The Only Way Out Is Through

Leadership as a pathway of integration

What if your healing and awakening were never meant to stop at the meditation cushion or the medicine circle, but to be tested, tempered, and embodied in the wild terrain of leadership?

Stepping into your dharma and building a movement is not just a business strategy, but rather a spiritual crucible. It is the place where everything you have learned on your healing and awakening journey becomes no longer theory, but your embodied truth.

This is the moment when all the books, ceremonies, meditations, and inner work stop being something you talk about and start being something you live by. It is where you move from sitting at the edge of the fire to walking through it, knowing you will not emerge the same on the other side.

Entrepreneurship done as a spiritual calling is not for the faint of heart. It is trial by fire. To stand up and say “This is who I am. This is what I came here to do” is to strip off every mask and every layer of protection. It is to risk rejection, failure, and misunderstanding…and yet it is also to risk the most terrifying thing of all: being fully loved for who you truly are.

For most people, whether they are conscious of it or not, the thought of taking off the mask and standing without armor feels like death. To stop people-pleasing and to quit contorting yourself into the shape that keeps others comfortable is to burn through lifetimes of conditioning.

For women especially, this act of leadership tears through generations of silence and self-sacrifice. We have been taught to smile, to stay small, and to carry everyone else’s burden while denying our truth and power. To stand in your truth and disrupt the status quo is to break every ancestral pattern that told you your worth was tied to disappearing.

When you step into sacred leadership, you are not just meeting the world. You are meeting every ancestor who came before you. All of their triumphs and heartbreaks, their dreams and disappointments, and their unspoken prayers and unfinished business rise to the surface, demanding to be seen. Leadership calls forth the entire lineage you carry in your blood and bones and demands that you hold it with reverence and courage.

When I first began to build Movement Maker, this truth came crashing in on me. I did not just meet my vision, but I also met the weight of my family’s story around survival and worth. My grandfather’s empire had crumbled in the Great Depression, and I grew up hearing the tale of him rebuilding from nothing. I then watched my father pour his life into creating his own legacy, only to see it slip through his fingers during the 2008 real estate collapse.

That history lived inside of me. In my nervous system, money and entrepreneurship were not freedom; they signaled danger. When I began to build my own movement, it felt like building on shifting sand, yet each step carried both the weight of my lineage and the invitation to rewrite it.

I also had to face the fear of making mistakes, of being burned at the stake for saying the wrong thing, and of being cast out from society. I masked behind procrastination in the name of integrity, when really it was just fear dressed up as virtue.

For six years, I lived in a cocoon, a deep chrysalis of solitude where everything I thought I knew was stripped away. That isolation was necessary, for it was the soil where my roots deepened. However, I soon learned that solitude can only take you so far, and integration cannot happen in a cave. It happens when you step out and stand in community. It happens in the messy, sacred arena of being mirrored, triggered, and loved all at once.

When you begin to build your movement, you are confronted with every edge of belonging and rejection. You discover quickly that leadership is not about being above anyone, but about being in the messy and sacred weave of relationships. It is about learning to hold the collective heartbeat while staying anchored in your own.

As a leader, you are held to a higher standard than others. You are called to speak your truth, to hold humility, and to build capacity for rupture and repair. This is a ton to hold, and yet you must also offer relentless compassion, reminding yourself that you are still only human. This dance between devotion and grace is where leadership becomes initiation.

Community becomes the fire that tempers you, and it is where your edges are rubbed raw and softened all at once. It is where you learn that true power is not control but actually presence. It is also where you realize that your movement is not yours at all. It belongs to the people who gather around it, shape it, and breathe life into it alongside you.

I often find myself whispering under my breath, “The only way out is through.” I had heard that mantra so many times on my healing journey, but it only rooted itself in me when I stood at the threshold of turning knowledge into wisdom. That threshold is not a metaphor. It is a birth canal, as Stan Grof so beautifully described. You are being pushed and pulled into the raw becoming of who you truly are. It is messy, painful, and it is sacred beyond words.

Most people will not walk through this path of fire. Not because they are weak, but because the path demands everything of them. It strips you of illusions and comfort and asks you to trust when every cell in your body is screaming for certainty.

This is where Spirit speaks the loudest. This is where you must drop out of the mind, which will always run worst-case scenarios in the name of safety, and sink into the heart. The heart does not bargain, it knows that this fire is not here to destroy you but to temper you into who you were always meant to be.

Building a movement is not just about creating change in the world. It is about allowing the movement to change you. It is about stepping onto your dharmic path and letting it shape you in ways you cannot control. It is about walking into the fire with trembling hands and an open heart, knowing that what waits on the other side is not perfection but embodiment. It is you, unmasked and unarmored, carrying the codes of liberation that can only be earned by living them.

This work is not meant to be walked alone. Subscribe to my Substack and join our circle of movement makers, visionaries, and sacred rebels who are stepping into their dharma and birthing the new earth together.