This Saturday morning, for the first time in almost six months, I have nothing.
No students. No Zoom. Twenty-five weeks of Saturdays and then, suddenly, one that's mine.
And I'm already missing them.
That's how you know you actually loved something. The absence shows up before the relief does.
Will I teach that program again next year? I don't know. I never know year to year. It would be sad if that were the last one, and it might be.
But I know for certain I'll teach again, because it turns out it's just in me.
Years ago, during my hypnotherapy training, I did a trance journey back to before I was born, looking for what I came here to do. What came back was simple. Love people. Connect people with people. Be a healing presence. And teach what I know.
That last one didn't land at first. I didn't think of myself as a teacher.
Then the journey walked me through my own life, and I watched the theme show up everywhere.
I'm five years old, home from kindergarten. I've turned my bedroom into a classroom and I've got my brother and three or four other neighborhood kids sitting there while I teach them everything I learned that day.
I'm fifteen and a half, two weeks into my first job at McDonald's, and they ask me to be a trainer. I did that for the next five years. Taught people to cook hamburgers, work the fryer, take an order and assemble it. Ended up as the store's training coordinator.
I did a corporate training gig recently and they asked whether I had corporate training experience. I laughed and said I've been doing this since I was fifteen. Which is true.
Then twenty years in television news, which I thought was a completely different life.
It wasn't.
A reporter takes something complicated and turns it into the few things you actually need to know, and teaches the world in a minute and fifteen seconds. A producer tells the story of a whole community and a whole planet in eighteen minutes, because the rest of the half hour belongs to commercials and to keeping you watching.
That's teaching. That's all it is.
And at two different stations I was the one showing new people the ropes. I was there for the transition out of manual typewriters, the big print, the six-pack of paper and carbon, the wire machines spitting out reams that you read and then jammed onto a nail on the wall. Into a newsroom that suddenly had a computer screen at every desk and went quiet.
Somebody had to teach everyone how to use them. That was me.
So I spent two decades thinking I was a journalist, and I was a teacher the whole time. Just in disguise.
Which meant that a year after my hypnotherapy training, when the school called and asked me to join the faculty, it wasn't a surprise. It was just the first time somebody paid me to do it out in the open.
And then here in Sedona I got tapped to train the other Soul Guides. Then the coaches. Then to build a coach certification program and teach it for years.
Every session I've ever done has a lesson in it somewhere. I can't help it.
So I'm sitting here wondering what I'll teach next
I've actually figured it out.
Watching what happened to people in that certification program, I noticed something I hadn't expected.
The transformation wasn't coming from learning to coach. It was coming from spending several months turning a healing lens on themselves.
They listened differently. They stopped rushing in to fix people. They caught their own patterns while those patterns were running, instead of three weeks later. Their marriages changed. The conversations with their kids and their parents changed.
And I kept thinking: why should you have to become a professional coach to learn skills that would improve nearly every relationship in your life?
You shouldn't. So I built the version for everyone else.
Twenty weeks. Tuesdays, ten in the morning Pacific, two hours, on Zoom. It starts January 12th and finishes the first of June.
Four movements. Learning to see. Telling the truth. Setting it down. Living it.
Each week is one idea, experienced together, with a practice you take into your actual life. Then you come back and we talk about what happened.
That length is the whole point, and it's the part people hesitate over.
Because twenty weeks isn't twenty weeks of content. It's twenty weeks of your real life happening while you learn. Your mother calls. Your partner shuts down. Work goes sideways. The old pattern fires on a Thursday afternoon, and this time you're in the middle of learning what to do with it, and there's a room to bring it back to next week.
A weekend can't manufacture that.
The group stays small on purpose, because everyone should get coached and not just taught.
Everyone talks with me before enrolling. Twenty weeks together is long enough that it should be a mutual yes, and if it isn't the right fit I'll say so.
If you've got a life you're quietly certain could be different, and you'd like five months and a small group of people to find out, that's what it's for.
Come Saturday, I'm going to sit with my tea a while longer and miss my class.
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