The Most Important Relationship You Never Question

Dearest Sovereigns:There is a voice you have been in relationship with your entire life.You have never questioned its authority. You have never asked where it came from, who installed it, or whether it has been telling you the truth. You have simply obeyed it, argued with it, tried to silence it, or performed for it the way you perform for every authority you have never thought to examine.That voice has opinions about your worth, your body, and your choices. It has questioned your right to take up space in a room, a relationship, a life. And somewhere along the way you made the most consequential mistake a woman can make.You believed it was telling you the truth.I learned the difference between that voice and the Voice of Love for the first time on a motorcycle in West Texas, many years into an IVF journey that was breaking me. But learning it once is not the same as living it. My experience on retreat in Chartres, France taught me that.What Chartres Taught Me About Whose Voice I Was Still CarryingI was quarantined in a hotel room in Chartres, France, sick with COVID, listening to a recording of a spiritual leader telling a room full of pilgrims that the women who had fallen ill were not spiritual enough to be present with the group.I want to tell you what happened in my body when I heard that.The old voice activated immediately. The one I thought I had learned to quiet through meditation, inner work, and the hard-won clarity of a woman who knows the difference between fear and truth.The voice started building a case that I was spiritual enough. It was not my fault I got sick. I have done more inner work than half the women walking that labyrinth. The voice was relentless and insisted on compiling evidence on my behalf.I argued with myself until 3:00 in the morning.And then I saw what I was doing.I was arguing with her voice and her verdict. The argument itself was the relationship. Every defense I constructed confirmed that her judgment had the power to require one.The moment I understood that, something released.Not because I felt vindicated. Because I asked myself the only question that mattered.Whose voice am I actually in relationship with right now?It was not Love’s voice. Love does not require a defense. It does not need you to prove your adequacy before it will speak to you. Love was not in the argument at all. It was in the stillness underneath, waiting with the patience of something that has never once doubted who you are.When I stopped arguing and breathed, Love was there.It had been there the entire time.The Voice You Have Confused for TruthFear’s voice is sophisticated. It does not always announce itself as fear. It sounds like reason and self-awareness. It’s practical and masquerades as the honest assessment of a woman who sees herself clearly and is simply being realistic about her limitations.But the body always knows the difference before the mind catches up.Fear tightens when it shortens the breath, contracts the chest, holds the throat closed around the words that need to be spoken. It produces the specific physical sensation of a woman bracing against something she believes is coming for her.Love expands, deepens the breath and opens something in the chest that feels, after years of the alternative, almost unbearably spacious.The body has never lied to you about which voice is speaking. It has simply been overruled so many times by the mind’s elaborate justifications that it has stopped expecting to be heard.The Only Voice That Is TrueThe Voice of Love is not the optimistic version of your inner critic. It is not a positive reframe of your deepest fear. It is not something you manufacture through affirmation or willpower.The Voice of Love = Divine Love. The fierce, ancient, radiant kind that does not require your situation to be resolved before it will speak. That does not need you to have healed sufficiently or chosen correctly or proven your spiritual adequacy before it will reach you.It reached me on a West Texas highway, riding a motorcycle as I argued with God.It reached me in a quarantine hotel room in Chartres, France when I was sick, excluded, and building a case for my own worth at 3:00 in the morning.It did not arrive because I deserved it. It arrived because it was always there, and I had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it.Fear’s voice is loud because it is afraid of being seen for what it is. It fills every silence and delivers its verdicts with such certainty that questioning its authority feels almost sacrilegious.But it is not the truth about you. It has never been the truth about you.The truth about you is what Love says. And Love, when you are finally still enough to hear it, does not deliver verdicts. It asks questions that open everything. It sees what is whole in you before you can see it yourself. It waits, without impatience, for the moment you stop arguing long enough to receive what it has been trying to give you all along.Your sovereignty begins the moment you stop treating fear’s voice as the authoritative account of who you are, and recognize it for what it actually is: a very old, very frightened story that was never yours to carry.An InvitationIn June, inside the Sovereign Women’s Circle, we are exploring the theme of relationships. The most important relationship work any of us can do is not with our partners or our histories. It is with the voice we have been in relationship with longest, the one shaping every other relationship from the inside, without our awareness or our consent.In our June gathering we will sit together with the question the Voice of Love has been waiting to ask you. We will practice telling the two voices apart in the body, in real time, in the middle of ordinary life.If you are not yet part of the Circle, come. Bring the voice you have been arguing with. Bring the verdict you have been living inside. The Voice of Love is already there, waiting with perfect patience for exactly this moment.Your sovereignty waits for you to turn away from the voice of fear and toward the Voice of Love. To your presence,KathrynThanks for reading The Sovereign Voice on Empowered Way! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com