Photo by Johannes Plenio

There are moments in our lives when everything shifts—when you realize that what brought you here won’t take you where you need to go. For me, 2025 marks one of those profound thresholds.

I’m closing Parent Wellness Group, my clinical therapy practice that I’ve run for the past several years. This wasn’t a decision made because the business was failing. Actually, it was the opposite. The practice was profitable from day one. Our clinicians were exceptional. Our clients loved the work. Everything was “working.”

And that’s precisely what made this decision so complex.

The Nine-Year Cycle

When my book coach invited our writing community to reflect on what was happening in 2016-2017, my jaw dropped. In 2016, I had my first child and started my clinical practice. The realization landed in my body like a lightning bolt: I was at the end of a nine-year cycle, and the closing of Parent Wellness Group was the completion of my therapist chapter.

This isn’t my first experience with this kind of release. Nine years before that, I was gripping tightly to my yoga teaching identity, holding onto one lingering class at a prominent Boston studio because I was terrified of what it would mean to let it go. When I finally released that class, something extraordinary happened. At 3 AM that same night, The School of Mom downloaded into my awareness like a lightning bolt. I bought the URL in the middle of the night, my youngest crying in the background, my mind buzzing with clarity.

I had to release one thing to make space for another.

When Insight Isn’t Enough

Here’s what I’ve come to understand through my own therapy journey and through working with hundreds of mothers: talk therapy has a very specific place and time in our healing journey, but it can actually keep us stuck if we stay in it longer than is helpful.

Therapy helps us understand why we feel guilty. It helps us name our patterns, gain insight into our mother wounds, understand our triggers. That awareness is crucial—it’s the foundation. I’m deeply grateful for my own therapy experiences.

But here’s the limitation: you can understand logically that your anxiety is inherited programming, you can name your people-pleasing patterns, you can have complete insight into why you react the way you do with your children—and still feel exactly the same. Still do the same things. Still get triggered in the same ways.

Because insight alone doesn’t create lasting change.

The work has to move into the body. It has to address the nervous system patterns, the ancestral programming, the biological reality of how our bodies have learned to survive. This is the work I’m here to do—not just helping mothers understand their patterns, but helping them actually shift them at a somatic, embodied level.

The Year of the Snake

2025 has been the year of the snake in the Chinese zodiac—a year symbolically associated with shedding old skins. Ironically, back in January, I led a workshop for my Radical Flourishing community where I actually mailed everyone snakes and we reflected on what we needed to release.

We’re always so naive at the beginning of a year, aren’t we? We think we know what we need to shed. And then life puts up a mirror we’d rather not look into.

For so many of us, 2025 has been a hard hit—relationally, politically, health-wise. It’s been a year that forced us to face what we’ve been avoiding. For me, it was the realization that I was holding onto my therapist identity not because it was serving my purpose, but because it felt safe. It was familiar. It gave me credibility. It allowed me to hedge my bets.

But I can’t authentically guide women to step into their next level of flourishing, to release parts of themselves that no longer serve them, to make brave decisions despite fear—if I haven’t done this work myself.

From Wanting to Be Liked to Being in Service

Being a therapist trained me to keep everyone safe, to make sure people felt comfortable, to be liked. And I do still want you to like me. Getting acknowledgement and affirmation feels good.

But I know now that to truly help mothers, to lead the movement of Mothering Ourselves Mindfully, I cannot have my primary goal be that you need to like me.

I’m no longer responsible for your feelings, and I’m not sorry about it. I’m responsible for being a guide to help you be responsible for your feelings. That doesn’t come from a lack of compassion—it’s actually the opposite. It comes from such deep respect for women’s capacity to change when they have the right resources and support.

I am no longer here to be a passive observer of your inherited survival patterns. I’m here to help you see them clearly, and then to guide you into your body—your wisest, most trusted guide—so you can actually make conscious, embodied shifts.

You’re not just thinking about feeling differently anymore. You’re actually feeling differently.

What I’m Becoming

So what am I now? I’m not just a therapist, though I have deep professional training and experience. I’m not just a mindfulness teacher, though that’s part of it. I’m not just a coach—anybody can be a coach, and I’ve earned something more specific than that.

I’m an embodiment guide.

I’m embodying what I seek to guide the women I support through. This professional decision has been an embodied one. This is me walking the very messy and fruitful walk.

The Invitation

As we close 2025 and step into 2026—the year of the horse, representing forward movement, momentum, freedom, and embodied power—I’m inviting you into your own reflection:

• What was happening for you in 2016-2017?
• What has this year of the snake asked you to shed?
• What identities, patterns, or ways of living have been keeping you safe but are no longer aligned with who you are becoming?
• What part of you is familiar but actually in conflict with your next level of flourishing?

Flourishing doesn’t look like sparkly flowers all the time. It looks like the gray, melting snow of late December. It looks like making the hard decision. It looks like feeling your anger. It looks like saying no. It looks like winter—because shedding and becoming is part of the natural cycle.

I am no longer the same person I was yesterday. When I come back in 2026, I will be stepping into and embodying my next level as a flourished mother, woman, partner, and embodiment guide.

The question is: will you join me in embodying yours?

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Listen to the full episode where I share this journey in depth, and join me for our live gathering on Wednesday, January 28th at 7:45 PM EST as we honor our thresholds from the year of the snake to the year of the horse.