The Hope Chest

My mother taught me not to feel. It took a lifetime — and my daughter — to unlearn it.

My father died when I was two.

My mother was left with six children. Five boys and one girl. Me. The youngest.

She did what she had to do. She kept the house running. She kept us fed. She kept moving forward.

Her motto was simple.

No one likes a whiner.

She wasn't cruel. She was surviving. And she taught us to survive the same way.

So I learned. I became very good at it. I took whatever arose, grief, fear, longing, hurt, and I put it away. Not destroyed. Just stored. I think of it now as a hope chest. Everything I couldn't feel went in there, folded carefully, lid closed.

For later.

—

Decades passed. I built a life. A career. I was capable, composed, and relied upon. I was good at holding things together — at work, at home, in every room I entered.

Then my first child was born. And something in me began to stir.

I started doing personal work. I wanted to be a good mother to my son. I found myself in a hotel room with 200 people at a seminar. The teacher asked us to stop. To feel our feet on the ground.

I couldn't feel anything.

Not my feet. Not the ground beneath them. Nothing.

A room full of people, eyes closed, breathing — and I was standing in a kind of interior silence I had never noticed before. Decades of emotions, carefully folded, stored away. And a body that had learned to go numb.

I didn't panic. I found it fascinating. That told me something important about who I was — and who I was here to become.

I wanted to know: What is in there? What have I been keeping?

—

Around that time, I heard Abraham Hicks on a cassette tape.

One line stopped me completely.

If you can understand energy, you can understand the universe.

I was in.

Not because it answered anything — because it pointed somewhere I had never thought to look. Inward. Into the body. Into the feeling itself, not away from it. I began to understand that emotions weren't problems to be managed. They were energy. Information. A language the body speaks and the mind wants to avoid.

I started learning. Slowly, carefully, the hope chest began to open.

—

And then came Mattie.

My daughter. A beautiful, bright light and a force of nature.

Mattie felt everything. Every emotion, fully and completely. She wasn't going to bury anything. She wasn't going to override anything. She arrived in this world with her emotional life wide open — and she had no intention of closing it.

She was my final push.

I couldn’t close her down. She was too powerful. So I had to learn. For twenty years, this human challenged me to grow and feel in ways I didn't know were possible.

I learned how to feel everything — and let it pass. That changed everything.

—

This is where my work comes from.

Not from a framework. Not from a certification — though I have those too. It comes from a little girl who put her feelings in a hope chest because that was the only way she knew how to survive. And from the long, beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable journey of finally opening it.

I know what it is to be completely out of touch with your own inner life and not know it. I know the particular shock of discovering that you cannot feel your own feet on the ground. I know what it costs to live that way — and I know what becomes available when you stop.

When I sit with someone now, I am not a neutral observer. I am someone who has made this journey herself. I know the territory — the resistance, the fear of what might surface, the strange relief when something finally moves.

Your emotions are not the problem.

They are what has been waiting — patiently, faithfully — for you to come back to yourself.

In the coming weeks, I will be sharing what I have learned about being with emotions, the cost of not feeling them, and what becomes possible in someone's life when they can experience them fully.

—

What have you been keeping in your hope chest?

If this lands somewhere in you, I'd love to have a conversation. Book a time here.