The Work That Was Already Mine
When the search outside led me back to what was inside all along.
For the past month or so, I’ve been making real progress on actually building The Sovereign Return (the course), which is a meaningful distinction from my more practiced pattern of planning, revising, rethinking, and perfecting the idea of it. I am, if nothing else, an expert in those particular arts.
I’m not deeply studied in Human Design, but what I’ve learned resonates. I’m a 1/3 Mental Projector. I love to learn, try, fail, and learn some more. Outside of my home, courses and trainings are likely my biggest financial line item. I have degrees, certifications, and threads followed across years of curiosity. I collect them. Once I start, I see how one idea connects to another and I follow that thread, sometimes somewhere fruitful, sometimes not. If all the courses I’ve signed up for and never completed were physical objects, I’d need a warehouse to store them all.
What I’ve come to understand, though, is that the most essential thing I’ve learned wasn’t found in any of those courses. It was found in me. My lived experience. My perspective. My journey. The moments that made me stop and actually look at my life, the patterns I kept repeating, the values I’d been modeling without ever choosing them, the slow and sometimes painful process of learning to trust my own inner knowing. The understanding, finally, that I don’t have to be the martyr in my own life for anyone else’s comfort.
That was the real learning. Everything else was leading here.
The first module of the course is called Reflect and Honor. It marks the moment just after the realization, those first tender steps back toward yourself. It isn’t about rumination, the kind that sends the mind and body into exhausting loops of the past. It’s simpler than that. It’s the quiet acknowledgment: I see you. You carried me here. Thank you. It’s about identifying the patterns that kept us from tending ourselves, examining the values we absorbed from the circles we traveled or the generations that came before us, and beginning to ask what our own values actually are. Sometimes they’re the same ones we inherited. Sometimes they’re not. Both are okay.
I remember one afternoon in late 2016, picking up a book called You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. I didn’t realize I was picking up a self-help book. I liked the sass of the title. I thought, I want to feel like a badass, how does that work?
That book was the blessed beginning of the end of a particular era of my life.
It cracked something open. It made me look honestly at where I was, who I was being, and what I already knew to be true but had been unwilling to say out loud. The life I was living, the way I had given away my own power year after year, keeping the peace, appeasing someone I had been with for 25 years, was not destiny. It was not the only possibility. It was something I was meant to learn from, grow from, and eventually offer a way through.
For most of my life, I believed the only learning that mattered was the kind built by others, certified, credentialed, marketable. That it was the external validation that gave me permission to do the work my heart was calling for. What I’ve come to understand is that the real curriculum was what I lived. What I have witnessed in others walking on similar roads and how we find our way back.
We often think “things are better on the other side”, and that is true. However, the other side I’m talking about isn’t somewhere else. It isn’t an escape. It’s the other side of the long neglect of ourselves, the return to the sacred interior we quietly abandoned.
We left our temples. We left our gardens. We built walls to protect ourselves, and somewhere in that building, we moved from resident to guard. We stationed ourselves on the walls, facing outward, always tending, appeasing, serving, giving until we lost the key and locked ourselves out.
So while the course offers no certifications or those marketable skills, it offers something far more rare: yourself, returned to you. There is nothing in this world more valuable than that.
For now, I will continue to build The Sovereign Return and bring it to life in preparation for the first few journeyers who will walk through its soon to be opening doors.
What did your walls originally protect? When did you last step inside them?
I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.
Your reflections are part of the medicine, and every voice adds to the remembering of our collective sovereignty.
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