The woman who tends everything but herself.
There’s a woman I keep meeting.
She’s up before anyone else. Out in the field in the dark, tending to her animals with a patience and a softness she rarely turns on herself.
She knows every creature in her care. Their moods, their needs, what unsettles them, what helps them settle.
She knows everyone around her like that too, but ask her what she needs, and something goes quiet in her.
Not because she doesn’t know, but because somewhere along the way, she learned that needing things was dangerous.
That too much was too much.
That love came with conditions she could never quite meet, no matter how hard she worked, how much she gave, or how perfectly she held it all together.
So she learned to hold it all together.
She learned to smile when she was seething.
To keep moving when she was drowning.
To turn her anger inward—into tiredness, into the extra helping, into the quietly whispered ‘you should know better’ directed at herself in the middle of the night.
The shame doesn’t announce itself. It seeps. Slowly, over years, into the way you hold yourself.
It’s just there, like a low hum under everything, in the way she can’t quite receive a compliment, in the way she braces when someone gets too close, in the way she still, after all this time, feels like she’s waiting to be found out.
She’s been alone in it for a long time, even when surrounded by people.
Even in the middle of her full, giving, busy life, she is alone in it.
One of the women in my world described it recently: “You don’t suddenly wake up and choose yourself. It’s much quieter than that.”
It looks like lying awake after you’ve said no, and feeling the ripple of it move through your body.
Noticing how quickly your mind tries to pull you back and make sense of it, make it safe, or make it familiar again.
Realising how long you’ve been orienting around everyone else’s feelings… and how strange—how exposing—it feels to turn towards yourself instead.
This is not a mindset shift. This is not something you think your way through.
It is your female nervous system.
The body that learned, very early, that it wasn’t safe to be seen, to need, to rest, to receive.
And it can be different. Not fixed. Different. Slowly, in the way that real things change—felt, not forced.
Birthday gift for you…
Sunday (April 5) was my birthday, (and Easter), and I recorded a meditation as a gift for you.
One of the women who listened told me she felt it in her heart❤️, which tells me everything, because this is where so much is stored and so much is waiting.
In the heart, the throat, and the womb. Three places women learn to guard the earliest. Three places this feminine work lives.
→ Download the Birthday Meditation Here
And if something in you has been circling, quietly, for longer than you’d like to admit, not quite ready but not quite able to let go either, I want you to know my retreats this year are still open.
Three times a year, a small group of women come together to do exactly this.
To stop performing, and to be held without condition while they slowly, carefully, learn to hold themselves.
If that’s calling to you, reply to this email and I’ll send you the details, or you can book a call directly with me here.
You’ve been alone in it long enough.
Have courage, dear heart.
Charli ♥️🦁
