This Is Not a Romance.

“Down in the valley, first of May

Gathering flowers, both fresh and gay”

More properly, it was actually January and I wouldn’t dare pick a flower in Costa Rica, for fear of it harboring some wildlife, but I digress before I even begin.

I sat down to write about politics, but as it happens, that was a silly attempt to keep from writing the real story, which was more accurately about a relationship.

My political story has walked hand-in-hand with this relationship. So writing about the end result of that relationship is the same thing as writing about the end result of me, everywhere, including politically. And I don’t even know how interesting it is? In some ways, it’s the same old thing: person meets person and they try to love each other.

But this is not a romance.

I can’t emphasize that enough. A romance makes you sigh and inspires you and leaves you feeling sweetly wistful and glowing and hopeful.

I don’t get the guy in the end, and it wasn’t pretty (though sometimes it was beautiful) and it wasn’t always healthy (maybe it never was), and if we’re really keeping it real, it probably wasn’t even a shared story. In other words, I was indeed deep in love, a bonny light horse(wo)man…but maybe alone in those feelings, to go right into the heart of the wounding.

“How little thought of what love

What love could do”

In January of 2024, I wrote in my journal, in Costa Rica, surrounded by colleagues and mentors and friends, that I wanted to live with an open heart, deeply in love, as love. Everything felt possible. For me, sure, but also for the world.

And in February 2024, three things (it’s ALWAYS threes with me) came into my life and kicked the crap out of me and left me reeling in a bad way

“Don’t you break my heart”

I used to relate to that line pleadingly.

It’s December 2024 now. And I sing it with a small smile, the kind of smile that says “I know you will break my heart and that’s just fine.”

So what happened between then and now was…sort of nothing??? Which is why this may not even be interesting. The writer in me wishes I was telling a redemption story, one where I met someone kinder and gentler who thought I was just grand, someone who loved me too, and where the end lesson was something like “Well, just let it all go, and everything will turn out better than you ever even dared to dream! Defy gravity, witches!!!”

Maybe that happens eventually. That would be great, mind you. I’m for it.

But this year wasn’t that story. I didn’t get a romance, and it’s a crying shame (says me).

“Saw a ship sailin’ on the big blue sea

She sailed as deep, as deep as she could be.”

Instead, it was a lot of me being alone and trying to fix myself so that I wouldn’t get my heart broken again.

I had it that I was a mess. At fault. Full of regrets and recriminations. At best, I was a naive fool, and at worst, addicted to pain.

And I was making further messes anytime anyone tried to have a relationship with me, with a heart I was trying to force to open, and failing pretty hard.

And I could sit here and write it all out, but that really WOULD be boring. I’ll just give you the Cliff’s Notes, okay? LOTS of coaching (naturally), therapy, embodiment work, lots of yoga, cord cuttings, sound baths, more crystals than any one human actually needed, ditto oracle cards and tarot decks, meditations, praying, and an ayahuasca retreat. A SILENT ayahuasca retreat, even.

So ultimately what happened was that I tried everything under the sun. And… I failed at that too.

In the sense that I threw everything I had at this love and I could not actually fix it. By which I meant “stop it”. I would know it was fixed when I no longer felt it.

So there I was, sitting there in full awareness that I’d walked through betrayal and deceit and manipulation and abandonment and rejection…every wound planted in me so young getting prodded at and exacerbated and deepened. Surely such a person did not deserve my love, you know? And that was really THE single biggest wound of them all.

I was really really really (repeating like a decimal) tired of loving all of these motherfuckers that simply do. not. deserve. it.

Ah. And there it is.

Okay, god. I see you. Finally finally finally, I see you.

“I put my hand in,

In to the bush,

Finding the sweetest, sweetest rose,

I pricked my finger to the line

And left the sweetest sweetest rose behind.”

My coach Marita reminded me last week that nothing we take on from a context of fixing will ever actually work.

To which I said “oh thank god” and finally meant it.

Tara Ewald, if you are going to live with an open heart, you are going to love a LOT of people that simply “do not deserve it”.

And why are you so sure that you deserve it anyway?

Somehow…through nothing but Grace, pure loving divine Grace, unmerited and unearned…I stumbled into this way of loving that withstood the WORST this man could throw at me and the BEST that I could throw at me too.

“Saw a ship sailing on the big blue sea

She sailed as deep as, as deep as she could be

But not so deep in, in love as I am

I cannot tell whether I,

I sink or swim”

Because the truth, the actual truth, is that we all deserve love. Period. That’s why we’re here. To learn how to create love beyond our circumstances and our wounding. To make love that goes deeper than perception, and merit, and obligation, and reciprocity.

Now mind you, this is not an argument for why you should run back to that relationship, or drop your boundaries, or otherwise recreate a pattern that doesn’t serve you. A relationship and love are two VERY different things sometimes.

But sometimes they aren’t different at all.

And you can see why it pertains to politics. I happen to believe that the ones walking the path of the Boddhisattvas are here right now.

“Thousands and thousands, all on this Earth.”

I have seen it in so many of my loved ones, as they walk into the hearts of their wounds and alchemize them, not only for themselves, but for their lineage, their communities, for humanity.

This is not a romance. It is, however, a love story.

Maybe the biggest love story of them all. Thich Nhat Hanh said “It is possible that the next Buddha will not be a human, but instead will be a loving community.”

Frankly, that never made sense to me until now. There are just so many warriors for love, warriors of the spirit, that I am watching face their worst fears with immense hearts and an implacable stand for what is best and highest in us. They are living problems you wouldn’t wish on anyone: dead mothers, sick children, children that struggle with the will to keep going, partners with mental illnesses that are hard to treat, traumatic loss of livelihood and property, bodies inexplicably ill and requiring intense treatments, minds that are suddenly not functional, betrayals that are nearly impossible to understand…the list is nearly endless and nearly unbearable.

And yet! There is something within these people that is simply unbreakable. And it’s not their hearts: those break, and how, and often.

I think it is their capacity to love. I think it’s their calling…our calling…to write this chapter of the greatest love story that’s ever been.

I am so grateful.

What is Essential

“Do I have to do this?” my client asked me with an expression of total terror on their face.

“Of course not” I said promptly. “You never have to do anything that you don’t want to do in this space.”

If I’ve learned anything at all from coaching and being coached, it’s really that: everything is optional, all of the time, and the only way anything ever works is if it’s freely chosen.

“But” I add “I can tell you this too: everything that you want will always sit on the other side of what you’re feeling right now. And that’s what we do here: I support you to bridge that gap between where you are and what you want. So you don’t have to do it now, but if you choose to, I think you’ll be very glad that you did.”

And that’s the bookend to that first learning: it must be freely chosen, but the work will always take us through our fear and discomfort to get what our soul desires.

In my experience I have some version of this conversation with *every single client* that I have and it’s always around our very first assignment…something that we call The Essence Conversation.

It’s an oddity in our practice: it’s the only scripted conversation that we use. And it’s also a powerful experience. I won’t give away the process, but the end result is that we give our clients five words. Those five words are meant to capture the essence of who they are…the human that they were born as, the dishes they automatically bring to the potluck, the self that they are before the self that is constantly calculating gets hold of the process.

I was musing out loud to Cindy about this and I said “Why do we do this exercise first?” and it wasn’t just a rhetorical question. I was really thinking about it.

We were trained to use Essence as a hiring conversation, but I’ve never used it once in that way. And yet I always bring it in early, usually within the first month of coaching. And it’s the first thing we do with our Phoenix flock. But why is that?

From here, let me take a rather odd historical detour, but I promise I will close the circle.

In the late 1600s, there was a man born in India who became a Sikh Guru that we now know as Guru Gobind Singh. You all know the Sikhs, even if you don’t realize it: they are the Indians who wear turbans over their long hair, which they never cut. They worship a single God, just as Christians do, and like Christians they believe in charity, service, and devotion to their God, whom they call Waheguru or “Wonderful God”. This particular man, Guru Gobind Singh, had four sons. The two oldest were killed on the same day, in the same battle, and the youngest two were captured by the enemy in that same battle, and bricked up alive inside of a wall.

“Yet despite losing his children, Guru Gobind Singh stayed surrendered to the Will of the Divine. He said that his children had come to him from the Creator. And that he understood it was time to send them back home. When a few of his Sikhs attempted to gather the bodies of his two eldest sons on the battlefield, Guru Gobind Singh asked them what they were doing. They replied that they wanted to give his sons a proper funeral. Guru Gobind Singh told them that they should then stop and pick up all of the bodies – for all of the boys and men lying dead on the battlefield were equally his sons.”*

By any measure, an extraordinary response in the midst of a crushing grief. So that’s the type of man we’re dealing with, and I think it’s important to give you that background before I share this hymn of praise that he authored.

I think it’s the most beautiful description of God that I’ve ever encountered.

Ajai Alai – Invincible, Indestructible.

Abhai Abai – Fearless, Unchanging.

Abhoo Ajoo – Unformed, Unborn.

Anaas Akaas – Imperishable, Etheric

Aganj Abhanj – Unbreakable, Impenetrable.

Alakkh Abhakkh – Unseen, Unaffected.

Akaal Dy-aal – Undying, Merciful

Alaykh Abhaykh – Indescribable, Uncostumed.

Anaam Akaam – Nameless, Desireless.

Agaah Adhaah – Unfathomable, Incorruptible.

Anaathay Pramaathay – Unmastered, Destroyer.

Ajonee Amonee – Beyond birth, Beyond silence.

Na Raagay Na Rangay – Beyond love, Beyond color.

Na Roopay Na Raykhay – Beyond form, Beyond shape.

Akarmang Abharmang – Beyond karma, Beyond doubt.

Aganjay Alaykhay – Unconquerable, Indescribable.

The Bible says that David danced before the Lord when he wrote his Psalms. Before I ever knew what the words above meant, I was dancing before the Divine. Once I read them I was less dancing than floored.

Because though I’m not a Sikh and I assume I never will be, it’s nonetheless how I want to relate to God. As the essence of all that is.

And more than just that, it’s how I want to relate to other people. To speak to the soul of them that holds that same kind of divinity, even when, especially when (!), it might be lost to them.

It’s the kind of mother I want to be, who parents her children beyond birth and beyond silence. It’s the kind of partner I want to be, who loves beyond karma and beyond doubt. It’s the kind of friend I want to be, whose companionship is undying and merciful. It’s the kind of “opp” (as my kids would say) that I want to be, one who is invincible and indestructible. It’s the kind of coach I want to be, who sees her clients as “indescribable, uncostumed”.

And…to close that circle here…it’s why we give our clients Essence words first. Because we are relating to their greatness at all times, even when they can’t see it. We don’t see our Phoenix flock as “people who need fixing”, or “people who can do better”. We see our job as creating a community that empowers individuals…in part because we all agree that everyone there IS their essence.

Some of the words we have given our Phoenixes?

Champion. Home. Love. Connection. Radiance. Haven. Magic. Moxie. Brilliance. Wit. Play.

Some of the essence words I’ve been given by my coaches?

Joy. Harmony. Creation. Wisdom.

I think about them all the time.

We have one spot left. Just one. And I’m already so excited for her to receive her words.

Words

Every time that I write I always think “I should be more reliable, steadier, publish more often.”

I choose a poetry book and treat it like divination, pick a poem at random and write the date in the top corner of the page. Underline what tastes good in my mouth when I say it. Jot down some spark of a thought at the bottom of the page. End it with “thank you”, and mean it.

I walked with my therapist yesterday, as we do, on forest paths bright with the violent orange mud of the Piedmont, slicked over with leaves, the aftermath of the hurricane. She said “Notice how willing you are to make everything your fault. Maybe some things aren’t your fault. Maybe you just want it to be on you, because then you’re certain someone will try to fix it.”

I write every day, in multiple places, take a childish glee in seeing my journal fill page by page. There was *nothing there*, and now there is something, pages of something.

But I probably should have been doing this longer, you know? Should have started earlier.

I write all the messages: text, private, direct, group. I leave pebbles for my loved ones, receive theirs. Say thank you and really mean it.

But I should be quicker to answer people, make sure I am being a good friend and person. I should be different. Obviously I should be different, and better, by now.

Yesterday, a huge tree had fallen over the trail, broken in two but still suspended in the air, its freefall stopped by the trees on the other side of the trail. A man came down the path in an ATV and my therapist said “‘I’ve walked this trail for a decade and never once seen anyone driving on it.”

I think about how my relationship to writing used to be that I mostly didn’t. Now I mostly do…every day, there are words linking up with words, myself connecting to other people, to my characters, to myself. In journals, in messages,

(and I can hardly believe it) in chapters.

I still make it wrong though. Not quite enough. My fault that it’s not quite right yet.

That man driving the ATV in the woods passed us by slowly, stately in sweat and cigarette smoke and good humor. Said “Now ladies, why did y’all knock that tree down?”

After he was gone, my therapist said through laughter “You really can’t make this shit up.”

And I say “thank you” to her and the universal writers’ room, with its magnificent sense of humor.

Self, self, beloved self…you wrote this today

with intent to share it. That’s enough. Thank you. I mean it.

The Trying

It was a little bit shocking to realize that I’d gone quiet on sharing a longer piece of writing for almost a month, mostly because I’ve been writing so much.

But it was all my novel-in-progress, and the odds of anyone seeing that yet are exactly zero. I would say that right now my main fear is that I will die in the rough draft stages, and my family will gently pity my delusional self as they quietly and unanimously agree to dispose of the evidence.

It’s going so well, obviously.

By which I mean that it’s messy and incoherent and rough and jagged, and Not Very Good…yet. YET.

And that last word is the key one.

The last few years have taught me so much about myself. I have had to learn, rather painfully, how much I resist the part of the learning process where I am simply not good at something.

(My clients are reading this right now and laughing because yes, my friends. We get it. Give us flawless execution or give us death. Guess which one we’re definitely getting.)

And I had a lot of strategies for avoiding the imperfect! Some favorites: get “perfect” by myself, set the bar so low that I’m guaranteed success, choose the most “logical” path as determined by other people, and oh yes, my favorite: dance around the edges of what I actually want and attempt to make things adjacent to my heart’s desire work for me.

Anything and everything to avoid pouring my whole heart into something I *really* want…and falling short. Anything to avoid really trying, going full out, taking the big leap… and experiencing the heartbreak of failure.

Better to experience the heartbreak of never having tried at all, or so I used to think.

In February, a trio of events smacked me right in the face. The details don’t really matter…what mattered was that all of them were *really* important to me. They were big dreams, y’all.

And I failed. Pretty hard. And it felt like the ultimate confirmation of that story that it’s a lot better not to try.

But I’m nothing if not stubborn. So I hired a bunch of people and spent a lot of money to address all of them, because …and I can only see this in retrospect….I had learned a NEW strategy, which was something like “Fix yourself so that you never fail again.”

And those people, god love them, seemed to agree that there was definitely something broken in me. I had picked my partners from my wounding, I had no boundaries, I was weak, I was suffering from my family lineage, I was frozen in a trauma response, I was out of integrity with myself, and so on.

Here’s a seemingly unrelated fun fact! My mother seriously considered naming me Rhiannon. Like everyone else, I love that Fleetwood Mac song, but my favorite line, the one that hits me in the gut is “Will you ever win?”

“Will you ever win?”

I don’t know if my whole life is the answer to that question, or if that question is the reason for my whole life.

Another fun fact! One of the best parts of my ayahuasca journey was realizing how *funny* she is.

During that journey, she called me… as in this body, this personality, this collection of facts that I am… “this vessel”. And at some point in that conversation, she said with some exasperation, “This vessel is very impatient.”

And I had to laugh, because it reminded me SO MUCH of my father saying, in the exact same tone, “Can’t tell her nothing, she’s got less years in her than she’s got digits, but she already knows everything!”

But she also told me that there was nothing wrong with me. Nothing at all. That I was ancient, and vast, and wise…that I don’t have to come back here, but that I do because I *love* reunion. That it’s my favorite thing.

“Will you ever win, Tara?”

I don’t know. But I know that I’ve finally learned how to let myself play the game.

My ideas exceed my skill level, and I don’t like waiting, and I’m terrified of never getting what I want…but I am playing to win regardless.

For me, winning looks like happy healthy children, a blended family, a blank page, a yoga mat, a full client roster, a waitlisted Phoenix III, a big cosmic love story.

But more than ANY of those things, lovely as they are, it looks like finally understanding all the way down into my bones that there’s nothing wrong with me. That the part of me that tries is the best and bravest and truest part of me. I don’t need to fix it, or repress it, or protect it… only love and honor it, and unleash her.

“She rings like a bell through the night, and wouldn’t you love to love her?”

I think I finally do love her.

Phoenix II Retreat

“This is why they used to burn us” one of the women offered up, quietly, but in a voice that was throbbing with power. And we all nodded. It was simply the truth.

There is such power in a circle of women. And yes, such magic, though it has nothing to do with spells or cauldrons or black pointy hats.

It is instead the magic of becoming honest. Feminine power is circular. Shared with. It sources itself from within itself. It accepts, radically, what is truly present and hums over it, lays hands on it, offers up a fierce love to it. Women work through rings: it’s how we push life itself into the world, through the ring of our own flesh.

This was a weekend that proceeded within the round. Closing loops, spiraling upward, rippling outward.

And it was a weekend of burning, though all that was burned was self-chosen for the flames.

I have a great deal to say, and a heart that is always overflowing with deep love for my work and my people…and… coaching is a confidential relationship. I don’t disclose my clientele (though they’re welcome to name me, and I love it when they do!). But the end result of this dynamic is that I end up talking a lot about myself, simply because it’s what I *can* talk about.

All of this to say: talking about the Phoenix II retreat this weekend will be similar. Ethically, what I can disclose to all of you is what it sparked within me.

We declare our breakthroughs, as I talked about a bit in my last post. Mine for this weekend was “to be a conduit for powerful cosmic love.”

The thing is…we don’t take on coaching to fix ourselves, though almost everyone wants to in the beginning. We come to coaching to start actively living as we truly are. In order to become more ourselves, we must first be willing to “unbecome” that which we *thought* we were. This involves a process of pulling something new from within us, and releasing something old that no longer serves us.

So what I chose to release to the fire was “disappointment”. I knew from ayahuasca and from just, you know, LIFE, that’s very clearly the thing in the way of that breakthrough in cosmic love.

Specifically my deep disappointment in the men in my life. The ones that were tasked with my care and chose to harm me, the ones that eagerly asked to love me and then abandoned me, the ones that asked me to jump from a great height only to drop me.

And, as ever, what we are holding on others is always something we ultimately fear is deeply true about ourselves.

Perhaps I am the disappointment. Perhaps it is me. If I were only better: prettier, more pleasing, always did the right thing, didn’t make mistakes, didn’t need anything, gave more, asked for less. If only I were different. If only I wasn’t this thing here. This forever falling short, not quite good enough, destined to disappoint, me.

And yet I am myself.

My coaches have taught me that we all construct our lives to avoid a certain experience. Rejection, failure, harm, shame, abandonment…whatever it is, there’s something you’d almost rather die than experience from others.

And then…and we all do this, it is the saddest truth of being human…we inadvertently end up creating that experience over and over again for other people, from the very efforts we undertake to avoid it for ourselves.

And that repeats in our lives until we are willing to look at it, own it, and let our story of ourselves be wholly burned to ash, that we may rise and return to love again.

In burning up my disappointment in my men, what I’m actually burning up is the truth is that I am forever and always the first to disappoint myself. By the lack of respect I have tolerated, the torrent of love that I choke down in silence, the ways I wait for men to prove themselves until I will fully reveal myself. In the ways I am so sure I have made them feel like a disappointment to me. Like they aren’t quite enough. For fear that I will try, really really try, and be found not enough myself.

And this is the cosmic joke (though it’s not funny) and the ultimate irony of patriarchy forcing the feminine into pyramidal power structures, into surveillance and silence and submission, into pyres and stocks and scarlet letters. When women are allowed to become honest within their circles, when they are allowed to source themselves powerfully, what actually results is more love. More peace, more acceptance, more joy, more grace. For the masculine as well as the feminine.

When they burned the “witches”, they were really burning “that which was needed”.

Because, sourced by my sisters, I came home and forgave all my men for being humans who try, and fail, and try again. And I forgave myself for falling short. For being me, in process, far from perfect, but always daring greatly. It is no sin to try, and fall short, and try again. It is instead great courage. How beautiful that we get to try together.

This weekend, as Phoenixes, we reclaimed fire. And found wings.

The Leader Goes First

I tell y’all what: the only thing harder than doing this work is NOT doing it.

The Forge is the coach training program I’ve been in for two years, after an initial training year at Accomplishment Coaching. I filled out my feedback form for this past Forge year today, and it was as thoughtful and intentional as all things Forge usually are; nothing standard or boilerplate about it.

This question hit me: “If you are a yes to returning for another Forge year, what did you have to overcome to become a yes?”

The usual answers (money, time) leapt to mind, but the truest answer was “the energetic commitment.”

Because the thing is …the leader goes first.

(This is a phrase that I’ve heard so often in coaching that I don’t actually know who to attribute it to…if you do, let me know and I’ll edit them in.)

I’ve always had this vague conception of it as concerning “the good stuff”: being willing to speak into the space, holding the silence and breathing deep for the client, asking the powerful question, saying the vulnerable thing, being the first to jump in the whitewater raft or off the zipline platform, being the first to apologize or own their side of the street, being on time with assignments.

I can do those things. Not always gracefully and certainly not always perfectly, but with a right good will.

And…the fish breaks down from the head too. Meaning that the leader will also be the first into their breakdown.

Breakdown in coaching isn’t like…a mental health breakdown…it's a term we use for when your old way of being in the world stops working. Other coaching lineages might use other terms. I remember Martha Beck calling it “the dark wood of error”, but it’s all the same concept: the way you used to get results stops working, or doesn’t work as well, or you stop wanting those results. In short: things fall apart. Sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly.

The great news is that what follows breakdown is breakthrough…the sudden expansion of your self to have a new way of being in the world.

And in coaching we declare our breakthroughs before they happen. Not because we’re masochists, but because breakdowns are *going* to happen when we take on this kind of work. You cannot create something brand new with the same old ways of being. And quite often what it takes to create is letting go of something old and discovering something new within yourself.

My breakthroughs this year were Trust, in August, and Grace, in January.

And only now, in retrospect, can I actually see the thread.

Because my leaders were going first. This was the Forge where…all of sudden….everyone, and I mean everyone, started playing for the miracle. The content of those miracles was completely different but what it required? Whew, y’all, the COURAGE. The immense courage. The Trust. The Grace. The devotion, grace, connection, joy, peace…I could keep naming the breakthroughs I saw people generate, so so so many of them devoted to healing a family lineage and breaking old generational patterns.

Sometimes the last chapter changes the whole story in the most magnificent way.

See, the leader doesn’t go first just because it’s “best practice” or they “should”. They go first because they create the clearing for everyone else to follow. The leader clears the energetic trail. They blaze the path.

Adam and Bay went first. And *how*. They carried so much and held space for us with such immense love.

And then the senior leaders went. And then us LPs went next. And then our participants.

And now our Phoenixes are going. And there will be people in their lives that follow *their* trails because when we take on this work we begin to live like gems tossed in the lake, as ever expanding rings of light radiating out until we can’t see where the ripples end.

And that’s the final cosmic jest of “the leader goes first” isn’t it? Who is the leader, really? It shifts as the container shifts! And what remains is the dynamic where your breakthrough becomes mine, becomes yours, becomes mine again. A Mobius strip of miracles, with no real end and no real beginning, just the immense privilege of being the one to hold the energy for that moment.