Radiant Audacity Wellness

‘A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows. She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.”

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Sometimes an opt out is actually an opening.

This morning, five women had to step away from The Return on October 3.

And while my first reaction was disappointment, I realized something:

Their no created room for someone else’s YES.

Five spaces just opened around the circle.

Five places for women who maybe thought they’d missed their chance.
Who have been watching from the edges.
Who felt the pull but hadn’t quite stepped toward it yet.

Maybe one of those spaces was supposed to be yours.

The Return was never meant to be about filling seats.

It is about gathering the women who are meant to be there.

Women ready to come back to themselves.
To their bodies.
Their truth.
Their pleasure.
Their fierceness.
Their softness.
Their knowing.

We’ll gather in the mountains at Mill Creek on October 3 for a full day of movement, ritual, creativity, nourishment, fire, water, laughter, truth, and remembering.

And apparently…

the circle just made a little more room.

Five spaces are open.

If you’ve been waiting for a sign to opt in—

this might be it.

🔥 THE RETURN
October 3 • Mill Creek
$133

Come take your place in the circle.

I think we’ve been applying the 80/20 rule to the wrong damn thing.

We use it for food:
Eat well 80% of the time so you can have the w**e, the dessert, the pizza, the whatever-the-hell-you-want 20%.

But what if we applied it to our whole LIFE?

80% grounded.
20% a little unhinged.

80% responsible.
20% wildly inappropriate.

80% early nights, good sleep, water, movement, taking care of your nervous system.

20% stay up too late.
Drink the good w**e.
Buy the concert tickets.
Skinny dip.
Flirt shamelessly.
Dance barefoot.
Take the trip.
Kiss somebody longer than necessary.
Say yes to the thing that makes absolutely no practical sense but makes you feel ridiculously alive.

Because maybe the goal was never to become perfectly disciplined humans.

Maybe the goal is to build a life sturdy enough to hold a little chaos.

Take care of your body.
Pay your bills.
Keep your word.
Love your people.
Do the work.
Make mostly good decisions.

And then…

leave 20% for the woman who occasionally needs to howl at the fu***ng moon.

I don’t want a life so optimized that there’s no room left for stories.

I want my 80% solid enough
that my 20% can be gloriously, deliciously, unapologetically unhinged.

There is a place between the bitch and the doormat.

I think that place is functional fierceness.

Not the woman who has sharpened herself into a weapon because she’s tired of being hurt.

And not the woman who keeps swallowing her truth because she’s afraid of being difficult.

The woman between them.

She has teeth.
But she doesn’t need to bite everyone who comes near her.

She has softness.
But it is no longer an invitation to walk across her.

She knows when to speak.
When to leave.
When to forgive.
When to say absolutely fu***ng not.
And—maybe hardest of all—when something simply isn’t worth her energy.

Functional fierceness isn’t about becoming louder.

It’s about becoming clearer.

Clear about what nourishes you.
Clear about what drains you.
Clear about what belongs to you and what never fu***ng did.

It is being able to hold a boundary without building a wall.

To remain tender without becoming available for mistreatment.

To hear someone else’s truth without immediately abandoning your own.

To choose peace without confusing peace with compliance.

There was a time when many of us thought there were only two choices:

Be good.
Be agreeable.
Be accommodating.
Be easy to love.

Or burn the whole fu***ng thing down.

But there is another way.

A mature kind of wildness.

A regulated kind of power.

A woman who can stand barefoot in the middle of her own life and say:

I know who I am.
I know what I need.
I know what I will no longer carry.
And I do not need to become cruel to become free.

That is functional fierceness.

Not the bitch.

Not the doormat.

The woman who knows she has both fire and softness inside her—and finally trusts herself enough to know which one the moment requires.

THE MEDICINE OF THE GRAY FOX

For the last week, I cared for an unusual little soul: a young male gray fox.

Someone found him as a kit and, intending to save him, raised him around humans. At six months old, he was released into a busy riverside park—but nobody had taught him to be wild.

Instead of avoiding people, he approached them. He wanted to climb, play, and wrestle, sometimes too roughly, because beneath his human habituation, he is still a fox.

That is the heartbreak.

A habituated wild animal isn’t necessarily tame, and one that seeks human affection isn’t necessarily safe—not because he is bad or aggressive, but because he no longer understands that humans are not his people.

In many cases, a story like this ends in euthanasia. For now, people are working to find this fox a place at a wildlife education facility where he can live safely.

Perhaps that is the medicine of the gray fox.

Fox symbolizes intelligence, adaptability, and the spaces between worlds. Gray foxes can climb trees, moving between earth and canopy, while the color gray itself belongs to the in-between—not simply good or bad, rescued or harmed, wild or tame.

Sometimes our best intentions create consequences we never imagined.

If you find orphaned or injured wildlife, contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Don’t raise wild animals as pets with the intention of releasing them later.

Proper rehabilitation is not only about keeping an animal alive. It is about preserving its wildness through minimal human attachment, species-appropriate care, and the behaviors it needs to survive.

Sometimes loving a wild animal means feeding it without letting it know you. It means resisting the urge to hold it—and making sure it never learns to love you back.

Wildness isn’t something we need to rescue them from.

It is part of what we are trying to save.

This beautiful gray fox deserved the chance to remain exactly what he was meant to be—

a fox. 🦊

🪞 Lots of stuff coming into clarity the last couple of weeks -from many, MANY angles!! This week last year I was immersed deeply in our Bali adventure. This week is not that at all. It’s been a rough one! Today my journaling session brought this into the light….

SOMETIMES WE NEED THE MIRROR.

There are people who come into our lives and reflect back the beautiful things.

Our strength.
Our growth.
Our becoming.

And then there are the ones who reflect back the things we’d rather not see.

The patterns.
The excuses.
The places where our words and our actions don’t quite match.

Those reflections can be uncomfortable as hell.

Because sometimes the truth hurts.
Sometimes it embarrasses us.
Sometimes it makes us defensive enough to blame the mirror for what we’re seeing.

And listen—we ALL have s**t.

Our own stories.
Our own wounds.
Our own demons quietly fighting for space inside us.

Those things deserve tenderness and compassion.

But they don’t change what’s true.

Maybe the real work isn’t about who has suffered more, who was right, or who gets to justify what.

Maybe it’s simply asking:

How am I choosing to show up in the middle of my own s**t?

Because there is a rare kind of love in someone who can see both our brilliance and our blind spots.

Someone willing to reflect the truth without needing to punish us with it.

Sometimes the mirror isn’t the enemy.

Sometimes it’s simply showing us something we’re finally ready to see.

Another study on human nature:
I stopped by a popular grocery store in Chico on my way home for work to grab some necessities (coffee and heavy cream 😂). It was packed. All demographics represented- except for blue collar people who work outside in the dirt apparently (men or women.)
Oh the looks I got. 👀 Most people gave me the up and down sneer and moved away from me. Except for one hippie lady in her 70s that I had a lovely conversation with and one gnarly biker guy that at least looked me in the eye and said hello. I tend to make eye contact with everyone I pass and if they look at me I say hello or smile or something.
It took me until I was back in the parking lot to come up with maybe they thought I was homeless…but I honestly don’t feel like I fit that description either. I even sniffed my pits to see if I stunk…nope that wasn’t it. My grocery cart definitely reflect that reality. 😂
It was really just that they don’t see people dirty from working outside?!? Especially women??!! You gotta be kidding me.
We gotta get back to trades and blue collar workers ….we keep this bitch running. I mean without loggers there would not be lumber to build your homes and businesses. Just saying. Am I also woo-woo?!! Hell yes I am. But I truly think that’s what is so powerful. Yoga means yoke or union—so I am yoking the two worlds ~that’s my mission in life.

Maybe the bitch in you isn’t asking to burn the village down.

Maybe she’s asking you to stop volunteering to carry all its fu***ng firewood.

Read that again.

Because somewhere along the way, we learned to call a woman angry when she stopped accommodating.

Difficult when she stopped over-functioning.

Selfish when she stopped carrying what was never hers.

Too much when she finally took up the space she’d been giving away.

So maybe this fire you’re feeling isn’t destruction.

Maybe it’s information.

Maybe your irritation is pointing directly at the places you’ve been saying yes while your whole body is screaming no.

Maybe your anger knows exactly where you’ve abandoned yourself in the name of being good, helpful, agreeable, understanding.

You don’t have to burn anything down.

You don’t need to blow up your life.

You don’t even need to make a fu***ng announcement.

Just.

Put.

The firewood.

Down.

Let the village figure out how to tend its own damn fire.

You’ve got one of your own to feed.

And she is fu***ng magnificent. 🔥

This was a kinda fun Chat GPT prompt….
(And check out the babes behind me - this picture is from July 1942 Time Magazine story. They are in Lassen Volcanic National Park on the 4th of July 🫨)

Before you meet Natalie, there are a few things you should know.

She is not particularly interested in behaving.

Not in the reckless way.
In the I have spent enough of my life doing things simply because that’s how they’re done way.

She will ask you questions you weren’t planning to answer.

She’ll want to know what makes you feel alive, not what you do for work.

She believes the body knows things the mind hasn’t caught up with yet. She trusts dirt under bare feet, women gathered in circles, long dinners, old trees, deep belly laughs, pleasure, movement, instinct, and the strange little tug in your chest that says, there’s more for me than this.

She has very little patience for performative bulls**t.

She likes people a little wild around the edges.

She swears.
She loves hard.
She feels deeply.
She notices everything.

She can be tender as hell and still refuse to make herself smaller so you’re more comfortable.

She’s increasingly uninterested in being palatable.

And you should probably know this part:

She has a habit of reminding people who they were before the world told them who they were supposed to be.

That can be inconvenient.

Because once you remember…

the job that’s killing you feels different.
The relationship where you’ve disappeared feels different.
The body you’ve been criticizing feels different.
The dreams you’ve been calling ridiculous start getting louder.

You may suddenly want to take your shoes off.

Quit apologizing.

Eat the damn butter.

Dance in the kitchen.

Say no without writing a dissertation about why.

Say yes to something wildly impractical.

Take up more room.

Feel sexy for absolutely no one’s benefit but your own.

And begin choosing your life instead of merely managing it.

So yes.

Consider yourself warned.

You may meet Natalie and leave slightly more feral, considerably more awake, and dangerously interested in becoming yourself.

And she will consider that a very good day. 🔥

The kids are back in school.
The calendars are filling in.
The routines are finding their rhythm again.

And somewhere beneath all of that…
you can feel the season beginning to turn.

The light is changing.
The mornings are cooler.
The earth is beginning her slow exhale.

Maybe you are, too.

Maybe summer was beautiful and wild and full.
Maybe it was chaotic as hell.
Maybe you’ve spent months tending, feeding, driving, planning, holding, loving, doing.

And now you can finally see a little light at the end of the tunnel.

October 3rd, we gather at Mill Creek for THE RETURN.

Not to become a better version of ourselves.

Not to optimize or reinvent or add another damn thing to the list.

But to return.

To our bodies.
To our knowing.
To the rhythm underneath the noise.
To pleasure.
To rest.
To movement.
To nature.
To the ancient medicine of women gathering together.

A day in the mountains as the season turns.

A threshold.

A chance to put down what summer asked you to carry and ask:

What wants to come home to me now?

If you’ve been waiting for a little breathing room…

Here it is.

THE RETURN
October 3 • Mill Creek
A gathering for women ready to come back to themselves.

Come sit with us. 🌲