Guten Tag, Reader,

“Alright, you know what’s coming…” I say to my client, and a big grin appears on her face. She wasn’t always this keen on answering the question I ask at the beginning of every coaching session:

“What are you celebrating about yourself? What have you been proud of since we last spoke?”*

“My intuition and the fact that I followed it,” she says

I won’t tell you what she intuited, but I will tell you that her intuition was right on point, and the results are positively life-altering.

A friend had shared earlier this week that she quit her job that morning. When I asked her what happened, she answered, “I just suddenly knew that it was the right thing to do. As soon as I sent that email, my body felt so light.”

The Lightness of Following Your Inner Knowing

Yes.

I remember that lightness.

I felt it when I followed my intuition and switched majors from Physics to Mass Communication.

When I moved in with my now-husband after only 6 months of dating.

When I switched to part-time employment at age 30.

When I knew I was going to leave my husband.

When everything changed and I knew I would stay.

Also, with seemingly (at the time) smaller decisions, like asking my really remote acquaintance (at the time), Angie, if she wanted to run a river retreat with me.

Or leaving social media.

Or creating a product that can be touched, shipped, and sold in a retail store.**

In some cases, days, months, even years of arguing with my intuition came before the lightness.

My analytical, air-element-driven, productivity-culture socialized brain does not appreciate trusting intuition or following the gut.

It feels threatened by such irrationality.

Sometimes my brain demands something soothing, like a pro/con list, or a wall full of sticky notes, before making a decision, and I am happy to oblige.

It’s a way to facilitate communication between the parts of me that crave spontaneous, wild creativity and the ones that require order, continuity, and security.

Mapping out all the options, sorting them, and evaluating them is actually a good strategy to check in with your gut, connect with your intuition.

Here is How

🧭 Whether you use a pro/con list, a mind map, or some other (seemingly) analytical tool to help you make a decision, check in with your body compass.

📏 How does your body feel on a scale from -10 to +10?

🫀 Try not to use any language here. This is not about checking in with emotions, but bodily sensations.

🎈 Does one option feel lighter, freer, more expansive than the other?

🪨 Does one create tightness, stiffness, a more restrictive sensation?

That’s your intuition (a.k.a. your essential Self) speaking its wisdom.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, I am not surprised. Our very left-brained hustle culture trains us to disregard, even overwrite, our body’s signals.***

But don’t fret. You can always reconnect to your body compass, to your intuition, to a life that feels light, even when shit is hard (sorry, there is just no way around the hard stuff).

Over the years, I developed a unique coaching style that combines nature therapy with neuroscience, creativity with strategy, and empowers my clients to find their own way through the midlife wilderness.

🧭 Special Offer just for YOU 🧭

To get a taste, you can now book a 30-minute Body Compass Calibration session. This offer is only available to my 🦩 joy letter 🦩peeps and only through the end of September (my birthday month).

​Book here for $19.71 (in honor of the year I was born).

You will receive a new way to tap into your inner wisdom whenever you make a decision, no matter how big or small.

Tell me

I will see you back here in two weeks. If you liked this letter, please forward it to a friend.

Always on your side, truly,

* It takes most clients several sessions to get into the mode of paying attention to the things they did well and celebrating themselves for them. Once they are into it, they often can’t wait to tell me the things they collected.

** The printed Advent Calendar card deck is coming!!!

*** How do I know? Because I overwrote my body’s signals for so long, I ended up in chronic pain for years. Now I listen to every whisper, rather than waiting for pain to YELL AT ME.

p.s. If you found something valuable in today's letter, why not buy me a coffee? I am keeping my writing AI-free, which means a lot of creativity goes into it. You can leave a tip for me here.