The Knowing That Comes Before Proof
To the Ones Who Don’t Yet Know What I Really Do
Dear friend,
Twenty-one years ago tonight—February 11th at 10:11 PM—my mother exhaled her last breath.
I was the only one in the room.
When she left her body, something moved through mine—warmth, a current, a crossing. A before and after sealing itself in my bloodstream.
But this wasn’t the first threshold we crossed together.
Long before I was born, my mother was told I had died.
No heartbeat. Too much blood. No viable pregnancy.
They performed a D&C. They told her to grieve. They told my father to seek psychiatric help for her certainty.
But she knew.
Not loudly. Not theatrically.
Quietly. Primal. Certain.
She went home. She lay in bed for months. She spoke to me. She trusted what she could not yet prove. And when I was born two months and a day early—Mother’s Day—blue, silent, no pulse—they pronounced me again.
And again, she said: No. She’s still here.
I have lived between worlds since my first breath.
Between life and death.
Between science and intuition.
Between fear and knowing.
Between what can be proven and what can only be felt.
And twenty-one years ago tonight, as I sat beside her while she crossed over, the cycle completed itself.
She stayed when others said I was gone.
I stayed when she was leaving.
Something ancient sealed itself in me that night.
Something that never stopped listening.
Because when my heart finally beat on its own—when breath finally took—I still did not cry.
Not that first day. Not for weeks. Not for nearly three months in the NICU after being life-flighted by Army helicopter from a rural hospital to a Seattle trauma center.
No sound. No wail. No outward declaration that I had arrived.
Only breath. Only observation. Only taking the world in before speaking back to it.
There is something about that beginning that still lives in me.
I do not rush toward noise.
I do not panic at silence.
I do not mistake volume for truth.
Before I ever made a sound, I learned how to stay.
And that—more than anything—is the shape of my work.
People sometimes think I use the word intuition lightly.
I don’t.
For me, intuition isn’t aesthetic spirituality. It isn’t mood. It isn’t preference dressed up as wisdom. It is the quiet knowing that arrives before proof. It is the body recognizing truth before the mind begins negotiating with fear.
Everything else—the spiraling, the bargaining, the proving, the overthinking—is the negotiation.
The knowing is quiet.
And most of us were taught not to trust it.
We were taught to override. To be reasonable. To be productive. To be palatable.
To contort in order to belong.
So we learn control. We learn performance.
We learn how to manage our lives.
And we become strangers to ourselves while doing it.
That’s usually when I meet people here at The Courage Practice.
Not because they lack intelligence. But because they are exhausted from negotiating with fear.
They felt something true a long time ago—about their work, their relationships, their body, their calling—and they’ve been bargaining with it ever since.
This is what I actually do here:
I help you stop abandoning yourself in the middle of your own life.
Yes—sometimes that means a career transition.
Yes—sometimes that means a relationship or health reckoning.
Yes—sometimes that means stepping deeper into leadership.
But not performance leadership. Not polish. Not proving yourself louder.
I help you cultivate self-leadership. The capacity to stay in your body when life speeds up. The ability to listen to what you know before there is evidence. The courage to stop contorting in order to be accepted.
Leadership, the way I know it, is self-trust under pressure.
And that kind of self-trust isn’t handed to you.
It must be grown. It grows the way my life began:
With someone willing to trust what could not yet be seen.
After my mother died, I returned to something feral and rooted.
I walked into nature every day—not as a ritual, but because it was the only place that felt honest.
Wind. Trees. Soil. Breath.
Grounded does not mean dull.
Alive does not mean chaotic.
Grounded is being at home inside yourself. Alive is trusting the current that moves through you—and letting it touch the world.
The people who are most alive right now—in the middle of collective grief, injustice, and upheaval—are not the ones gripping tighter.
They are the ones building a home inside themselves.
Not to escape reality. To remain human inside it.
If you are here—reading this—maybe it’s because something in you is tired.
Tired of proving. Tired of contorting. Tired of leading from fear instead of knowing.
You don’t have to believe in anything mystical to understand this:
Your body knows. And it has always known.
There comes a moment in a life when you can no longer override what you know. When the negotiation with fear becomes more exhausting than the fear itself. When your body begins whispering in ways that productivity and positivity cannot drown out.
That is usually when people find me.
Not because they want inspiration.
But because they want to come into contact with something real within them.
Not louder. Not shinier. Not more impressive.
Just real.
If you want more of this—stay.
Not because I’m here to explain the moment.
But because I’m here to help you stay human inside it.
And because something in you deserves to stop negotiating with fear.
From my breath to yours,
Practice Postscript
Where the letter stops being read & starts being lived.
If today feels tender—if you feel the weight of something unnamed—place one hand on your chest. One hand on your belly. Breathe.
And ask yourself quietly: What did I know before I got scared?
You don’t need to act on it.
You don’t need to announce it.
You don’t need to prove it.
Just notice.
That’s where the relationship begins.
That’s where real self-leadership begins.
If you’re standing at a threshold and you’re tired of negotiating with fear alone, you’re welcome to begin here.
Not to be fixed. But to be met.
