When People Say One Thing and Do Another

We’ve all experienced it: the person who says “Yes, I’ll be there” — and then never shows up. The client who books a call and disappears without notice. The friend who makes promises they never follow through on. These moments sting, not only because they inconvenience us, but because they erode trust.

For me, this isn’t just about disappointment or irritation. It’s about standards. I live by mine. They aren’t arbitrary rules, they are expressions of respect and love — for myself, for others, and for the work I devote my life to.

When I make an agreement, I hold it. When I say I’ll be somewhere, I show up. When I enter into a relationship — whether with a client or a student — I am clear about expectations. That clarity creates safety, and that safety creates room for growth, transformation, and trust.

So when people flake, ghost, or break their word, it hits differently. It’s not just a missed appointment. It’s a rupture of integrity.

Why Standards Matter

Some might see “standards” as rigid or demanding, but I see them as love in action.

My standards are a promise:

• That I will treat you with honesty and respect.

• That I will show up prepared, present, and committed.

• That you can count on me to do what I say I will do.

In return, I ask for the same. Not perfection, but accountability. Not rigid obedience, but respect. Because mutual standards make healthy relationships possible — whether in business, friendship, or community.

The Cost of Ghosting

When someone ghosts, it leaves a ripple effect. A no-show in a coaching session doesn’t just waste time; it blocks energy that could have gone toward someone ready and willing to receive support. A broken promise in a circle of women doesn’t just inconvenience me; it fractures the sense of trust and safety that allows the group to go deep together.

Every “yes” that isn’t followed through weakens the currency of agreement. And in the spaces I hold, agreements are sacred.

Choosing to Align

I know not everyone lives this way. Some people move through the world casually, loosely, without much thought to the impact their choices have on others. And that’s their path. But it is not mine.

I choose to align myself with people who value their word. I choose to surround myself with those who understand that commitment is not a burden, but a gift. I choose to invest in relationships — personal and professional — that honor mutual respect.

Because when we hold each other with that level of care, magic happens. Transformation unfolds. Trust deepens. And we all get to feel safer, stronger, and more alive.

A Gentle Invitation

If you’ve ever been the one who ghosts or flakes — maybe without meaning to — this isn’t about blame. It’s about awareness. The invitation is to notice the impact of your choices, and to consider what it would feel like to hold yourself to a higher standard. To become someone others can truly count on.

And if you’re someone, like me, who holds strong standards: keep going. You’re not “too much.” You’re modeling integrity in a world that desperately needs it.

Your standards matter. They protect your time, your energy, your relationships, and your work. And when you honor them, you call in others who will honor them, too.

Living Sober, But Still Not Believed

One of the hardest parts of quitting drinking isn’t the act itself—it’s living with the suspicion that lingers in the eyes of the people you love most.

You’ve done the work. You’ve rebuilt your life. You’re keeping your promises. You’re showing up differently, every single day.

And yet, the comments still come:

“Are you sure you’re sober?”

“Why did that take you so long?”

“I just don’t trust it yet.”

It can feel like no matter what you do, you’re trapped in an old story that no longer belongs to you. The feelings that come with this are real: hurt, frustration, even grief. You’ve worked so hard, and sometimes it seems like no one notices—or worse, no one believes you’ve truly changed.

Here’s what I want you to know: their suspicion is not a reflection of your reality. It’s a reflection of fear, old patterns, and their own challenges in seeing change in others.

Your sobriety is real. Your healing is real. And the life you are building is yours to claim—regardless of whether anyone else sees it yet.

But there’s an important step many women miss after achieving sobriety: creating a life beyond it. A life where your dreams, desires, and intentions are front and center—not proving yourself to others, not trying to earn trust or approval. This is where coaching can make a difference.

In my 1:1 coaching, I walk beside women who are sober and ready for more. Together, we create clarity, safety, and accountability so that you can:

Explore where you are now in your life.

Identify what you truly want next.

Move past the blocks that keep you from stepping fully into the life you desire.

Build confidence and trust in yourself, so external doubts matter less and less.

If this resonates, I invite you to a complimentary strategy session with me. It’s a pressure-free space to connect, explore your next chapter, and see if coaching together feels like the right fit.

Recovery is just the beginning. Your freedom, joy, and belonging are waiting.

Sobriety: The First Step on the Warrioress Path of Individuation

Sobriety isn’t just about quitting alcohol.

It’s about saying yes to a deeper, more meaningful life.

It’s about turning toward your fear—gently, bravely—and whispering, I’m here. I’m not leaving myself anymore.

Sobriety is sacred. It’s not punishment. It’s reclamation.

It’s the first step in a much bigger journey—what Carl Jung called individuation—the lifelong process of becoming your truest self.

When we choose sobriety, we open the door to the six stages of individuation:

1. Building Safety & Trust (Foundations for Growth)

Why: Without safety, the nervous system stays in survival mode, blocking deeper growth.

What it looks like: Learning self-regulation, finding safe people and spaces, and building a relationship with your own inner protector.

Practices: Grounding exercises, trauma healing, consistent supportive relationships, body-based awareness.

2. Claiming Autonomy & Power (Separating from External Control)

Why: Individuation requires distinguishing your voice from family, culture, or authority’s voice.

What it looks like: Saying “no” without guilt, making choices based on inner truth, releasing people-pleasing.

Practices: Boundaries, values clarification, journaling your truth, standing firm in decisions.

3. Finding Belonging & Identity (Authentic Connection)

Why: True belonging comes when you no longer betray yourself to be accepted.

What it looks like: Cultivating relationships where you are loved as you are; embracing your heritage, gifts, and unique quirks.

Practices: Joining communities aligned with your truth, healing sisterhood/brotherhood wounds, creative self-expression.

4. Embracing Sexuality & Freedom (Integrating Life Force Energy)

Why: Sexuality isn’t just about sex — it’s your aliveness, creativity, and passion for life.

What it looks like: Releasing shame, owning your desires, and feeling free to express your energy in ways that feel safe and authentic.

Practices: Movement, sensual self-connection, releasing old conditioning around desire and pleasure.

5. Experiencing Love & Intimacy (Heart Integration)

Why: The ultimate goal of individuation is living from the heart while remaining sovereign.

What it looks like: Loving deeply without losing yourself; allowing intimacy to expand your wholeness rather than erode it.

Practices: Vulnerability work, conscious relationships, forgiveness (without bypassing truth).

6. Integrating All Parts of Self (Wholeness)

Why: Individuation is not becoming someone else, but bringing all your parts into harmony — the light and the shadow.

What it looks like: Meeting your shadow parts without shame, embodying both your strength and tenderness, living in alignment with your soul.

Practices: Shadow work, dream work, parts work, creative ritual, spiritual practice.

The Ongoing Cycle

Individuation isn’t linear. You’ll revisit these stages many times as new layers arise. Each cycle brings you into deeper authenticity, freedom, and inner authority.

Sobriety is about becoming whole.

And when you choose to stay present with yourself,

To feel instead of flee,

To soften instead of numb,

To serve instead of self-abandon…

That’s power. That’s love. That’s freedom.

You are becoming.

And it takes a Warrioress’ heart to walk this way.

If this speaks to you, I invite you to join my mailing list sign up here—where I share heart-centered reflections, offerings, and gentle reminders that you don’t have to walk this path alone.

The Birthplace of Sisterhood Wounds: When Mean Girls Are Just Little Girls in Pain

"She Used to Love School—Not This Year"

The quiet beginnings of sisterhood wounds and how we fail our girls when we don't intervene.

She’s only ten.

Bright, sensitive, full of creative sparkle—and lately, heartbreak.

My great-niece has been coming home from school feeling like she doesn't belong. Once a place of friendship and fun, her classroom has become a quiet battleground of whispers, exclusion, and cruel side glances. She's learning—far too young—that other girls can turn cold, that safety in community can suddenly slip through your fingers, and that silence from adults can sometimes hurt just as much.

This is the beginning of sisterhood wounding.

We often talk about the “mean girl” dynamic as something that emerges in the teen years, but it starts much earlier. Before there’s language for it. Before there’s understanding. And far too often, before there’s any meaningful support.

But how do the “mean girls” become mean?

Why do they turn on each other?

Where does this need to isolate, control, and intimidate come from?

These questions haunt me—not just as someone who loves this little girl, but as a woman who remembers her own early wounds. As someone who has spent years guiding women through the tender process of repairing these very same fractures decades later.

In most cases, these young girls aren’t inherently unkind. They’re afraid.

They’re absorbing unspoken lessons from the world around them:

That power comes from dominance, not connection.

That closeness is dangerous when it can be turned on you.

That being accepted means playing the game—even if it means hurting someone else.

These are not just personal wounds—they’re cultural ones. Systemic ones. The kind that get passed down like invisible inheritance, showing up in schoolyards, sleepovers, boardrooms, and women’s circles.

And when adults don’t name it—when teachers don’t intervene, when school systems prioritize academic performance over emotional wellbeing—these wounds deepen. Silence becomes complicity. The girl who is excluded begins to believe she’s not worthy. And the girls who isolate her often don't even understand the damage they’re causing.

This blog post is for my great-niece—and for every woman who still carries that ten-year-old version of herself inside. The one who learned it wasn’t safe to trust other girls. The one who shrank, or hardened, or stayed quiet to survive.

Because if we want to heal sisterhood, we must start here.

We must look at how it begins.

We must talk about what we're teaching girls—consciously or not—about belonging, empathy, and power.

And we must create spaces where the next generation can learn a new way.

Let’s Not Look Away

If you’re a woman reading this, I invite you to pause and remember:

Where were you when you first learned that other girls could turn on you?

When did you begin to hide parts of yourself to stay included, stay safe, stay quiet?

This isn’t just about schoolyards. It’s about a cultural pattern of disconnection that runs deep in our collective story as women. And it often starts early, long before we have the words to name it.

So let’s name it now.

Let’s stop brushing off “mean girl” behavior as a phase.

Let’s stop assuming our daughters, nieces, and students are fine just because they’re not crying.

Let’s stop pretending that staying silent keeps the peace.

Instead, let’s be the generation that sees it.

That speaks up. That interrupts it. That models something different.

Because every time we choose compassion over competition, courage over silence, and connection over isolation—we’re not just healing ourselves.

We’re changing the story for the girls coming after us.

She used to love school.

Let’s make sure the next girl still can.

When Sobriety Doesn’t Feel Safe: Why Some Women Are Leaving 12-Step Communities

Sobriety is sacred. For many of us, choosing to live alcohol-free is one of the most courageous, life-giving decisions we’ll ever make. But what happens when the very spaces that promise healing, safety, and sisterhood begin to mirror the same dynamics that drove us to numb out in the first place?

More and more women I speak with are quietly leaving 12-step spaces—not because they don’t value the principles, the traditions, or the structure—but because they no longer feel safe or seen within them.

The Pain of Not Belonging in a Place That Promises Belonging

It’s a heartbreak few talk about: showing up to a recovery space week after week, only to feel invisible. You try to share, to connect, to offer your presence—but you're met with silence, side-eyes, or subtle exclusion. You're not asked to coffee. You're not included in the “after-meeting” chats or text threads. You begin to notice the cliques—the unspoken hierarchies, the favoritism, the quiet policing of how “sober” or “program” enough you are.

This isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s retraumatizing. Especially for women carrying sisterhood wounds or histories of bullying, abandonment, or being “othered.”

Some describe the feeling as being spiritually lynched—ostracized in a space that preaches radical acceptance and love.

When Safety Becomes Performative

Recovery spaces are meant to be sanctuaries—brave containers where you can show up messy, raw, in-process. But for some women, the rules of “safety” are not applied equally. Instead of curiosity, there is judgment. Instead of inclusion, there is control. The group becomes more about conformity than connection.

And here’s the thing: when a space that claims to be healing becomes a space of harm, your body knows. Your nervous system knows. You start to dread going. You leave meetings feeling worse. And eventually, you leave altogether.

Not All 12-Step Spaces Are the Same

It’s important to say this: not every 12-step room feels this way. There are beautiful, inclusive meetings that offer deep, life-changing support. Some of us have been lucky enough to find those rooms—or to create them.

But when you haven't, or when you once did and things shifted, it can be profoundly disorienting and painful. Your decision to step away doesn't mean you're not committed to your sobriety—it means you're listening to what your body, your heart, and your spirit need now.

Leaving Doesn’t Mean You’ve Failed—It Might Mean You’re Healing

If you’ve walked away from 12-step spaces because you felt unseen, unwelcome, or unsafe—know this: you are not alone. And you are not a failure.

You are responding to a deeper wisdom. You are honoring your nervous system. You are refusing to stay in spaces that replicate harm, even if they’re wrapped in the language of recovery.

There are other paths. Other women. Other ways of living sober that are grounded in love, embodiment, and true belonging.

What We Long For

We long for spaces that center lived experience, not hierarchy.

Spaces where safety is felt, not forced.

Where your story matters. Your voice matters. Your body matters.

We long for sober spaces that celebrate nuance, autonomy, and diversity of thought—not just dogma or doctrine.

We long for spaces where sisterhood feels nourishing, not threatening.

And for many of us, that means building new communities. Trauma-informed, heart-led spaces where we can unlearn the patterns of invisibility, silence, and shame—and come home to ourselves and each other.

✨ If this speaks to you, I invite you to join my mailing list.

I share somatic tools, loving insights, and community invitations for women walking a soulful sober path—without shame, without perfection, and without pretending.

💌 Join here to receive support that honors your body, your healing, and your truth.

Boxing with the Bottle

In the ring of dusk and dawn I stand,

Gloves laced tight by trembling hand.

Across from me, that shadowed shape—

The bottle’s ghost, with no escape.

It grins with teeth of amber glass,

A sly old friend from darker past.

We’ve danced before, it knows my swing,

My weakest rib, my broken wing.

The bell rings out, a hollow chime,

A call to war, to end old time.

It jabs with whispers, slick and mean,

“Just one more round…you know the scene.”

But I’ve been training, breath and bone,

With truth, and tears, and nights alone.

My body knows another beat,

One born of fire, not defeat.

I duck the shame, I dodge the lie,

Each punch I throw, a battle cry.

Not for perfection, not for fame—

But just to rise and name my name.

Blood and sweat, the ring is red,

With all the things I never said.

But still I fight, and still I stand,

With fire burning in my hands.

And when the final bell does sound,

I won’t be crawling on the ground.

I’ll lift my chin, my heart, my flame—

And walk out stronger than I came.

The ghost still lingers, calls my name,

But I’ve unlearned the rules of shame.

Not with fury, not with pain—

But power pulsing through my veins.

I choose my breath. I choose the light.

I won this round. I own this fight.

I Am a Mistress of My Emotions

Dear Beautiful Soul,

I wanted to share something close to my heart today—a soft invocation for any moment when you're feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or simply tender.

Let this be a reminder of your power, your rhythm, your grace.

________________________________________

I Am a Mistress of My Emotions

When sorrow drapes itself across my heart,

I hum a melody that soothes my soul.

When grief whispers through the quiet,

I invite joy to dance lightly in its place.

When my body aches with heaviness,

I move with grace, honoring each breath.

When fear stands in my path,

I take her hand and walk forward as her sister.

When I feel less than enough,

I adorn myself in the beauty of my becoming.

When uncertainty tightens my throat,

I speak with the voice of the woman I am becoming.

When scarcity shadows my thoughts,

I dream of the harvest already on its way.

When doubt clouds my mind,

I remember every time I rose from the dust.

When I feel unseen or small,

I turn my face toward the vision that called me here.

I do not silence my emotions. I listen.

I do not fight them. I flow.

I do not fear them. I lead.

They rise in me—and we dance in rhythm, but I choose the steps.

I walk in beauty. I walk in knowing. I walk in grace.

________________________________________

With love,

Nicole

Sober Alchemy: A Sacred Path to Healing Our Relationship with Alcohol

Embodiment work offers a profound, loving, and holistic way to transform our relationship with alcohol—by returning us to the deep, innate wisdom of the body.

At its heart, this is a journey of coming home to yourself. Of reclaiming your body as sacred. Of learning to listen deeply to the messages she has always held for you.

Alcohol often becomes a way to cope—to numb pain, soften stress, or soothe unspoken wounds. But through the Ishtara meditative movement method, we’re invited into something different. Instead of avoiding discomfort, we learn to meet it with curiosity, compassion, and gentle presence.

By anchoring into your body, you begin to access a wellspring of intuitive knowing—guidance that reveals the "why" beneath your habits. This is not a path of shame or judgment. It’s a loving return to self—one that honors your story, your body, and your truth.

Through Ishtara’s unique meditative movement method, we create space to reconnect with the sensations, emotions, and energies long held within. These are the very places alcohol may have once masked. And now, with tenderness, they begin to unwind.

This process allows you to release, rewire, and complete old patterns of pain, tension, stress and disconnection. It’s about honoring your body’s rhythm—inviting more flow, freedom, and inner balance, instead of reaching outward for relief.

As you deepen this relationship with your body, something beautiful begins to emerge: a quiet sense of love, grace, and power. The kind of nourishment that dissolves the need for external soothing—because you’ve learned how to hold yourself with sacred care.

This journey isn’t about restriction or rigidity. It’s about liberation.

A gentle return to sovereignty.

A soft awakening to the joy and wholeness that’s been waiting within you all along.

Learn more in a Free Introduction Class - Sign Up Here