A little over a year ago, I was doing everything "right." I was leading DEI work that people trusted, moderating panels alongside mentors I'd once only watched from the audience, three years into a plan to build my brand, deepen my impact, and eventually launch something of my own. From the outside, it looked like momentum.

From the inside, something was already shifting. My company was growing fast and changing faster. I felt more isolated from my own team with each cycle. The DEIB work I led was resonating with employees but losing ground with leadership who no longer wanted to be associated with "a DEI company." Then the entire team was laid off. Mine included.

I felt what you'd expect: disappointed, angry, scared. Hundreds of colleagues and mentors were navigating the same layoff at the same time, in an industry that was visibly changing beneath all of us. I wasn't sure I wanted to change with it.

In the middle of that uncertainty, I took a personal retreat to The Mae House in upstate New York. I cried. I did cartwheels. I spent long stretches in nature, journaled without an agenda, and sat with people who helped me remember I still had the capacity to dream. Not just to find another job, but to actually imagine a future I wanted to build.

I found an old journal entry from earlier that year where I'd mused, almost in passing, about wanting a paid sabbatical, having more spaciousness for coaching, for creative work. I hadn't given it permission to be real yet. In the middle of that rupture, I realized I was being realigned toward exactly that.

Since then, I've built Rooted Reclamation from Mexico City, from Brazil, and from wherever I happen to be. I'm not tied to one city anymore, and increasingly, I don't need to be. What I learned in that season is that rest is not the opposite of ambition, that self-trust has to be rebuilt in your body and not just decided in your head. This became the foundation of the SOLO Method, the coaching framework I now guide clients through: Stillness, Openness, Loving Kindness, Ownership.

This practice exists because I needed it first. It's for the people doing the sacred, sometimes disorienting work of building a life and a career that actually fits.