genuinely full?

When do I feel connected to something larger than myself? Where does that sense of belonging to something beyond just my own story show up? What are the conditions that allow it?

What feels sacred to me? What do I treat with reverence, even quietly, even privately? What experiences make me go still?

Two Practices for This Week

Ten Minutes of Silence. Just ten minutes, once this week, without a podcast or a scroll or a task. Sit, or walk slowly, or just be. You don't have to do anything with it. Notice what surfaces when the noise steps back.

A Meaning Inventory. At the end of the week, ask yourself: what moments this week felt genuinely meaningful - not productive, not impressive, but meaningful? Where did you feel most like yourself? Where did you feel connected? Just notice. You're building a picture of what your particular kind of meaning actually looks like.

(I am doing these too!)

You Don't Have to Have It All Worked Out

Spiritual purpose isn't a destination you arrive at. It's more like a direction you keep orienting toward - sometimes clearly, sometimes by feel, often through the very experiences you didn't choose.

What gives your life meaning is already present in your life. In what moves you. In where you feel most connected. In what you quietly hold as sacred.

You don't have to name it perfectly. You just have to stay curious about it.

And keep paying attention.

Next week: the final post in the series. We'll bring it all together - and talk about what it looks like to actually live from purpose, not just think about it.

---

EMBody Wisdom offers life coaching, grief coaching, spiritual direction, Healing Touch, workshops, and group experiences for people ready to come home to themselves. Learn more at www.embodywisdomca.com

What the Heart Already Knows

Is there something you've been carrying around?

Maybe it's a longing you haven't quite let yourself name. Or a cause that makes your throat tighten when someone brings it up. A kind of work you keep circling back to in your imagination, even while the practical part of you keeps redirecting.

Or maybe it's grief. Something or someone you've lost. A version of life that didn't go the way you hoped. And somewhere underneath the grief, if you're willing to look, there's usually a clue about what actually matters to you.

I've come to believe (in particular because it gives me another foothold in to understanding who I am) that our emotions are not obstacles to purpose. They are part of how we find it.

Emotions Are Information, Not Interference

Most of us were taught to manage our feelings; in workplaces, in families, sometimes even in church . Set them aside. Lead with logic and let emotion follow at a safe distance, if at all.

But what if that is totally backwards?

Your emotions aren't just reactions. They're responses to what your life means to you. Grief points to what you loved. Anger often points to what you value. Joy shows up where you're most alive. And longing -   quiet, persistent longing - tends to point toward something in you that hasn't had room to be expressed yet.

When we override those signals for long enough, something dims. We stay functional. Productive, even. But we lose the thread back to ourselves.

The Longing You Keep Talking Yourself Out Of

Think for a moment about the things that move you - especially the ones you've learned not to bring up in certain rooms.

The injustice that makes your chest tight. The community you can't stop thinking about. The creative work that keeps pulling at you even though it doesn't make obvious sense. The conversation from three years ago still specifically loops through your thoughts sometimes.

Longing isn't wishful thinking. It's information. It points somewhere.

We dismiss it because following it feels risky. What if it doesn't work out? What if people think I'm being naive? What if I've waited too long?

But the quieter question is: what does it cost to keep dismissing it?

What Breaks Your Heart Is a Clue

We can’t always know all the things that we don’t know.  All we can do is move forward with the information that we have.  Even if we are asking the questions we think will help to clarify.  

When I said yes to working with my current boss, I did check in. I asked two things: is this possible? And can we work together? Both answers were yes, so I said yes.

What I didn't ask was: what will this actually cost me? What will I have to adjust, or silence, or shrink in myself to make this work? I walked ahead naively - genuinely, almost cheerfully naively - assuming it would all be easy and lovely. That I'd show up as myself and that would be more than enough. That everyone would naturally see it that way too.

They did not all see it that way.

The emotional signal was there before I ever started. I just didn't ask it honest questions. I asked what I wanted to be true, got those answers, and called it discernment. Real discernment would have asked: what do I have to become in this new relationship - and is that something I'm actually willing to do? (which also might have been the same naive answer - but maybe with more information)

The gap between what I hoped and what was took longer to reckon with than I'd like to admit. But sitting inside it taught me something I couldn't have learned otherwise: our emotions will tell us the truth, if we're willing to ask them the right things.

And what breaks your heart? That's some of the most honest information you have. It points to what you were made to care for - the suffering you can't look away from, the gap between what is and what could be.

That's not something to fix or push through. It's an invitation worth paying attention to.

Three Questions to Sit With

These aren't meant to be thought through so much as felt into. Read each one slowly. Take a breath. Notice what stirs before your mind rushes in to analyze it.

What keeps calling to me emotionally? More than just what I think I should care about. What actually keeps showing up, even when I try to redirect it?

What breaks my heart? Where does the pain in the world land personally for me - where can I not stay comfortably detached?

What deeply moves me? Where do I feel most awake, most human, most connected to something beyond just myself?

Two Simple Practices

The Emotion Inventory. When you notice a strong feeling this week - good or hard - just pause before you explain it away. Ask: what is this trying to tell me? Not whether it's appropriate. Just - what is the signal? You're not solving anything yet. You're just practicing listening.

The Longing Journal. Five minutes. Write about something you quietly long for - not something practical, not something you're supposed to want. Something that pulls at you, that you've been careful not to say out loud too often. Just write it down. You don't have to do anything with it. But named things can be worked with. Unnamed ones just quietly drain you.

Your Heart Has Been Paying Attention

Even when you haven't been.

Even when you've been too busy, too cautious, too hurt to listen - some part of you has kept track of what matters. What moves you. What grieves you. What you can't stop caring about, even when you've tried.

Purpose isn't usually hiding somewhere outside of you. Most of it is already there, encoded in those places.

The work isn't finding it. The work is letting yourself feel it again.

Next week: Post 5 — Communal Purpose. Because purpose doesn't just live in us — it lives between us.

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EMBody Wisdom offers life coaching, grief coaching, spiritual direction, Healing Touch, workshops, and group experiences for people ready to come home to themselves. Learn more at www.embodywisdomca.com

The Stories That Shape Our Purpose

 Untangling What's Yours From What You Were Handed

Somewhere along the way, someone handed you a script.

Maybe it was a parent who equated worth with achievement. A teacher who told you what you were - and weren't - good at. A culture that defined success in a very specific, very narrow way. A family system where certain dreams were quietly discouraged and certain paths were simply assumed.

You didn't choose the script. But somewhere along the way, you started living it. And the longer you live it, the harder it becomes to know where their story ends and yours begins.

This is the heart of mental purpose work: not just what do I want to do with my life - but which parts of what I want are actually mine?

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The Belief System You Inherited

Here's the thing about conditioning: it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't show up wearing a name tag that says "Hi, I'm a belief your mother gave you that no longer serves you."

It shows up as the voice that says who do you think you are when you reach for something bigger.

It shows up as the automatic no - before you've even let yourself fully imagine the yes.

It shows up as the relentless overthinking that keeps you circling the same decision for months, because some part of you learned that wanting the wrong thing had consequences.

Inherited beliefs are particularly tricky because they often feel like truth. Like reality. Like just the way things are. They have been rehearsed so many times, for so many years, that they've stopped sounding like beliefs at all. They sound like you.

But they're not you. They're weather you've been living inside for so long you forgot there was another kind of sky.

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Fear of Failure Is Rarely About Failure

I've sat with a lot of people (in ministry and coaching and spiritual direction and healing work) who say they're afraid to fail. And when we slow down and look more closely - what they're actually afraid of is something older than any specific failure.

They're afraid of being seen as too much. Or not enough. Or of disappointing someone they love. Or of confirming a story that was told about them before they had words to argue back.

Fear of failure is almost always fear of a verdict. Some old voice, some old wound, that got there first.

And through all of the work I have done in my own life I have found that: you can complete an Ironman. You can survive brain surgery. You can rebuild yourself from loss more than once. And that voice can still show up. (dammit) Still quiet. Still insistent.

The goal isn't to silence it forever. The goal is to stop letting it make your decisions.

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Three Questions Worth Sitting With

Again - these aren't for thinking. They're for noticing. Read slowly. Breathe. Feel before you analyze.

Which goals are truly mine? Look at what you're currently working toward - your career goals, your life goals, the things on your someday list. Now ask honestly: if no one in your life would ever know whether you achieved this or not - would you still want it? If the answer hesitates, get curious about that hesitation. Whose approval lives inside that goal?

What beliefs keep me small? Not the beliefs you'd name in a workshop. The ones that operate quietly, under the surface. The ones that show up as I couldn't possibly or that's not realistic or people like me don't do that. Where did that belief come from? How old is it? Is it actually true - or has it just been true for a long time?

What would I pursue if I knew I couldn't fail? The classic question - but asked differently here. Don't answer with what sounds good. Answer with what makes something light up in your chest even as your mind rushes in to explain why it's impractical. That lighting up is data. That's the body pointing toward something real.

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Two Practices for Untangling the Stories

1. The Origin Trace The next time you catch yourself in a loop of self-doubt or overthinking, pause and ask: how old does this feeling feel? Often the answer is surprisingly young - seven, twelve, sixteen. The part of you that's spinning out isn't the adult you. It's a younger you, running a very old program. You don't have to fix it in that moment. Just naming it - this is an old story - creates just enough distance to breathe.

2. The Rewrite Take one belief you've been carrying that keeps you small. Write it down exactly as it sounds in your head. Then ask: if I wrote a different version of this story - one in which I was worthy, capable, and allowed - what would it say? You're not trying to gaslight yourself into positivity. You're practicing the discipline of authorship. Because at some point, someone else wrote your story. And you get to decide whether to keep living it.

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Redefining Success on Your Own Terms

At some point, the most courageous thing you can do is ask: whose definition of success have I been chasing?

This is not so you can throw it all away. But to look at it clearly. To keep what is genuinely yours and set down what was always someone else's to carry.

Success on your own terms might look quieter than what you were taught. It might look stranger, or bigger, or less impressive to the people who handed you the script.

But it will feel like something that performance never quite could.

It will feel like you.

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Next week: Post 4 - Emotional Purpose. What our emotions are actually trying to tell us about who we're meant to be.

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EMBody Wisdom offers life coaching, grief coaching, spiritual direction, Healing Touch, workshops, and group experiences for people ready to come home to themselves. Learn more at www.embodywisdomca.com