& so many interesting things have come into my life through meditation. Tonight I want to talk about one in particular, because it has been the theme of my whole week.

Earlier this week I posted a Note on Substack about how much I adore my clean kitchen counters and it resonated with quite a few of you. If I haven’t gotten back to your reply yet, I will. I intend to read and respond to every single one.

What that Note sparked for me was just how magical my kitchen is. It continues to be a gift that gives and gives and gives to me, a beautiful place that nourishes my family. Tonight I want to share the story of how this kitchen materialized into form in my life.

First we have to rewind. A little less than a decade.

The vision

I had this beautiful meditation and in it I saw this kitchen. White countertops. So serene. The light was amazing. In the meditation I was standing in one particular corner of my now kitchen and I was sharing a book that I had published. In front of me were all my friends and family, celebrating the book launch with me!

That part of the manifestation has not come into full form yet and I promise it will. I definitely have a book brewing inside of me and I do look forward to that book party.

Back to ten years ago. I have this vision of the kitchen, me, the book, the whole thing.

At the time I was living in a home that my husband and I had purchased, on a lake in a neighboring town to where I live now. That home held a lot of dense energy, and it was honestly a very challenging chapter in our lives. We did not live there long. While we were there we had to undergo a pretty major renovation just to get it livable, so we were working with this amazing team. Refined Renovations, they were called. If you’re local to me, they’re lovely, lovely human beings and they actually helped me through what became a very difficult experience. We’ll get there.

So we’re designing the kitchen, and I’m telling them about my vision. I said, I had this meditation, I had this vision, this is my kitchen. It’s bright white, here’s the windows, here’s the orientation, da-da-da-da-da. They kept coming back to me and saying, Katie, we just can’t make that kitchen work.

Nope, nope, nope, nope. This is my kitchen. I know this is my kitchen.

They kept coming back. We danced back and forth. They were doing their absolute best and it was not coming together.

The shaman

Around this time I had a shaman come to the house. An amazing gentleman who spends part of his time in the US and part of his time in Europe, a really magical soul, Patrick. I invited him over and explained that the house was holding a lot of dense energy and I’d love his support clearing it.

In parallel to all of this, because I think so often our internal realities mirror our external realities, my husband was deeply in the throes of addiction. I was also working a big corporate job with two really small children, to give you the lay of the land.

What else was happening then. My body was going numb pretty much every night, which is a whole other story. For now I’ll just share that I was numbing out a lot of what was happening in my reality, because it was too big and too much to process. The little kiddos, the big job, the house literally falling apart and this family disease of addiction. It was a lot. My body is a great wisdom keeper for me, so when things go awry, they show up in my body big time. Does this happen to you too?

All of this is happening and I am still dead set… this is my kitchen, this is my kitchen, this is my kitchen.

The shaman sat in front of my house by a tree for about three hours. Then he came in and said, Katie, you need to wait three to four months before you do anything.

Just pause the renovation.

I looked at him like, are you kidding me. You want me to wait three to four months? The house is falling apart. It’s a disaster.

I felt his truth and it felt true to me too. I knew he was not wrong and I did not really want to listen. So I compromised and slowed things down.

As maybe you can imagine, my life imploded in pretty dramatic ways over the next three to four months. My husband left. We needed to sell the house. I needed to buy a new one in rapid order.

There are so many spin-offs of this story I could share. Tonight I’m going to really try to stay focused on the kitchen.

Heart pings on Zillow

I am a person who moves. When things become clear and there is no resolve in sight, I take action. I ended up buying a house within about two weeks, which is kind of wild.

I was scrolling through houses online, feeling really grateful that I had the support and was in a position to make this happen. It was clear that as a soon to be single mother I was not staying in the fixer upper by myself. I needed a space that was move in ready, that felt good, that could be a healing home for me and the kids.

So I’m scrolling through Zillow, and I come across this one listing. Something about it pings me. Pings my heart. I’m like, ooh, I have to see this.

While all of this is going on, I ended up calling my doctor, of all people. He said, you need to call my wife. What? His wife is a realtor, which I had not known. I called her, and she and her team miraculously sold the fixer upper for me, which was amazing. Then she took me to see the house that had pinged me on Zillow.

I walk in the front door. I wander around. I turn the corner.

And there is my kitchen.

Hmm.

Yeah. She’s right there.

My heart settled.

This is what makes meditation so fascinating to me, how these visions come to us, and how when we trust the heart pings and the people brought into our lives and the signs and the symbols, we get led in the right direction.

I was led to this beautiful kitchen in an incredibly gnarly time in my life. The moment I walked in, I knew everything was going to be okay and it was all going to work out. This has truly been a healing home for me and my family and it has been a co-creator in my reality, this home that I did eventually buy.

What I really want to say is that when you get those signs, whether it’s through dreams or meditations, or maybe you’re just driving down the highway and you get the urge to turn a different direction, I invite you to really trust them. There’s so much support all around us, leading us in these beautiful directions.

One more musing from this week

In closing, a brief story from a few days ago.

I was volunteering at one of my kiddos’ schools for their fall festival, which is an amazing day where everyone’s outside and there’s caramel apples. I was working the apple cider press. You can make your own pickles, there are hay rides. It’s a cool, cool day.

I worked my shift from ten to twelve, and then I had this funny window. Not quite enough time to go home, not short enough to just stick around and wait. So I figured I’d take a little drive and see where I land.

Where she goes to school there’s very little cell reception, so I could not plug anything into my maps. I thought, ooh, this is a great self-trust exercise. Listening to my intuition and seeing where I’m guided. I am very direction illiterate. So I just felt into my heart.

The first thing I come across is this beautiful field of zinnias. I pull over, I get out, I take a picture, I take in the magnificence of it. The zinnias are all set right against this backdrop of fall leaves and trees. Ooh. Okay. This is off to a great start.

I jump back in the car, wander down the road, and I see this body of water. If you know me, I am a water girl. Ooh, what is this.

I get closer and I see the sign for Walden Pond.

I am now five minutes from my daughter’s school and I had no idea this pond was so close.

I pull over, I park, I wander down and it’s just a gorgeous day. There are people swimming. It’s October here in New England, and quite a number of them are elders in wetsuits. Some couples. A very heartwarming scene.

I find a little cozy nook and I lie down and I close my eyes and I listen to the water and the birds and feel the sunshine on my face, and I do a meditation. I slip right into that space, feeling the sun warming my heart, expanding in gratitude for the day, in awe of the whole thing. Five minutes from my daughter’s school there is this remarkable, beautiful, historic, sacred site.

When I finish, I’m getting hungry. Now I’m really not sure where I could possibly drive to get something to eat, and the GPS still isn’t working. Okay Goddess. Show me. Show me lunch.

I keep driving, I make some turns and I land in Concord Center, which I’ve been to before, so I know it. I park, I wander to this little lunch spot, and I have an amazing sandwich, and it fills me right up.

We really are so divinely guided.

When we develop those self-trust muscles, so much opens up in our lives. I think everyone should try this. When you have two free hours, go for a drive and see where you land.

Don’t follow the GPS. Follow your internal GPS.

When you receive signs and symbols and synchronicities, trust them and ask for help.

I asked for help and I was led to some beautiful places this week.

That’s my Friday evening share, from my heart to yours.

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

K 💖

I did not plan on recording anything today, and I am squeezing this in before my Full Light circle in half an hour, because something happened in the car ride to school this morning with my daughter that I really felt called to give a voice to.

So we’ll rewind back a couple of hours into my morning. We’re going about our nice little car ride to school, my daughter’s sharing her very vivid dream from last night, we’re unpacking the subconscious meaning of it, which is just a fairly normal morning around here… maybe it is in your family too. Then we’re getting close to school and she completely pivots on me and comes out with this zinger of why do women stay in unhealthy relationships.

Whew. Okay. This is all pre 8 a.m.

I think it’s coming from a book she’s reading, and I’m going to need to unpack a little bit of that later. We were closing in on the school at that point, so I gave her the quick version, which is that we often choose the familiar because it feels safer. She got out of the car and hopped on her way and her question stayed with me all morning. So now we’re at eleven thirty and I’m going to share my reflections with you.

I guess I’d start by saying I don’t think this question is really about relationships at all. I think the question is about patterns, about why the familiar thing feels so much like home, this comfy cozy pattern, even when the familiar thing might be hurting us and why another choice can feel strange and far away.

The timing of this is interesting too, that it’s coming up in Venus retrograde, because this is a great time to go into the underworld and look at our patterns and the stories we’ve been playing out. Of course this is now going to be the theme for our circle at noon today, because when we are individuals who are wired for beautiful, abundant, fantastic, juicy lives, we often have to say goodbye to old patterns and it’s really fucking hard.

The truth is, our body would rather run an old program than run no program at all.

These patterns we have are cheap, they cost nothing to repeat and a brand new one costs a ton of energy and attention and effort. I’m not going to pretend it’s easy to shift a pattern. They are possible to shift. Our natural default state is to reach for the familiar groove because it saves us the work, even when that groove is worry, even if it’s the exact same fear we woke up with yesterday and the day before and maybe even our entire adult lives. That’s the wiring and there’s nothing wrong with any of us. It’s comfortable to choose these patterns.

If you’ve been hanging around in some of the spaces I hang around in, you may have heard the phrase that neurons that fire together wire together. It’s a big Dr. Joe Dispenza phrase and it actually comes from a psychologist named Donald Hebb, who started writing about this back in the 1940s. The concept has held up really well because it helps us understand that these patterns really are just a sequence running in our brains. They’re smooth and fast and automatic and when we repeat them they get faster and faster and faster and the path wears in, until eventually the pattern runs without you even asking it to. It’s kind of like when you’re driving a familiar route, like our car ride to school and sometimes you have no memory of the drive because you were on autopilot. That’s sort of what’s happening with these patterns in our brain.

On top of that, our nervous system is really good at memorizing whatever we give it to practice.

Hmm, yeah.

Our nervous systems will memorize a pattern of contraction just as faithfully as they will memorize a pattern of light. They don’t judge what we hand them, they just record the repetition.

So this morning when my daughter asked me why a woman stays, sure, that brings up a lot of feelings for so many of us. Leaving is asking a body to stop running a program it has run 10,000 times and to run an unfamiliar one instead, often from a state of exhaustion, frightened, doubting ourselves. That’s a big fucking ask.

Staying has a lot more to do with physics than it has to do with being weak.

There’s a version of this story I’ll tell my daughter someday when she’s old enough to hear it, about why I overstayed in an unhealthy relationship with her father while he was in the depths of addiction. Let’s just say I know this pattern well.

I know the comfort of staying.

I know I overstayed maybe a tiny bit in my corporate job too, though thankfully I’d gotten some repetitions in before that and knew by that time that I was creating a new pattern. Staying is comfortable because we know that path. For those of us who might be recovering people pleasers and I have a particular talent for that, we’re really good at making situations work long past the point that they’re working.

Feeling you, any recovering people pleasers out there today. 🙋‍♀️

So why can’t we just say I’m going to choose joy? I’m going to choose to be joyful today. Or choose an affirmation. I am joy, I am joyful, I am abundant.

We might wake up in that state, but often if we say a nice little affirmation in the mirror in the morning, it’s long gone by lunchtime.

I get it. We believe we can decide our way into a new feeling. We can say it out loud, I am choosing to feel abundant, today I’m going to trust myself and we mean it completely in the moment we say it. I’m not making fun of any of this, because I’ve done it in journals, in my car, at the start of many a January. It has not worked for me, and I’m going to tell you what I do instead.

When we really intentionally want to create a new pattern, we want it to last past lunch.

What I have learned is that our bodies reorganize around repetition.

We can’t just say I’m choosing to be abundant today and feel that new feeling once, because the old feeling has been practiced 10,000 times and the old one is always going to win in that scenario. We get to practice with repetitions and we build the new feeling the same way the old one got built, because the old one got built by repetitions too. We just might not have been conscious of those repetitions.

This is what we do when we take these Light Rides™. We drop into the heart and we deliberately call the light forward, laying down new patterns on purpose, incredibly intentional, handing the body a coherent signal to memorize instead of leaving it to rerun the past on its own.

I always think of the mind like a library of books of our past. When we go into the heart space, we access all these new possibilities, new patterns. Then at the end of the Light Ride™ we ride back up into the mind and we inform it. We teach the mind. We say, hey, we learned something new and we’re going to take action on that something new. The more we practice the state, the more the body learns the shape of it, until one day we start running it on its own. That’s our light becoming automatic. That’s self-trust becoming a reflex instead of a decision you have to make every single morning.

I’ve seen so much evidence of this, because I’ve been working with some of the same women for years now. We’ve been in circle together taking these Light Rides™ and I’ve had the beautiful opportunity to witness lives radically shift, radically transform, and mine has too amid it all.

I do think when you do this with other women it is exceptionally powerful, because you realize that some of these patterns you’ve been running are more collective patterns than individual patterns and there’s a power in breaking them together.

Hmm. Okay, let’s see. Where should we go from here?

Let’s talk about the retrograde we’re in for a minute, this Venus retrograde. We are descending into the underworld. I know that sounds scary and yucky… it’s actually a great time to look at our patterns. We have about nine days left, because on October 23rd Venus meets the sun and is reborn and then for the next 20 days of this Venus retrograde we get to ascend back up in this new pattern. So I think this is a really timely conversation that my daughter was bringing forth in the car. We can repattern anytime and this is a particularly juicy juicy window to work with our old patterns.

I get it. It is scary to change. It is scary to build new patterns, because with the old ones at least we know what we get. It is also scary to live a half life. It is also scary to be happy some of the time and call that the deal.

So let me leave you with a little mini practice. I will always invite you into joining the Full Light circle or taking the Light Ride™ subscription here on Substack, because it is what I believe in and I believe these repetitions make radical changes in our lives. For today though, one little baby practice you can do.

Take 60 seconds and hold your hand on your heart. I invite you to call forth the light, however it comes to you, maybe a warmth or a glow or a color, maybe even a small little sun in the middle of your heart space. Then I invite you to pick one feeling you want your body to learn. Maybe it’s trust, or peace, or joy, or being whole. Let that feeling fill you the way the light fills you and hold it for one full minute.

It’s different when we call forth and inform these patterns in a field of light, because our body speaks in light and feeling and thought and radiation. So when we really feel peace in our hearts, or abundance, or whatever you’re calling for, we start that rewiring.

If you want to go deeper, try it for 30 days, or for 60 days, this little baby practice. If you want to go deeper still, join me for a Light Ride™. It takes us out of the busy mind and into the stargate of our hearts, into this still place, this zero point. It’s a really magical place and what makes it life changing is that we bring what we learn in that heart space back up, we inform our minds, we take action and we create new patterns.

So do what you can. Maybe you learn something new today.

Maybe as another way to practice this in your daily life, if you’re going out for a walk, take a new path. I think sometimes when we reinforce that into our bodies, that hey, it’s safe, it’s safe to walk a different way, we build a little more trust to make some of these bigger changes.

I’m sending you so much love and I am going into circle now.

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

xo,

K 💖

We are deep in a Venus retrograde, the rare 40-day descent that only comes around every year and a half and right now we are about 10 days from the very bottom.

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I was sitting in the garden this morning and I got this ping to jump on and record a little something for all of you about what was moving through me on this equinox day. When I glanced over at my phone, I noticed it was 11:11. I thought, ooh, yes, that is definitely a little wink from the universe that I should jump on and record something.

I love 11:11. Ones are all about new beginnings, and today feels like a fresh transition. We’re also in a one year numerologically, and that feels extra potent too. A year of new beginnings, of a new cycle, of a new nine year cycle being born.

What I really wanted to come on and talk about today is that every equinox, I pay really special attention to the signs that show up. I have been getting them aplenty this morning. I feel like they’re these little messengers for the back half of the year, sort of like the universe slipping us a note under the door of what’s coming next.

Before I share mine, and the day is still young so there may be more to come, I want to invite you to do this with me today. Keep your eyes open. Maybe it’s a bird, or a song playing on the radio of your car. Maybe it’s something somebody says to you, somebody you bump into. Maybe it’s an animal messenger. Maybe it comes in the form of numbers. Whatever shows up for you today, I invite you to really notice it, because I believe it is coming and landing with you on purpose, to represent this theme that you are stepping into, that we are all collectively stepping into for the back half of this year.

Okay, so here’s what happened this morning.

Most mornings after I get everyone off to school and get my workout in, I like to have a little breakfast outside. Right now in New England we have this fall crisp air and the sun is warming you and it just feels so yummy and delicious. So this morning I go outside and I’m sitting there, and it’s really the first time I am consciously aware that it is equinox. Just enjoying the day, the weather, the wind.

I glance over at my butterfly bushes, and I notice this spark of orange in the bushes. It’s this beautiful, beautiful monarch butterfly. I’ll share a picture of her in the article too. She’s just brilliant, this orange that is amazing and beautiful and deep. My butterfly bushes are pinks and purples and mauves and a little white, and she’s just flitting back and forth. I’m watching her and something pings in that it’s equinox.

She’s a messenger.

For me, the butterfly represents transformation. I was sitting there watching her and I kept thinking, not so long ago she was a little caterpillar.

That really landed for me, because I feel like I’m coming out of my own caterpillar phase. If you’ve been with me for a minute on this Substack journey, I think we’re only a couple months in, you might have noticed that this year I’ve had a lot of health stuff, mold. It was really just like a slow, inward, cocooning kind of year.

So I’m watching the butterfly and I’m feeling this in my cells, that transformation, this messenger of transformation is really here for me. I’ve been feeling this pull to be more out, more flitting about. I landed here on Substack. I feel ready to step into a new phase that does not feel like cocooning.

As this is going on, I’ve got a couple of text threads going this morning, and people are chiming in and out. I have this amazing mystical book club and they’re pinging in and out. All these little bits and bobs are seeding and helping me understand all of the messages of the season I’m stepping into.

I understand pretty deeply that we are always in choice. We create our own realities. Manifestation is simply consciousness alchemizing energy into form. I was thinking this morning about, well, why? Why have I alchemized this cocooning phase into form? This mold, this health stuff.

I want to be careful here. This is a lens for my own life that I am sharing. It’s not a judgment for anyone else who is struggling with health stuff. It’s not meant to bring any shame. We were in a crazy year. Our house really could not breathe. It was very real, it was very physical. I also believe there’s a deeper layer to everything we experience.

When I feel into mine, I’m able to get pretty clear about what was going on and why I chose this experience in my reality. It’s not the prettiest choice I’ve made. For me, it was really about feeling scared to fully step into my visibility. Instead, this past year, I chose distraction.

For those of you that know Gene Keys, I carry the 56 gene key, the storyteller’s gate. It’s like my main gene key. Its shadow is distraction.

Often when I’m standing right at the edge of something big, right before I’m about to really step into something new, part of me reaches for something else to pour all of my energy into instead. Yep. I do that. It’s true. The mold year, as I’m lovingly calling it, I think might have been the biggest distraction I have ever taken. It swallowed my body, my home, swallowed my calendar, my attention. It gave me a really legitimate reason in the world not to be seen.

Fuck.

Once I saw it, I started seeing this pattern everywhere. This all just fully landed this morning, so this is really hot off the press and maybe even too soon to share, but here we go.

The pattern of distraction I noticed isn’t just in one place in my life. It’s in all aspects of my life. It’s in love, it’s in health, it’s in friendship, it’s in my work. It’s often just easier to choose a distraction than to go all the way in.

I feel like this messenger of the butterfly this morning told me it’s time to go all the way in. It’s time to be fully out of that cocoon. It’s okay to shine in your full luminosity.

Maybe you know this pattern too. Maybe your distraction looks different than mine. Maybe it’s a busy calendar, a crisis that always seems to show up right on time, or a reason that sounds really good for waiting a little longer. If any of this distraction theme is landing for you, I want you to know there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s a very human pattern, and it can change.

So often when I talk about manifestation, I share that manifestations need a structured container to hold them. Our inner state has to be strong enough to hold the transformation we’re calling in. If our container is leaky, and I like to use a visual of a colander, we can bring this magical stuff in, but it just runs right out of the bottom. We end up recreating the old story because it’s the one that our system knows how to hold.

Seeing the pattern is the first step, and repatterning it is a practice. I got a funny little lesson about it this week. It comes out in these cute little ways.

Steve has been giving me a hard time about organizing some mahjong classes at the house. I think he could see the distraction long before I could, so I was defiantly proceeding full steam ahead with my mahjong plans anyway. Today it hit me. Mahjong is a distraction. It’s a fun one, there’s nothing bad about it, and it is a distraction.

The minute that clicked in this morning, two people of the three that were coming to my house to learn mahjong canceled like seconds later. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s just so good. Once we really feel our truth and feel our patterns, you kind of can’t unsee them, and things start aligning in our favor once we get honest with ourselves.

I’m seeing it in the house too. There’s like a million imperfect little things and loose ends after this project, and this morning I’m realizing I could spend another three months tending to the lingering items. There’s a bunch of things where the paint is kind of imperfect. There’s a hole in the ceiling here and there. Yes, they’re all things I could tend to.

What if I just say I’m done?

I’m choosing to be complete with this project.

For me, that’s what repatterning looks like. It’s about catching the distraction. That’s the theme for me. The theme for you might be different. For me, the theme right now is catching the distraction, even the fun distractions, because sometimes they are fun. I’m not saying mahjong is bad. It’s a distraction from the bigger thing, the bigger purpose.

When we do this, that energetic container strengthens. We start to shore up those holes in the colander.

That’s what we do every week in my Full Light women’s circle. We drop out of the mind, we come into the heart with a Light Ride™, we feel what’s actually true, even the big and icky stuff, and we let it move. Then we take these small aligned actions, week after week, with the same women witnessing us, and the consistency is the container.

I have absolutely no doubt I created Full Light in large part for myself, because I needed the rhythm and I needed the community. If you’ve been craving a place to practice this with other women, I am absolutely inviting you to join us in the Full Light circle. I’ll link it in the article.

It is a practice. It’s always a practice. We get to choose, we get to create our reality, and we do really need to get honest and feel into why did I call this in. For me, today on the equinox, my whole moldy experience landed.

We get to make these little baby internal decisions. For me, it’s paying attention to the distraction.

I also wanted to share, because my mystical book club was such a theme this morning. We started reading this book together by Zach Bush, called Biological Intelligence. In the book, he talks about another book. His book is sort of framed off this other book called Unwitting the Devil, so we’ve been kind of bouncing back and forth between the two. A few of us are reading both of them now.

What I shared with my mystical book club this morning is that I do still have this low vibe voice. I’m not sure if I want to quite call it the devil, but that’s what the book references. It can show up as this negative self talk. The next time it comes in, I’m going to answer it from my truth, from that bigger inner knowing, rather than from my fear. For me, that looks like going all in.

I feel like the butterfly was a little nudge of yes, Katie, it’s time. We can’t pull anyone else through their own transformation. We can shine our light, we can share our truth, and that’s why I’m sharing this story with you.

For you, the theme might be completely different today. Perhaps elements of this will resonate with you.

I’d love to hear what signs are showing up for you today on this equinox. Where are you being asked to go all in? I’d love if you could drop it in the comments.

Let’s see what signs come up, what threads weave together.

I wish you all a very, very happy equinox. I always invite you to trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.

Have a beautiful day, my friends.

It wasn’t until a friend’s mom received a Parkinson’s diagnosis that I felt a massive urgency flood into my body to actually get it onto the page. I’ll be honest about my first reaction. I called bullshit on that diagnosis. I have spent the past year in enough mold forums to watch Parkinson’s, MS, and other serious diagnoses completely reverse once people got out of the environment that was making them sick. That's why I finally sat myself down to write about what I learned. Not because I know better than anyone's doctor, but because I want you to trust yourself enough to keep asking questions.

I didn't plan to become someone who knows this much about mold, but sometimes life has a funny way of calling us forward to be a wayshower for others.

I have found this true after getting divorced, after leaving my Fortune 100 executive career, after starting a business, and now after this mold journey. When we go through pivotal experiences, we learn things whether we like it or not, and with that wisdom comes an opportunity to pay it forward. My hope is that if this article finds its way to you it’s supportive, hopeful and gives you a sense of not being alone.

It’s been exactly one year since my whole mold saga began… I want to walk you through it step by step, in the order it actually happened, because when I was in the thick of it I would have given anything for someone to lay it all out for me.

Here is the thing I did not expect to be writing about, but am pleasantly surprised by… this turned out to be a self-trust story.

I spend my working life helping women trust themselves. It is the whole thing I do and I feel in totally full body alignment with this work.

Yet, this year I got handed the hardest version of my own teaching, because for months my labs looked “fine” and my symptoms sounded scattered and the easiest thing in the world would have been to accept that I was just tired, just stressed, just a low hum of anxious, just a busy mom in her forties, maybe it’s just perimenopause. The only reason we got to the root was that I kept trusting myself and saying something is wrong to my doctor who was willing to keep digging with me.

More than 90% of people with mold illness are first misdiagnosed with something else, usually anxiety, depression, or chronic fatigue. Sit with that number for a second.

Nine out of ten of us get told, in one way or another, that the problem is in our heads.

If you are reading this in the part where nobody believes you yet, that number is for you.

But, before I go further, a few things.

I am not a doctor. I am not a medical professional of any kind. I am a mom who learned an enormous amount over the past year because I had to. My whole business is built around helping women trust their own intuition, so I’d ask you to do exactly that here. Feel into what’s true for you. Take what’s useful. Leave the rest.

Every mold resource I mention will be linked. I am not an affiliate for these resources. If you ever want to support my work directly, I have my Light Ride™ guided meditations here on Substack, my weekly women’s circle called Full Light, and a small number of private client spots (if you are interested, connect with me directly at katie@mysticalliving.co).

A little more housekeeping, then I promise I’ll get to the good stuff… I’ve organized this by category so you can scroll to whatever stage you’re actually in right now. If you’re still trying to figure out if you’re sick, start at the top. If you already know mold is in your home and you’re staring down remediation, jump there. If you are just sort of curious or a friend of mine feel free to skim. You do you.

Here’s the simplest explanation I can give you if this is all new. Certain molds produce toxins. Most people breathe them in and their bodies clear them out without any drama. Some of us can’t. Our immune systems switch on to fight, and then never switch back off, and that permanently activated inflammation starts causing problems everywhere at once. That’s why the symptom list looks so scattered and unrelated that no one takes you seriously, including sometimes yourself.

And one more thing worth knowing before we start if you are a pretty healthy person landing here… there may be absolutely no need for you to go down this mold rabbit hole. Roughly 25% of the population carries a genetic susceptibility that makes it hard for their bodies to clear these toxins. The other 75% can walk through the same water damaged building and be fine. That’s why one family gets devastated and the neighbors never notice a thing. Through testing, we learned our family is in that 25%. It means this is something we’ll carry awareness of for the rest of our lives. I want my kids informed and educated about it. I do not want them to be paranoid. Ok I think we’re ready for the story… here we glow.

SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT

It was August of 2025. One year ago. I knew something was not right in my body.

I couldn’t lose weight no matter what I did and I know that is a little vain, but it was an early warning clue. I was brain foggy, I felt hazy and honestly just less smart. I was losing my usually thick healthy hair, also a little vain, but it was really rattling me! Chronic neck, shoulder, clavicle pain prevented me from pursuing many of my favorite activities. New psoriasis spots popping up daily… that was fun. I could not regulate my body temperature. My usual motivation, the thing I’ve always been able to count on in myself (I’m a generator in human design… it’s like the energizer bunny archeytype), just wasn’t there. My kiddos and I were getting sick constantly. Anything that came through the house, we all got, and it would hang on for weeks at a time. Not a normal cold cycle… out of school 2 weeks and down for the count for a cold!

I went to my doctor.

All the traditional blood tests came back “fine”.

Yup, totally “fine”, no clues. Thyroid, hormones… all the buzzy things looked good.

Luckily, I have a doctor who knows me. I have been with my family doctor for almost a decade, and there is real value in that kind of relationship. He knows my baseline. He knows I’m not someone who imagines symptoms. He didn’t flinch when I kept pushing him. I kept saying, we have to keep digging, something is wrong. He listened.

Somewhere in all of this he wrote me a note that I have thought about probably 10 times since. He said, “you sure are in tune with your body”.

Yes I am… I’ve been honing my self trust muscles!

I know how rare that exchange is. Women get told it’s hormones. It’s stress. It’s motherhood. It’s your age. There’s a name for it now, medical gaslighting, and I hear versions of it far to often from women I work with. If your doctor is not curious about you, that is information about your doctor, not about your body.

Please keep pushing. You are the only one who lives in your body. Trust your inner knowing.

So, one day I was sitting in his office and he said, Katie, I think we need to run the CIRS panel.

CIRS stands for chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And the minute he said it, something clicked in my whole body.

Oh my Goddess.

Fuuuuuuucckkkk.

Maybe it’s CIRS… again.

Because this was not my first time. I had been diagnosed with CIRS about eight years earlier, done the Shoemaker protocol, remediated my house for mold, and thought all of it was firmly in my past. We’ll get into what all this means as we go.

First, I want to sit here for a second, because if you are getting this diagnosis right now, I know exactly what that room feels like.

The relief and the dread arrive at the exact same moment.

Relief, because someone finally has a name for it. You are not imagining this. You are not crazy. It is not that you are simply tired or overwhelmed with the parenting juggle or bad at handling stress. Something real is happening in your body and it has a name and there are tests for it.

Dread, because I already knew what was on the other side of that name. I knew about the testing and the cost and the displacement. I knew this was going to take over our lives. Part of me wanted to argue with him.

Not this again. We already did this.

We ran a series of blood tests. The markers were startling. Every one of my inflammatory markers was activated.

If you want to ask your own doctor about this, the markers commonly used in the Shoemaker Protocol are C4a, TGF-beta 1, MMP-9, MSH, VIP, VEGF, ADH and osmolality, along with HLA-DR genetic testing to see whether you carry the susceptibility.

In the simplest terms I can offer as a non-doctor: several of these measure inflammation that has been switched on and never switched back off. Others measure hormones and regulatory signals that get suppressed when your body has been fighting for too long. MSH is one of the big ones, and when it’s low, it affects sleep, mood, weight, hormones, gut function, and pain regulation all at once, (good times!) which is part of why this illness makes people feel like everything is broken simultaneously. HLA-DR is the genetic piece, telling you whether you’re in the group that can’t clear these toxins efficiently.

Standard bloodwork includes none of this, which is exactly why so many of us get told everything looks “fine”.

At the same time, I ran the visual contrast sensitivity test, the VCS, on myself and my whole family. I recommend this as a starting point for anyone who suspects something. It’s around fifteen dollars, you can do it online, and it measures your ability to distinguish contrast, which gets impaired by biotoxin exposure. It is not a diagnosis, but it tells you where to look. It’s also a helpful way to track your healing progress too.

Only one person in my entire family passed it.

That was one of the hardest moments of the whole year for me.

Watching my kids be sick was the part I could not make peace with. They were catching everything, staying sick for weeks, dragging through days they should have been running through. My children were not operating at a hundred percent and they had no idea why, and neither did I, and I am their mom and I could not fix it quickly.

We tested the kids with bloodwork too. And then my doctor said the sentence that changed the next year of my life.

Katie, it’s time to test the house.

Fuuuuuuucckkkk.

TESTING THE HOUSE

Just like my initial bloodwork, my house “appeared” clean, not a single sign of visible mold… but it was time to dig deeper.

We started with the HERTSMI and the ERMI. Both are dust tests you can order and do yourself. The ERMI looks at thirty-six different mold species and gives you an overall score for your home. The HERTSMI is the shorter version, looking at the five molds most associated with making people sick. You literally walk around your house with a Swiffer cloth collecting dust, then mail it in. Simple, relatively inexpensive, and a solid first step.

The results came back & were alarming.

Again, there was no visible mold anywhere in my house. None. And I had always taken water events seriously and stayed on top of anything I noticed, due to having dealt with this exact situation previously. If you take one thing from this section, let it be that you cannot always see what makes you sick.

Every water event deserves your FULL attention.

The dust tests told us something was there. The next step was hiring an inspector.

I chose to go with what I considered the best of the best, because I wanted this done right. I hired Safe Start Environmental out of Illinois. They flew in, and their inspector spent an entire day in my house.

He came back with a hundred-page report.

When you are sick and overwhelmed and foggy, a hundred-page report is a brutal thing to receive. If that’s where you are right now, I want to say gently: one day at a time. One page at a time. You do not have to understand all of it today.

The report showed water issues in every single one of our bathrooms, basement, family room and flagged that we needed to explore further.

FINDING SUPPORT

Around this time I joined my first CIRS community, the Biotoxin Lady’s community, run by a woman named Lauren… a true earth angel.

This was one of the most helpful things I did in the entire process. Inside her community you can ask questions and get quick answers, and I was able to meet with Lauren directly. She’s another mom who went through this herself and built an entire business around helping people navigate it. That’s not something I plan to do, but I have deep respect for her and what she’s built.

Being able to ask questions of people further down the road than me, about special diets, about home inspectors, about remediation companies, made an enormous difference when I was too foggy to research everything myself. It’s also where I found my remediation company. Before we get to remediating we first had to…

SHED THE SHIT

“Shed the Shit” is a mantra I’m known for, and something I often share in my membership. Our internal and external realities mirror each other. When things feel stuffed and sticky on the inside, one of the fastest ways to shift your state is to clean up what’s around you.

I did not expect to live that teaching quite this literally.

We had to get rid of almost everything.

Porous materials hold biotoxins.

Upholstery, mattresses, fabric, even paper, anything soft and absorbent that lived in a contaminated environment carry biotoxins. We found creative solutions to items that we wanted to save, like taking all the kids’ art work and creating a decoupaged masterpiece! We had fun with it as we sat on the floor with all the art spread around us, gluing down finger paintings and third grade self portraits and it is now one of my favorite things in this house and can be easily cleaned.

For everything else we got a dumpster. Anything exposed and porous went into it. We live close to our town recycling center, so nonporous items that were salvageable went there, and we made a big donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters with what could be given a second life. Our dumpster had a resident skeleton named Bobby, because you really need a little humor when you are shedding the shit. There was also shame that moved through me at what we had accumulated and sadness of those versions of life disappearing… many of my finds from expat life in Europe were ready to be released… it was cleansing too. Cathartic.

I snapped photos of photos I wanted to save, like this vintage car that buzzed me through Umbria. I savored every page of a very detailed journal I uncovered from a summer I lived in Paris as a teen — that couldn’t possibly be disposed, so it is safely in a plastic bin to be tended to in time. I made the best choices I could and frankly much of this stuff was my accumulation and mine to tend to. Thankfully for Steve and the boys I had lots of muscles to help get things out.

Being now a year out… there is not one single thing I miss.

Not one. I have thought about it, and I cannot name a single object I grieve.

Which tells me something about how much of what we hold onto is weight rather than value.

If you’re staring down your own version of this, look up a list of what needs to go after mold exposure, because the categories are fairly well established and it helps to have something outside your own foggy brain making the call. Take it item by item rather than room by room. And know that whatever grief comes up isn’t really about the couch.

REMEDIATION (aka get rid of the mold)

I chose Better Breathing Environmental, recommended through Lauren’s community. I am based outside of Boston and this is a local company to me.

Something worth knowing before you hire anyone: you want a certified Indoor Environmental Professional, an IEP, not a general contractor who says they do mold. This is very important. There’s a Shoemaker-endorsed remediation standard specifically for medically sensitive situations, and it is very different from cosmetic mold removal. This is exactly why I went with Safe Start for inspection and Better Breathing for remediation, both of whom work to that level.

This matters enormously: true remediation is removal, not killing. Bleach is not remediation. Fogging is not remediation. Kilz and chemical treatments are not remediation. If someone proposes spraying something to kill the mold and calling it done, that is not what you need. The mold particles themselves make you sick whether they’re alive or dead. They have to be physically removed from your home. We physically removed everything that was moldy.

Right as remediation began, we had to move out of the house. We thought we’d be gone 3 weeks, maybe 6 at the most.

It was 5 months.

The crew started with the bathrooms, since those were the flagged areas. What they found behind the walls was MAJOR black mold. Hiding behind every single bathroom wall in the house.

They would send me photos like these and I would just stare at them.

Fuuuuuuucckkkk.

We ended up having to gut every single bathroom in the house. And in the process we learned something else. Our original builder had cut a tremendous number of corners. We had to replace every single piece of plumbing in the house, because incredibly cheap plumbing had been used everywhere it couldn’t be seen, and beautiful copper wherever it could. Our home was only eight years old.

If I were ever buying a home again, I would do the inspection completely differently. I would bring in someone who checks moisture in the walls and does not just walk through looking at surfaces. I would not be afraid to be the person asking for more.

THE RENTAL (was very cute, but very moldy!)

Ugh, I did exactly what you are not supposed to do. I did not test the rental for mold.

I just couldn’t at the time. I told myself it was going to be “fine”. I asked the homeowner if there had been any mold issues, I thought that was enough due diligence (fast forward and we learned they were not transparent with us). How could the rental possibly have a mold issue too. I wanted to be blissfully unaware.

I don’t think people talk enough about what displacement does to a family.

5 of us humans plus 2 German Shepherds.

You are not on vacation.

You are living out of a house that isn’t yours, without your things, without your rhythms, with your kids sleeping in unfamiliar rooms, with new neighbors, while somewhere across town your actual home is being torn open. Every single thing takes more effort, the school commutes elongated. Where are the scissors. Where is the good pan. Everyone is a little off and nobody can say exactly why.

There were nights I just cried from the pure overwhelm of it. I remember genuinely believing we were never going to get to the other side of this. It is easy to look back now, feeling better, sitting in my own breathing house (we’ll get to that, but yes houses need to breathe like people!), and narrate it like a story with an ending. In the middle of it there was no ending in sight. There was just another test, another estimate, another delay, and a body that wasn’t working.

A couple months into the rental, I started to feel a little better because we began to detox our bodies, but nowhere near where I should have been. We retested our bloodwork and things simply were not improving the way my doctor expected. And once again he said it.

Katie, I think you need to test the rental.

Well, don’t you know it.

The rental came back even more moldy than our actual house. Different molds, but worse.

Fuuuuuuucckkkk.

I give myself grace on this one. I know I should have tested it immediately, and I let hope override what I knew. Lesson learned, and it did delay our healing timeline.

So now we needed out of the rental, our house wasn’t ready, and I was too paranoid to move into another rental and roll the dice a third time. Did I mention the biotoxins make you feel a little crazy!

I talked to my earth angle contractor Hans and asked how we could possibly move back in. By that point I actually believed my house was safer than anywhere else we could go, because it had been fully remediated. Construction was still happening around us. It wasn’t ideal. It was the best available option. I trusted myself and we prepared to move home.

BUT FIRST… SMALL PARTICLE CLEANING, THE STEP NOBODY TELLS YOU ABOUT

If you take one practical thing from this entire article, outside of trusting yourself, please let it be this one.

After remediation is complete, your home needs what’s called small particle cleaning. Remediation removes the moldy materials. Small particle cleaning removes the invisible toxic dust that remediation leaves behind, settled on every surface in your house. That dust is what keeps making you sick after you thought you were done.

The process is meticulous. HEPA vacuum, wet wipe with a damp microfiber cloth, then HEPA vacuum again. Every surface. It takes hours per room.

Most remediation companies skip it, because it’s labor intensive and expensive. You have to ask for it specifically, and you should get it in your contract as its own line item. Multiple CIRS practitioners will tell you that recovery can fail entirely without it, and I believe them.

We had ours done through Better Breathing Environmental after the remediation was complete.

I also clean my home very differently now, permanently. Here is exactly what we use.

The whole philosophy is simple: no bleach, no Lysol, no Febreze, no Windex, no synthetic fragrance, nothing that adds a chemical burden to a house we just worked this hard to clear. And a real HEPA vacuum, which matters more than almost anything else.

Floors. Bona Free and Simple for hardwood, with a hardwood-specific mop. Bona Multi-Surface for tile and concrete, with its own separate mop. Damp, never wet, and never mix the mops between surfaces.

Vacuum. A C3 Calima Miele, with the brush attachment used on air vents too, which people forget entirely.

Bathrooms. Branch Basics with Oxygen Boost for tile, grout, and toilets. Spray, wait five minutes, scrub, rinse well. Seventh Generation glass cleaner and a squeegee for shower glass. And a daily shower spray after every single shower, sprayed on and left to sit, never rinsed. That one habit alone prevents a lot.

Sinks. Branch Basics to scrub, then white vinegar poured into the overflow hole at the top of the sink, ten minutes, then flush with hot water. That hole is a place mold loves and nobody thinks about.

Kitchen. Branch Basics on countertops. A non-toxic degreaser for the stovetop, on a cooled stove. Microfiber cloths for everything, laundered after every use.

Periodic. A free-and-clear CLR product for hard water on glass, but only when the glass actually looks cloudy, not routinely.

Filters. Air Oasis, every room.

I made a one-page guide for our house so there’s no guessing and no substituting.

POST TESTING, AND WHY YOU DO NOT SKIP IT

Before we moved back in, we did post testing, and I want to make this its own point because people skip it.

Have someone different from your remediation company do your post testing. Different eyes, different incentives.

Timing matters here too. You wait roughly four weeks after remediation before you retest, so dust has time to re-accumulate. Test too soon and you can get a falsely clean result. We waited about four weeks after small partical cleaning.

I used Madeline Flagg of Purely Green Environmental for ours. She founded the company back in 2002, has a chemistry degree from Boston University and research background at Harvard Medical School, and holds NORMI and ACAC certifications. She came in and ran a full battery of tests to confirm we had actually gotten all the mold and that the air was clean.

She found an area that had been missed in the original inspection.

We remediated that too. If I had skipped this step, we would have moved back into a house with mold still in it, believing we were done.

For anyone tracking numbers: Shoemaker’s guidance is that people with CIRS need an ERMI score under 2 to actually recover and get their MSH moving in the right direction, we currently have MSH ranging from 10-27 in our family… we are working towards 40+. I have not run a new ERMI yet. Once our construction is finally finished, I will.

In an ideal situation you’d wait until construction was 100% complete before moving in, but in many cases things aren’t ideal, so do the best you can.

THE HOUSE THAT COULDN’T BREATHE

We finally moved back in during the summer.

The humidity in the house was 77%. Alarm bells!

Mold grows above 60%. I was terrified. We had five dehumidifiers two of which were serious Sante Fe’s running around the clock and we could not get the humidity below the sixties.

We knew we’d had poor construction, but this was something deeper, and I needed the root cause, not another workaround.

Through my partner, we found an expert, John who came and walked the entire house with us. When we got to the attic, he stopped and said, okay, I know what’s going on.

You have what we call in the industry a “sick house”. Your house can’t breathe.

My home had been sold to me as extremely energy efficient, built fully to Massachusetts code. The entire attic was covered in spray foam. Every bit of it.

I joked with him that it was like my house was wearing a mask.

He said, yes. That’s exactly right. Your house cannot breathe.

I have thought about that a lot since. I walked away from my Fortune 100 career because my company wanted to put something into my body that I had not consented to and to not only mask me physically, but to mask my inner knowing and values. And then I came home and got sick because someone had sealed my house shut in the name of following code. Same story, twice. Something applied over a living thing, for its own good, that stopped it from breathing.

I asked what we do about it. He said we remove the spray foam. And then he said the thing that made the decision for me: if you don’t, you’ll be in this exact same situation in a couple of years. You will absolutely grow mold again.

Holy fuuuuuuucckkkk.

Just as I thought we were reaching the end of this project, we were starting a new one.

BREAKING CODE ON PURPOSE

My contractor brought in a crew, and this is where we broke code. We chose what we knew was right for our home over what the building codes enforce.

I don’t want to go full conspiracy theory here, though anyone who knows me knows I love a good rabbit hole. But I am genuinely concerned that current building codes are making homes so tight that they are making people sick. That’s a conversation for another day.

The spray foam removal was a gnarly, gnarly job. Ninety degrees outside every day the team worked, dehumidifiers still running throughout the house. I made a lot of chocolate chip cookies, ice creams, popsicles, and lunches for the crew. It became the small thing I could actually do. I could make cookies. So I made a lot of cookies. The crew worked in my attic in a heat wave pulling out truckloads of foam and I fed them like it was my job!

Almost immediately, we could see it working. Where the spray foam came off, the roof deck underneath was completely wet. All that trapped moisture finally releasing.

We were also tracking CO2, which had been sitting well over a thousand (this is bad). More evidence the house wasn’t getting fresh air. And yes, for anyone in the know, we had an ERV, which is required in a tight home to bring fresh air in. It wasn’t doing the job. Could we have added more equipment, more contraptions, more systems to compensate? Sure. But I wanted to solve it at the root.

My house needed to breathe.

As the foam came out, the humidity dropped and the CO2 started to normalize. I track both with a device from AirThings, which I’d recommend to anyone. It measures humidity, CO2, radon and more.

We also added gable vents to let the house breathe, and I chose mine in an octagon shape. That was a feng shui decision. The octagon is seen as a symbol of protection to ward off negative energy and as a vehicle for the advent of good health and good fortune. Yes please! If I was going to cut new openings into my home to let it breathe again, I wanted them to carry intention rather than just function.

Intentionality has been true of the whole rebuild. Every choice we’ve made putting this house back together has been a conscious one down to the energy of the paint colors, in a way it never would have been if none of this had happened. Probably a share for another day, but as part of this process I removed WiFi from my home! I also way upgraded my water with a whole home water filter the AquaOx XL and the Cloud Reverse Osmosis system… these are the things that turn me. Keeping my family toxin free is what I find super sexy these days!

THE SHOEMAKER PROTOCOL

While the house was healing, so were we. Parallel paths… you genuinely cannot do one without the other. The cleanest protocol in the world will not hold if the walls around you can’t breathe, and a beautifully renovated house won’t help if your body hasn’t caught up.

The Shoemaker protocol was developed by Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker, a physician who pioneered much of the research and treatment around biotoxin illness and CIRS. It’s the protocol I used eight years ago the first time, and I knew from experience that it worked for me.

The first rule and step 1 of 12 of Shoemaker is that you have to be out of the moldy environment before you can begin. So we started step 2 once we were in the rental (back when we thought it was mold free, whoops!), beginning with a heavy-duty binder called CSM. A binder does exactly what it sounds like. It grabs the toxins in your gut and carries them out of you, instead of letting them get reabsorbed and recirculated over and over. That’s the whole first move. Stop the loop.

We are still working our way through it. Right now we’re focused on eradicating MARCoNS, a resistant staph colonization that can live way up in your sinuses and quietly keep your inflammation switched on no matter what else you do. Seems wild that we are only on step 3, but I truly believe the first 3 steps are the gnarliest and take the longest. My last rodeo with CIRS my life completely changed after VIP (step 12) … it’s like the holy grail of healing! Do not skip step 12!

The protocol itself is well documented and easy to find online, so I won’t reproduce it here, I do think this guide from Surviving Mold is helpful. What I’ll say is that the sequence matters, the order is not arbitrary, and doing it with a practitioner who actually knows the protocol makes an enormous difference.

What strikes me looking back is how similar the two paths were. With my body, we had to stop treating symptoms and find the source. With my house, we had to stop chasing humidity with dehumidifiers and find out why it couldn’t breathe. Both times, what finally worked was going to the root instead of managing the surface. I have spent years teaching women to do exactly this, to stop managing the feeling and go find what’s underneath it. This year I got to practice it on my own drywall!

DIET, SUPPLEMENTS, ALTERNATIVE TREATMENTS…

I explored a lot here, and I want to be honest that this is the area where I think you have to find your own way.

I did stints following Nutrition with Judy and her carnivore protocols. We found that too strict for our family long term, and I still think she has a tremendous amount of excellent free material. Her podcast and website are worth your time.

Where we’ve landed, and what’s genuinely working for us right now, is gluten free, low amylose, organic whole foods. Simple, not extreme, sustainable for a family with kids. I live near the best USDA certified organic farm Volantes and do 90% of my shopping there.

On supplements, we all take various different ones depending on our unique needs, and we’re using Formula 1 NSB for our MARCoNS treatment after BEG did not work for us. I’m not going to write out our full supplement stack here because it’s individual and it changes, but I’m genuinely happy to answer questions in the comments if something specific would help you.

One thing I will tell you about, because it’s been one of my favorite pieces of this whole process, is HTMA. Hair tissue mineral analysis. You trim a little bit of your hair, send it in, and it maps your mineral levels and what you’re actually deficient in. I do mine through Dr. Heather Finley and her team. If it speaks to you, I am sharing an affiliate link here, so you can use my code: FRIEND

Two things I love about it. First, it’s specific to me, not a generic protocol.

What comes back is a supplement blend formulated for what my body actually needs. Second, it comes as a powder, which matters a lot to me. I do not love swallowing a fistful of capsules every day, and this way I’m getting what I need without that extra capsule.

The best part came six months in, when I did my second HTMA. Things are still not exactly where I want them, but we could see real, measurable progress from the first test to the second! You get a full hour deep dive with Heather’s team on your results.

Healing from CIRS is slow and it is mostly invisible from the inside. You do not wake up one morning “fixed”. Having something that shows you moving in the right direction, even a little, even when you still feel like garbage, is genuinely sustaining. Find your version of that. Whatever gives you evidence. Some people find tracking with a mood journal helpful. Also the VCS is a great way to see progress too.

I do envision a time when we can come off of most of these supplements. Right now, our bodies need the extra support to do the work of healing, and I’m at peace with that.

Many alternatives were tried, I’m pretty willing to try anything… red light (we have a Sauna Space), Ampcoil for PEMF, Lumiceuticals, Hockett for oxygen and ozone therapies(left me with full body hives for a week!), craniosacral, altlas orthogonal chiropractic, brain health explorations…

INSURANCE

I don’t think enough people know to fight here, so I want to spend time on it.

I’ve found that having a good broker is the single most important variable here, someone who will fight for you!

Early on it became clear my original broker was not going to advocate for me. Mold coverage is capped at ten thousand dollars in my state. That was the whole conversation with her full stop, end of story. Another conspiracy theory in the making on the cap of $10k!

I switched brokers at the very beginning of this process, and I worked with a gentleman named Dylan who was a lifesaver through the entire thing. We talked on the phone multiple times a week. Not once a month. Multiple times a week, for a year.

Here is the argument you need with insurance and Dylan is the one who kept making it: water causes mold. Mold does not simply appear on its own. Which means the right claim is a water damage claim, not a mold claim, and those are governed by entirely different limits.

We are still mid negotiation, so I’m not going to get into specifics publicly, though I’m happy to talk privately if you’re facing this. My corporate background taught me not to get walked over, and I brought that energy here. Insurance is a relationship-based industry, and you want someone in it who will genuinely go after it for you and stay your partner the whole way.

I’m happy to share Dylan’s contact details if you want them. My phone just buzzed while I was writing this paragraph. It’s Dylan. Still on it, a year later.

TELLING PEOPLE

This part surprised me with how much it mattered.

CIRS is genuinely hard for people to comprehend. There’s no cast, no scan, no obvious wound, and the whole thing sounds a little unbelievable to anyone who hasn’t lived it. So I wrote a document explaining what was happening, what CIRS actually is, and how each person in our family was affected, and I shared it with our loved ones.

It was one of the more useful things I did. People want to help you, people want to understand. Most of the time they just don’t know what they’re helping with. Handing them one clear page did more for us than a hundred half explanations.

With the kids, I took the same approach. We talked with their teachers so school had some context for what was going on at home. And we educated the kids themselves, in age-appropriate terms, on what this is and why our family is affected when other families aren’t.

I want my children to grow up knowing they carry this susceptibility, knowing what to look for, and knowing how to advocate for themselves in a doctor’s office someday. Informed. Educated. Not afraid of their own house.

THE PEOPLE WHO CARRIED US

I could not have done this alone.

Steve was grounded and steady through the entire thing, and he was physically impacted by all of it too. That’s what makes it remarkable to me. He was sick himself and still somehow the calm in the room. Knowing I wasn’t in this by myself, and knowing I could completely fall apart in front of him without him flinching, is a large part of why I made it through with smiles.

There’s something else I noticed this year that I did not expect. So many men showed up in their full masculine presence. Steve, and my contractor Hans, my doctor, Dylan, Dennis and his remediation crew, the inspectors, and the people who just kept moving things forward when I had nothing left to move them with. There was a healing in that for me, honestly. Having good men in your life who simply take the next step, who don’t need to be managed or convinced, who look at your situation and say I’ve got this part.

My family was incredibly supportive throughout. Showing up with the binders, the nasal spray, the supplements… it’s a bit of a production and they rolled with it all, offering constant love and support.

And the communities I was part of, Lauren’s, and my own membership circle, gave me windows every week where I got to be myself again instead of a woman managing a constant crisis.

That’s what I’d tell you if you’re in this. Let people carry pieces of it. Tell them what’s actually happening. You do not have to hold all of it in your own two hands.

WHAT HELD ME THROUGH IT

I want to talk about the thing that held me steady through all of this, because it isn’t a product or a protocol.

I have a guided meditation practice I created called the Light Ride™. Through this year, when I was too foggy to think clearly, too tired to plan, and too overwhelmed to make one more decision, listening to my own pre-recorded Light Ride’s™ was the thing that kept giving me access to myself. It’s very hard to hear your own knowing when your body is inflamed and your house is being torn apart and you’re living in a strangers home and someone is sending you photographs of black mold behind your children’s bathroom walls.

Meditation didn’t cure my CIRS – what it did was keep me in relationship with myself while my body and my home were both being rebuilt.

I kept running my weekly Full Light circle through the entire thing, and that consistency turned out to be its own medicine. Showing up in community every week, when everything else in my life was uncertain, gave me a rhythm to hold onto.

Friends who were in the thick of it with me, I happen to have 2 beautiful friends going through CIRS/remediation right along side me and then my healthy friends who would listen or do ceremony and help transmute the mold. My friendships deepened in this season, as I had less energy to give and saved it for those that had the capacity to go deep into this portal with me. Now that I’m feeling myself again, I have more capacity to reengage with live and friendships and host people — this reemergence feels really good!

If you’re in this right now and your nervous system is fried, I’m not going to tell you to meditate your way out of a biotoxin illness. I will say that having ten to twenty minutes a day that belonged only to me, where nobody needed anything and no decision had to be made, was one of the few things I had complete control over during a year when I controlled almost nothing. If the Light Ride™ speaks to you, check it out here. If meditation doesn’t speak to you, my friend Sarah Tacy has a nervous system repatterning program that you may find supportive. Find something for you.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

My house is breathing!

And we are starting to breathe better too.

Everyone in my family feels tremendously better. We still have a ways to go on the protocol, and I’m not going to pretend we’re at the finish line. But my creativity is coming back online, which is personally very exciting to me. I want to move my body again. I want to walk and be in nature. I have the energy to write this article, which a year ago I absolutely did not.

A little context for those that don’t know me, I’m an entrepreneur, I work for myself, and that meant I could quiet my business down while we went through this. I kept running my weekly Full Light membership circle the entire time, and that consistency was genuinely beautiful to have. I kept working with my private clients. And I stopped all marketing & social media completely during this period, and I feel no pull to go back to any of it. I didn’t even send an email to my list for a year! That’s probably its own article. Landing here on Substack, in a place where people go deeper than a five second reel, has felt like the right place for me to reemerge gently.

I had the resources to do this the way I did. Investing in a healthy home and healthy bodies became the number one place I put my money this past year. Not everyone is in that position, and there are creative solutions at every level. That’s exactly why I’m putting all of this out here for free.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, sick and foggy and overwhelmed and staring at a report you can’t process: there is light at the end of this tunnel. I promise you.

My house is breathing. No fuuuuuuucckkkk required.

You will get there too.

WHERE THIS IS ALL HEADED

Here is a number that stopped me cold when I found it. The EPA estimates that up to half of U.S. buildings have water damage capable of harboring mold. Half.

As someone who spent a career studying trends in my corporate America life, and who has become one once or twice myself, I believe this is going to be one of the bigger stories of the coming years. As building codes push homes toward greater and greater efficiency, those homes breathe less.

Less breathing means more sickness.

More sickness means more dependence on pharmaceuticals.

I don’t think this conversation is going away.

I think it’s just getting started.

There’s a passage in Leviticus, chapter 14, describing a priest inspecting a house for contamination in the walls. If it’s found, the affected stones are torn out. If it returns after the walls are scraped and replastered, the entire house must be torn down, because it’s considered unclean and unfit to live in.

This is not a new problem. People have been contending with sick houses for thousands of years. But it is a problem that will grow if we continue down a path where we are restricting our homes of breath.

EARTH ANGELS

A small handful of people became what I think of as earth angels this year. People I trust completely, and will keep sending others to.

My family doctor, who kept digging with me. Lauren, the Biotoxin Lady, and her community. Safe Start Environmental in Illinois. Better Breathing Environmental. Madeline Flagg at Purely Green Environmental, for post testing. John, who found the mask on my house. My contractor Hans and his crew. And Dylan, my insurance broker.

Every one of them has been linked throughout this article.

WHY I’M SHARING ALL OF THIS…

I’ve noticed a pattern in my life. After my divorce, other women going through divorce found their way to me, sometimes for one conversation, sometimes it became a friendship. After I left corporate, women who wanted to leave corporate found me too, and some became clients. Now with mold, the same thing keeps happening. My remediation company regularly asks if I’ll talk to this person or that person, and I always say yes.

I believe everything is working out for me, even in the gnarliest seasons.

And I believe that to whom much is given, much is expected.

So here is everything I learned, in one place, instead of one conversation at a time. I may write the divorce version and the leaving corporate version one of these days too.

I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge this year, and I want to be clear that I am not going to build a business on it. This is not my life’s work. What lights me up is supporting women to trust themselves, and that’s what I’ll keep doing.

Which is maybe why this year hit the way it did. Every single turn in this story came down to the same thing. Believing myself when the bloodwork said fine. Pushing when it would have been easier to accept the answer. Testing the rental when I did not want to know. Asking why the house was humid instead of buying a sixth dehumidifier. Not one of those was a medical decision.

They were all self-trust decisions, and I only made them because I have spent years building my self-trust muscles on smaller things.

That is the actual reason I do the work I do. Not so women feel good, although that is an epic bonus! I do it so that when the moment comes and something in you says something is wrong here or really right, you already know how to listen, and you already know how to act on it! Taking action on our intuition is a big part of this magic.

This mold information is simply something I learned, and something I can share with you.

There are a lot of people profiting in this space, and I think it matters that we trust our own inner compass and do what’s right for our own families. I’m not a mold expert. I’m a mom who got sick, whose kids got sick, and who questions everything, because questioning everything and getting to the root of what’s true has always been a core value in my family.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten things. I tried to capture the biggest pieces, in the order they happened although there was a lot of parallel pathing, organized so you can find what you need. If you get a heart ping to send this to someone who’s going through something like it, please do. That’s exactly what it’s for.

Any questions, please add them to the comments and I’ll respond to everyone.

Take what’s for you here, and leave the rest.

& remember to trust your light, because what lights you up lights up the world.

xo,

Katie Sol 💖

This ride is the antidote.

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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…