20 years of journals, 1 grocery store I keep avoiding, and the mind that finally stopped asking permission.

Turns out mastery was never the point. Knowing myself was.

The Two Minds You Need to Reclaim Your Sovereignty + Authority

Last spring, I pulled a box down from my closet.

It contained twenty years of journals. Leather-bound journals, spiral notebooks, fancy little gilt-edged journals I had bought myself because apparently my anguish deserved quality stationery.

For twenty years, I believed I was being a good spiritual student. I was processing, reflecting, looking for patterns, doing the inner work.

I opened one journal. Then another. Then another.

The dates changed. The circumstances changed. The names changed. My handwriting got shakier.

But underneath all those beautifully examined experiences was the same ache:

I wanted to be acknowledged, wanted to be wanted, wanted to be loved.

For twenty years, I had been writing to be heard by someone who wasn’t there.

That was the day I recognized that a practice can begin as liberation and quietly become a loop.

I wasn’t writing my way toward freedom anymore. I was circling the same emotional block in increasingly attractive notebooks.

So I stopped journaling.

I stopped trying to process every feeling, decode every experience, and drag every unanswered question under the bright interrogation lamp of my mind.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stop performing your own growth.

That box of journals taught me something I am only now beginning to understand fully.

I have two distinctly different ways of using my mind.

One directs, the other receives.

And reclaiming our lives in retirement, after years of obligation, may depend upon knowing which one needs to be in charge.

Most women my age have spent decades exercising the directed mind.

Get the children ready, show up at the job, pay the bills, make the appointment, plan the meal, remember the birthdays, take care of the parents, solve the problem, meet the deadline, keep everybody and everything moving.

The directed mind is magnificent. It chooses an outcome, gathers its resources, and gets its ass in gear.

I used mine this week to host Breakthrough. Tuesday at seven was not a vague spiritual inclination. Women were expecting me. I prepared, showed up, opened the room, and led the conversation.

I also used it to build an MCP that can examine my Substack analytics.

I am seventy years old, and I spent much of this week staring at technical language that might as well have been written by Martians with advanced degrees. But I wanted actual information about my publication, not vague numbers scattered across several screens. I wanted a deeper understanding of my readers and what they actually need. This process showed me, in black and white, what matters most to you.

So I gave my mind a directive:

Figure this damn thing out.

And we did.

It moved smoothly. Hosting Breakthrough moved smoothly too. Directed does not necessarily mean difficult, forced, or unpleasant. It simply means I selected the direction and deliberately moved toward it.And honestly, it felt a little bland.

But that is not the only way my mind works.

When I began working on an art commission, I did not approach the canvas with a list of instructions and threaten it into becoming a painting.

I began, I looked, I listened.

A painting has its own intelligence. One color changes what the color beside it needs to become. A shape feels wrong before I can explain why it is wrong. Something in me responds to what is appearing.

That is my receptive mind.

It does not issue orders — it notices.

Then I experienced the marriage of the two distinct mindsets: I used both minds when I decided to walk 500 steps.

The directed mind got me out of the chair and started my feet moving. Then I turned on my favorite music from the seventies. Somewhere around the dining room, my respectable little exercise program was hijacked by a dance party.

I did not plan to dance. I felt the impulse and followed it.

One mind created the movement; the other recognized the joy that arrived inside it.

This week, my receptive mind has also been saying something much less entertaining:

Don’t go to the grocery store yet.

For five days, I have supposedly been going to the grocery store. For five days, something in me has said, nope, not yet.

I cannot give you a logical explanation. I am not starving. There is food in the house. Nothing terrible will happen if I wait.

So I am waiting.

Maybe that quiet no is protecting me from something. Maybe my body needs rest. Maybe the timing is simply wrong. Maybe there is no grand mystical explanation at all.

I don’t have to know.

That may be one of the greatest freedoms I have claimed in retirement. I can listen to myself without putting every feeling on trial.

For most of my life, “I don’t want to” was not considered sufficient information. There were responsibilities to meet and people depending on me. Like many women, I became very skilled at overriding myself.

We call that discipline.

Often, it is discipline. Sometimes it is also the slow practice of abandoning our own signals.

No philosophy gets permanent authority over my mind anymore. Not a coach deciding whether today’s resistance is fear or wisdom. Not a morning routine dictating what kind of energy I’m allowed to have. Not a productivity expert turning rest into a character flaw. Not a spiritual teacher turning uncertainty into a mystical message requiring interpretation. I fired all of them. Nobody outside of me gets to be the authority on what’s happening inside me — not anymore.

Then retirement arrives and many of the outside instructions disappear.

Nobody tells us where to be every morning. Nobody hands us the next assignment. Nobody grades our performance.

We finally have freedom, but freedom presents us with a problem:

How do we know when to give ourselves a push and when to leave ourselves the hell alone, whether we are resisting because we are afraid or hesitating because something is not right for us, whether this dream needs discipline or room to reveal itself, whether we are procrastinating or listening?

There is no universal answer. This is why reclaiming a dream requires more than positive thinking, a vision board, or a color-coded plan.

It requires becoming a student of yourself.

The directed mind can build a life. It can choose, focus, organize, and act. But left in charge of everything, it can turn retirement into another job. It can take a beautiful desire and squeeze it into goals, deadlines, measurements, and obligations until the dream starts looking suspiciously like unpaid employment.

The receptive mind can hear what still feels alive. It notices curiosity, energy, resistance, timing, desire, and the quiet no that makes no logical sense.

But reception without direction can become endless waiting. We can spend years hoping clarity will arrive before we take the first step.

We need both.

The receptive mind discovers what is calling us; the directed mind gives it somewhere to live.

Sometimes I hear the desire first and then create the structure. Sometimes I create the structure, begin moving, and discover the desire along the way.

I did not know I wanted to dance. I only knew I needed to walk.

The dance met me in motion.

I wonder if that is how some of our lost dreams return. Not as fully formed plans or dramatic revelations, but as something that meets us after we take one deliberate step.

A week ago, one of the women in my weekly Breakthrough group had an announcement. Her own joy compelled her to share the very real breakthrough she had experienced as the result of one simple mind exercise I had asked everyone to try.

I wrote about the exercise last week.

Focus on a red car. Any red car.

Describe it in detail. See the exact shade of red, the shape of the car, the seats, the dashboard. Feel yourself sitting behind the wheel and driving it. Then, as you go about your everyday life, notice how many red cars you see.

To her surprise, she began seeing red vehicles everywhere.

Of course, the red cars had always been there. The exercise did not cause them to materialize in traffic. What changed was her awareness.

She had deliberately directed her mind toward something, and her mind responded by raising her awareness so she could see what had previously gone unnoticed.

But seeing red cars was the smallest part of her breakthrough.

She now had evidence that she could direct her own mind with intention. If she could train it to notice red cars, she could also train it to stop searching constantly for danger.

That realization allowed her shoulders to drop. She no longer needed to live in the perpetual fight-or-flight anxiety that had followed her through so much of her life. She knew she could choose what she wanted her mind to look for.

And subtly, almost without fanfare, that old practiced way of moving through life began to slide away.

She took one deliberate step.

That was all it took to discover that she possessed more authority over her inner life than she had ever realized.

And that authority matters enormously at this stage of life.

For decades, many of us directed our minds toward whatever required our attention. We looked for the next problem, the next responsibility, the next person who needed us. Our minds became remarkably good at finding exactly what we had trained them to find.

Then we retire, supposedly ready for unlimited freedom.

Except we don’t know how to live without the invisible instructions that have acted as the silent partner in our lives.

For decades, those instructions told us where to be, what needed our attention, who needed us, and what had to happen next. Then one day, they go quiet.

We finally have the freedom to decide what we want our minds to notice now, but freedom is not much use if we continue obeying instructions that no longer exist. We can keep scanning for danger, decline, and everything we might lose, or we can deliberately turn our attention toward curiosity, possibility, pleasure, and the parts of ourselves that have been waiting to be seen.

But reclaiming that authority does not mean replacing one relentless set of instructions with another. It also means learning when to stop directing, become quiet, and listen for what wants to emerge.

Retirement did not merely release me from a job. It released me from living entirely by instruction.

I can choose to direct my life when direction is needed, and I can choose to respond when something inside me stirs.

Declaring ourselves lazy because we have chosen to enter the listening, receptive mode is no longer useful or necessary.

Once you realize you have the authority to choose which mindset the moment requires, you no longer need to beat yourself up for not doing anything. Instead, you can intentionally allow yourself to feel good about being still until you hear the next move.

That can be difficult to trust at first. I know.

We have been trained to believe that if we are not producing, planning, fixing, or accomplishing something, we are wasting time. But listening is not wasting time. Receptivity is not laziness. Sometimes appearing to do nothing is the most deliberate choice we can make.

At the end of this article, I will share a small resource you can use to begin developing this kind of trust in yourself.

I can follow an unexplained yes, honor an unexplained no, and change my mind when the mind I am using is no longer the one the moment requires.

The question is not whether you are disciplined enough to reclaim your dream.

The question may be whether you can recognize which part of you needs to lead next.

Do you need to choose a direction and move, or do you need to become quiet enough to hear the direction already rising within you?

Stop asking permission to find out. Pick one today and see what happens if you actually trust yourself enough to be wrong.

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Your sovereignty begins with trusting yourself.

If this article stirred something in you, I created a guidebook to help you begin building the self-trust required to know when to direct your mind, when to listen, and when to stop declaring yourself lazy for honoring what you hear.

Become an annual member today and you’ll receive the guidebook at no additional cost, along with access to our weekly Breakthrough gathering and everything else included with your membership.

You’ll also receive 20% off for as long as you remain a member. Not merely for the first twelve months. If you choose to renew next year, your discount renews with you.

This is not another set of instructions for fixing yourself.

It is support for reclaiming your sovereignty and trusting the woman you already are.

For paid members the rescource, Building Trust with Yourself is available on the PERKS list page.

And if something in this piece made you pause, nod, or feel a little less alone — please give it a heart before you go. That one small tap tells the algorithm this conversation matters. It puts these words in front of another woman who needs to hear them today. She's out there. Help me find her.