🔥 Rest isn’t retreat. It’s strategy.

Sadie Speaks is my personal writing — short, honest essays from the deep middle of things. They started as emails to my list, but they’ve become something more: snapshots of truth, power, and self-return, written in real time.

🎧 Want to hear it how I meant it? Listen to me read it below.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

I had to cancel last weekend’s Wild Woman Gathering – and it gutted me. 

But I saw it coming. By midweek, it had been raining for days, and the soil was already soaked through, holding more than it had capacity for. The gathering field is wetland-adjacent, making field conditions often precarious at this – the wettest – time of year. 

So on Wednesday I didn’t even need to check the forecast. I could feel the answer in my body. The land wasn’t meant to hold more. It needed rest. Just like you don’t brush your hair when it’s soaking, because it’s more likely to break – neither do you trample a saturated field, turn it all to mud, and call it sacred. 

My farmer-turned environmentalist brain knows this. I spent years working as a pasture management specialist before I ever started this work. And the number one rule: you don’t turn high foot traffic onto wet pasture. Hooves (or boots) destroy the soil structure, and the damage takes seasons to undo.

So I called it off. Cried a little. Made my apologies. Refunded event fees. And still – even with the mud underfoot and a wicked storm rolling in during the exact time we would’ve gathered – I second-guessed myself. Because that’s how deep the programming runs. To perform. To deliver. To prove that I’m reliable. Worthy. Enough.

You feel this, too. I know you do. It’s in the moments when your body begs for rest but your brain, trained by a thousand years of patriarchy, tells you that rest is weakness. That ease is laziness. That being trustworthy means never backing out. Never changing your mind. Never letting other people down – even when pushing through means betraying yourself.

And so you keep pushing. Smiling. Over-functioning. Forcing things because they’re on the calendar. And calling it strength.

Cancelling last week’s gathering was painful – and that pain was a wake-up call. A reminder of how often I’ve confused power with push instead of alignment. Power doesn’t always look like standing up and speaking out. That’s just the masculine form of power – the one we see constantly in this culture, usually being weaponized and performed. 

But feminine power? The kind where we’re resting instead of reacting? Where we’re listening and responding instead of blindly charging ahead?

We almost never see that modeled.

So I’m here to tell you: this type of power is real. It matters. And not only do you have permission to lean in to it – you have to. Because if you don’t, they’ll keep calling your depletion devotion and handing you applause for running yourself into the ground. Because when we don’t call out — and actively disrupt — this bastardized version of what power is… we pass it down.

Your kids are watching you to learn what power looks like in a woman. What gets praised. What gets swallowed. What gets left behind, or trampled. Or done anyway, just because we said we would. 

We’ve forgotten how much power there is in staying still. In surrendering to what is – not because we can’t handle it but because we’re choosing not to. And that’s something we need to relearn. To start embodying again, if we want to create a different, softer existence – for our kids, and for ourselves.

Resting in your power can look like retreat or resignation – but it’s not. The difference is the attitude, not the action. It looks like staying quiet when your mother-in-law is being ridiculous and you just can’t with her shenanigans anymore but you know she won’t actually absorb a damn thing you have to say. Not jumping in to play Judge Judy between siblings who are old enough to figure it out themselves. Saying no to that party invitation because you want a night to chill in your underwear watching Frasier reruns on the couch. Closing the door when you need fifteen minutes of alone time without being talked to or touched – and not explaining why. It looks like choosing not to perform strength in a way that costs you softness — but to hold steady, allowing it to emerge naturally through presence.

Leave the mess. Let the group chat go unanswered. Go take a bath instead.

This isn’t losing ground – it’s learning to stand differently. More deeply. More honestly. More you.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — you can book a session with me here. I’d be honored to hold that space with you.