This past weekend, my son got married.
When I delivered my words at their reception on Saturday night, something happened that I still can’t fully explain. The words didn’t land the way words usually do. They dropped into people’s hearts. They illuminated my son and his husband in a way that felt sacred, that felt like wisdom moving through me rather than from me. People told me afterward that something shifted in them—in how they saw this marriage, in how they saw love itself.
That wasn’t eloquence. That wasn’t something I could have crafted through my mind, no matter how much I tried or how clever I became. It came from somewhere else entirely.
Here’s how it was possible.
A couple of months before the wedding, I woke up one morning with a thought. It arrived like a knowing, the kind that doesn’t come from planning or ambition, the kind that comes from somewhere deeper. You should speak at this wedding.
I hadn’t thought about it. I hadn’t been asked. Looking at the schedule of events, the flow of the day, there didn’t seem to be room for a mother’s words. And yet the thought came again the next morning. And the next. Each day it arrived, clear and calm, until I finally agreed: I will write something, in case there’s a chance.
So I wrote.
And what came through was bigger than me. It came from that place I’ve been tending to so carefully, that quiet, intuitive knowing that only surfaces when you’ve kept your instrument clean, your energy protected, your deepest self available.
I know how easy it is to overcomplicate a life. I know the shape it takes, the way it moves through my body as low-level anxiety, the way depletion settles into my chest like something heavy and dark. I have a sensitive demeanor, the kind that requires tending the way a garden requires water. When I stop paying attention to my own energy, when I let the small depletions accumulate into something larger, I land in places that don’t feel good, sadness, burnout, the kind of exhaustion that hollows you out.
It’s not pretty, and I’ve learned not to go there lightly.
What took me longest to understand is that this care of myself isn’t indulgent. It’s foundational. Because underneath the sensitivity, beneath the need for rest and space and attention, there’s something else—a gift. A heightened intuition that has become the most reliable compass I own. When I’m rested, when my nervous system is regulated, when I’ve honored what my body needs, that intuition lights up. It shows me things. It guides me toward my own life, and it opens me to service in ways I could never access through my mind alone.
Which means when I neglect this part of who I am, I lose access to the very thing that has shaped everything good in my life.
I think so many of us address our most precious resources backwards.
We push through. We override the small voice that says rest, the tug that says this doesn’t feel right. We sacrifice the instrument to achieve the goal, not realizing that the instrument—our intuition, our wisdom, our deepest knowing—is the only tool that actually matters. We land in depletion. We land in burnout. We land in a place where there is absolutely no chance of accessing the inner wisdom that might have guided us toward something real, something true, something that actually works.
I see it everywhere. I see it in myself when I’m not careful. The ambitious override. The pushing. The not-yet, not-quite, just-a-little-more. And then the crash.
Here’s what I want to say, especially to myself, and to anyone who reads this:
Taking care of your energy isn’t selfish. Honoring your intuition isn’t indulgent. Resting when your body asks for rest, protecting your nervous system, staying close to what actually feels true for you—these aren’t luxuries. They’re the foundation of everything that matters.
Because your intuition, your deepest knowing, your connection to something larger than yourself—that’s your greatest tool. Not just for your own wellbeing, though of course for that. But for your service. For the gifts you’re meant to offer the world.
When we take care of ourselves—when we really take care of ourselves—we’re not withdrawing from the world. We’re tuning the instrument. We’re making ourselves available to wisdom. We’re saying yes to the whispers that might ask something of us that we could never create through will alone.
And that’s when the real work begins. That’s when we become useful. That’s when the magic happens.
With so much love from my corner,
Sarah
