5/8 — the fifth rule of her way club (aka: how to change your life in 6-12 months)
OCT 10, 2025
Before we begin, 2 important things:
- This fall/autumn, starting on October 21, with the next New Moon 🌚, I am gathering a small circle of writers, dreamers, and noticers for six weeks of writing together. It’s called The Art of Noticing. I’d love you to join me. Learn more here.
- Thank you for completing the questionnaire I sent out last week! The responses are so valuable, interesting and beautiful. If you haven’t completed yours yet (and you’d like the gift of working with me 1:1), please, do so here.
Continuing our 8 rules of her way club series. If you’re just joining, begin here:
1/8 — deciding to play by your own rules
2/8 — subtracting what doesn’t belong
3/8 — the natural consequence: uncertainty
interlude — her way deep rest
4/8 — trust yourself
5/8 — inner life
Let’s zoom out for a moment and look at this her way club series, this living guide to “how to change your life” from the inside out, from the meta perspective.
- Play by your own rules → agency + permission.
- Subtract what doesn’t belong → space-making + integrity.
- Embrace uncertainty → courage + surrender.
- Trust yourself → embodiment of agency + intuition.
- Inner life → alignment + authenticity
This chapter is about self-intimacy and alignment.
You’ve taken your power back. Now you have to learn how to use it well.
Each step so far has been designed to move you from external orientation to inner sovereignty. To peel back the noise and return you to your own truth.
Here, in Rule 5, the invisible becomes visible. Your inner world: your beliefs, your essence, your nourishment, begins to take shape in how you live. This is the bridge between the private self and the life that others see; between what you feel and what you create.
Everything that follows next: where you belong, the work you do and what you createin the world rests on this foundation.
Your outer world can only expand as far as your inner life allows. Prosperity, creativity, and fulfilment all flow from how well you tend to the unseen parts of yourself.
Let’s unpack this with some questions I’d like you to sit with, ponder, or journal on:
- Who are you when no one is watching?
- What are the themes that keep repeating in your life (your soul’s curriculum)?
- What qualities define your way of being (not what you do)?
Before we look outward, we must look inward.
Your authentic life begins with knowing yourself intimately, noticing how you show up in your life, and distinguishing your authentic essence from the patterns and conditioning you’ve absorbed.
This is where you learn what truly nourishes you, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually and cultivate the inner alignment that allows prosperity, clarity, and vitality to flow naturally. The life you want doesn’t need to be chased; it meets you when your inner world is tended, your essence is clear, and your choices reflect who you truly are.
your life is a mirror
The way you see yourself shapes the life you inhabit.
Psychologically, it’s perception in action. The human brain is a meaning-making organ. It filters billions of pieces of information each second, searching for coherence: evidence that matches your existing story of who you are.
Every encounter, every opportunity, every setback, reflects back to you what you already believe about who you are. If you carry a story of not being enough, of not being ready, of being small or invisible, the world obliges in its own subtle ways, nudging you to notice evidence that confirms your fears. And so you move through your days tense, alert, protective, half present, waiting for life to prove you right or wrong.
Three months ago, I filmed this simple Q&A. While answering one of the questions, I happened to start speaking about one of my deepest core wounds and fears: abandonment. It’s a pattern that stems from childhood. My core caretakers abandoned me as a child. The day after I published that video, my ex-boyfriend abandoned me with a phone call, leaving me alone in the city we had moved to together. Life was mirroring a self-perception I had of myself, encouraging me to release it. The past three months of my life have been a deep dive into clearing this old pattern and telling a new story. I have been on a journey of consciously changing my self-perception to change my reality. I teach how I do this in CLEAR landing in Nov.
When you begin to see yourself with gentle curiosity instead of judgment, things shift. Your life experience as a mirror is never against you. It is a teacher, a reflection of the energy you carry, of the care or the neglect you hold for yourself.
There’s a paradox: the more you accept who you are, exactly as you are in this moment, the more room you create to evolve.
Acceptance does not mean complacency or stagnation. It is where growth, change, and transformation can take root. By acknowledging your current limits, your fears, your flaws, and your brilliance, you create the space for new parts of you to emerge.
You breathe into yourself the permission to be fully present and fully human, and in that presence, the world shifts around you. Opportunities appear, guidance flows, relationships deepen, and your own intuition becomes a clearer, more unwavering compass.
Self-perception is the foundation of everything. It determines what you notice, how you act, and what you allow into your life. If you want to cultivate a life that feels aligned and expansive, the first place to start is here, in the mirror, in the tender, unwavering attention you give to the one person who will always be with you: yourself.
You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You already know. You need to listen.
your essence
Your essence is not hidden. It is already present, already alive, already breathing within you. Your essence is your lived expression of the nexus of your soul.
What obscures it are the layers of conditioning, the inherited expectations, the shoulds, the stories you’ve been told about who you are supposed to be. Essence is what remains when you subtract those things.
You uncover your essence by paying attention.
Notice the moments when you feel fully alive, when time seems irrelevant, when your attention sharpens effortlessly, when your body and mind are in quiet alignment. These are signposts. They show you what lights you up, what nourishes you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
Make a list of these moments. Be specific. What activities, conversations, environments, and ways of moving make your energy sing? Which choices leave you depleted? Which patterns make you feel small or constrained?
Parallel to discovering your essence is recognising conditioning. Conditioning is subtle, woven into your daily life like a thread you don’t notice until you pull it. It shows up as automatic reactions, habitual thoughts, the urge to conform, the fear of disappointing others, the compulsive need to perform or prove yourself.
Once you notice these patterns, you can begin to deconstruct them. You can experiment with saying no to old rules, with acting differently than you “should,” with testing new ways of thinking, feeling, and being. Each choice to step out of conditioned patterns is a reclamation of your energy, a clearing of space for essence to breathe and expand.
Essence is living, breathing, and fluid. It evolves as you evolve.
The needs and desires of my authentic self, my essence, shift constantly. The person who began writing online twelve years ago, compared to the person writing now, is entirely different. My values remain, yet they are lived and understood in entirely new ways. Love is felt in the willingness to show up for myself even when it’s hard. Freedom is claimed not through limitless choices but by being able to choose what is meaningful to me. Beauty is found in the attention I place on the ordinary. My essence is always maturing. It is a conversation with myself across time, a deepening dialogue between who I am becoming and the life I am willing to inhabit.
You cannot fully access essence when you are operating from the script written for you by others.
The act of naming your essence is also an act of claiming it: I choose this. I am drawn to this. I move in this way. I feel alive here. With that recognition, you create the foundation for all the inner and outer work that follows. The clarity to decondition, to reshape your habits, to remove the old narratives that no longer serve you, and to step forward with intention and alignment.
Sometimes we lose touch with what we’re drawn to, what we want, desire, or even like. It happened to me recently. I couldn’t access the parts of myself that once pulsed with desire. Too much had happened too fast, and life spun me around until I didn’t quite know who I was anymore. So I began a small, secret practice I call ‘Things I WANT’ list. Since I no longer knew what I wanted, I started collecting clues. Every time I heard someone talk about something they were doing, experiencing, or feeling, and my body reacted with a quiet spark of recognition, a soft ‘me too’, I wrote it down. Because they revealed something about how I wanted to feel. Over time, those little notes became signposts back to myself.
Desire is a compass. The things you want are indicators of what nourishes you, what enlivens you, what helps you remember who you are.
nourishment
Nourishment is the way you feed your mind, body, emotions, and spirit so that your life can function at full capacity, so that your presence can hold space for yourself and others.
Rest is nourishment. Play is nourishment. Silence, ritual, beauty, immersion in nature… they are infrastructure.
When you nourish yourself, you create a nervous system that feels safe to expand, a body and mind capable of holding joy, curiosity, and creativity without depletion. Everything you build: your work, your relationships, your life path, is only as sustainable as the inner ecology that supports it.
Pay attention to what sustains your energy rather than depletes it. Notice which conversations leave you full and which leave you empty. Notice what thoughts and stories you tell yourself that feel like nourishment, and which ones tighten, constrict, or exhaust. Notice how movement, food, and environment affect your clarity, focus, and vitality. Nourishment is as much about subtraction as it is about addition. Removing what drains you, creating space for what feeds you.
The more devoted you are to this kind of inner prosperity, the more effortlessly your life flows, because you are operating from fullness rather than deficit.
prosperity
Prosperity is measured not just in money but in clarity, in capacity, in the freedom to create the life you want. It is the overflow of a well-tended inner world. A life in which your essence is honoured, your instincts are trusted, and your energy is devoted to what makes you feel alive.
The work is always inward first: nourishing yourself, holding space for your evolution, cultivating self-trust and intuition.
Then, and only then, does the external world respond, drawn to the light you carry. Your inner abundance becomes a magnet. Attracting resources, opportunities, and experiences that match the vibrational reality you have already created for yourself.
Nourishment and prosperity are inseparable. One is the root; the other, the fruit. Without tending the root, the fruit cannot ripen fully. With devotion to yourself, your energy, and your essence, abundance flows as a natural consequence of a life lived in alignment.
The heart of transforming your life is knowing yourself intimately.
Not superficially, but at the level of your thoughts, feelings, instincts, desires, and patterns. Change doesn’t begin with the outside world; it begins with you, with the way you show up in your own life.
The question isn’t just what you want, but who you are being as you move through each day, as you respond to challenges, as you make choices. Are you living out of your authentic soul essence, or are you unconsciously following old patterns, conditioning, and expectations that no longer serve you?
Taking responsibility for this is understanding that every small choice either nourishes you or depletes you. When you begin to show up for yourself in alignment with your essence, you learn what truly sustains your energy, what makes you feel alive, what your life needs to flourish.
This is the work of self-knowledge: observing without judgment, naming the ways conditioning has shaped you, and making deliberate choices to nourish yourself in the ways that matter. Only when you are clear about who you are and what nourishes you can you begin to recognise what kind of life is right for you.
In our next step of this series, we begin to build that life externally. But first, let’s complete this section here:
practice
Take this week to quietly study yourself. Not your habits or productivity, but the subtler currents underneath: what lights you up, what drains you, what makes you feel most you.
Each day, jot down one small observation about what nourishes you and one about what depletes you. Don’t try to fix or optimise anything. Just notice. This is how self-intimacy begins: through witnessing, not forcing.
At the end of the week, look at what you’ve written. See if you can trace the shape of your essence through those notes. The qualities, environments, and rhythms that bring you alive. Those are the clues to the kind of life that fits you.
micro-vow
“I am willing to know myself deeply.
I take responsibility for how I show up in my life.
I will tend to what truly nourishes me,
so the life meant for me can find me.”
comment
What’s one subtle way you’ve noticed yourself living out an old pattern that no longer fits? Share it below. Naming it is the first act of coming home to yourself.
P.S. A peek into CLEAR (clear your path, change your life), landing in November.