Courage was my word of the year in 2024.
I had no idea back then how much that one word would continue to teach me.
At the time, I imagined courage as something fairly obvious: taking the leap, doing the things that scared me, speaking up, making a bold change, and stepping beyond what was familiar. While courage can certainly look like those things, I have come to understand that some of our bravest moments are much quieter.
Sometimes courage is simply choosing to be seen.
Choosing to begin.
Choosing to trust something within you before you know where it will lead.
One of my own moments of finding the courage to begin in 2024 was starting the Wild Wellness blog. It might sound simple: write a post, press publish, and do it again. Underneath that simple act was something much more vulnerable—putting my words, experiences, questions, and perspective into the world.
Once something is shared, it is entirely out of our control how it will be received.
Starting the blog asked me to trust my voice enough to let it be read, seen and felt. It also gave me permission to explore the many threads that make me who I am rather than squeezing myself into one neat category—wellness, writing, vision, the body, the nervous system, creativity, nature, spirituality, books, travel, music, and life itself.
I didn’t know where all those threads would lead; I simply knew I wanted to follow them.
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
Brené Brown
Looking back, I can see that 2024 was about more than simply doing brave things. It was about becoming more visible to myself by acknowledging all that mattered, making space for my own voice, and trusting that it didn’t need to look like anyone else’s.
Two years later, I can feel how much mr original definition of courage has expanded. The woman who chose Courage in 2024 is not the same woman writing about it in 2026. The word has become less about proving that I can be brave and more about learning to deeply trust myself—my timing, my voice, my body, my creativity, and the things that genuinely light me up.
One of the deepest expressions of that trust is choosing to stay in my own lane.
We live in a world where looking sideways is almost effortless. There is always another person to compare ourselves with, another timeline to match, another definition of success, or another way of doing things. It can become so easy to look outward for direction that we forget to ask what is true for us.
What if your way is allowed to be different?
You don’t have to think, feel, or move through the world the same way as everyone else.
Your body has its own language, your heart has its own rhythm, and your life has its own timing. This doesn’t mean closing yourself off from other perspectives—we can listen, learn, and grow while remaining anchored to our own inner compass:
🔷 You can admire another person’s path without making it your map.
🔷 You can celebrate their expansion without deciding you are behind.
🔷 You can receive guidance without handing over your inner authority.
🔷 You can follow your heart while remaining open to learning.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”
Mark Twain
Sometimes we feel something long before we can explain it when our heart knows before our head does.
🔷 A recurring idea or creative pull.
🔷 A subtle shift in energy around a person, opportunity, or possibility.
🔷 A quiet yes without a five-year plan.
🔷 The sense that something is no longer right, even though it still makes perfect sense on paper.
This doesn’t mean every feeling is an immediate instruction. Our inner worlds are complex, and feelings can carry fear, memory, desire, and expectation.
They also contain information. Courage can be the willingness to become curious about that information—to pause, listen, and ask the folowing 3 questions:
What am I actually feeling right now?
What keeps calling my attention?
What feels true when I become quiet enough to hear it?
Sometimes the brave choice isn’t to act immediately.
Sometimes it is simply to stop overriding yourself.
We as humans tend to make courage too grand. It doesn’t only belong to moments that make cinematic stories.
It often lives in the quiet choices of daily life:
🔷 Having the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
🔷 Asking for help or setting a firm boundary.
🔷 Changing your mind without apology.
🔷 Resting without needing to justify your worth.
🔷 Trying something you’re not yet good at.
🔷 Sharing something you’ve created or admitting you don’t know.
🔷 Starting again, and letting yourself want what you truly want.
There doesn’t always need to be an audience as some of our bravest choices will be witnessed only by ourselves.
Last weekend, I met courage in another form when I facilitated an upgraded version of the Wild Wisdom & Sacred Rage Release workshop.
As I stood in that room, I could feel a clear, golden thread connecting that moment straight back through the years:
2024: Courage asked me to put my voice out into the world.
2025: Courage asked me to introspect and integrate the practices, honoring my boundaries, setting sensational standards and listening deeper to my own body.
2026: Courage asked me to trust that voice enough to hold space for others to meet theirs.
There is a particular vulnerability in facilitating something that genuinely matters to you.
You are bringing your presence, experience, heart, intuition, preparation, and intention into a room and allowing the experience to unfold naturally.
The workshop has evolved, and so have I.
I wasn’t trying to recreate what had come before; I was allowing it to become something new—listening to what the room needed, drawing from what I had learned, and trusting my own way of facilitating. The courage wasn’t in knowing exactly how everything would unfold. It was in trusting myself enough to meet whatever emerged.
The courage to begin had become the courage to embody; the courage to share had become the courage to hold; the courage to find my voice had become the courage to trust it.
If you would like to read more about this workshop experience, you can explore my recent post, Where Rage, Release & Reclamation Meet, where I share more about what unfolded during our time together and the space that was created.
There is something particularly fitting about exploring courage beneath the Waxing Gibbous Moon. Today, as the Moon builds in its waxing phase toward fullness, it offers a gentle visual reminder: the Moon doesn’t leap from darkness to complete illumination in a single moment. It reveals itself gradually—a sliver, a crescent, half, and then more, gathering light step by step.
Courage gathers in the exact same way. We don’t necessarily wake up one morning suddenly fearless. It accumulates through small, daily acts of self-trust including setting a sensational standard, having an honest conversation, taking a creative risk or choosing a quiet moment to listen inwardly.
The Waxing Gibbous Moon reminds us that we don’t need to be completely illuminated before we begin.
We can move while we are still becoming.
We can take a step without knowing the whole path.
Like the Moon glowing gloriously in the night sky, becoming more visible doesn’t mean transforming into someone else—it means revealing more of what was already there.
I invite you to turn inward for a moment and reflect on where courage is quietly stirring within you:
Where is courage quietly emerging in your life right now?
Where are you being invited to stay in your own lane and trust your timing?
Where have you been comparing your journey or timeline with someone else’s?
What does your body know that your mind keeps questioning?
What conversation or boundary is ready to be honored?
Where might you be ready to begin—or ready to stop?
Where are you already being courageous, but haven’t given yourself credit for it?
Courage isn’t necessarily asking you to make a giant, disruptive change.
It may simply be asking for one honest, grounding step.
As the Moon gathers light toward fullness, give yourself a little space to notice what is gathering within you, too.
Feel your feet beneath you. Notice your breath. Place a hand over your heart, your belly, or wherever your body invites you to connect, and simply ask yourself What is quietly emerging?
You don’t need to force an answer.
It might arrive as a sensation, a word, an image, a memory, or a quiet knowing.
If there is no answer yet, that is perfectly okay too.
For me, the journey from Courage in 2024 through 2025 and now into 2026 has been less about becoming a braver person and more about becoming a more trusting one—trusting my voice enough to share it, my path enough to stay in my lane, my body enough to listen, my heart enough to follow, and myself enough to hold space for others from a place that is authentically mine.
Emergence is not about becoming someone entirely new; it is about revealing more fully what has been within us all along.
Wherever you are in your own becoming, give yourself permission to move at the pace that feels true for you, making space to listen deeply, feel honestly, discern what matters, choose what feels aligned, and take the next step when you are ready to begin.
When courage asks you to step forward, may you always remember that you are not expected to follow the psth of someone else to prove that you are moving forward.
Your lane is allowed to be your own.
Your rhythm is allowed to be your own.
Your emergence is allowed to be your own.
This is where bravery begins. With the courage to trust the way home to yourself.
