The Prayer that Answered Itself

Dear Sovereigns:For years I said the same prayer and turned away before it could be answered. And then, one day I did something different.I was standing on the fly bridge of a sightseeing boat off the Na Pali Coast of Kauai, holding the metal rails with both hands while the bow rose and fell on two and three-foot waves.The mountains fell into the ocean, lush valleys falling into water. The sea gulls followed our boat and the wind kept things interesting.It was the kind of beauty that makes you reach for something larger than yourself.So I did what I always do in moments like that. I looked out at that impossible green coastline falling into the ocean, and I said the prayer I had been saying for years.God, please make me more like you.I had said those words dozens of times. In cathedrals and on hiking trails, and in the ordinary silence of early mornings. I said them, and then I waited, and the waiting always felt like the truest part, the place where I was most honest about the distance between who I was and who I sensed I could become.But this time something was different. I was not waiting for an answer so much as releasing the need for one. I stayed present. The sea breeze moved through my hair. The boat lifted and fell. And then, in the middle of all of that ordinary sensation, I heard something that nearly knocked me off the railing.Please let me be more like you.I stood very still. And then it came again.Allow me to be more like you.What recognition feels likeI want to tell you what that did to me, because I think it is the same thing it might do to you, which is why I am still trying to find the right words for it years later.It did not make me feel special. It made me feel seen. And those are not the same experience at all.For most of my adult life I have operated from a quiet, persistent belief that I was not quite enough. Not broken, exactly. Just perpetually a few degrees short of the woman I was supposed to become, if I only worked harder, prayed better, gave more, needed less. I have done significant personal development work. I read the books and attended the retreats and sat with the learned teachers. Intellectually, I knew I was worthy of love.But knowing something and receiving it are entirely unique acts.What I received on that boat was not encouragement. It was recognition. The sense that the Divine was not waiting for me to improve before engaging with me fully, but was actively, urgently interested in what it felt like to be me, in this body, on this water, on this particular afternoon.The game that changed everythingI stood at the railing and something in me went quiet. Not the quiet of absence, but the quiet of a woman who has finally stopped talking long enough to listen.The self I had built to navigate the world, careful, competent, perpetually preparing, stepped back. And in that small interior clearing, I did something I had never quite done before. I simply looked. At the water. At the light on the water. At the green coast rising from the sea like something God threw down to see what would happen.And I offered it.Do you see that?What came back was not words. It was a wave of joy moving through me, the kind that has no origin you can point to, warm and present and entirely real. I asked again, “Do you see that?” The joy returned. We played like that for a few minutes, the Divine seeing through my eyes what I had been too busy to fully see myself.And then I looked down and saw a flash of silver in the water. That is when the dolphins came.A pod of 3, leaping directly in front of the bow. And one, higher than the others, turned and looked at me.I laughed until I cried.A Shift in IdentityThe experience of interacting with God reminds me of a passage from Richard Rohr’s book, “The Naked Now.”God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.As I open to the Divine and allow myself to have a personal relationship, something astonishing happens. I am no longer the small, ego-based self. Instead, as Teresa of Avila observed, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God.”This is why I createThat is where Sovereign Women began. Not in a curriculum or a concept, but in the experience of being known before I had finished earning it. Of being loved without condition, without agenda, without a list of requirements I had not yet met.My books, meditations, and courses are created from this knowing that God wants to know me through my eyes. He is as interested in me as he is in you, because we are his creations. The why motivating my work is so God is seen.For example, I wrote the book, Sovereign Women, because when women listen to their inner knowing, they discover how to navigate their world with wisdom, grace, and love. There is a space between the extremes, beneath the cultural conditioning, where the quiet intelligence of the feminine soul flows and sovereignty returns. I create meditations because the body needs its own path to the center, separate from the mind’s. The body carries its own intelligence and wisdom that is often drowned out by the mind’s continued activity. Meditation allows the mind to settle while the deeper wisdom can be accessed, felt, and embodied.I built the Sovereign Women’s Circle because I watched women receive the teaching intellectually and then walk back into their lives unchanged, and I understood that witness is what completes the circuit. When other women see you in your sovereignty, it changes everything.Where the path leads nowThe Women’s Circle is pausing right now while I tend to the path that leads to it. When it reopens, it will be ready for the women who have already been walking.In the meantime, the path continues.If you have not yet read the book, Emily’s story is waiting. You can find Sovereign Women: Love Is a Revolutionary Choice on Amazon. Read it slowly. She is not a character you observe. She is a woman you walk beside.If you have not yet found me on Insight Timer, search my name and follow me there. The Divine Feminine Remembrance meditation and the Empowered Wealth Consciousness course will take you somewhere words cannot, because they work in the body rather than the mind, and that is where sovereignty actually lives.The question I asked on that boat, I am still asking. The difference is that now I know the answer moves in both directions.You are being asked the same thing.With love,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