Life has a way of teaching us profound lessons in the most unexpected moments. This week, as I recorded from my favorite spot in the woods, I found myself reflecting on two interconnected experiences that shifted my perspective on suffering, flourishing, and what it means to show up authentically in our lives.

The Dangerous Game of Comparing Suffering

I’ll be honest with you – I had a moment of cringe this week. While listening back to my previous podcast episode where I mentioned the stress of getting a new car, I felt that familiar wave of self-judgment. Here I was, talking about my “problems” while heartbreaking events were unfolding in the news, families being torn apart, real tragedy happening in the world.

But then I caught myself in this toxic pattern that I see every single day in the mothers I work with. It goes something like this: “I’m really struggling, but I know I don’t have it as bad as…” followed by comparisons to people facing war, poverty, or other devastating circumstances.

Here’s what I’ve learned and what I want you to understand: we cannot be in the business of comparing suffering. Your heart is valid, and your struggles are real, regardless of what others are experiencing. Just because someone else is going through something difficult doesn’t mean we need to minimize or dismiss our own pain.

The truth is, my week wasn’t actually about car stress at all. We had experienced a tragic loss – a dear family friend, someone who felt like family, leaving behind two young children. One of them is the same age as my oldest daughter. I found myself imagining my child growing up without a mother, and the weight of that reality was almost unbearable.

When Timing Feels Perfect Despite the Pain

In the midst of this grief, I was scheduled to host a retreat for the women in my Radical Flourishing program. Coming into the retreat, I felt emotionally empty, like my eyeballs were sunken from so much crying. But there was this deeper knowing, what I call the “cyclical celebrator” within me, that whispered: this timing is meant to be.

And it was.

Sitting in that space of raw grief, I had what I can only describe as a hundred-thousand-foot view moment. Looking at the 8 year old daughter of our friend who passed who would grow up without her mother, I was struck by a profound truth: there is nothing more important than the work of becoming self-aware, healing our nervous systems, and developing the capacity for deep presence and self-compassion – not just for ourselves, but for everyone in our lives.

Redefining What Flourishing Actually Means

During the retreat, as we sat on my dock overlooking the pond, one of the women thanked me for sharing that I had been “weepy” all week. She admitted it was easy to assume I had it all together, that I was always flourishing.

This gave me the opportunity to share something crucial: being weepy IS flourishing for me.

We’ve been sold this lie that flourishing means constant happiness, perpetual positivity, having it all together. But real flourishing is about riding the full spectrum of our human experience with grace, ease, and self-compassion. It’s about feeling our feelings without getting caught in a spiral of judgment or anxiety. It’s about moving through emotional waves rather than contracting against them.

Flourishing isn’t about avoiding the hard stuff – it’s about developing the capacity to be with whatever arises in a more conscious, loving way.

Becoming the Unicorns We Need

Throughout our retreat day, I kept coming back to this metaphor of the unicorn. By definition, a unicorn is something radically different, something rarely seen. And that’s exactly what we’re becoming.

We’re becoming the grounded, compassionate, body-loving women and models that don’t really exist around us in abundance. We can’t easily find examples of women who are doing this work of radical self-acceptance and emotional fluency. So we’re creating ourselves as these examples.

When I ask the confronting question, “Who in your life sees, loves, accepts, and witnesses you unconditionally?” many of us struggle to answer. But through this work, we’re becoming those people for ourselves and for each other.

The Power of Repetition and Beginner’s Mind

One thing that struck me during our retreat was how these women, some of whom have been with me for five years, continue to receive the teachings in new ways. We learn through repetition, but more importantly, we’re different people each time we hear something.

Every time you encounter a concept, a practice, or a piece of wisdom, your capacity to receive and integrate it is different because YOU are different. This is how we rewire our programming, lay down new neural pathways, and upgrade what I call our “matrix” – the unconscious patterns we inherited around being women, mothers, and humans.

Making Decisions from Abundance, Not Scarcity

As I shared details about our upcoming NOURISH retreat – the first time we’re opening a retreat experience to women not in our deeper programs – I felt compelled to address something important.

If you find yourself thinking “I can’t afford it,” “It’s too hard,” or “I can’t make it work,” recognize that as old programming. If you continue making decisions from fear and scarcity, that will be your reality for the foreseeable future.

But if you’re ready to step into making choices from a place of abundance, hope, and connection, then you need to put yourself in rooms with people who can support that transformation.

The Most Important Work We Can Do

This week reminded me why this work matters so deeply. In a world full of suffering – both our own and others’ – the most profound thing we can do is learn to be with our experience more consciously and compassionately. Not to bypass or minimize, but to fully feel and move through with grace.

We’re not just changing ourselves; we’re becoming the models our children and communities desperately need. We’re the unicorns, creating a new way of being in the world, one mindful moment at a time.