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Welcome to Witches and Yoga Pants, your cozy corner of the cosmos, where modern magic meets everyday life. We're here to explore magic, mindfulness, and personal growth with a grounded, no-fluff vibe. Whether you're into moon rituals, tarot spreads, or just trying to survive Mercury retrograde, you are in the right place. So get ready to disrupt some old patterns, explore what it means to reclaim your power and remember who you really are. So pull up your yoga mat, light a candle, and let's get into it. Hello and welcome back to Witches in Yoga Pants. I'm very happy to be back. If you've listened to the little announcement that I put out a few weeks ago, you know that I decided to take a short break from the podcast because I was moving through a pretty significant life transition. I knew that I needed to give myself some space to actually be in my life for a little while rather than immediately trying to turn everything I was experiencing into something I could talk about here. And I think there's something really important about doing that, because sometimes life changes slowly. Things shift almost silently over months or even years, and we don't necessarily notice how much has changed until we look back and realize that we're standing somewhere completely different from where we started. Sometimes life changes very quickly. There are periods when one decision seems to create another decision, one realization opens a door to another realization, and suddenly the life that felt relatively predictable a few months ago looks completely different. Those are the seasons where we can find ourselves asking some really big questions. How do you know when a chapter of your life is actually complete? How do you know when it's time to stop trying to fix something, change something, save something, or make yourself fit into something that perhaps you've simply outgrown? And maybe even more importantly, how do you trust yourself when the answer you're getting from somewhere deep inside doesn't necessarily make sense to everyone around you? Because I think one of the hardest parts about change is that sometimes we know before we can explain how we know. There can be this quiet awareness inside of us that says this chapter is complete. But the mind immediately wants evidence. It wants a list, it wants proof, it wants to know exactly what happened, exactly when it happened, and exactly whose fault it was, and exactly what we're going to do next. But our deeper knowing doesn't always work that way. Sometimes we simply know. And learning to trust that knowing can be one of the hardest things we ever do. I've been thinking a lot about the chapters of our lives and how strange it is that we can stay inside one for so long that we don't realize it's already ended. We can keep living the routines, we can keep fulfilling the roles, we can keep doing what we've always done because there's comfort in familiarity, even when the familiar no longer feels right. And sometimes nothing dramatic happens. There isn't necessarily one moment where everything breaks. There isn't always a betrayal or a crisis or some enormous event that gives us permission to say, okay, now I'm allowed to leave this behind. Sometimes the chapter simply completes itself. And I think that can actually be harder to understand because we're taught to look for reasons. We think we need something to be terribly wrong before we're allowed to change it. We think we need to justify why we want something different. We think we need to be miserable enough, hurt enough, disappointed enough, or certain enough before we can choose another direction. But what if completion doesn't always look like destruction? What if sometimes completion simply feels like realizing that the version who entered this chapter is no longer the version of you standing here today? I think we underestimate how much we change over the course of a lifetime. We talk about growth as though it's always obvious, as though becoming more ourselves should feel like this beautiful, expansive process where everything just gets clearer and easier. And sometimes it does. But sometimes growth is incredibly disruptive. Sometimes growth asks us to look at the life we built and admit that parts of it were built by a version of ourselves who had completely different needs. Maybe that version of you needed safety. Maybe they needed belonging. Maybe they needed approval. Maybe they were trying to create stability because stability was something they had never really experienced. Maybe they were trying to be good enough, useful enough, needed enough, agreeable enough, or easy enough to love. And none of that means that that version of you did anything wrong. They were building a life with the awareness that they had at the time. But then you grow, you learn, you heal things, you begin paying attention to yourself differently. And eventually you might look around and realize that the life you created while trying to survive belong or keep everyone else comfortable doesn't necessarily fit the person you've become. There is a particular kind of grief in that realization because sometimes we don't just grieve people or relationships or places. Sometimes we grieve versions of ourselves. We grieve the person who tried so hard, the person who believed that if they just gave a little more, worked a little harder, stayed a little quieter, became a little easier or needed a little less, everything would eventually feel right. And when we finally recognize that person, there can be a sadness in realizing how far away from ourselves we may have wandered. I think losing ourselves happens all at once. Most of the time it happens in tiny compromises. We stop doing something we love because there isn't enough time. We stop saying what we really think because it's easier to keep the peace. We become so accustomed to taking care of everybody else's needs that we stop asking ourselves what we need. We adjust, we accommodate, we adapt. And adaptation is not inherently bad. Relationships require compromise. Families require compromise. Work requires compromise. Being part of a community means we don't always get to do exactly what we want, whatever we want to do it. But there is a difference between compromise and disappearance. And sometimes we don't recognize that difference until we suddenly realize that we don't quite know ourselves anymore. Maybe you've had a moment like that. You look back at your life from the outside, and everything might appear relatively normal, but internally, something feels unfamiliar. You start wondering, when did I stop doing that? When did I stop laughing like that? When did I stop wanting things? When did I become afraid to say what I actually think? And when did I start making every decision based on how it would affect everyone except for me? And maybe the biggest question of all, when did I stop trusting myself? That question has been on my mind a lot lately because I think self-trust is something we talk about frequently in spiritual spaces, but we don't always talk about what it actually requires. Trusting yourself sounds lovely until your inner knowing is asking you to do something inconvenient. It's easy to trust yourself when your intuition confirms what you already wanted to hear. It becomes much more difficult when your intuition begins pointing towards change, because change has consequences. Other people have feelings about our decisions, people have expectations of us, families have expectations, society has expectations. And if you've spent a significant portion of your life being very aware of everyone else's feelings, trusting yourself can initially feel almost selfish. You may know what you need and immediately begin building a case against it. What about this person? What about this responsibility? What about what people will think? What if I hurt someone? What if I regret it? What if I'm wrong? And suddenly the quiet knowing that felt so clear gets buried beneath a mountain of questions. This is one of the reasons I talk so much about intuition and human design and learning how your own internal guidance communicates with you. Because the mind is incredibly good at arguing. Give it enough time and it can argue you out of almost anything. Your intuition is usually much simpler. It doesn't necessarily give you a five-year plan. Sometimes it gives you one piece. It's this, not this. Wait, stay now. And then the mind wants to know what happens after that. But sometimes we're not supposed to know what happens after that yet. Sometimes the next step only becomes visible after we take the first one. That can be terrifying when you've built your life around certainty. But I also think there are moments when continuing to demand certainty becomes another way of avoiding what you already know. When we keep asking for another sign, we pull another card, we ask another friend, we wait for another synchronicity, we tell ourselves that if the universe wants us to make this change, surely it'll give us something undeniable. Meanwhile, we may have already been given the answer a hundred different ways. The answer may be the feeling that keeps returning, the thought you can't quite make disappear, the part of you that becomes more alive when you imagine something different, the exhaustion you feel when you imagine continuing exactly as you are. Sometimes the sign is simply that you know. And I think one of the biggest lessons in spiritual development is realizing that eventually we have to stop outsourcing our knowing. Teachers can guide us, cards can reflect something back to us, astrology can help us to understand timing, human design can help us to understand how we're designed to make decisions. Friends can offer perspective, therapists and healers can help us see patterns we can't see ourselves, but eventually we still have to live our own lives. And there are decisions that nobody else can make for us. There are chapters that only we feel closing. There are versions of ourselves that only we know we've outgrown. And sometimes choosing to honor that knowing creates movement very quickly. Here's another thing I've been thinking about. We can spend years feeling stuck. And then once we make one aligned decision, everything starts moving. Opportunities appear, conversations happen, people enter our lives, other people leave. Things we thought would take months happen in weeks, doors that seem completely closed suddenly open. And because the movement happens so quickly, we can start doubting it. We think, shouldn't this take longer? Shouldn't I feel confused? Shouldn't I struggle with this more? Should I wait? But time is not always the best measurement of truth. Something taking a long time doesn't automatically make it right. And something happening quickly doesn't automatically make it reckless. Sometimes the decision happens quickly because the internal process has actually been happening for years. That is something I think we forget. From the outside, a change can look sudden, but the person making the change may have been slowly arriving at that decision for a very long time. There may have been hundreds of tiny realizations, hundreds of moments of clarity, hundreds of moments of discomfort, hundreds of times they tried to make something work differently, hundreds of moments when they ignored themselves and went back to what was familiar. And then one day there is simply enough clarity to act. To everyone else, it might look like a sudden decision. Inside, it might feel like finally catching up with something your soul has known for years. And that brings me back to the idea of completion. I don't think that every chapter that ends was a mistake. And that's really important. We have a tendency to look backward after something ends and rewrite the entire story. If a relationship ends, we might decide the whole relationship was wrong. We might leave a career and we may decide we wasted all those years. If a friendship fades, we may wonder whether it was ever even real. But something can be deeply meaningful and still be complete. Something could have been exactly right for who you were at one point in your life and no longer be right for who you are becoming. Those two things can exist together. You can be grateful for what something gave you and still release it. You can care for someone and recognize your paths are changing. You can appreciate the person you once were without requiring yourself to remain that person forever. And I think there is enormous freedom in allowing ourselves to hold complexity like that. We don't have to make the past bad in order to choose a different future. We don't have to villainize another person to validate our own growth. And we don't have to prove that we've suffered enough to earn the right to change. Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is simply this chapter mattered enormously, and now I know it's complete. Of course, knowing doesn't mean there isn't grief. Endings and beginnings often exist right beside each other. You can know you've made the right decision and still mourn what you're leaving. Those emotions don't cancel each other out. They're part of being human. And when something has been part of your identity for a very long time, releasing it can create a strange empty space. Who am I now? That question can feel uncomfortable, especially when we've spent years defining ourselves through roles: partner, parent, caregiver, employee, business owner, friend, the responsible one, the strong one, the one that holds it all together, the one everyone can count on. Roles can become identities without us even realizing it. And when one of those roles changes, we might suddenly find ourselves face to face with the person underneath all of them. That can actually be one of the biggest gifts of transition. You get to meet yourself again. You get to ask questions you might not have asked in years. What do I like? What do I want? What makes me feel alive? What feels peaceful? What do I enjoy doing? What do I want my days to feel like? What parts of myself have I been neglecting? What have I been tolerating simply because I became accustomed to tolerating it? What would I choose if I trusted myself completely? Those questions, my friend, can open doors. And sometimes what we discover is not an entirely new person. Sometimes we find pieces of ourselves that have been there all along. Maybe they were quiet. Maybe they got pushed into the background. Maybe there simply wasn't room for them in the life we were living, but they were still there. And there is something incredibly powerful about realizing that becoming yourself again doesn't always mean reinventing yourself. Sometimes it means remembering, remembering what you loved, remembering how you laughed, remembering what curiosity felt like, remembering what it felt like to make a decision without immediately wondering whether everyone else approved. Remembering the part of you that had dreams before practicality took over. Remembering the person who existed before you learned all of the ways you thought you were supposed to be. Maybe that's one of the reasons certain life transitions can feel so intense. They're not only asking us to release something, they're asking us to return to ourselves. And returning to yourself can create changes that happen faster than your mind is prepared for. There's often a period when your internal world has already shifted, but your external world hasn't caught up yet. That space can feel incredibly strange. You know something's changed. You know you have changed, but the logistics are still unfolding. And this is where the self-trust becomes a practice rather than an idea. You don't have to know exactly what your life will look like six months from now. You don't have to have every detail resolved. You don't have to know how every person will respond because odds are they won't respond how you think they will anyway. You don't even have to know exactly who you're becoming. You only have to keep listening for what is true now. That is where I think sometimes we make transitions harder than they need to be. We think we need to try to solve the entire future from the present moment. We want guarantees before we move, but life rarely gives guarantees. What it gives us are invitations, a conversation, an opportunity, a realization, a feeling, a door, a choice, and then another choice and another. Eventually we look back and we realize those small decisions created an entirely different life. I think there's something important about allowing ourselves to change our minds about what we want. We are often encouraged to be consistent, as though consistency is always an evidence of integrity. But sometimes integrity means admitting that something you once wanted is no longer what you want. You are allowed to change. You're allowed to grow. You're allowed to discover new things about yourself. You're allowed to want a different kind of life than the one you imagined 10 or 20 years ago. That doesn't erase the person you were. It honors the person you're becoming. And maybe one of the most loving things we can do for ourselves is stop requiring our present self to fulfill every promise made by a past version of us. We can honor that version of ourselves without remaining bound to every choice they made. We can thank them for getting us here. We can take the responsibility for where we go next. There's something else I want to say about trusting yourself during periods of rapid change, because I think this is where people sometimes become frightened by their own momentum. When you've been stagnant for a long time, movement can feel suspicious. You might have spent years thinking, analyzing, processing, healing, waiting, and wondering, and then suddenly things begin to fall in place. And instead of allowing yourself to experience that movement, you might start looking for reasons to distrust it. But what if the speed isn't necessarily the problem? What if the movement is happening because you finally stopped standing in your own way? Sometimes the hardest part isn't making the change. It's accepting that you're allowed to be happy after you make it, that you're allowed to feel lighter, you're allowed to feel excited, and you're allowed to discover parts of yourself that you thought were gone. You are allowed to experience joy even while other pieces of your life are still complicated. We can become so accustomed to struggle that ease feels unfamiliar. We can become so accustomed to carrying responsibility that putting some of it down feels irresponsible. And sometimes we have to learn how to receive our own lives again. Maybe you're listening to this right now from the middle of your own transition. Maybe something in your life is ending. Maybe something's beginning. Maybe you don't know which one it is yet. Maybe you can feel that something needs to change, but you're not ready to make the change. That's okay too. There isn't a universal timeline for these things. I don't think we should force endings any more than we should force beginnings. There's a difference between knowing something intellectually and being ready to act on what we know. Sometimes we need time, sometimes we need resources, sometimes we need support, sometimes we need to sit with something long enough that the knowing becomes unmistakable. But I do think we owe ourselves the honesty of listening. Even if we aren't ready to act yet, even if the answer scares us, even if we don't know what comes next, we can at least stop pretending we don't hear ourselves. Because there is a cost to abandoning our own inner knowing over and over again. Eventually we stop trusting ourselves, and rebuilding that trust begins with very small things. Listening when your body says no, following curiosity when something lights you up, resting when you're tired, speaking when something needs to be said, changing your mind when something no longer feels right, allowing yourself to want what you want without immediately judging it. Self-trust is built every time you show yourself that your inner voice matters, and eventually those small acts create the foundation for the bigger ones. Maybe this is ultimately what these chapters are about. Not simply leaving something behind, not simply starting something new, but becoming someone who trusts herself enough to recognize when life is asking her to move. Someone who understands that completion isn't failure. Someone who can honor what was without requiring it to continue forever. Someone who can stand in the strange space between one life and another and say, hmm, I may not know exactly where I'm going, but I know myself well enough to take the first step. I think there are moments in our life where we are given the opportunity to choose ourselves again. And sometimes that choice changes everything. It can be frightening, it can be messy, it can move much faster than we expected. There may be grief mixed in with excitement and uncertainty mixed in with an incredible sense of possibility. But underneath all of that, there can also be something that feels very much like recognition, like coming home to part of yourself you forgot was there. And maybe that is how we know sometimes. Not because every question has been answered, not because we know exactly what happens next, but because somewhere underneath all that noise, we recognize ourselves again. And if you're standing at the end of a chapter right now, maybe you don't need to rush into the next one. Maybe you don't even know what the next one's called. Maybe your only job is to listen closely enough to hear what you already know. And sometimes you do know what the next chapter is. You can feel it waiting for you. Maybe it's even calling you forward. And there's nothing wrong with allowing that knowing to be part of what helps you recognize that it's time to turn the page. Sometimes we aren't stepping into the unknown at all. We're finally allowing ourselves to move forward, to move towards something we already know we want. And then trusting ourselves enough to honor it. It's good to be back. Until next time, trust what you know, honor what has completed, and make room for who you are becoming. Take what you've heard today even further by joining my newsletter community. Each week you'll receive journal prompts and reflections connected to the episode that are designed to guide you in bringing these conversations off the podcast and into your own journey. Let's keep going deeper together. The link is waiting for you below.