Empowered Way Podcast

Dearest Sovereigns: My parents came to town to see the life I was building, and somewhere in that visit they asked the question I had been dreading since they booked the trip. “How much are they paying you?” I told them the truth, which was ten thousand dollars a year. It was 1983, and even in 1983 money, that number was not going to impress anyone. They sat in stunned silence. I watched the numbe...

Dearest Sovereigns: The overwhelming grief found me on the highway, on the drive home after dropping our daughter off at college. I had always assumed empty nest syndrome happened to other women (and not to me). I discounted any warnings from friends who had already experienced the nest emptied. I dismissed any articles I happened across that described a dense, dark emotional atmosphere in the hom...

Dearest Sovereigns: In college, I was offered a place on a group trip to England. Six weeks at Oxford in the summer. Lots of side trips to historical and magical places across England, including Stonehenge. I wanted to go with the kind of hunger you only feel when a door opens onto a life you dreamed was meant for you. My parents said it wasn’t for me. I cried and begged, and when that didn’t work...

Dearest Sovereigns: Every morning since 2017 I have sat down in the same chair with one intention, which is to connect with Divine Love. Some mornings my mind arrives busy and insists on reviewing every worry before it will consider settling. Breathing intentionally and slowly, I release them to Love, one at a time, as my body loosens and my thoughts clear. Other mornings I bring nothing but mysel...

Dear Sovereigns: We were watching Ted Lasso the other night. The club needed players, and someone raised the idea of an open tryout, the kind where anyone can walk in off the street and be seen. In the middle of that conversation somebody said the name, Susan Boyle, and Ted had no idea who she was. I did. I spent the rest of the episode only half watching, because a name I had not thought about in...

Dear Sovereigns: I have loved rainbows my entire life. Every time one appears, it is always unexpected and a reminder that we live in a world where magic is all around us. I have seen rainbows in Hawaii, the British Virgin Islands, and in my own back yard. Each time a surprise and a delight. One day, I became curious about why the colors in a rainbow are always in the same sequence, how they form,...

Dear Sovereigns: Several years ago, I walked the ancient labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, one hour south of Paris, carrying something I no longer wanted to carry. I will not name it here. I suspect you already know the weight I mean, because most women are carrying their own version of it. The grief that lives inside a family relationship and the one you have also wounded. The part you played that...

Dearest Sovereigns: I was at a personal growth workshop when the teacher asked us to sit in silence for twenty minutes. My mind turned hostile immediately, screaming, “This will not work!” As my resistance grew, my mind shouted, “I cannot sit here doing nothing!” I looked around to see if anyone else was having difficulty. All the women around me were sitting quietly, their hands open on their lap...

Dear Sovereigns: I was two days into a visit with my daughter when she told me she did not need my help. She is married and lives in another state. She has built a life that runs perfectly well without me standing in the middle of it. I knew all of that on the plane. Then I walked into her house and fell straight into mother mode, offering suggestions about things she had already handled. We had a...

Dear Sovereigns: I met Melissa Henderson on a small tour van to the Isle of Skye. She was kind enough to allow me to interview her about her life, the unexpected transitions, and the lessons she learned along the way. Melissa Henderson has a master’s degree in publishing. She has never built her life on it. That sentence took years and a great deal of money to earn, and she is still optimistic and...

Dearest Sovereign: I asked a machine to write about Love. It gave me eleven hundred words in less than a minute. The sentences were clean and the structure held. There was a paragraph about Divine Love that I could have published on a good morning without anyone noticing the difference. I read it twice and felt nothing. Not because it was wrong or didn’t produce what was asked. It gathered every w...

Dearest Sovereigns: When my daughter was five years old, she started at a new school. After the second day, she started complaining of a stomach ache. We thought it was nerves, being at a new school with other children she didn’t know. Her pain continued and when she started throwing up and couldn’t stop, we took her to the doctor. A diagnosis was quickly given: appendicitis. She needed an operati...

Dearest Sovereigns: The unicorn found me somewhere between Edinburgh and Sterling Castles, in the middle of a history lesson I didn’t expect to learn. As I toured these ancient buildings, I noticed unicorns repeatedly depicted in tapestries, the Coat of Arms, and on statutes. What was it about unicorns that captured the imagination of Scotland and England? I read one version of the story first. Sc...

Dearest Sovereigns: A few years ago I sat in a room full of women who were tired of being the ones who held everything together, and I watched something shift the moment one of them said out loud what she actually wanted instead of what she thought she should want. That is the work Beverly Keaton has spent more than two decades doing. She is the author of Heart-Filled Living: Creating What’s Next...

Dearest Sovereigns: I read the poem, “Instructions for Visiting Earth” by James McCrae for the first time on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, at my kitchen table, with no warning that it was about to unravel me. By the third line I was crying. Not the polite kind of crying you can blink away and keep reading through. The kind that comes from somewhere older than the moment. Deep sobs rose from my ch...

Dear Sovereigns: My latest novel, Sovereign Women started as a story about Emily Carter, a woman standing in the space between fear and love. But underneath Emily’s story was mine. I wanted to write something that finally gave women a third option, not head, not heart, but something quieter than both. Every instinct in me wanted to pick a side. Readers want a verdict. They want the author to hand...

Dear Sovereign: I will be out of touch for the next two weeks. It’s summer and that means it’s time for vacation! You may not know that there is an extensive library of meditations on Insight Timer . I am one of the teachers on that platform and would be honored to share my meditations. What is Insight Timer? It’s a free app you download to your phone. The beauty of setting up an account is access...

Dearest Sovereigns: The most important declaration of independence I ever made happened on an ordinary afternoon, with no fireworks and no one watching. For years I had built a life that looked like freedom from the outside, and I was still governed by something I never chose. Fear had been making my decisions for so long that I mistook its voice for my own. The day I stopped handing it that autho...

Dear Sovereigns: There is a particular quiet that arrives when certainty stops working. You know the one. The plan was clear, practical, and the answer was obvious. Everyone agreed on what you should do. And then something happened that none of it could hold, and for the first time in a long while, you did not know your next steps. Most of us are taught to fear that silence and fill it fast. To re...

Dear Sovereign: Julia Faire became a famous actress because she never grieved a terrible loss. That is not a criticism. It is the most honest thing I can say about how she built her life. Eleven years before the story of my second novel begins, something happened that should have unmade her. Instead of allowing it, she ran. She left everything behind, moved to Los Angeles, and poured herself into...

Dear Sovereigns: For years I said the same prayer and turned away before it could be answered. And then, one day I did something different. I was standing on the fly bridge of a sightseeing boat off the Na Pali Coast of Kauai, holding the metal rails with both hands while the bow rose and fell on two and three-foot waves. The mountains fell into the ocean, lush valleys falling into water. The sea...

Dear Sovereign Sisters: There are two ways to be allowed into a room, and we spend most of our lives confusing them. The first is permission. Someone with authority looks at you, weighs you, and decides you may enter. You followed the rules. You earned the seat. You proved you belonged, and the proof was accepted. The second is presence. The door is simply open. No one weighs your value. No one de...

Dearest Sovereigns: There is a voice you have been in relationship with your entire life. You have never questioned its authority. You have never asked where it came from, who installed it, or whether it has been telling you the truth. You have simply obeyed it, argued with it, tried to silence it, or performed for it the way you perform for every authority you have never thought to examine. That...

Dear Sovereigns: I was on the back of a motorcycle somewhere in West Texas, holding on to my husband and finally, after many years, letting go of everything else. The grief had been living in my chest so long I had stopped noticing its weight. Three years of IVF. Years of watching my body fail at the one thing women are supposed to do naturally. Many hours of quietly, relentlessly arguing my case...

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