What struck me wasn’t only his story. It was the reminder of how easily a life can drift away from the kind of quiet that lets anything real come forward.

He also said something else: that young people should have access to that kind of encounter. That they need it too.

I smiled when he said it. Because I had one.

My parents sent me to a CVJM camp at the Altrhein in the mid‑eighties during summer break. Tents, outhouses, a barrel for a shower, and mosquitos in biblical quantities. Ten days. Girls in one tent, boys in another. The adults were kind, practiced cat herders in their own right. The first year was rough. The second year, something shifted. The quiet of that place away from the camp and at night stopped feeling like a lack and started feeling like a presence. I did not have language for it. I just knew that something happened in that silence that did not happen anywhere else.

Years later, studying geology, I found it again. Field mapping: five to ten square kilometers (roughly two to four square miles) of Palatinate landscape assigned to me alone. Then again during my diploma thesis, long days in woods, fields, and pastures, off any path people used. Just terrain, a compass, and a lot of quiet. The silence there was large. Unhurried. The air had that particular resin‑and‑soil smell of late summer. I had to learn to be in it rather than manage it. Eventually, I stopped wanting to manage it at all.

Listening to Palmer, I noticed something in myself too, the way even I, someone who loves silence, now has to protect it. Most people are not getting much of it. Palmer named that directly. Research suggests that four seconds of quiet in a conversation is enough for people to feel uneasy, even rejected. We fill elevators with phones. We fall asleep to podcasts. Somewhere along the way, silence became a problem to solve rather than a place to inhabit.

Some of this is old wiring. We are social animals; silence can read as danger. But digital life has amplified that into something closer to dread. There is even a name for it now: sedatephobia, a fear of quiet. When something is always available to fill the space, the capacity to simply be in silence weakens, the way a muscle does when you stop using it.

I went looking for it deliberately too. Silence had found me in geology almost by accident. Learning to hold it for others was a different kind of apprenticeship.

Ghost Ranch surprised me. I went there for my spiritual formation training, and the landscape did not let me rest in the way I expected. Every canyon wall was stratigraphy. The Triassic reds, the fault lines, the sheer geological insistence of the place. I could not turn that eye off, and I stopped trying. What I found instead was a kind of coexistence: the earth speaking its long history, and me learning, in that same silence, to listen differently. At night the stars were extraordinary. And the mice rustled in the walls of Casa del Sol.

That same season, Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center had forest trails, and I walked them alone after my shifts as an eco‑educator. Almost always no one else around. Just trees, and the particular stillness of a place where wildlife actually lives. School groups came from nearby suburbs, kids who had never been in nature before, never stood still in it. What struck me was watching them learn that stillness here was not a form of punishment. It was the entry requirement. If you wanted to see anything, you had to be quiet. The birds and animals insisted on it. For some of them, that was an entirely new experience.

What gets lost is not only rest. Something deeper in us also goes quiet when it cannot be heard. Palmer calls it inner wildness. Gendlin calls it the felt sense. The contemplative tradition calls it the soul. Different words, same direction: it speaks very quietly, and it will not compete.

I have spent years learning to hold that quality of silence for other people. In a Focusing session, there is a moment when the person I am with goes quiet in a different way. Not the quiet of searching for words. Something below that. Something that has been waiting. I have learned not to pull them back into their head. Invitations keep the process moving from the inside.

Spiritual companionship asks the same thing. The companion’s job is not to speak into the silence. It is to stay present while the other person hears themselves. Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a session is what neither person says.

I still crave that quality of quiet. The Altrhein with its mosquitos and its wildness. The Palatinate woods, literally off the beaten path. The interior pause of a Focusing session when something is just beginning to take shape.

Palmer said the soul comes forward like a shy animal. Maybe that is what silence has always been: not empty space, but wild territory. Unmapped. And for those willing to stop filling it, unexpectedly alive.

This was my world from the time I was a baby until elementary school.

The day started at five. My parents woke me to drive me over before their workday began. By the time I arrived at my grandparents, my Opa was already outside feeding the chickens and my Oma had breakfast on the table. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts, homemade jam, and a fresh egg. And carob coffee, warm and slightly sweet, in a cup that was always the right size. The same every morning. I would come in from the car, still half asleep, and something in me would settle. The table already set, my Oma moving quietly in the kitchen. My body knew before I did that I was somewhere safe.

I did not have words for any of this then. That kitchen felt different from anywhere else.

Weekends were different.

The food was still good. My mother made sure of that, even exhausted from a week of work, even after cleaning up after everyone else. But we ate in the dining room. Proper chairs, proper table. No sofa, no warmth at your back. Something in the air made it hard to settle. The room was tense in a way that was hard to name. Not bad exactly but charged. You ate and you felt it, whatever it was. The thing no one named.

I learned to be small there. To not take up too much space.

Starting elementary school, the daily rhythm with my grandparents ended. Life moved on the way life does. School, adolescence, years of navigating the charged air of weekends made permanent. My grandparents’ kitchen became a place I visited rather than a place I lived. The carob coffee, the fresh egg, the particular quiet of those mornings faded into something I could not name and did not think to look for.

Until my body started looking for it anyway.

Nobody talks about this

When I moved out to study, the weight came quickly. I did not understand it then. I thought it was student food, irregular hours, the chaos of a new life. Looking back, I think my body had just lost its last anchor. It was on its own for the first time, unregulated, reaching for something to fill a gap it could not articulate.

Food was available. Food was reliable. Food would have to do.

Decades passed. Life happened, and so did death, divorce, illness. Then perimenopause arrived, though I did not know that was what it was.

It started with a frozen shoulder. Then acupuncture, and suddenly my body had new rules. Nightshades were gone. Tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant. Everything seemed to contain nightshades. Eating out became complicated. Cooking at home became an exercise in subtraction. Food, which had always been the thing I reached for when life felt hard, was no longer simple.

When I wondered aloud whether this might be the beginning of menopause, I was laughed at. I was forty seven. Too young, they said.

My body knew otherwise. But nobody was listening to it yet, least of all me.

Looking back, it was all perimenopause. I just did not know it. The information that exists now about hormones, about the nervous system, about how profoundly this transition can reshape a woman’s body and life was not reaching women like me then. If it had, things might have been different. I might have spent less time feeling like I was failing my own body and more time understanding what my body was actually going through.

But I did not have that. So I did what I knew how to do. I ate.

I was navigating late perimenopause and Long Covid at the same time. Two conditions with few established treatments, little medical guidance, and no clear end in sight. Both invisible. Both dismissed. For a long time, I had been living at a distance from my own body, avoiding its messages out of fear. I had stopped perceiving its sensations as signals and started experiencing them as threats, disruptions to whatever stability I was trying to hold onto. My inner critic had grown loud. Old things had surfaced. The body, already overwhelmed, was carrying more than I knew.

It was never food

Focusing did not fix anything at first. It just changed the relationship.

I learned to turn toward what I was feeling instead of away from it. To get curious rather than alarmed. There is a Rumi poem, The Guesthouse, about welcoming whatever arrives at your door, even the difficult visitors, even the ones who rearrange the furniture. Focusing felt like that. An invitation to stop treating my own body as something to manage or override and start listening to it instead.

Nothing bad is happening. I can be curious. I have permission.

That sounds simple. It was not. Learning to listen inwardly with curiosity rather than dread was slow work. But something began to shift. When I finally gave the parts of me that had been struggling space to be heard, something unexpected happened. A stillness came first. Then the tension released, and with it a lightness, like something that had been bracing for a long time could finally let go. From that stillness, something distinct emerged. Not a thought exactly, but a knowing. Clear direction about what to do next. The body I had experienced as chaotic and unpredictable turned out to have very precise things to say. It had just never been asked.

A few years into Focusing, a friend suggested Network Spinal Analysis, a chiropractic approach that works not by manipulating the spine directly but by making light contacts at specific points, inviting the nervous system to reorganize itself. It sounded unusual. I went anyway.

My body wanted to be there. My mind just tagged along.

I had no expectations. But when I got up from the table, something had shifted. Less pain. More motion. A lightness I had not felt in decades. When I got home, my husband looked at me and said: you are walking completely differently. I had not noticed yet. He had.

Over time, the tension that had lived in my spine for decades began to release. I gained an inch in height within the first 10 sessions, called entrainments, my spine finally aligning itself, taking up the space it had always been meant to occupy. My body was remembering something it had forgotten.

It was just recently after a Network Spinal entrainment, in a Focusing session with my Focusing partner, that something finally surfaced.

The realization did not come as a thought. It came as a knowing, the way things arrive in Focusing, from somewhere deeper than the mind. My body, for more than four decades, had never felt safe. Not truly. Not at the level where it could simply rest.

It showed up as a question: When was the last time you felt safe?
My mind jumped in right away with its usual protest. What do you mean. I am perfectly safe.
My Focusing partner stayed with me. They helped me stay with the discomfort and the question instead of the mind’s answer.

And for the first time, that knowing was not just heard. It was received. My Focusing partner really heard what was said. There is a difference. Being listened to is one thing. Being truly heard is another. Something in me that had been waiting a very long time finally got to land.

My body had been doing what bodies do when they have lost safety. Looking for the feeling it had known. Reaching for the one place it had felt safe, that kitchen, that table, that particular quality of morning, through the only means available to it. Food. Not hunger. Never really hunger. Safety.

The body keeps the score. I had read those words. Now I understood them from the inside.

I eat differently now.

Not because I followed a plan or found the right diet. Because my nervous system finally has what it was looking for. Network Spinal, Focusing, spiritual companionship, years of slowly learning to listen. Together they gave my body what no amount of eating ever could. Regulation. Safety. The felt sense of being at home in myself.

The food intolerances have eased. The weight has not settled, but for the first time in years it is moving again. I do not have food noise anymore. I eat smaller portions now, not Texas sized. My body no longer asks food to create a feeling it could not find anywhere else. The relationship has changed because the need has changed.
But more than any of that, the reaching has stopped. I no longer eat to soothe something that food was never going to fix.

What I eat now reminds me of my grandmother’s table. Simple goodness. Unhurried. Something warm. Nothing complicated. My body recognizes it. Not as memory exactly, but as homecoming.

It took four decades. But my body finally found its way back to that kitchen.

It is ironic, in a way. I spent years learning how to listen, first as a manager, then as a spiritual director, then as a Focusing practitioner. It still took me a long time to understand that what changed me most was not so much the listening. It was the moments when someone actually heard me, and learning to hear others.

What changes me is not the quality of someone's attention alone. Something else has to reach me before anything inside can shift. What happens inside me when I am finally being heard is the moment my body recognizes it is no longer being managed or interpreted, and something previously inarticulate begins to take shape. That moment is the part of the conversation that matters most.

Rogers named this with characteristic bluntness when he wrote that being heard feels damn good. He was naming the moment when I feel received rather than evaluated, when my nervous system stops bracing and something inside begins to reorganize. It is not a moment anyone can manufacture. It arrives when the presence across from me is steady enough that I no longer have to perform.

Being heard is more like a physiological event. When someone receives my words without steering or narrowing the frame around what I am allowed to say, my breath deepens. My shoulders release. There is a sense of calm emerging inside me. The pressure to make sense of myself for someone else eases. In that relief, a different kind of clarity becomes possible. It does not come from effort. It comes from something in me finally having room, and an inner quiet.

I remember the first time I noticed this. My breath dropped lower without me doing anything. I suddenly realized I was not bracing anymore. It surprised me, mostly because I had spent so long trying to listen well to others without recognizing how rarely I had been received in that same way.

In Focusing, this moment is unmistakable. I speak a few tentative words, not polished and not certain, and the listener simply receives them, maybe repeats them if needed. I open up either way. It is the safety, not so much the accuracy, that matters. The listener learns how to stay with the speaker’s experience without shaping it. Then my body brings forward the next piece of knowing. Not the final answer. Only the next thing that is ready.

My felt sense only forms in an atmosphere where nothing is being demanded of it. I can cultivate inner listening, but the experience of being heard requires another human presence steady enough that my system can stop adjusting itself to someone else’s expectations. When that presence is trustworthy, something begins to move in me that could not move before. Trust is the condition. What follows is my body’s own movement.

Rogers understood this too. He wrote that the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. What he did not need to spell out, but what Focusing makes explicit, is that this acceptance is often first experienced through another person's presence. Being heard is the doorway through which self acceptance becomes possible, because it gives my body a chance to recognize itself without interference. Being heard teaches the body it is safe to show up. It also teaches something deeper: that I exist, that my inner life is real, that I matter.

Most of the time, I do not realize how rarely I am truly heard because I have grown accustomed to being listened to through someone else’s frame. Even the most well meaning listeners bring their own urgency, their own interpretations, or a quiet pressure toward clarity or resolution. It is not intentional. It is how most people have been trained to relate. But this also means I am constantly adjusting myself to fit the listener’s expectations, and in that adjustment something essential gets lost. Often it is the very thing that most needs to come forward.

Being heard is different. It is the experience of being met without distortion, without someone trying to shape my meaning or tidy up my emotional landscape. It is the moment when my inner life is allowed to exist on its own terms. What is inside me is not an inconvenience to be managed. It is asking to be heard. That permission is what allows deeper layers of experience to come forward. Not because I am performing vulnerability, but because my body senses it is safe enough to reveal what it has been carrying. Being heard is how I return to myself.

I pulled at something that looked like a weed and caught the scent before I saw the leaves. Thyme. Three years ago, I scattered creeping thyme seeds in that exact spot. Nothing came up in the first season. Nothing in the second. I assumed the whole thing had failed and moved on.

But there it was, finally surfacing in its own time.

I almost pulled it out before I recognized it. The moment was small, just a scent, a whiff of it, but it stopped something in me. Because I had been carrying a story about this body and this season of life: that if I do the right things, results should follow in recognizable ways. Eat differently, move differently, pay attention, and the outcome will confirm it. That belief is old wiring. Effort in, outcome out.

My body no longer works that way. What I eat, when I eat, how much, yet none of it produces the clean confirmation I used to get. The body has its own logic now, its own pace, and it doesn’t owe me a timeline.

I have been doing the work anyway. Most days it has felt like nothing was happening.

The thyme said otherwise. Not all growth is visible while it’s occurring. Some things take root long before they surface. Some things look exactly like failure until the moment they don’t.

I thought about the other places I’d been scanning for evidence and finding none. The slow build of my practice. The long process of learning how to inhabit this changed body. I’d been reading the absence of visible progress as confirmation that nothing was working.

Maybe the seeds are simply taking their time.

The thyme had no say in when conditions would be right. It just waited. My body is doing something similar. But in my own life, I can shape some of those conditions — try things, adjust them, return to what seems to matter. Real change still follows its own pace. It just responds to the ground I prepare.

Some things surface only when they’re ready, and not a moment sooner.
The waiting is often the hardest part.

This spring I was sitting at my desk, staring out at the live oak tree, my cat pressed against the glass like he was watching prime-time television, the channel was tuned to two squirrels whizzing around in the tree top. And then — I noticed it. The fresh, bright spring green. Not thought it. Noticed it. No, actually almost felt it. And at the same moment, a memory hit. As a kid, the first fresh green in the forest lit me up from the inside. And I remembered my Opa was the one who taught me that these tiny beginnings mattered. For so long I had forgotten about that. Adult life had thinned that attention for a while, but this year I felt the old spark again. I allowed myself to stay with these memories, the sadness, and the joy.

The Childhood Rhythm

I grew up with my grandparents, Oma and Opa in German, during the day while my parents were at work. I was basically raised by a whole generation of “old” folks in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. A generation that had survived several wars, hunger, poverty, and kept a close relationship to nature, which showed in the large vegetable gardens and orchards in their backyards.

When I was still too young to help in the garden, I sat on a blanket under the big cherry tree watching the life around it.

My grandma always used to tell everyone that I was so content sitting there with a big smile, kneading and tasting the moist soil. As I got older, I helped after kindergarten with any garden work — sowing, weeding, harvesting fruits and vegetables, and watering during the growing season. And of course, eating strawberries, raspberries, cherries, tart cherries, plums, gooseberries, carrots, tomatoes, and more right out of the garden. Those were my snacks during the day. I got hungry, ran outside, pulled a carrot fresh out of the ground, rinsed it off, and ate it. The green top ended up in the chicken coop. And out of curiosity one day, not sure exactly why, I wanted to see if a green pea fit in my nose. I remember it fit perfectly but it was a pain to get it out again. I learned that fresh green peas are not meant for the inside of my nose — and the chickens still devoured it. I’ve had a rather mixed relationship with fresh green peas ever since.

After we had been sowing in spring, I ran outside every morning to check if the first sprouts were peeking through the soil. I was fascinated by the process and the progress visibly changing every day. There was so much power in this little seed making its way through the dark soil toward the light, and how it knew that roots grew downward and the green sprouted upward. And what disappointment it was when the rabbits had visited overnight and nibbled all the fresh shoots. My grandpa went around the garden to check where the fence needed mending. And then we had to sow anew.

It was a slow rhythm. Each plant had its own time. My grandparents didn't talk about balance — they just had it, the way people do when their hands are in soil every day. Like the rest of the small community where they lived. Many of them had a garden. There's actually something in soil — a bacteria — that lifts mood. My grandparents or their friends didn't know that. Maybe their bodies did.

It was a tightly knit community, and everyone looked out for each other. Most were the age of my grandparents, some even older, and had lived through one or two world wars. This past shaped the community. And if my grandparents didn’t have time to look after me, it was neighbors down the street, together with their grandchildren, or I was in the nearby kindergarten during the morning and afternoon. It was the most empowering and encouraging tribe I could have wished for as a child.

What Still Grounds Me

Until today, something still happens when I sit under a tree or smell wet soil after rain. Hard to explain. My body just quiets down. Though I should mention — here in North Texas you can't just plop down on the ground like I used to in Germany, that’s because of fire ants. And in the small riparian woodland nearby, wandering off the path through the leaves is not recommended either. Snakes live there. So my communion with nature has some practical boundaries.

What I’m Wondering Now

Somewhere between the first job and the second decade abroad, I stopped being part of the seasons and started watching them. Spring became something that happened outside while I was doing something else. Which, now that I say it out loud, is a little absurd. The green was right there outside the window the whole time.

I don’t think I’m the only one who drifted.

This spring made me notice that gap. Not dramatically — just a quiet ‘oh.’ I’d been watching spring like an outsider instead of letting it do anything to me. Maybe that’s the part of midlife no one talks about — noticing what used to be automatic and wondering if it still has a place.

I’m going to find out. Carefully. Because fire ants, snakes, and poison ivy.

P.S. Over the past weeks my Notes have been small invitations — to notice a shift in the body, a recognition, a knowing that arrives before the words do. That's a felt sense. Do you notice yours?

When I tell people I’m a certified Focusing Professional, I’ve learned to wait.

There’s a pause. Always. Sometimes it’s polite silence. Sometimes it’s genuine interest with a slight squint. And almost always, somewhere in there, is the quiet question: focusing on what, exactly?

Productivity? Mindfulness? Something involving candles?

I don’t blame them. The word does a lot of work and gives very little away. Which is either a design flaw or a perfect metaphor for the practice itself — something that sounds simple, resists easy explanation, and reveals itself only when you actually try it.

What Focusing actually is

There’s a formal definition — a philosopher, Eugene Gendlin, decades of research, the discovery that people who changed in therapy weren’t just talking but pausing, sensing, staying with something unclear-but-alive inside.

But the theory wasn’t what hooked me.

What mattered was realizing there was a kind of knowing in my body I had never been taught to access. Not an emotion exactly. Not a thought. More like the physical shape of something I hadn’t found words for yet.

Gendlin called that a felt sense.
I just knew it felt like a door.

The resistance

I came to Focusing through an online course on existential wellbeing — stumbled onto it, really, the way you stumble onto things that are actually looking for you. The course description stirred something. And my first instinct, immediately, was resistance.

Not skepticism. Not “this seems unlikely.” Something closer to: I know this is going to open something I’ve kept closed for a long time.

There’s a particular quality to that kind of resistance. It doesn’t feel like doubt. It feels like standing at a door you already know is unlocked, hand on the handle, not quite ready to turn it.

I had always been someone who could connect with my emotions. I thought I was pretty good at the inner life stuff. What I didn’t know — what I couldn’t have known — was that I’d been living almost entirely from the neck up.

My body had its own layer of knowing. I just didn’t know how to hear it.

What happened when I walked through it

The first thing I noticed wasn’t insight. It was sensation.

A specific quality of attention — slower, kinder, more curious than the way I usually moved through my own interior. An invitation to sense rather than think. To stay with what was murky instead of rushing to make it clear.

And then, gradually: the body started talking.

Not in words, at first. In textures, weights, temperatures. A tightness that wasn’t just tension. A heaviness that had something it wanted to say. The practice wasn’t about interpreting these things — it was about meeting them. Staying present with them long enough for them to shift, or speak, or simply feel heard.

It sounds subtle. It is subtle. It is also, in my experience, one of the more quietly profound things a person can learn to do.

What changed

Before Focusing, I could name my emotions, but I didn’t have a relationship with my body as a source of wisdom.

Years in engineering geology had trained me to trust analysis, precision, data. The body was the thing that got tired and needed feeding — not a reliable instrument.

Focusing dismantled that quietly.

I learned that my body wasn’t just reacting to my life — it was living it. Processing it. Holding things I hadn’t gotten to yet. And when I learned to listen — really listen, without agenda — it turned out there was a great deal worth hearing.

Did it solve everything? No.
Did it make my life more alive? Yes. Unmistakably.

What this has to do with you

You don’t need to be in crisis to benefit from listening inward. You don’t need a diagnosis, a breakdown, or a dramatic turning point.

You just need to be human, which means you have a body that has been quietly registering your life, every decision, every tension, every unspoken thing, and filing it somewhere you haven’t looked yet.

The pause.
The breath.
The willingness to sense what’s actually here rather than what you think should be here.

That’s where it starts.

Your body has been talking to you for years.

Let me start with a confession: I did not see this coming.

For most of my adult life, I was a scientist. A geologist, specifically — the kind who earns a Ph.D., travels the world solving complex problems in oil fields, and trusts data above almost everything else. I was good at it. I liked it, mostly. And then one day in 2015, my boss retired, my department dissolved, and I was laid off.

I’d like to say I handled it gracefully.

I did not.

What I did instead was stumble — slowly, reluctantly, sometimes kicking — toward something I couldn’t have named at the time. A different kind of knowing. A different kind of work. And eventually, a completely different way of being in my own body.

This Substack is where I write about that journey. And where, I hope, you might find something useful for yours.

The poem that cracked me open

There’s a Joyce Rupp poem called Old Maps No Longer Work that I return to again and again. It’s about reaching a point in life where the paths that used to carry you — the ones that held your laughter and caught your tears — simply stop going anywhere useful. Where the only honest thing your midlife soul can say is “trust me. No map.”

That’s where I was in 2015. Probably where I’d been for a while, if I’m honest.

The layoff just made it undeniable.

I was at one of those crossroads that midlife has a way of forcing: the life I'd built no longer matched the life I could feel trying to emerge. The old map was leading nowhere. And I had absolutely no idea how to travel by the stars.

From rock formations to inner landscapes

What followed was a decade of the most unexpected education of my life.

I attended a retreat in New Mexico at a place called Ghost Ranch (yes, it’s as magical as it sounds). I enrolled in a spiritual direction training program — which was slightly awkward, as someone who doesn’t identify with any organized religion. I discovered a practice called Focusing, developed by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, that changed how I relate to my own body and myself. I navigated long COVID and late perimenopause simultaneously, which is its own particular adventure in chaos. I got certified as both a Spiritual Director and a Focusing Professional.

And somewhere in all of that, I found my work.

I call it Embodied Listening — a mouthful, I know. What it actually means: I sit with people who are going through hard, murky, in-between times, and I help them listen inward. Not to tell them what they’ll find. Not to prescribe a framework or a belief system. Just to help them get quiet enough to hear what’s already there.

Who I’m writing for

If any of these sound like you, pull up a chair:

You’re somewhere in midlife and the life you built is starting to feel like it belongs to a slightly different person. Not bad, necessarily. Just... not quite right anymore.

You’re spiritual, but not religious — you believe in something, you’re drawn to meaning and depth and mystery, but organized religion has never been quite your home. (You are, statistically speaking, in very good company. About 27% of American adults now identify this way.)

You’re curious about Focusing — this strange, body-based, surprisingly simple practice that I cannot stop talking about, because it genuinely helped me through some of the hardest years of my life.

You're navigating menopause, or a body that's changing in ways you didn't anticipate — and you are tired of being told it's just a set of symptoms to manage.

Or you just know something needs to shift, and you’re not sure yet what or how.

What I actually believe

I believe your body is talking to you. Constantly. Most of us have just gotten very good at not listening.

I believe midlife is not a malfunction. For women, menopause is part of that — not a medical inconvenience but an initiation. A threshold. And how we move through it matters enormously.

I believe that people who don’t fit neatly into religious boxes still deserve deep, skilled spiritual companionship. Maybe especially them.

And I believe — because I’ve lived it — that it’s possible to come through the in-between times with more of yourself intact than you started with. More rooted. More real. More at home in your own skin.

That last one took me a while. But it turned out to be worth the trip into the dark.

A word about me

I’m Simone. German-born, Texas-based, recovering engineer-geologist. I hold a Ph.D. in a field I no longer work in, which is either a cautionary tale or a love story about following what’s alive in you — probably both.

I’m a certified Spiritual Director and Focusing Professional. I work with people in midlife — anyone navigating the in-between times, the identity shifts, the body that's asking for different things, the quiet questions that don't have easy answers. And with those in the second half of life who sense something sacred stirring and want a companion for that inward journey.

My website is simoneislistening.com, if you want to find me there.

And this Substack is where I’ll be writing — about Focusing, about midlife, about menopause as sacred passage, about what it means to be spiritual without a map.

I’m glad you’re here.

— Simone

If this resonated, consider sharing it with someone who might need it. And if you have questions, thoughts, or your own story of map-tossing, I’d genuinely love to hear it in the comments.