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  • I’m Only Ever Somewhere Until I’m Not Supposed to Be There Anymore

    I’m Only Ever Somewhere Until I’m Not Supposed to Be There Anymore
    2026/06/17

    There are plenty of perspectives on how to approach uncertainty, and this is one I planted in my garden decades ago. Today, it’s one of the most beautiful flowering trees in my inner garden.

    I’ve gone through a lot of trauma in my life, and I have endless stories I could dive into that would keep me stuck. I also have stories that help me move forward. How I process my past is my choice. How you process yours is your choice.

    There is no right or wrong way to do it, but I do think honesty matters. Are the stories and beliefs we’re feeding helping the beautiful plant life grow in our inner gardens, or are they feeding the weeds?

    I’m only ever somewhere until I’m not supposed to be there anymore has become one of my reminders that fighting reality is a losing battle.

    Why not embrace it instead?

    “When you argue with reality, you lose—but only 100% of the time.”

    — Byron Katie

    I’ve applied this perspective to all areas of my life:

    I’m supposed to live here, until I don’t.

    I’m supposed to be in this relationship, until I’m not.

    I’m supposed to work here, until I don’t.

    I’m supposed to have use of my senses, until I don’t.

    I’m supposed to be in this friendship, until I’m not.

    I’m supposed to have this amount of money, until I don’t.

    I’m supposed to be healthy, until I’m not.

    I’m supposed to live, until I don’t.

    Our personal stories can take these statements in countless directions, but for me, they pull me out of the story altogether. They remind me to keep taking the next step toward love, abundance, and peace.

    The rest works itself out whether I’m fighting reality or not.

    Of course, I still find myself worrying sometimes. I can let old stories take over and create stress, fear, and endless “what ifs.” When that happens, I usually discover I’ve been feeding weeds.

    Worry is just weeds spreading through our gardens. Whether we’re worrying about ourselves or someone we love, we’re still planting seeds from the energy of fear, lack, and separation.

    I don’t know about you, but I’ve spent plenty of time on that worry hamster wheel. It has never taken me anywhere worth going. Mostly, it leaves me exhausted.

    I’d rather find a different way to exercise my mind.

    Believing that I’m where I’m supposed to be until I’m not, doesn’t stop me from making healthier choices. In fact, I find it easier to move in a healthy direction when I’m not carrying the weight of constant worry.

    When I’m doing the work of aligning my energy with love, abundance, and peace, my decisions become clearer. My mind becomes quieter. My next step becomes easier to see. And right now, that’s where I am—until I’m not.

    Even that thought takes the pressure off. Just because I’m in a good headspace today doesn’t mean it’s meant to be permanent—and that’s okay. I don’t have to beat myself up for not being somewhere I think I should be. I’m tired of carrying that burden.

    Instead, I remind myself that I’m where I’m supposed to be, learning what I’m supposed to learn, growing how I’m supposed to grow, and being who I’m supposed to be in this moment.

    The rest will unfold as I keep tending my garden and trusting the process.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    5 分
  • Breaking Down to Breakthrough

    Breaking Down to Breakthrough
    2026/06/14
    When I was seventeen, I struggled with severe depression, suicidal ideations, attempted suicide, and was diagnosed with PTSD. That’s just a snapshot. I could send myself into a tailspin within seconds. The darkness became so overwhelming that I eventually agreed to admit myself into a hospital for help. At the time, I believed things would only get worse. I couldn’t imagine a future filled with hope, peace, or joy. Looking back now, this was a period of my life that I’m surprised I survived. What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t at the end of my story.Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.I was standing in a garden that desperately needed tending.Back then, I thought my breakdowns meant something was wrong with me. I did everything I could to avoid them. I wanted to outrun the sadness, distract myself from the pain, and pretend everything was okay. Eventually, life taught me something different. A breakdown isn’t a bottom. It’s the turning of the soil before new growth can emerge and breakthrough to become a beautiful flower.One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to embrace the breakdown. Not because it’s comfortable. Not because it’s fun. But because resisting it only prolongs the suffering.Today, through the lens of Inner Garden Work, I see these moments as growth seasons. Just as a garden experiences storms, droughts, and seasons where everything appears dormant, we experience periods of grief, anxiety, depression, heartbreak, and uncertainty. What looks like the end of something is often the beginning of something new.The bigger the downward spiral, the bigger the growth spurt At least, that’s how it’s worked for me. That’s what I call the breakdowns to breakthroughs that come after I’ve done the work of feeling, integrating, healing, and growing.Learning this skill didn’t prevent difficult seasons from happening. Life still delivers losses, disappointments, heartbreaks, and challenges. What changed was my understanding of them. I stopped seeing myself as broken. I started seeing myself as reclaiming my garden.When a storm arrives now, I remind myself that it has come to teach me something. The lesson might take a day. It might take a month. Sometimes it takes much longer. In my experience, the length of the lesson often depends on how tightly I’m holding onto the problem. The first step is always the same. Feel the feelings. Don’t run, numb, avoid, or pretend I’m not having them.When one of my Category 4 hurricanes rolls through, I let it move through me. I cry. I journal. I sit quietly. I allow myself to acknowledge what is happening instead of pretending it isn’t there.Then I start asking questions:· What fears are stirring up?· What belief needs to be weeded out?· What do I want to plant?· What needs nurturing in my garden?· What lesson am I being invited to learn?I didn’t get to this place alone. My mom did her best to help me see that I was working myself up in my teen years. She gave me a seed—I just wasn’t ready to plant it yet.In my early thirties, I was introduced to the work of Byron Katie. A friend gave me a CD series called Making Your Thoughts Work for You with Dr. Wayne Dyer and Byron Katie. While I had already done a great deal of personal growth, her approach gave me practical tools for examining the stories I was telling myself. Her work helped me understand something profound: Not every thought deserves a place in the garden. Some thoughts are flowers. Some thoughts are weeds. Learning to question my stressful thoughts became one of the most effective tools I’ve ever found for creating peace.Another lesson came from my first sponsor in AL-ANON. She suggested I stand on a chair and look at a room from a different angle. Then she encouraged me to change the order of my daily routines. One day she told me to put the opposite foot into my underwear first. I had to leave myself a note in my underwear drawer. It sounds ridiculous, but it worked. The exercise wasn’t about underwear. It was about interrupting familiar patterns.When we become trapped in our thoughts, we often become trapped in our habits as well. Sometimes the smallest change can help us see a situation differently.I’m neurodivergent, so living in my head can sometimes be a little overwhelming. It’s important for me to have ways to break myself out stories that aren’t serving me. This is what I call feeding the weeds.It’s one of the reasons I love hiking off trail. When I’m paying attention to roots, snakes, sticks, and direction, I become fully present. The constant chatter quiets down, and I reconnect with the moment I’m in. I also love deep cleaning. When I’m paying attention to the little details of what I’m doing my mind slows down, and I can start being present to moment. Then, I take a few minutes to breathe and be present in my body to see what I’m really feeling. I have quite a few...
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    11 分
  • How Inner Gardening Became My Soul’s Calling

    How Inner Gardening Became My Soul’s Calling
    2026/06/08
    I think many of us spend years trying to change our lives externally without realizing we are living from an untended inner landscape.We try to fix relationships, careers, finances, circumstances, and even our identities while ignoring the condition of the internal soil everything is growing from.For a long time, I didn’t fully understand this myself.Like many trauma victims, I became very good at surviving. I knew how to show up. I knew how to carry the weight of the world on my back—not comfortably. I was functioning while quietly disconnecting from myself underneath it all.I thought peace would arrive when the external conditions of my life changed, the right people showed up, the stress ended, the uncertainty passed, and when I finally felt safe enough to exhale.What I Slowly Started to UnderstandNo matter where I went or what I did, I was still struggling in my inner world. Fear, lack, and separation kept following me. My old wounds were just waiting to be triggered at any moment. I would slide back into old patterns that just didn’t serve me.Ways of reacting, protecting, shame spiraling, abandoning myself, and giving too much to gain self-worth followed me. And this was all while reading endless self-help books and being in and out of therapy. I took a lot of steps to move myself forward in my life, but the energy of fear, lack, and separation still managed to keep spreading through everything good I tried to do for myself.Eventually, I realized that so much of what we experience externally is connected to what we are unconsciously cultivating internally through where our energy is being directed. That was the beginning. I started paying more attention to my stories that were playing on an endless loop in my brain. That’s when I started putting my focus on living from a loving place. How could living in the energy of love help me process all of life’s twists and turns. In my writing on FromALovingPlace.com is where the garden metaphor started taking on a life of its own. You can even see seedlings of it in my first book, Letters from a Better Me.At the end of 2019, I created a presentation for a speaking event where the garden really began taking shape. My first book was released in 2020 in the very beginning of the pandemic, which made me need to focus even more of my energy on staying out of the energy of fear, lack, and separation. That’s when I decided to start a blog series called, “Daily Aligning with Love, Abundance, and Peace.” The series lasted a year. In that year the inner garden work grew. It became a way of understanding healing, relationships, taking accountability & responsibility, communication, leadership, and conscious living itself.Gardens Don’t Become Healthy AccidentallyGardens require awareness, attention, nourishment, protection, patience, consistency, and a whole lot of honesty. A garden can’t flourish by pretending weeds are flowers. Weeds with pretty little flowers steal the resources the healthy plant life needs to thrive. Strangling vines can smother tall trees. That truth became impossible for me to ignore.I began recognizing how many of us are living from gardens overrun by fear, lack, separation, resentment, exhaustion, comparison, self-abandonment, emotional survival, and inherited beliefs we never consciously planted. Some of us learned to survive by people pleasing, controlling, being vengeful, overachieving, staying quiet, being loud, and/or disconnecting from our emotions entirely just to name a few.We develop protective patterns for very real reasons. But eventually there comes a moment where survival patterns begin preventing the very peace, connection, love, and abundance we long for. That is where inner gardening begins. It’s not a place for perfection, performance, or pretending we are always positive. It’s real and it gets dirty.Inner gardening comes from awareness, openness, and acceptance of what weeds are showing up. We have to be willing to sit honestly in the garden of our lives and ask:* What have I been watering?* What keeps growing here?* What needs tending?* What needs uprooting?* What have I mistaken for protection that is actually keeping me disconnected from myself and others?Inner Garden Work is Deeply PersonalI saw how fear spreads when weeds are left untended. I saw it in the energy I put into relationships, families, communities, causes, organizations, politics, religions, entertainment, and into the environment. The energy of fear, lack, and separation is all consuming when it goes unchecked. I saw how quickly fear can distort perception, fuel division, and disconnect people from compassion, clarity, and an individual’s perspective of truth.I also began seeing something else. I saw how love, peace, abundance, emotional responsibility, gratitude, boundaries, self-awareness, and conscious connection can spread too. I see how what I cultivate internally impacts the environments I create externally. The way I speak, ...
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    12 分
  • Ep. 20 Listening with Love: When to Walk Away for Your Own Peace

    Ep. 20 Listening with Love: When to Walk Away for Your Own Peace
    2025/03/28

    Ep. 20 – Listening with Love: When to Walk Away for Your Own Peace

    Sometimes, the most loving thing you can do… is walk away. In this episode, we explore the quiet power of listening with love—not just to others, but to your own intuition. Discover how to recognize when conversations or connections become draining, how to set healthy emotional boundaries, and why protecting your peace is a radical act of self-love. This is your invitation to choose clarity, compassion, and peace—starting with yourself.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    16 分
  • Ep. 19 Listening with Love: Turning Conflict into Connection

    Ep. 19 Listening with Love: Turning Conflict into Connection
    2025/03/21

    In a world filled with division, how can we turn conflict into genuine connection? In this episode, we explore the power of listening with love—learning from inspiring figures like Daryl Davis, Fred Guttenberg, and other transformative leaders. Discover how curiosity, empathy, and open-hearted dialogue can break down barriers and foster understanding.Whether you're facing personal disagreements or societal divides, this episode offers practical insights to shift from fear and separation to love and connection.

    🔹Topics Covered: Conflict resolution, active listening, emotional intelligence, and finding common ground.
    🎧Listen now to transform the way you approach conflict!



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    14 分
  • Ep. 18 Listening with Love: How to Respond Instead of React

    Ep. 18 Listening with Love: How to Respond Instead of React
    2025/03/14

    Ep. 18 – Listening with Love: How to Respond Instead of React

    Are you reacting or responding in your conversations? In this powerful episode of Listening with Love, we explore the difference between knee-jerk reactions and mindful responses—and why shifting your approach can transform your relationships. Learn how to break free from old patterns, take accountability for your energy, and communicate from a place of love, abundance, and peace.

    If you've ever felt triggered, misunderstood, or caught in emotional cycles, this episode is for you. Discover practical tools like pausing before speaking, recognizing your emotional triggers, and responding with clarity and intention. Tune in now and start building deeper, healthier connections today!

    🎧 Keywords: mindful communication, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, healthy relationships, personal growth, responding vs. reacting, healing, accountability, love, abundance, inner peace



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    11 分
  • Ep. 17 Listening with Love: Listening to Yourself First

    Ep. 17 Listening with Love: Listening to Yourself First
    2025/03/07

    What if the key to healthier, more loving relationships is learning to truly listen — to yourself first? In this powerful episode of From A Loving Place with Author Rachael Wolff, we explore how self-awareness is the foundation for breaking unhealthy patterns, setting boundaries, and creating the life you truly desire.

    Too often, we expect others to give us the love, respect, and validation we aren't giving ourselves. When we tune into our own stories with compassion — not self-blame — we reclaim our power and open the door to healing.

    Rachael shares raw, personal experiences of overcoming codependency, building self-worth, and transforming every relationship by listening with love.

    If you're ready to step out of drama cycles and into your own power — this episode will show you where to begin: within.

    Listen now to start your journey toward self-awareness, self-love, and the relationships you've been waiting for.

    #ListeningWithLove #SelfAwareness #HealingJourney #FromALovingPlace




    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    13 分
  • Ep. 16 Listening with Love: The Art of Intuitive Listening and Responding

    Ep. 16 Listening with Love: The Art of Intuitive Listening and Responding
    2025/02/28

    Listening with Love: The Art of Intuitive Listening and Responding

    Have you ever truly listened—not just to words, but to the energy behind them? In this episode, we explore the transformative power of intuitive listening—the ability to hear beyond spoken language and recognize the emotions, intentions, and truths that often go unspoken.

    Discover how intuitive listening and responding can help you navigate relationships, identify hidden agendas, and foster deeper connections. Learn to differentiate between messages rooted in love, abundance, and peace versus those driven by fear, lack, and separation—a tactic often used in marketing, media, and even personal interactions.

    Join me as we uncover the subtle, yet profound art of listening with love, pausing before we respond, and allowing our intuition to guide us to deeper truths. This is not just about conversation—it's about transformation.

    🎧 Subscribe now to From A Loving Place with Author Rachael Wolff



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fromalovingplace.substack.com
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    13 分