What happens when the life we carefully planned is not the life our soul is asking us to live?
In this episode, we explore what becomes possible when the different parts of us begin working together—when thinking and action no longer rule alone, but learn to serve feeling, intuition, and the deeper wisdom within. Through Jung’s four psychological functions, The Handless Maiden, Perceval, and the parable of the farmer and his horse, we look at the difference between trying to control life and learning how to participate with it.
I also share the winding story of how Know Thy Soul came into being—how my plan to launch a podcast led instead to a spiritual writing retreat, an unexpected encounter with Anne Lamott, two books, and eventually back to the podcast I had intended to create all along. Along the way, we explore the difference between intellectual understanding and gnosis, the direct knowing that comes through lived experience.
This is an episode about trusting your intuition, following the next right step, and learning to live from the inside out. Because sometimes what appears to be a distraction, failure, or detour is actually the soul guiding us toward the life we came here to live.
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Handless Maiden by the Brothers Grimm
- Carl Jung’s four psychological functions, individuation, the inferior function, shadow, and projection
- The Grail legend of Perceval, Blanchefleur, and the Fisher King
- The ancient Chinese parable of the farmer and his horse: “Good? Bad? Who knows?”
- The ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself,” inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi
- The Hebrew words lada’at, lehakir, and yada
- The Greek concepts of logos and gnosis
- The Nag Hammadi writings, often grouped under the name “Gnostic Gospels”
- The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 3
- Anne Lamott and Bird by Bird
- Ted Lasso
- Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 15
- Alan Watts’s comparison of religion to a boat used to cross a river
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The full episode transcript is below.
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that lead us back to wholeness.
Over the last four episodes, we’ve followed the journey of *The Handless Maiden* from the fairy tale into real life, exploring how we lose our connection to our inner knowing—and how we begin to grow our hands back.
Today, we’re going to jump to the end of the story and explore what life looks like once we’ve grown our hands back—when the inner king and queen have each journeyed through the forest and can finally live together with their child.
If you didn’t listen to the previous episodes, here’s the short version.
The Handless Maiden is a fairy tale about a young woman whose father makes a bargain with the devil and unknowingly promises away his daughter. When the devil comes to claim her, he cannot take her because she remains connected to God. Eventually, her hands are cut off, and she leaves home alone. She wanders through the forest, marries a king, receives a pair of silver hands, is later exiled again, and eventually finds refuge in a place called “Here All Dwell Free.”
There, over the course of seven years, her hands slowly begin to grow back. Meanwhile, the king undertakes his own seven-year journey to find her and their young son. When they are finally reunited, they return to the castle, and there is great rejoicing throughout the kingdom.
There is so much in the earlier part of the story that we haven’t covered yet. Topics like the wound, the healing, solitude, relationships, etc. But I wanted to give you a sneak peek at why we might want to go on this journey. What might life look like after we grow our hands back?
Before I tell you what growing my hands back has looked like through the writing of my book and the creation of this podcast, I want to introduce one idea from Carl Jung that helped me understand what was happening.
Jung believed that becoming whole does not mean perfecting the parts of ourselves we already know how to use. It means bringing the parts we have ignored, suppressed, or left unconscious back into relationship with the rest of us. Integration is a central part of the lifelong process he called individuation.
Jung described four basic psychological functions: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition. We all possess all four, but most of us learn to trust and rely on certain functions far more than others.
Thinking helps us use logic, analysis, and structured reasoning to make sense of the world. It allows us to weigh evidence, consider consequences, solve problems, and turn complexity into something manageable. But when Thinking rules alone, it can rationalize away anything that cannot be easily measured or explained, including what we feel and intuitively know.
Feeling, in Jung’s framework, is not simply emotion. It is the part of us that recognizes value and asks, “What matters to me? Does this feel right? Is this aligned with who I am?” Feeling helps us understand ourselves and connect empathetically with others, but without balance, it can become difficult to distinguish our deeper values from a temporary emotional reaction or our desire to keep everyone else happy.
Sensation connects us to what is physically present through sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and the signals of the body. It notices the concrete details of what is happening right now and helps us remain grounded in practical reality. But when Sensation dominates, we may become so focused on what we can physically observe that we leave little room for imagination, deeper meaning, or possibilities we cannot yet see.
Intuition notices patterns, possibilities, and connections that are not immediately visible. It often arrives as an idea, an image, or a quiet knowing before we can logically explain where it came from. Intuition helps us imagine what could be, but it needs Thinking and Sensation to help discern that guidance and bring those possibilities into the physical world.
None of these functions is better than the others. The problem begins when one becomes so dominant that the others are ignored. Jung called this one-sidedness: one function becomes the one we consciously trust and rely upon, while the others remain less developed and less accessible to us.
In much of modern Western culture, rational Thinking—and often whatever can be externally observed and measured through Sensation—has been treated as more trustworthy than Feeling or Intuition. As a result, Feeling and Intuition are frequently left underdeveloped or pushed out of conscious authority.
In a strongly Thinking-dominant person, Feeling may become what Jung called the inferior function—not because it is less valuable, but because it has been given less room to develop.
Integration does not require us to abandon our natural strengths. It asks us to develop all four functions so we can consciously draw upon each of them, allowing them to work together rather than permitting one to rule the entire kingdom. For me, that has meant learning not only how to think, but how to feel; not only how to intuit what might be possible, but how to remain present to what is actually here.
In the symbolic language we’ve been using throughout this podcast, I think of Feeling and Intuition as closely connected to the inner queen. She listens, receives, senses, and knows.
Thinking and Sensation help the inner king respond to what she knows. He gives it structure. He protects it, acts upon it, and helps bring it into the world.
When the king rules without the queen, we may build a life that functions beautifully from the outside but feels empty within. But when the queen has no king beside her, we may know exactly what our soul is asking of us and still never act upon it.
We need both.
And I think that is what the reunited king and queen actually represent.
Any of the four can operate consciously or unconsciously. But within the symbolic framework we’ve been exploring, Thinking and Sensation are closely connected to our conscious engagement with the tangible world, while Feeling and Intuition often draw from deeper processes unfolding beneath our conscious awareness.
And this helps us understand the masculine and feminine characters we repeatedly encounter in stories. The king, warrior, or father usually moves through the visible world: thinking, organizing, protecting, deciding, and acting. The queen, maiden, or mother often represents the inner world: feeling, intuition, relationship, meaning, and the quiet wisdom that cannot always explain how it knows.
This does not mean that men think and women feel. All four functions—and both masculine and feminine energies—exist within every one of us.
But I do think this helps us understand what we call patriarchy. Symbolically, patriarchy repeats the same pattern as the father cutting off the maiden’s hands: the masculine severing the feminine from her ability to feel, act, create, and trust what she knows.
In Jungian language, we might understand this as one-sidedness: the conscious Thinking function claiming the throne while other ways of knowing—Feeling, Intuition, and even the direct information we receive through our bodies and senses—are pushed aside.
We see this pattern in the external world when men control, silence, dismiss, or diminish not only women, but also what has traditionally been associated with the feminine: emotion, intuition, vulnerability, receptivity, and relational wisdom.
And because men carry all of those capacities within themselves too, diminishing the feminine in the outer world also requires them to diminish it within themselves. The result is a patriarchy that wounds both men and women alike.
It teaches women to surrender their authority, while teaching men to surrender their vulnerability, emotional wisdom, intuition, and capacity for deep relationship. Symbolically, women lose their hands, while men lose access to their hearts.
Neither can be whole, because we cannot sever half of the human psyche without wounding the entire kingdom.
How many times have we heard the expressions, “Take it like a man,” “Boys don’t cry,” “Suck it up,” or “Emotions are for girls”? Beneath all of them is the same message: becoming a man requires cutting yourself off from feeling.
But what we suppress does not disappear. A person who has been taught to disconnect from emotion does not become free of it; they become more vulnerable to being controlled by feelings they have never learned to recognize, understand, or consciously relate to.
What we cut off becomes part of what Jung called the shadow—the qualities, feelings, and wounds we have pushed out of conscious awareness. Because we cannot yet recognize them within ourselves, we often project them onto the people around us.
Fairy tales give this inner process a visible form. A curse or enchantment can symbolize what happens when some essential part of the psyche has been exiled: it continues to shape the story from the shadows until it is finally recognized and brought back into relationship with the whole.
So this is not simply my story. It is a human pattern—named by psychology, enacted in our relationships, and carried for centuries in our myths and fairy tales.
And that is exactly what we saw happen to Perceval—and what, in one form or another, so many of our great stories have been trying to show us: what we exile from ourselves does not disappear. It continues shaping our lives until we are willing to turn toward it.
Perceval learned how to rescue, but not yet how to relate. He could fight for Blanchefleur, but he could not remain with her. His attention was still fixed on his own quest—on who he wanted to become and whether he had what it took.
So even when he sensed that the Fisher King was suffering and the question arose within him, the inherited voices telling him how a knight should behave were louder than his own inner knowing. He remained silent.
Perceval did not lack masculine strength. He lacked a relationship with the feminine wisdom that could show him what his strength was meant to serve. He had not yet learned how to turn from “What about me?” toward “What ails you?”
His story shows us that patriarchy does not only cut off the maiden’s hands.
It wounds the king too.
A man who has been severed from his inner feminine does not become more masculine. He becomes a stranger to his own soul—disconnected from his feelings, from genuine relationship, and from the voice of God within him. Those capacities do not make him less of a man. They are part of what makes him fully human.
And women can internalize this same pattern, learning to distrust or suppress these parts of themselves. So patriarchy does not create a healthy masculine by diminishing the feminine. It wounds the entire inner kingdom.
When the feminine has been silenced, she appears in stories as handless, sleeping, imprisoned, or locked away in a tower. And when the masculine loses his connection to her wisdom, he often becomes a tyrant, a wounded king, or an aimless knight who no longer knows what his strength is meant to serve.
Integration is the sacred marriage between these two ways of knowing. Feeling and Intuition help us recognize what is meaningful and where our soul is leading us. Thinking and Sensation help us discern that guidance, give it structure, and carry it into the physical world.
The queen recognizes what is sacred.
And the king places his strength in service to it.
Think back to the king’s numbered pear garden. Every pear had been carefully counted and numbered, and the king knew immediately when one was missing. It is a perfect image of the conscious masculine: orderly, observant, and capable of creating and protecting structure.
There is nothing wrong with that order. A garden needs to be tended. But when the masculine rules alone, it can begin to believe that reality consists only of what can be counted, measured, categorized, and controlled.
Then the maiden enters, guided by an angel, and eats one of the pears. Her arrival introduces mystery, intuition, and divine guidance into a system that cannot account for any of them. The missing pear reveals that the king’s understanding of reality is not necessarily wrong, but it is incomplete.
And even after he falls in love with the maiden, his first solution to her handlessness is an external one. He gives her silver hands so she can function within his world. They are beautiful, practical, and carefully crafted—but they cannot feel.
That is what happens when the masculine tries to solve an inner wound without the wisdom of the feminine. The goal is not to destroy the numbered garden or reject the king’s capacity for logic and order. It is to bring the king and queen back into relationship, allowing structure and mystery, thinking and feeling, the visible and the invisible, to inform one another.
Our hands are the bridge between the inner and outer worlds. They allow what we feel, know, imagine, and receive within us to become something tangible.
The queen says, “This is true. This is what wants to be created.”
And the king says, “Then let me help you build it.”
Integration doesn’t mean I never feel afraid, question myself, or ask someone else for advice. It means every part of me is allowed into the conversation—and no outside authority gets to silence what I know within myself.
It means my inner truth and my outer life are finally beginning to match.
And before I jump into my own story, I want to tell you one more parable.
Because the thinking mind has a way of deciding what our lives are supposed to look like. It wants to number and order every pear in the garden. And when something disrupts that order, it is very quick to decide what the disruption means.
But intuition leaves room for what we cannot see yet. It knows that we are almost never standing at the end of the story.
There’s an ancient Chinese parable about a man whose only horse escapes from his stable. His neighbors come to him and say, “Oh, you poor man. What terrible luck. How will you survive without your horse?”
And the man replies, “Good? Bad? Who knows?”
Several months later, the horse returns, bringing a whole herd of wild horses with it. The neighbors gather around again and say, “You are the luckiest man alive.”
And once again, he replies, “Good? Bad? Who knows?”
Then one day, while his son is riding one of the horses, he falls and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “How terrible. What awful luck. How will you manage without your son’s help?”
And the man says, “Good? Bad? Who knows?”
A year later, war comes to their region, and every able-bodied young man is called away to fight. But because the man’s son has a broken leg, he is spared. The neighbors tell the man how fortunate he is to still have his son.
And again, he replies, “Good? Bad? Who knows?”
The story could continue indefinitely, because every ending becomes the beginning of another chapter. The lesson isn’t that losing the horse was good or that the broken leg was good. It’s that we are almost never in a position to know what a single event will ultimately mean.
Hard things cause real pain. But we often add another layer of suffering when we decide too quickly what those events mean—and when we cling to the numbered pear garden we had already arranged in our minds.
Integration allows each function to do its part. Sensation meets what is actually happening. Feeling tells us what matters. Intuition keeps us open to what we cannot see yet. And Thinking helps us decide what to do next.
Thinking is no longer the king ruling alone, trying to write the ending before the rest of the story has had a chance to unfold. It works in relationship with the rest of the psyche.
That doesn’t mean becoming passive or simply allowing life to happen to us. It means we stop fighting reality long enough to hear what life is asking of us—and then we act.
And nowhere have I experienced that kind of integration more clearly than in the writing of my books and the creation of this podcast.
So let me tell you how this podcast came to be—and how it continues to evolve and grow. But first, lets back up to years before I ever thought about a podcast.
In one of the earlier episodes, I told you that I was constantly scolded for talking too much in class. And while I fully recognize that talking during class may not have been appropriate, speaking has always been part of what I came here to do.
The first time I knew I was meant to speak publicly was in 2016, when I attended an event for a company I was working with. As I listened to the keynote speaker, my whole body lit up like a Christmas tree. I remember looking at her on that stage and thinking, “I’m going to be on that stage someday.”
The knowing was so alive inside me that I stayed until almost everyone had left the room, snuck up onto the stage, and took a picture. You can see that picture in the blog post on my website that accompanies this episode.
But here is what I can see now: my body knew before my thinking mind understood.
Something about that woman standing on the stage had awakened a true knowing in me. But because she was talking about the life and business she had built with that company, my mind decided that was the life I was supposed to build too.
So I charged forward. I built a solid business with the company, although never anything close to the level she had built. Then, a few years in, I realized that I no longer felt the passion for it that I once had.
From the outside, someone could look at that chapter of my life and say I failed. I saw a future, worked toward it, and never made it onto that stage through that company. And in some ways, I felt like a failure. But I also knew that I couldn’t keep moving forward towards something my heart wasn’t invested in.
But looking back now, I see it differently.
That company brought me into the world of personal development. It taught me to believe in myself, and it taught me how to sell in a way that felt aligned and genuine. It also began teaching me how to listen within.
And eventually, I understood that the knowing I felt in that room had not been wrong. I had simply misunderstood it.
It wasn’t the business she had built that made my body light up. It was what she was doing on that stage.
She was helping an audience made up mostly of women see their lives in a way they had never seen them before. She was using her voice to give them eyes to see their own lives differently.
That was what I recognized. That was what my soul was responding to.
The company was the vehicle that brought me into that room, but it was never the destination.
And when I finally knew that my time there was done, people warned me that it wouldn’t be better anywhere else. They told me I was making a huge mistake by leaving and that I would never find that kind of opportunity again.
But something within me knew it was time to go. I wasn’t looking for another opportunity. I was looking for my soul’s path. I couldn’t have told you that at the time, but I can say it with confidence now.
Around 2018, I read a book that awakened something else within me. It was the first book I had read that felt as though it had been written by a woman directly to other women—like she was sitting across from me in a coffee shop. As soon as I finished it, I thought, “I could write a book like that.”
I had no idea what my book would be about. There was no title, no outline, and no real plan. It was less like a fully formed idea and more like a seed being planted somewhere inside me.
Over the years, I attended several book-writing workshops. One piece of advice I heard again and again was to set your alarm for five o’clock in the morning, force yourself into your office, sit down at your computer, and start writing. Eventually, something good would come out.
And every time I heard that, I remember thinking, “Ew. I don’t know how I’m going to write a book, but I know that’s not it.”
That method may be exactly right for someone else. But something within me knew that this particular book wasn’t going to be forced into existence.
I told you in last week’s episode that we are not separate from nature. We are nature.
You don’t put an apple seed into the ground and expect it to produce apples the next morning. Some seeds sprout quickly. Others spend years developing roots before anything visible appears above the soil. We are no different.
All of these experiences were seeds, each one growing in its own time. My work wasn’t to keep digging them up to make sure they were growing. It was to tend my inner garden and trust their timing.
So in the years that followed, I traveled deeper into the worlds of healing and spirituality. I became almost a full-time student, studying Rapid Transformational Therapy, shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism, BioGeometry, Vedic counseling, Human Design, and Gene Keys, just to name a few.
With nearly every new thing I studied, I would learn something valuable and then find myself thinking, “This isn’t the whole story. There’s more.”
So I kept going. I took courses, read hundreds of books, earned healing certifications, attended workshops, and followed each new rabbit hole that set my heart aglow. I couldn’t see how all the pieces fit together yet, but something within me kept leading me toward the next one.
Along the way, I also kept seeing myself hosting a podcast. The sense of it was persistent, but the clarity wasn’t there yet. I attended podcasting workshops and learned a lot, but whenever I tried to force the podcast into a particular concept or format, it never felt quite right.
For a while, I thought I had many different seeds growing at the same time. But the books and the podcast were never really separate. They were different expressions of the same thing growing within me. I simply couldn’t see that yet.
Things really began to shift when I first read the story of *The Handless Maiden* and immediately knew that my first book would be called *Growing Hands*.
For the next nine months, I literally described myself as gestating a book. I could feel it developing within me even though I hadn’t put any words on paper and no clear form had taken shape in my conscious mind.
But I had already carried four babies. I knew that my body could grow a heart, bones, fingers, and an entire human being without my conscious mind directing every step of the process.
And I began to understand that creativity could work that way too. Something deeper within me was already growing the book, long before my thinking mind knew how to write it.
In the meantime, I had also begun thinking about starting a podcast, and I was working casually with a business coach.
During one of our conversations, we were discussing what I might call it, and she shared a piece of advice that unlocked something for me. She said she liked podcast names that took a familiar phrase and changed it slightly. She gave me the example *Awake at the Wheel* instead of the familiar phrase *asleep at the wheel*.
After that conversation, I asked myself, “What familiar phrase describes what I do and what this podcast will be about?”
Immediately, the ancient Greek maxim inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi came to mind: “Know thyself.”
But *Know Thyself* was already the name of another podcast, and more importantly, the word *self* had never sat quite right with me.
As you’ve already seen, these stories contain so many different selves that live within us: the wounded child, the king, the maiden, the hero, the shadow—even the armor we wear. But I wanted the name to point toward the part of us these stories are ultimately trying to lead us back to.
The soul.
And that’s how the name Know Thy Soul was born.
After the name came to me, I immediately went straight online to see whether the .com domain name was available.
It was.
Do you know how insane that is? If you’ve never tried to buy a domain name, let me explain just how magical this felt.
A few years earlier, I had started a blog. I recently found the notebook where I had brainstormed names for it, and there were about three full pages, with three columns on every page, filled with possibilities. Almost none of them were available as a dot-com.
The name I eventually created was Busoula. I began with the Italian word bussola, meaning compass, and altered the spelling so that the word *soul* lived inside it. It was meant to represent a compass pointing toward the soul.
I loved the idea. It said exactly what I wanted it to say—but it also took me that entire paragraph to explain it. It wasn’t immediately understandable, and it never felt fully right.
Looking back, I don’t think Busoula was wrong. It was another step. Another seed. But it was a name I constructed, carefully arranging letters until they carried the meaning I wanted them to carry.
Know Thy Soul was a name I received.
It arrived in an instant, fully formed, when I was finally ready to hear it. And somehow, the domain was waiting for it.
But this wasn’t intuition acting alone. Intuition gave me the name, and then my thinking mind knew exactly what to do with it: check the domain and begin creating a place for it in the world.
One received the direction. The other helped bring it into form.
That is what integration looks like.
And remember, this was still 2 years ago in the early summer of 2024.
That same summer, another opportunity came along that included a logo design, and that is where the Know Thy Soul logo was born.
I had a name, the .com, a logo, and a coach. I was ready to start a podcast that summer.
But my divine design had a different plan for me.
Just a few weeks earlier, my ex had asked to take the kids to a family party during one particular week that summer. It was really the only week I could travel by myself, and I knew I wanted to go to some kind of retreat center.
A friend recommended a few places, but none of the workshops being offered that week really spoke to me. I chose one anyway because I didn’t want to waste the only week I had available.
I booked the workshop and my flights. And almost immediately, I got a pit in my stomach. But I brushed it off.
The next morning, I woke up and saw a post from the retreat center about an emergency that had happened on campus. I knew immediately that I wasn’t supposed to go there. Not because I was afraid, but because it felt like confirmation that the pit in my stomach had been trying to guide me somewhere else.
Thankfully, the workshop organizers were very accommodating and refunded me without any issue. And because I was still within 24 hours of booking the flights, those were refundable too.
I decided to book a different retreat center in California that I had also been considering. I wasn’t particularly excited about any of their workshops either, but time felt like it was running out, and I didn’t want to lose my only opportunity to travel.
Interestingly, when I went to rebook the flight, I had an issue with the app and had to call and book it with an actual person—’90s style.
As we were about to hang up, I got one of those strange nudges. There was absolutely no logical reason to ask the question. I had already changed my plans once, and I had no intention of changing them again. But something told me to ask anyway.
“Do I still have 24 hours to change this flight if I need to?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
I thanked her and hung up.
Later that evening, I found myself browsing the retreat center’s website, trying to get myself excited about the trip. I landed on the events calendar again, only this time I scrolled just a little farther down—past the week I had booked—and saw a program that stopped me in my tracks: *Embodied Spiritual Writing*.
The moment I read those words, my entire body lit up.
My mind immediately began telling me all the reasons this was a crazy idea. First, it was the wrong week. Second, I was supposed to be focusing on the podcast. But my body was telling me a different story. My heart felt like it might jump out of my chest.
I may not have intellectually understood why, but something else within me knew: that was where I needed to be.
In English, we use the same little word—know—for experiences that are not the same at all. We can know a fact, know how to do something, know another person, or know in our bodies that something is true. English has ways of describing those differences, of course, but that one little word has to carry all of them.
Other languages sometimes make those distinctions more visible. Modern Hebrew distinguishes between lada’at (lah-DAH-aht)—knowing information—and lehakir (leh-hah-KEER)—knowing someone or something through familiarity and relationship.
Greek gives us another way of understanding this distinction. Logos is associated with word, reason, and rational explanation, while gnosis came to describe direct, experiential knowing in later spiritual traditions. Logos can help us understand something. Gnosis is what happens when we know it from within.
That word, gnosis, is also where we get the word Gnostic.
In 1945, thirteen ancient books containing more than fifty writings were discovered inside an earthenware jar buried near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The surviving copies date to the fourth century, which meant they had remained hidden for roughly sixteen hundred years.
Among them were the *Gospel of Thomas* and the *Gospel of Philip*, two early Christian writings often grouped among what we now call the Gnostic Gospels. These writings are very different from one another, but many emphasize this kind of knowing—not simply believing ideas about God, but directly recognizing our relationship with the divine.
In the *Gospel of Thomas*, Jesus says, “The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.” He then connects coming to know ourselves with recognizing ourselves as children of the living Father.
In this teaching, knowing ourselves and knowing God are not separate pursuits. The journey inward is not a journey away from God. It can bring us into gnosis—a direct, lived knowing of God.
And as if the name weren’t already fitting enough, the Greek phrase “Know thyself” is gnōthi seauton (GNOH-thee seh-ow-TON). Gnōthi comes from the same family of words as gnosis, from a verb meaning to perceive, recognize, or come to know.
So *Know Thy Soul* was never meant to mean learning facts about the soul. It means coming into relationship with it—learning its voice well enough to recognize it when it speaks and trusting it enough to allow it to guide your life.
And perhaps it’s no accident that the workshop was called Embodied Spiritual Writing. I didn’t reason my way toward it. My body recognized it before my mind could explain it. Somewhere deeper than thought, I knew this was why none of the other workshops had excited me. This was the workshop I was meant to attend.
I checked with my ex, and once we cleared the date, I immediately called the retreat center, assuming it would probably be too late to change my plans again.
Instead, they switched everything without any issue. They even credited me the difference because the workshop was slightly less expensive.
Then I called the airline. At first, they told me that flights booked with travel vouchers didn’t qualify for the same 24-hour change policy.
When I explained what the previous agent had told me, they reviewed the call, honored her promise, changed the flight, and even credited me the remaining balance.
Remember, this was supposed to be the summer I started the podcast. Every logical part of me said I should stay focused on the plan.
But I didn’t let a plan I had already made—or my need to be able to explain what I was doing—talk me out of what I knew.
I trusted what I was feeling.
And I found my way there anyway.
This is what it means to give sovereignty to the inner queen. She senses where we need to go.
The role of the inner king isn’t to dominate her, dismiss her, or demand that she logically explain everything she knows. His role is to listen to her guidance, protect it, and help carry it into the world.
She gives us the direction. He helps us give it form.
From the outside, all of this might look like flightiness or a lack of commitment. And yes, I haven’t always remained committed to my plans in the external world as tightly as some business gurus would have liked me to.
But I have remained steadfastly committed to my inner queen.
I may have changed the plan, but I never stopped following the path.
And there were so many more twists and turns to this story. Yet every one of them seemed to be guiding me exactly where I needed to go.
That first writing workshop absolutely was where I needed to be.
Something unlocked in me there—something my rational mind still can’t fully explain.
We did an exercise where we free-wrote, then did a spiritual practice, and then free-wrote again. And for whatever reason, this particular practice made my skin crawl.
I hated it.
Every fiber of my being wanted it to stop.
I have no idea what it moved or opened within me. But when we returned to the page, what came through me was profoundly different from what I had written just an hour earlier.
I wrote from my soul.
When I returned home, I told my coach about the workshop and said that maybe I needed to shift my plans. She immediately suggested another writing workshop taking place in Los Angeles three months later. It offered both an in-person and an online option.
The online option would have made so much more sense.
But once again, something within me knew that I needed to be there in person. I had absolutely no logical explanation for why.
Of course, this time my thinking mind didn’t let me off quite so easily.
Who are you, Jenn, to go back to California three months later?
How can you spend that kind of money again?
And why can’t you just do it online?
But this time, I didn’t need to silence my thinking mind. That would only repeat the same pattern in reverse.
I simply gave it a different job.
It didn’t get to decide where I was going. The inner queen had already given me that direction. Now the inner king could help me figure out how to get there.
So I took a deep breath and went to work making the trip possible.
Somehow, life opened up and gave me another full week to travel. I would spend the weekend at the writing workshop and then return to the same retreat center I had visited that summer, where I could spend the rest of the week integrating what I had learned and practicing my writing.
And then, about a week before the event, the reason I had known I needed to attend in person began to reveal itself.
The organizers sent an email saying that they were opening one of the hour-long workshop slots for an attendee to teach. Anyone who wanted to be considered had to submit a two-minute workshop pitch video.
And that opportunity was only available to—you guessed it—the people attending in person.
The online attendees could watch the workshop, but they weren’t eligible to teach it.
Now, remember that moment years earlier when I knew I would someday speak on stages?
Because of that knowing, I had attended several speaking workshops over the years. One of them had specifically taught us how to tell a story in two minutes.
So I knew I had to submit a pitch, even if I did it only for the practice.
There was just one problem.
What could I possibly teach a room full of aspiring authors?
My thinking mind told me I had nothing.
You aren’t an author.
You aren’t qualified.
You have no business standing on that stage.
But my inner queen said something entirely different.
So I sat in meditation and asked what workshop I should pitch.
Almost immediately, a memory from college came to me.
Years earlier, I had created an event centered around listening, trust, stepping into the unknown, and taking the next right step over and over again.
Sound familiar?
And suddenly, I knew exactly what I would teach.
My workshop would help writers find their inner voice and trust it to guide the writing process.
Because by then, I no longer believed that books were written solely from the mind. I believed they emerged from something deeper—something that already knew where the story wanted to go.
The writer’s job was to learn how to listen.
I hadn’t yet experienced that process firsthand through writing an entire book. But I had been learning to live it in my life for years.
I recorded my video, sent it in, and was selected to pitch my workshop onstage the first night. After all the presentations, the audience would vote on which workshop they wanted to attend and that person would present on Sunday.
I didn’t submit the video because I thought I would win. I submitted it because something inside me said, This is the next step.
Do you see the difference?
I wasn’t asking, Will this get me the outcome I want?
I was asking, Is this mine to do?
My job was to take the next step. What happened after that wasn’t mine to control.
On Friday evening, after taking an early-morning flight from the East Coast, I was the last person to present. About sixteen women had gone before me, and by the time I stood up, it was nearly ten o’clock Pacific time. The room had mostly emptied, and it had been a very long day for everyone.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking.
Did you get the workshop?
Did you win?
Because we have been trained to see success as getting the thing we think we want—to see winning the workshop as good and not winning it as bad.
But life has taught me that sometimes the thing we think we want is simply leading us toward the thing we actually need.
So the answer is no, I didn’t get the workshop.
I got something better. I got clarity.
The next morning, I woke up around four o’clock, which is pretty typical for an East Coaster visiting the West Coast.
And in that half-awake, half-asleep space between sleeping and waking, a message came through loud and clear:
“Jenn, your workshop…that’s your book.”
And just like that, everything clicked into place.
Clarity.
The very thing I had been waiting almost seven years for.
For the first time, I could clearly see what my book was about.
But that wasn’t the only magic waiting for me at that event. And once again, I could receive it only because I had gone in person.
The main workshop ran from Friday evening through late Sunday night. My plan—you know, the one I had made with my mind—was to stay at the same hotel through Monday morning, wake up early, pick up a rental car, and drive six hours to my next destination. I hoped to arrive by the middle of the afternoon.
The final keynote speaker that weekend was none other than Anne Lamott, author of *Bird by Bird* and many other books I love.
A few weeks before the event, the organizers had sent an email saying that Anne was offering a smaller, more intimate writing workshop on Monday morning, immediately after the main event ended.
And here’s the important part: it was only available to people attending in person.
But I was still trapped in my “I already have plans” mindset. I was supposed to leave early Monday morning, so I mostly ignored the emails.
Then the plans at my next destination shifted, and I no longer needed to arrive Monday afternoon.
Suddenly, my Monday morning was open.
For the first time, I could see what I hadn’t been able to see before.
This was an incredible opportunity to learn from a writer I deeply admired.
How had I not noticed it before?
There was only one problem.
By then, the workshop was sold out.
No big deal, I thought. If I’m meant to be there, life will find a way. And if not, then I’m meant to leave Monday morning and begin writing at my next destination.
Now, a little side note.
I’ve attended a lot of workshops over the years. And while they can be incredibly helpful, they can also be incredibly exhausting.
I’ve never attended one that truly honored the feminine.
Most workshops try to fill every waking moment with activities, presentations, speakers, and exercises. So before this one began, I made a promise to myself: I would honor what I was feeling.
If my body needed rest, I would rest.
And in the middle of a presentation on Saturday afternoon, I got that feeling. My body was telling me it had had enough and needed to go back to the room.
So I listened.
I left.
On my way back, I stopped at the hotel coffee shop for a cup of tea.
And guess who was the only other person in there?
Anne Lamott.
Just me and Anne Lamott.
There’s actually a picture of us together on my Instagram page, if you need proof that this happened.
We talked for a while. I bought her a pack of gum. We walked back to the conference center together and talked about *Ted Lasso*, the upcoming election, and all kinds of things.
At some point, I mentioned that I had hoped to attend her workshop on Monday morning, but it was already sold out by the time I knew I could make it work.
Without missing a beat, she looked at me and said:
“Just show up Monday morning and tell them I sent you.”
Wait.
What?
Did Anne Lamott just give me permission to name-drop Anne Lamott?
I was already staying at the hotel through Monday morning anyway. So on Monday, I woke up, packed my bags, and headed toward the room where her workshop was being held, with absolutely no idea what would happen next.
I walked up to the woman checking people in and told her what Anne had said.
She smiled and replied:
“Great. I just need your email address so we can send you the invoice.”
You guys.
I was in.
And just as the first workshop had unlocked my ability to access my feelings through writing in a way I never had before, this workshop unlocked something entirely different.
Craft.
It was as though Anne reached into my brain and showed me how beautiful sentences were made.
Before that workshop, I had a dream of becoming a writer.
After that workshop, I became one.
I couldn’t get to my next destination fast enough.
I spent the next five days beginning the process of birthing what would eventually become the first chapters of my book.
Do you remember all those book-writing workshops I told you about? The ones that said to set an alarm, get up at five o’clock in the morning, force yourself into your office, and eventually something good would come out?
Yeah.
This was nothing like that.
I couldn’t catch the words fast enough.
All those years earlier, I had known how I didn’t want to write a book. What I hadn’t known was how I did want to write one.
So I kept showing up.
I kept listening.
I kept taking the next right step.
And eventually, I birthed a book.
In Stephen Mitchell’s translation of chapter 15 of the *Tao Te Ching*, it asks:
“Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”
I had read that line dozens of times, and it had never really meant anything to me.
Until this happened.
Then suddenly, I understood it in the way something can only be understood once you have lived it.
Writing had become the action that arose by itself.
And because of that, I didn’t spend the next year and a half working on the podcast.
I pivoted.
I followed the guidance instead of the plan.
And I wrote a book.
Then, as I neared the end of that book, the final chapter I felt guided to add kept growing longer and longer. Eventually, I realized it wasn’t a chapter at all.
It was asking to become its own book.
Seriously?
Another book?
Yes, I looked up at the sky many times and said:
“Seriously? I just wrote a book, and now you want me to write another one?”
But once again, I pivoted.
And I wrote a second book.
In the nearly two years it took me to write both books, I never once had to force myself into my office to write.
It was as though the ideas arrived each morning, and wings carried me to the computer.
When the books were complete, it was time to begin thinking about how I would bring them into the world.
I started drafting query letters to agents, but I still couldn’t clearly see how the books wanted to make their way into physical form.
What I could see—what I knew—was that it was finally time to bring the podcast into the world.
So once again, I pivoted.
But this time, I was ready.
I already had the name.
I already had the logo.
And now I carried a much deeper understanding of these stories because I had spent nearly two years living with them, writing about them, and allowing them to change me.
This podcast is infinitely better because of everything that happened during those two years.
The depth I reached—not only within the stories, but within myself—never would have happened if I hadn’t written those books.
Especially the second, which could only emerge because I had written the first.
Looking back now, I can see that every step was preparing me for the next one.
So there I was this spring, feeling as though I was about to give birth all over again.
You know those final weeks of pregnancy?
Restless.
Uncomfortable.
Unsure what to do with yourself.
Certain that something is coming, but having no idea exactly when.
That’s how this spring felt.
And then, once again, I felt called to attend another workshop.
I didn’t really understand why I was supposed to be there. The topic had almost nothing to do with writing, podcasting, or anything else I had been working on.
But again, I just knew.
And while I was at the retreat center—not even during the workshop itself—I had a deeply spiritual experience.
When I came home, these episodes began flowing out of me in the same way the books had.
I kept taking the next right step.
Just like the turtle.
Over and over again.
Do I know what tomorrow will bring?
No.
Have the books found their way into the physical world yet?
No. Not yet.
But I no longer mistake “not yet” for failure.
Because the Way isn’t only about reaching a destination. It’s about remaining in alignment while we travel.
Could I have forced myself to write a book the way all those workshops suggested?
Probably.
But it wouldn’t have been the book my soul wanted to bring into the world.
And it wouldn’t have led me here.
Looking back now, the only word I can think of for this journey is magical—not because I’m special or because my life is somehow different from yours, but because I stopped demanding to see the entire path before taking the next step. And I am still very much in the middle of the story. I’m still learning how to grow a podcast, still discerning how the books want to enter the world, and still unsure what tomorrow will bring. But I trust.
Just this past weekend, a friend told me that her life wasn’t as magical as mine. She said she was always looking for signs, but she could never find them.
Did you hear that?
She was looking for them. She was doing what so many of us have been taught to do: looking outside herself for something that could tell her what was true. It is what Perceval spent so much of his life doing.
Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said that the kingdom would not arrive in a way that allowed people to say, “Here it is,” or “There it is.” The kingdom of God is within you.
It was never somewhere else waiting to be found. It was already here, waiting to be recognized.
The signs in my life haven’t appeared because I went out searching for them. I have learned to stay connected to myself and present to what is happening, within me, so I can recognize what life is showing me when the time is right.
I laughed and told her that my life hadn’t always felt magical either. For years, I ignored what I knew, handed my authority to other people, and believed everyone else could hear God more clearly than I could.
The magic didn’t begin because life suddenly started speaking to me. It began when I finally learned how to listen.
I spent years growing my hands back—learning to feel, learning to trust, and learning to listen. And that is really what all of these stories have been about.
In The Handless Maiden, the maiden grows her hands back. Perceval learns to see. The masculine and feminine learn to live in harmony with one another. And the turtle from last week’s episode trusts what is written into her very bones.
They are different stories, but the invitation is always the same: Come home. Not to a place, but to yourself—to the part of you that already knows.
The same intelligence that guides an acorn into becoming an oak tree, a river toward the sea, and a turtle toward the place where she will lay her eggs is alive within you too.
For years, I thought the goal was to find the right answer—the right career, the right relationship, the right teacher, the right plan, the right path, or even my life’s purpose. But the turtle taught me something different.
The path isn’t something you find. It’s something you walk, one step and then the next.
And I think we misunderstand purpose when we reduce it to a career or to the work we do every day. Our deepest purpose is to come into relationship with the soul, learn to recognize its voice, and trust it enough to follow.
Our work may become one expression of that relationship, but it isn’t the purpose itself.
I’ve told you before that most of us were taught to live from the outside in. We learned to look outside ourselves for answers, approval, direction, and permission.
That’s what I was doing in the labor room. It’s what I did through so much of my life. And it’s why I felt so lost.
But the stories showed me something different. Eventually, life showed me something different too.
There is another way to live. We can live from the inside out.
That means living a life in which your deepest knowing gets a vote, your feelings matter, and your intuition is honored rather than dismissed. It means restoring the soul to the throne and allowing all the other parts of you to work together in service of what is sacred.
And perhaps the best part is that the choice remains ours. As we’ll see in future stories, free will is part of our divine inheritance.
This doesn’t mean that one choice makes us good and the other makes us bad. But the two ways of living do not lead to the same place.
From everything I have experienced, one brings us into the gnosis of God—not simply knowing about God, but living in direct relationship with God. The other slowly severs us from that relationship and, in doing so, severs us from ourselves and from life.
That is what *Know Thy Soul* is really about.
Alan Watts compared religion to a boat that helps us cross a river. We need the boat to make the crossing, but the boat itself isn’t the destination.
And that is what we are really exploring here: how to make the crossing from living outside in to living inside out, how to come into relationship with the wisdom already alive within us, and how to trust the voice that has been quietly guiding us all along.
The stories, myths, fairy tales, scripture, religion, rituals, psychology, and even science are simply the boats that help us cross the river.
If you would like to keep walking with me—and be the first to know when the books find their way into the world—you can join my email list at knowthysoul.com.
You don’t have to see the whole path, and you don’t have to know exactly where it is leading. You only need to take the next right step.
The turtle does it. So does the river, and so does the acorn.
And somewhere deep inside, you already know how to do it too.
Until next time, my friends.
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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