The women who arrive in my classes, retreats, and therapy sessions are sincerely looking for healing, expansion, clarity, or sometimes just a little room to breathe.
They are thoughtful women, deeply engaged with the people and work they love. Rarely do they arrive because they want another spiritual philosophy. Most are carrying something much more ordinary.
A life that has become full. Beautiful in many ways, but crowded.
Crowded with responsibilities, information, expectations, decisions, and the steady rhythm of accomplishing what needs to be done. Yet many quietly sense there may be another way to move through life. One that feels more spacious, more relational, and more deeply their own.
We often assume what we need is another answer. Another practice. Another book. Another workshop. Yet what I’ve witnessed over the years is something much simpler.
Most women don’t need more information. They need a different relationship with the life they are already living.
That’s where Via Sophia begins.
Not as a philosophy to adopt or a spiritual identity to become. Via Sophia is simply the Way of Living Wisdom. A way of meeting yourself, other people, nature, beauty, challenge, joy, and the ordinary moments of everyday life with greater presence, intimacy, and participation.
This is why I’m gathering women in the lush jungle of Costa Rica. Not because wisdom only exists in beautiful places. It doesn’t.
But because becoming spacious within beauty creates clarity.
When life slows enough, something remarkable begins to happen. Your body softens. The constant internal conversation quiets. Your attention widens.
You begin hearing yourself again.
Not the version shaped by urgency or expectation, but the quieter wisdom that has been patiently waiting beneath the noise.
Your rhythm. Loosened from the momentum of a cluttered schedule.
There is value of retreating within your own being. More easily done when you are temporarily away from habitual living. Embraced and nourished within the natural world, you relax and reorganize.
So you may return to the relationship with yourself. So you may inhabit the life you are living.
Via Sophia is not something you learn and then apply later. It is a way of becoming more intimate with the life you are already living.
Over time, you begin recognizing wisdom as it appears in ordinary moments. How compassion naturally softens a difficult conversation. Where discernment brings clarity to a decision. When beauty becomes nourishment rather than decoration. How courage quietly asks you to take one honest step forward.
Within Via Sophia, you are invited into relationship with thirteen Mystical Mothers.
Each offering companionships as they model qualities and ways of being that help you recognize what is already living within you. Whether used as nourishing resources, teachers, or mirrors, the intelligence of each Mystical Mother invites recognition of your participation in life. And how you may more consciously engage in the living conversation that is alive in every moment.
Within Via Sophia, every phase of life is welcomed.
Joy and sorrow. Clarity and confusion. Rest and emergence. Belonging and solitude. Loving and letting go. Nothing is excluded. Nothing needs to be hidden. Everything becomes part of the conversation because Life itself holds everything.
Everything is welcome in this natural way of being. Because Life holds everything.
In Costa Rica, this way of living becomes easier to notice.
The rainforest teaches alongside us. The ocean soothes you. Meals offer slow, meaningful conversations. Silence becomes nourishing. Laughter becomes part of the practice. Before long, you begin to notice that every moment is part of the living conversation.
You don’t come to Costa Rica to escape your life. You come to remember how you want to live it.
Sometimes the path isn’t asking you to find yet another way of being. Sometimes it is asking you to inhabit the one that is already quietly unfolding beneath your feet.
This October I’ll be welcoming a small circle of women to Selva Armonia in Costa Rica.
Together we’ll spend a week exploring Via Sophia – the Way of Living Wisdom – not as something to master, but as a way of inhabiting our lives more fully. If something within you longs for beauty, spaciousness, meaningful conversation, and a more intimate relationship with Life, perhaps this is your invitation.
If you feel called to immerse in beauty with me, I’d love to see what we discover together. Let’s have a conversation.
Peace be with you and with all. No exceptions.
Studies of students entering college for the first time revealed that simple acts of kindness made a difference. During weeks where students reported doing more ordinary acts of kindness, they also experienced more happiness, resilience, optimism, and flourishing. Perhaps even more important, they felt less loneliness and anxiety. Ordinary kindness. Nothing dramatic or overly taxing. You don’t have to head off to school to get into the ‘act’ this week.
Learn the one essential skill that allows you to face any challenge with confidence, sturdiness, and inner calm.
More than a technique. It’s a game changer.
ia Sophia has arrived. This “Way of Wisdom” offers an invitation to step upon a Living Spiral Path and discover a new understanding of what it means to embody the Mystical Feminine.
For the past fifteen years I have lived and taught within the Mystical Feminine. I have sat within many circles and immersions with women as we explored how to practically and powerfully engage Feminine wisdom in everyday life.
When my daughter was in eighth grade, she and her Girl Scout troop were beginning to explore ideas for their individual Silver Award projects.
Around our dinner table, we tossed around possibilities. Nothing landed. Nothing stirred real interest. So we encouraged her to do what we have always trusted. Stay open. Listen. Pay attention to what people are talking about in the world.
Driving into Soul Sanctuary last weekend, I noticed the trees were engaged in a wild dance.
I should have paid closer attention as I got out of the car, because the wind nearly took me with it. Walking to the door, I had to lean in and brace myself for a moment just to stay upright. The cold whipped through my clothes and found every uncovered space, sharing its bone-numbing chill.
We recently had a big snow in my neck of the woods.
Everyone was hunkered down. The fridge was full, chicken soup was bubbling on the stove, and my book pile sat patiently on the coffee table. As the snow covered the neighborhood and the plows dumped fresh mounds over our carefully shoveled walk, we took turns peeking outside.
As a kid, snowstorms were pure joy.
“I think we need to be friends.”
Those were the first words out of my mouth when I introduced myself to Rev. Hilda Covington. We’d just finished a county meeting of nonprofit mental health and social service agencies. She was the presenter that month. We almost didn’t meet because Hilda arrived an hour and a half late to a two-hour meeting.
Life has a rhythm. It speeds up and slows down according to mysterious forces.
Your personal rhythm dances with the celestial bodies, seasons of the year, developmental phases, and the pulse of your Soulful evolutionary process. Living in harmony with these rhythms is in many ways hard to understand as it is a complicated and deeply personal process. Your rhythm dances with everyone’s rhythm in the grand Cosmic Dance.
