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.
In September, I’m returning to the Temples of Humankind in Damanhur, Italy. It feels like an understatement to claim that this is a place of power, mystery, and majesty. Yet, I’ve found this to be true for myself and those I’ve met who’ve traveled within the extraordinary to the Temples and the community of Damanhur.
One cool Spring morning, I stepped on the treadmill at the gym looking forward to walking a few miles. Recovering from an injury, I had to walk at a moderate pace so I had brought my copy of What Is Enlightenment? magazine to explore. I always found something to inspire me within this publication focused upon consciousness, culture, and cosmos.
Stress is a natural experience in life. It’s often viewed as a doorway to disruption of wellbeing, peace of mind, and a clear navigational path in a challenging situation.
I’m a bit of a news hound these days. As one who hasn’t watched a newscast in years, I’m surprising myself. Ordinarily, I wait for the news to come to me. And it does. When something is important for me to know or respond to, I hear about it. Kind friends, clients, my husband, or a random stranger share a soundbite which cues me to look into a situation further. I’ve been very comfortable with this level of engagement for years now.
In the midst of our country’s woes, I’ve got Lucinda Williams singing in my head.
“You can’t rule me
you wanna go and tell me what’s good for me
you wanna tell me what I’m payin’ for
Well, the game is fixed, it’s plain to see
I ain’t playin’ no more”
I drove through a hail storm today. It began gently, offering a musical accompaniment to my journey. Intensifying, the hail noisily demanded my attention.
