About this episode: One year ago this week, Sarah launched Goddess in Training with three episodes, a brand new set of skills, and a pull she couldn’t explain. This week she marks the anniversary not with a polished retrospective but with something rawer — a solo reflection on what 47 episodes, a new job, a new relationship, and a season of creative resistance have quietly been teaching her.
Topics covered include the paradox of flow and structure, love as the connective tissue between all things seen and unseen, what her first three episodes were really about, plant medicine as a portal through emotion, coaching and the realization that we already hold what we’re seeking, and why an unmowed patch of lawn might be the whole point.
Episodes referenced:
Episode 1 — Emmanuel on relationships and intuition
Episode 2 — Deborah Collins on intuition in the workplace
Episode 3 — Mage Marigold on mediumship
Jillie Clark — angelic channeler
Prashanthi — on paradox
Connect with Sarah: Website | Substack | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
🎵 Music credit: Intro and outro music: Madre Ayahuasca by Arkawa
Used with permission. More at arkawamusic.com
🌐 Visit www.goddessintraining.online for more tools to support your intuitive journey.
The Unmowed Lawn
I didn’t mow that corner of the yard because I ran out of time.
That’s it. No intention behind it, no spiritual reasoning, no plan. I just looked at it one afternoon and thought — that’ll happen later — and moved on to whatever was next on the list.
I watched four birds work that patch of long grass like it was a feast. And I realized I had accidentally made something beautiful by not finishing something.
I’ve been sitting with that image all week as I recorded my one-year anniversary episode of this podcast. Forty-seven episodes. A year of conversations about intuition, grief, plant medicine, love, mediumship, work, and what it means to come home to yourself. And here I am, a year in, feeling more uncertain about the future of this project than I did on the very first day.
The resistance has been strong. Every time I sit down to write, to book a guest, to look at my content calendar, something in me goes not yet. I’ve started a new job. I’m in a new relationship. The creative flow that carried me through an entire year of podcasting has slowed to something closer to stillness.
I spent some time this week being annoyed about that. Wondering what was wrong with me. Wondering if I’d lost the thread.
And then I thought about the birds.
There’s something I said in one of my very first episodes that I keep returning to: what we know is so tiny compared to what we don’t know. I said it as a kind of humility statement about the spiritual realm, about the unseen. But I think it applies just as much to our own lives, our own timelines, our own purposes.
I didn’t know when I launched this podcast that learning to edit audio and appear on camera and find guests and craft an intro would be building something — a set of tools — that might serve a completely different purpose than I currently understand. I thought I was making a podcast. Maybe I was. Maybe I was also in training for something else entirely, something I won’t be able to name for another year or two.
That’s the thing about following a pull. You don’t get the full picture when you start walking. You just start walking.
When I went back and listened to those first three episodes this week, something struck me. I launched a podcast about trusting your inner knowing — and what I was actually recording was a woman mid-excavation. Still digging.
In my first episode, I talked with my best friend Emmanuel about relationships and intuition, about the years I spent not listening to myself, about the healer who asked me what I liked to do and watched me freeze completely — because I had organized my entire life around other people and had no idea who I was alone. In my second episode, Deborah Collins said something I’ve thought about almost every week since: that anxiety and excitement feel identical in the body. The difference is only the story you tell about it. In my third episode, Mage Marigold talked about how spirit opens you up when there’s work to do, and closes you back down when you need to rest.
When you’re done, we’ll close it and you can go rest and eat chocolate cake.
I think I’ve been eating chocolate cake.
And I think that’s exactly right.
Here is what I actually believe, sitting here a year in: love is the connective tissue between everything. The seen and the unseen. The living and the dead. The birds and the long grass and the person listening to this in their car on the way to a job they’re not sure about anymore.
Every time I’ve gone deep in plant medicine work — every time I’ve crossed from this ordinary world into something I can only call the other — the vehicle has been emotion. Specifically love. It’s the only thing that gets me there. Not intention, not technique, not surrender as an idea. Love as a felt thing. Love as a portal.
And I think that’s what all 47 episodes have been circling, from different angles, in different voices. How do we get back to that? How do we stay there? What gets in the way?
The answer, I’m increasingly sure, is simpler than we want it to be.
We already have it. We already are it. The seeking is real and necessary and human — and it also, eventually, leads us back to what was there the whole time.
Most of the people I coach come to me feeling like something is missing. And almost always, when we sit quietly enough with that feeling, what emerges is not a gap — it’s a recognition. Everything they were looking for was already present, just obscured by the noise of should and can’t and not yet.
That’s what I found when I stopped trying to produce an anniversary episode and just... talked.
I don’t know what Goddess in Training becomes next. I have some inklings. I feel a pull toward more plant medicine facilitation work, toward deeper coaching, toward writing that goes somewhere I haven’t gone yet. There are guests I want to sit with, conversations I can feel wanting to happen.
But not right now.
Right now I am in a sacred pause that I didn’t choose but that I trust. The new job, the new relationship, the creative stillness — none of it is a problem to solve. It’s an initiation I’m in the middle of. And initiations, by their nature, don’t resolve on a schedule.
The lawn will get mowed eventually. The birds know what to do in the meantime.
If you’re new to this podcast, welcome. Go back into the catalog and find whatever title catches your eye. There’s no order, no required sequence. Just people who wanted the best for each other, sharing what they’ve found.
And if you’ve been here from the beginning: you’ve watched me live what I’ve been preaching. Which is messier and more real than I planned.
Thank you for being here.
Sarah Stevenson is a transition doula, plant medicine facilitator, and host of Goddess in Training. She lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
If this essay moved you, consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a cacao — it keeps this work alive.
