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I spent years thinking manifestation meant the shiny new vision board, the affirmations, the visualizations I had to picture over and over. It wasn’t very fun. Looking back on it, it was actually pretty exhausting… and …

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This morning I woke up from a dream and my dream was about rushing, and I had no idea that this dream would become the theme of my entire day, or that it would turn into this transmission to share with you. It certainly kept revealing itself as the day went on.

The first thing that I noticed this morning when I woke up was I had absolutely nowhere to rush to. I stayed in bed and read a couple of chapters of my book before I did anything else. For someone who has spent most of her life rushing, lounging in bed on a weekday morning felt almost illegal.

(this book is soooo good, I am savoring it by just reading a few chapters a day!)

In my corporate America days, Mondays were a big deal, and they started early and went late. It was like the report card came in every Monday. There were buckets of reports to go through and meetings to be had, and Mondays in my system felt intense for decades of my life. So this morning, well past that season of my life, a Monday with absolutely nothing to do felt incredibly luxurious.

Here’s what I’ve been sitting with today, this theme of rushing.

I started rushing young. I was an early rusher. I remember riding through traffic with my mom to get to Harvard for this elite swim practice after school, watching the clock, willing the cars to move. There was always traffic. Anyone who has lived in the Boston area knows what I’m talking about. Everything about getting there felt like a sprint.

Then I would get in the water, and for the next two hours, time would stop. I didn’t have a language for it back then. I just knew that something happened to me in that pool that did not happen anywhere else in life. My breath found a rhythm, the black line on the bottom became the only thing in the world, thoughts came and went and I let them, and this was my first meditation. Years before I ever called anything meditation or knew the word.

Fast forward to college, and I rowed. Same thing. We’d rush to the boathouse, rush to rig, rush to launch, and then we would be out on the water for hours sliding and breathing in unison, and the noise in my head would go quiet. Yes, I was a D1 athlete rushing towards a title, but I was also doing one of the most meditative things a human can do.

I find that so interesting now, that some part of me was always choosing the slow inside the fast. My body knew what it needed even when my mind was busy chasing. I just naturally knew.

Then I went into corporate life, and for the first time there was no pool, there was no boat, there was no built-in place where the rushing stopped for me.

I became an executive by 26, and I rushed to that title, and then I rushed to the next one and the next one after that. I rushed through meetings I didn’t even need to be in. I rushed through meals standing at the counter. I rushed through the cafeteria line when I even managed to make it to the cafeteria. I even listened to podcasts at 2x speed so I could get more wisdom in less time. That probably tells you a lot about who I was in that season of my life.

At some point in those years, I did find formal meditation, and it became a beautiful place where I could go back to that quiet. It was for sure a lifeline for me in that season. That season of my life was not balanced though. I was using meditation like a pit stop, 10, 20, 30 minutes of safety before I merged back onto the highway at full speed. I’m so grateful that I had this tool in my kit at that time, and it wasn’t enough.

Underneath all of this rushing, it really was never about ambition. It was way deeper. It was about worth. I was rushing to feel worthy. I was rushing to be seen. I was rushing to finally feel like enough. In this season, every title was a bid, and every achievement bought me about 10 minutes of relief before I was on to what was next.

I didn’t understand until much later, but I do know now that when we rush, we do not feel.

Take that in.

We cannot sit with a hard feeling at a sprint. We cannot hear a quiet knowing over the noise of our own momentum.

Which means all those years I was moving fast and getting things done, I could not actually tell you what I wanted. Not really. I could tell you what was next on the list. I could tell you the next achievement. I could even tell you what everyone in the room needed. I could not tell you what my own heart wanted, because knowing that requires slowing down enough to feel it, and feeling was the thing I was outrunning.

Unfortunately, the rushing did not stay contained to me either. It rippled. There were mornings I’d be slinging a Prada bag over my shoulder, chasing a ringing phone, making breakfast for the kids at a sprint, rushing my children out the door.

I was handing my rushing straight to my kiddos, and I’m sure to my corporate teams as well. The kids are what really stick with me most. If you’ve ever tried to rush a child, I think you know what happens. They plant their feet, they slow down, and they resist us completely. What a beautiful mirror they were for me. It took me a long time to see it, and probably in those moments I was just frustrated that I was going to be late to my morning meeting.

Undoing a lifetime of that wiring does not happen overnight.

It took my “corporate detox”, as I lovingly refer to it, which is a real phase with real symptoms, by the way. I promise I’ll write a whole piece on that soon. If you are exiting corporate or considering it, this is important information.

It took years of meditation, of somatic work, of finally getting quiet and listening. Over those years in my corporate detox, I began to titrate back to myself a little at a time. I love that word titration, these small doses. We don’t need to flood a nervous system that’s been running on urgency for decades. We just give it evidence slowly that it’s safe to come down, that it’s safe to slow down, safe to be held in our thoughts and our feelings.

My friend Sarah Tacy has been in the somatic world for decades, and I love how she explains somatics. She uses this word “resourced” all the time. She talks about the movement between fast and slow in terms of being resourced, building the capacity to stay with yourself through whatever arises. When she first spoke that word to me, I don’t remember the exact moment, I just know that word “resourced” spoke to me.

In my corporate days, I was not “resourced”, not to the degree I needed. I was running hard with almost nothing underneath me. Today, I feel deeply “resourced” in my partnership, in my family, in the work I birth into the world. Because of that, I can have big, fast creative bursts of inspiration, and I can also have slow, somatic mornings like today. It’s not one or the other anymore. It’s not that rushing is bad. Intensity serves us in certain moments and in certain seasons.

That brings me back to today, and this is where it gets really good.

After reading in bed, I went to a somatic workout class with two girlfriends, and it’s run by this beautiful woman, Ivy. I will tag her studio. It’s called Squat and Reset, and if you are local to me, you must check it out. I told her at my very first class that I think I helped manifest it, even though I didn’t know her at the time, because I have been quietly wanting this movement in my life. Then there was Ivy and her beautiful new studio.

The whole design of the class is activation and then safety, all throughout the class. You’re going into the fire, you’re letting your body work hard, your heart rate climbs and your system revs and you feel that intensity. Then you come back down deliberately into rest, into being held, into this beautiful safety net. That’s the whole practice. It’s not about staying calm or staying revved. It’s learning to travel between the two on purpose.

I love this because it says something that I did not understand for most of my life. Fast is not bad, and slow is not holy. Seasons of exertion are part of being alive, and I would not trade my rushing years for anything. The skill is not avoiding the intensity and the fire. The skill is knowing how to come back down out of it, and being able to feel yourself when you are there.

The thing I love about Ivy’s classes is that each one has a theme, and today’s theme was about being enough.

Somewhere in the middle of class, in my body, not my mind, something landed, and these words came to me.

I am right on time.

Not ahead, which is the story I told myself for decades. Not behind. Right on time.

Here’s the part that really gave me full body chills. I have this piece of art hanging on my wall by Kara McKee, a former colleague of mine who is now an extraordinary singer-songwriter. This piece of art that she made is also words from one of her songs. I’ll see if I can tag it in here. The words that hang on my wall right above my desk from Kara are, you are right on time, you are loved, you are whole, there’s a divine plan of goodness written in your soul.

(check out Kara’s newest album at the end of the article!)

I have walked past these words for a long time. Today, in my body, in the middle of the workout, I finally believed them at a cellular structure.

Kara probably deserves an article of her own. Her story is really incredible and beautiful, and she will get one one of these days too. I’ll share a picture of her artwork with you.

After class I had nothing on my calendar for the rest of the day, and the three of us, my two girlfriends that I had met there, we walked to a cafe like we were in Paris. It was so beautiful. We sat outside. We just stayed for hours. Nobody checked a phone. Nobody was thinking about what was next. We just talked and wove through all of life’s stories, and it was so beautiful. I looked around at one point and realized I was sitting with women who are not rushing either.

I don’t regret the rushing chapter. I don’t think it was bad. It gave me a beautiful career, a body that knows how to work, amazing children, and I am grateful for all of that.

I’m also grateful it’s over.

If you are reading this in a parking lot before a camp pickup, or at 10pm at night with a full calendar already stacked up in your head for tomorrow, I really want you to hear this with me.

You are not broken for rushing.

We learned somewhere that speed was how we earned our place, and while we do pay the toll from that, and it’s not a character flaw. It’s actually a very effective strategy, and that’s why it’s so hard to set it down.

You don’t have to quit anything to start coming back to yourself. I do invite you try to slow down, in small doses, to feel your feelings.

That’s what meditation gave me, and that’s why I share my Light Rides™. In our Light Rides™, one of the parts that’s so beautiful is that we take one small action based on what we felt. That, my friends, is how we slowly over time build our muscles of self trust. We build the skill set of going fast and going slow.

If meditation isn’t your pathway in, go check out Squat and Reset, or go look at my friend Sarah Tacy’s work, or go just listen to one of Kara’s songs. Maybe even just start listening to your podcasts at a normal speed.

Remember, you are right on time.

Trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.

xo,

K 💖

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She was a magical & powerful woman, and for fourteen hundred years history changed her image into something much smaller. It's only now being restored (in the past few decades) and that's what we're doing for ourselves too in this guided meditation — going back to find whe…

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Hey friends of Substack. I wanted to beam in to share that I’m finding my way on this gorgeous platform, and I have to tell you — using my voice feels so much more natural to me than writing. I know that writing is such a beautiful part of this Substack community, so here’s what I’m doing: I’ll always record my shares in my voice, my storytelling, then transcribe and edit them so that for those of you who love to read, you’ll have an article too. I’m trusting myself here. Starting with my voice feels right.

My share today is about the end of this healing era.

As I sit here in my closet, I’m feeling grateful that the walls of my house are mostly closed up now. For the past six months they were pretty much wide open — studs, wiring, the full bones of the place on display. I know my home better than I ever could have imagined, down to the roots. We pulled back the curtain on the black mold. It’s excavated out of the house now, mostly out of our bodies, out of my kids’ bodies. I’m feeling that something else is closing up right on schedule with my walls, and that’s what I wanted to share about today.

Before I dive in — I’m a huge fan of astrology. I’ve taken classes, I follow the charts, and still, I’m not an astrologer. I can’t claim to go super deep on the topic. It’s not my lane, so I’ll point you to some of my favorite astrologers: I absolutely adore and . I believe they’re both on Substack, so I’ll tag them here.

With astrology, our charts are so nuanced and so individual that sometimes it’s difficult to speak to what’s happening in the collective. Your sky is not my sky, and I’ve never felt right handing anyone a one-size-fits-all share. Sometimes we contradict ourselves, though — because every once in a while something happens that’s so big it belongs to all of us at once. I would be remiss not to say I am feeling a shift coming, and the planets seem to agree with me.

This is one of those weeks.

For the better part of fifteen years, the slowest-moving planets in our sky — the ones that shape whole eras, not weeks — sat in earth and water signs. That’s all about body and feeling, inward and downward and under. You don’t need to know anything about astrology to know what that has felt like, because you’ve lived it along with me. I describe it as an era of reckoning — the shadow work, the grief we stopped outrunning. A lot of us learned words like nervous system, somatic, boundaries. We sat with things. We processed. We came together. We healed.

Sometimes it’s time for a season to end, and this healing era is no different.

That brings me to the turning point we find ourselves in. Over the last two years, quietly, every one of those slow-moving planets has moved into a fire or air sign — vision and voice, spark and momentum. Really different from earth and water. Right now the deep sky holds no earth and no water at all, and it happens that this weekend it peaks: all four of these slow planets line up at the same time in the sky, forming the shape of a basket.

There’s a really cool French astrologer, André Barbault, who’s no longer with us on this earthly plane, but you can research his work — he saw this window coming decades ago and called it a splendid relaunch of civilization. I’ve heard it called the Golden Age.

Personally, I’m calling it the Green Light Era, because that’s what it feels like to me. For the past fifteen years, I’ve felt like I was in a sort of yellow-to-red light. A lot of sitting and staying and feeling and healing. Now I just feel this new light, this green flashing light — go, go, go. That fits with fire and air. It’s faster. More momentum.

I don’t know what this Green Light Era will bring. Nobody does, and I’d be gentle with anyone who tells you they know exactly what they see in the future, because there’s so much nuance to what will come. What I can tell you is I am really fucking ready for this shift.

These yellow light years at my house were a rollercoaster of coming further into myself and honoring my truth, and I’m really grateful for them. I’ll probably look back at this period as one of the most unraveling but also beautiful periods of my life — from getting divorced, to leaving my fancy Fortune 100 exec career for a path way less traveled. My body took a lot of tending in these fifteen years, from chronic low back pain to CIRS to too many things to list. Let’s just say I’ve been to a lot of doctors, healers, acupuncturists. It’s a lengthy list. Maybe these last six months have been the deepest of them all — the situation in our home and in our bodies felt like the final excavation. A cleansing.

I know myself better than I ever have, and I really honor all the lessons from this season. But I don’t know about you — I am so ready to move. To share, to communicate, to hone my Human Design Gate 56 gift — it’s the storyteller’s gate — and share my voice more with all of you.

For the past fifteen years, the sky asked us: what do we feel?

Now my sense is the sky is asking: what will we do about it?

Not once we’re fully healed or fully ready or fully certain. I believe this Green Light Era moves at the speed of a heart ping. We feel the pull, we act on it, small and real, and this taking action builds self-trust.

One other note. If you’re still deep in your healing season, this is not some sort of deadline. I’m still moving through this mold situation myself. Not everything shifts in one dramatic moment — seasons are personal, and our bodies each know their own timing. My light has turned green and I feel that. You may feel it on a different timeline than me, and collectively, there’s a shift I’m embracing into.

On Monday we had this beautiful New Moon, which opened up a six-month intention window — what we’re planting now unfolds through the middle of January. If you missed the New Moon, or you don’t know about new moons, that’s totally cool. I just invite you to feel into a little baby seed you want to plant, maybe over this weekend. It doesn’t have to be a whole grandiose big dream. Just one little baby seed. As you plant it — into the cosmos, into your heart — feel into the frequency that the light is green, and we’re divinely supported in what comes next.

I’d love to hear from you — how this landed, and what you’re feeling in this season too?1

Trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.

Sending you all lots of love,

Katie Sol 💖

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Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor — a neuroscientist who studied her own brain after a stroke — teaches that when an emotion gets triggered, the chemical rush of it moves through your body in roughly a minute and a half. After that, the chemistry clears. So when we stay stuck in a funk for hours, it’s …

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I coined this term years ago, and once you hear it you’ll know exactly who yours are.

A lotus friend is the one who is with you in the muck. Who sees you at your most raw, your most undone, your most unrecognizable — and stays. Who also gets to witness your sheer brilliance, your becoming, your light. Because those two things always go together. You cannot have one without the other.

My first paid subscriber to my Light Ride™ meditations this week is one of my lotus friends. We met in corporate America and watched each other grow through more seasons than I can count. But what I keep coming back to — what makes my heart grow three sizes every time I let myself go there — is one specific night I will never forget.

It was my wedding anniversary. My kids were away. I had been waiting for my then husband to come home so we could celebrate, and as the hours passed the apartment got quieter and the light outside got darker and something in my gut started getting very loud.

I was alone and scared and my mind was spinning in every direction at once. Worst case scenarios on top of worst case scenarios. And underneath all of it, a knowing I had been trying to outrun for a long time — that something was seriously wrong. That his behavior had become increasingly erratic. That the word addiction kept rising up in my body no matter how many times I pushed it back down. I had been holding all of this completely alone. The people closest to me had no idea what was happening inside our home, inside our marriage, inside me. I had been keeping his secrets without even fully realizing that’s what I was doing.

Eventually I got in my car and drove the windy streets looking for him. Ditches. Side streets. Anywhere. The darkness made everything feel more ominous, my headlights cutting through streets that all started to look the same. I came home with nothing and sat with that for a moment — and then made a decision I should have made a long time before.

I was done holding this alone.

I called her.

Twenty minutes later she was at my kitchen counter. Level headed, clear, steady in a way I couldn’t be in that moment. She encouraged me to call the police. A very sweet officer responded and asked me gently — do you think he was drinking or using drugs? Tentatively, I said yes. He told me that in these cases, usually another precinct picks them up and calls it in.

That’s exactly what happened. There had been an accident. Someone else had been involved. And suddenly words I never imagined would belong to my life were being said out loud. Jail. Arraignment.

She went with me.

What happened when we arrived to bail him out has stayed with me in a different way. The officer we encountered there was nothing like the first. He was cold, cutting — and in the way he spoke to us I felt something I was not prepared for. Shame. Like somehow this was mine to carry too. Like I should have prevented it. I understood his frustration, I did — but his lack of compassion for what I was walking through that night still makes me shudder. To this day when I drive past that station something in my body tightens.

Some details of that night are crystal clear. Others have gone hazy. But what has never faded — what I can still feel as clearly as if it were yesterday — is her. At my counter. In my passenger seat. Steady when I couldn’t be. Holding what I couldn’t hold alone.

That’s a lotus friend.

This week, she became my first Light Ride™ subscriber. I stepped into something new and tender and mine — and she showed up. Again. Of course she did.

The lotus grows in muddy water. It needs the muck to become what it is. So do we.

Who are your lotus friends? Tell me about them in the comments.

As a gentle reminder, remember to trust your light, because what lights you up, lights up the world.

With love,

Katie Sol 💖

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The theme is self-trust. We drop down into the heart, find our own inner light, and let one quiet truth surface — the kind you already know but mi…

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In this first episode I break down what the Light Ride™ actually is — why visualization drops us past the busy mind, what a heart ping is, and the piece most meditations miss: it’s not enoug…

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For a long time, I didn’t feel right. Not dramatically wrong — just… off. Fuzzy. Heavy. I couldn’t lose weight no matter what I did or make it through a day without losing my voice. My energy was gone. I was tired in a way that sleep didn’t fix.

And I was losing my hair.

So I did what we’re supposed to do. I went to the doctor.

Your blood work looks fine.

I went back.

Everything looks good, Katie.

Here’s the thing — I teach women about self trust every single week. I teach that it’s like a muscle. That we build it slowly, the same way we build strength at the gym. Rep by rep. Staying with it even when you want to quit, even when it’s uncomfortable.

So I stayed with it.

I said no something is not right.

My doctor was willing to dig deeper. He ran more tests. What those tests began to uncover took my whole family on a wild ride this year…

CIRS. Aspergillus. Mycotoxins. Biotoxin illness. HLA genes. MARCoNS. VCS test. Shoemaker Protocol. Neuroinflammation. Branch Basics. Cholestyramine. Binders. Limbic retraining. Nervous system regulation. Mast cell. Low amylose diet. Remediation. ERMI test. HERTSMI. Spore trap. Air sampling. Mycologist. Containment. Negative air pressure. Fogging. Small particle cleaning. Mold.

If any of those words are familiar to you — you might already know where this is headed.

That’s me ⬇️ behind a containment wall in my own home. Part Two is coming…