The Gilded Leaf 🌿

We took a full week off for the Fourth — I hope your holiday was soft and your tea was strong — and I’m back today with a little bit of housekeeping before we steep, because I want this series to be clean for anyone just joining us at the tea table. Since June 5th, we’ve been walking The Living Tree together — Malkuth, then Yesod, then Hod. Today, we arrive at Netzach, Hod’s partner across the tre...

A standalone Gilded Leaf episode — outside the Living Tree series — written as a direct letter to someone just stepping into adulthood. Inspired by a real conversation over the Fourth of July weekend, I walk through the quiet difference between loving someone's potential and loving who they actually are, between being loved and being useful, between what's familiar and what's actually good for you...

This week at the tea table, I’m pouring a cup of hibiscus — deep garnet, tart, and cooling — and talking honestly about what happens when the season doesn’t give you a bridge. No break between the school year and camp. No exhale. Just a pivot into a different kind of joy that still asks everything of you. In this episode, we talk about the particular kind of tired that builds like heat, what Tradi...

We are four weeks into the Living Tree series, and this week we step sideways into Hod — the sephira of splendor, sacred intellect, and the luminous architecture of the mind. In this episode, we sit with rosemary, tulsi, peppermint, and oatstraw, and we ask a question most of us have never been taught to ask: what is the difference between the inner critic and the sacred editor? Hod is the part of...

The hardest relationship you will ever have is the one you have with yourself. You can leave rooms, block numbers, start over somewhere new — but you cannot escape you. This Sunday at the Tea Table, we sit with the voice. The one that rises up the moment things get quiet. The one that says you can’t, you shouldn’t, you aren’t enough. We ask the question nobody asks gently enough: whose voice is th...

There is a sphere on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t sit at the crown, luminous and unreachable. It doesn’t root at the base in the dark earth of Malkuth. It lives in between — just above the ground, just below the heart — gathering everything that has moved down from the heights and holding it, distilling it, preparing it to finally touch the world. Its name...

Some medicine is not sweet. Tonight we are sitting with dandelion root — the plant most of us were taught to call a weed, the one that pushes up through the pavement anyway, unbothered and faithful to its own nature. In this episode, I asks what it means that so many of us learned to do the same: to smooth over our heat, to rename our anger, to fold ourselves smaller so the room would stay comfort...

There is an ancient map. It predates the wellness aisle, the apothecary, the printing press. In the Kabbalistic tradition, it is called the Tree of Life — ten luminous centers of awareness arranged like a body standing between earth and heaven. Root to crown. Receiving to giving. Contraction to expansion. It was drawn as a tree. That was not an accident. In this first episode of Season Two series,...

Some wounds don’t announce themselves. They just quietly shape everything — the reaching, the searching, the particular ache of feeling like you were never quite enough to keep. This week at the Tea Table, I’m sharing something I’ve held close for a long time. A fairy-lit basement in Beaverton. A healer named Trisha Michaels — Reiki master, sager, channeler of Archangel Michael — who walked me hom...

What Grows in the Dark There is a kind of work that doesn’t look like work from the outside. It doesn’t show up on your face or in your calendar. It happens in the quiet — in the unlit rooms of your interior landscape — in the places most of us have been too afraid to look. This week, Burdock Root is my teacher. In this episode, we sit with shadow work, the body as mirror, and the ancient principl...

In this Sunday Tea Table Confessional, I’m sitting with the tender, complicated work of loving someone without disappearing inside the relationship. I share about a past partnership where I found myself carrying the invisible emotional labor of the home — managing schedules, tending my daughter’s inner world, holding his healing, and keeping the household running — all while slowly losing my own s...

There is a kind of exhaustion that has very little to do with sleep. This episode is for the woman who keeps the day moving even when her own inner world is asking to be sat beside for a while. The one who loves deeply, tends faithfully — and has slowly, quietly, begun to disappear inside the doing. This week we carried Yarrow’s medicine from Wednesday’s Weekly Steep into a more tender place: what...

Tea Table Confessionals is where I bring the things that don’t quite fit anywhere else. The unfinished truths. The questions still finding their shape. The quiet overwhelm of seasons that are full and hard and meaningful all at once. Every Sunday I pull up a chair, pour something warm, and say the thing I have been carrying all week. No performance. No polish. Just an honest conversation between t...

There is a kind of tired that sleep does not touch. Not the tiredness that comes from a long day or a short night. The deeper kind. The kind that settles into the body quietly, over time, when the nervous system has been asked to carry more than it was built to carry alone — and has been answering yes, anyway, for longer than it should have. I know this tiredness right now. I am living inside it....

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf, the whistle of the kettle- sings the song about one of the oldest and most haunting questions I know how to ask: What does the soul carry when it reaches the threshold? Through the ancient Egyptian Book of Coming Forth by Day, I reflect on the weighing of the heart, the feather of truth, and the quiet possibility that these old teachings were never only about de...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf, I reflect on being single, open to love, and the hardest truths long-term partnership has taught me. I speak about repair, emotional maturity, single motherhood, self-worth, and why being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. This is a warm, honest conversation about love, discernment, and the kind of partnership truly worth keeping. — The Gilded Leaf 🌿...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thegildedleaf.substack.com/subscribe We made it. Seven chakras. Many herbs. One long, slow, beautiful climb — and today we arrive at the crown. In this final episode of the chakra series, I walk back through every energy center we’ve visited together — from the root’s question of s...

This week on The Gilded Leaf, I rise with you into the sixth chakra and sit with the quiet power of the third eye — not as a trick or a spectacle, but as the place in me that knows what’s true long before language finds it. I pour a cup of mugwort herbal blend, my favorite dreaming herb, and let its wild, silvery scent curl up around us as I tell the story of Alaska winters, ink‑dark skies, and th...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf Chakra Series, we arrive at the throat — the place where truth travels from the chest to the lips. Over a cup of peppermint and a warm throat blend, I trace the long path of finding my voice: from growing up the youngest in a house of writers, to swallowed words and over-explaining, to the quieter power of speaking honestly without abandoning herself. Together we...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf — Chakra Series, we arrive at the heart chakra: the bridge between the body’s lived stories and the quieter spiritual currents beneath them. We briefly revisit the root, sacral, and solar plexus — where the body has been learning safety, emotional flow, and personal power — before settling into the heart as the place where survival and identity begin to open towa...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf — Chakra Series, we arrive at the solar plexus: the fiery center of self-esteem, will, and personal power. We briefly revisit the root and sacral chakras — where the body has been learning safety and emotional flow — before stepping into the place where desire becomes decision. We talk about the quiet ways many of us, especially women, are socialized to be pleasa...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf , I reflect on a past relationship that didn’t end because love was absent — it ended because growth changed the shape of what I could tolerate. This isn’t a story about blame or heartbreak. It’s about nervous system evolution. About what happens when you stop over-functioning in the name of connection. About the quiet moment when clarity arrives and you realize:...

In this episode of The Gilded Leaf, I explore the second chakra as a place of pleasure, creativity, and emotional truth—approaching it with reverence, warmth, and a little well-earned humor. This is a conversation about desire before it becomes story, before it’s labeled or judged, and about learning to trust the body’s quiet yes. With a sensual but grounded lens, I reflect on intimacy, self-trust...

🌿 Episode One — The Root Chakra: Safety, Belonging, and the Right to Be Here In this first episode, I’m opening a seven-part series exploring the chakras as a way of understanding emotional life, nervous system states, and the slow work of becoming—not as something to fix or ascend, but as a way of listening more carefully to how the body holds experience. We begin at the root, the place connecte...

In this episode of 🌿 The Gilded Leaf , I explore the place yogis sometimes call “the bad sit”—the hips—and what it means when they start speaking up during times of transition. This is a conversation about how fear, uncertainty, and the act of moving forward live not just in the mind, but in the body itself. I reflect on my own experience of hip pain as a visceral response to standing at the edge...