You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out to Feel Fre

MAY 2026  ·  FREEDOM THROUGH ABUNDANCE

On loss, nervous system safety, and what it actually means to live like you have enough — before your outside world catches up.

I want to tell you something I spent most of my life not believing: freedom is not waiting for you on the other side of figured out.

It is not waiting until the savings account hits a certain number. Not waiting until the relationship is healed, the career is aligned, the body feels right, or the calendar finally clears. I know this now — not because someone told me, but because this past year I lived the long, uncomfortable, beautiful proof of it.

And I want to share it with you.

When Loss Comes in Layers

Grief is not something I came to as an adult. It has been a companion my entire life.

I grew up in a family navigating chronic illness — my sister, Stephanie's, degenerative neurologic disease began presenting before I was born, so there was never a version of my childhood that did not include that kind of loving and losing in slow motion. My first experience of losing someone I loved happened when I was three years old. I did not know a life without grief shaping it.

I say this not to dwell in the heaviness of it, but because it matters for understanding what came next.

I already knew where this road led. That knowledge had lived in my body long before any official milestone confirmed it — carried quietly in the way you learn to love someone while already grieving them, in the way you show up every day knowing what the horizon holds.

In December 2024, my brother, Isak, was placed on hospice care — battling the same degenerative neurologic disease that had taken Stephanie. It was a milestone in the truest sense: not a surprise, but a marking. The beginning of the end of his journey, and in some ways, the moment my own healing work had to begin in earnest.

At the end of February 2025, I was laid off. Company restructuring. The kind of loss that arrives with professional language and still lands like a gut punch — the kind that closes a chapter you did not choose to end, and leaves you standing in a doorway wondering what comes next.

At the end of August 2025, Isak passed away.

And then in November — just a few days before my birthday — I lost my dog. The one who had been my quiet companion through all of it. The one who had sat with me in the hardest, most private moments of grief, when no words existed and presence was the only thing that helped.

Each loss built on the last. Layered. Compounding. And with each one, the inner work I had already started — the nervous system work that had begun when Isak's hospice care started — became not optional but essential.

The Foundation I Had Been Missing

I had spent years doing all the things that are supposed to lead to abundance — working hard, setting goals, journaling intentions, showing up. And I was exhausted. Because underneath all of it, I was operating from a nervous system that had never truly felt safe. One that had been quietly bracing through years of anticipatory grief, through watching loss approach from a distance and being powerless to stop it.

What I did not understand — what nobody had ever put into words for me clearly — was that no amount of strategy or effort can fill a nervous system running on empty. You can pour your best ideas, your biggest dreams, your most disciplined habits into a body that does not feel safe, and the cup will always have a leak.

When I came across the work of Phillip Andrew, something clicked that I had been circling for years. He teaches that nervous system regulation is not a nice-to-have — it is the foundation. That dysregulation fuels financial chaos, relationship conflict, overwork, and disconnection. And that when you try to build abundance on top of a dysregulated system, you are just overlaying a new vision onto the same old operating system. Nothing really changes.

That hit me somewhere deep. Because I had been trying to build freedom from the outside in — through achievement, through pushing through, through proving. And the work of this past year has been learning to build it from the inside out.

What Regulation Actually Felt Like

I am not going to pretend it was graceful or linear. But I can tell you what it felt like when something began to shift.

My mind stopped racing.

That might sound simple. It was not simple. It was everything. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I could sit somewhere — in nature, in a restaurant, in a parking lot, literally anywhere — and feel peace. Not numb. Not distracted. Actual, quiet peace. I could observe my surroundings without my nervous system scanning for the next threat. I could just be where I was.

Creativity started to flow again. I felt inspired in ways I had not since before the losses began stacking. When I was in conversation with someone, I could actually listen — fully, without my attention being split by my to-do list or my phone or the low hum of anxiety that had become so familiar I had stopped noticing it.

And then people started saying things.

You look incredible. What have you been doing? There is something different about you.

I had been focusing on my health as part of my healing journey — movement, sleep, nourishment. But what they were seeing was not a workout routine. It was inner peace showing up in my skin. It was genuine presence. It was joy that was not performed but felt. The kind of glow that does not come from a product — it comes from finally feeling safe enough to stop bracing.

My outside world was beginning to reflect my inner world. Not because I forced it. But because I finally stopped fighting myself long enough to let it.

So What Is Abundance, Really?

This is the question I keep coming back to — and the one I want to sit with you in for a moment.

We have been handed a cultural story about abundance that is almost entirely about numbers. The right income. The right net worth. The right square footage. And while financial stability matters — genuinely, practically matters — it is not the thing. It was never the thing.

Abundance, the way I understand it now, is a state of being before it is a state of having. It is time that feels spacious, even when the calendar is full. It is relationships that feel nourishing, even when they are hard. It is creativity that flows, rest that actually restores, and a quiet inner knowing that you are not behind — that you are exactly where you need to be.

It is the difference between grasping and receiving. Between proving and trusting. Between performing abundance and actually inhabiting it.

And here is what I have learned through the hardest year of my life: you can begin to inhabit it right now. Before anything changes. Before the grief lifts completely. Before you have it all figured out.

The losses I walked through this past year — Isak's passing, losing my dog, a career chapter closing — were not things I would have chosen. But they are not all the same kind of loss. A job is a chapter ending. It can be grieved and released, and something new can grow in its place. The loss of Isak, of Stephanie, of the ones who shaped you — that is something different. You do not get over it. You learn to carry it. You find a new normal and you build your life around and within it. Grief does not work like a problem to be solved. It works like a river — you learn to move with it.

What the regulation work gave me was not a way out of grief. It gave me a place to stand inside of it.

An Invitation

This month at Parallel Journeys, we are exploring Freedom through Abundance — what it looks like across every dimension of life. Time. Relationships. Creativity. Nature. Community. Rest. Joy. And yes, finances too — because we think that conversation is worth having honestly and without shame.

But more than anything, we want to explore the inner work. The nervous system. The stories we carry about what we need to have or resolve before we are allowed to feel free.

Because Kelly and I believe — having walked this road ourselves, in different ways and together — that freedom is not a destination. It is a practice. A choice you make in the middle of the mess, not after it clears.

If this post stirred something in you, we invite you to sit with it. Grab your journal and let one of these prompts meet you where you are:

You don't have to have it all figured out.

You just have to be willing to feel safe enough to begin.

Written by Mariah Sather

With love and abundance,

Mariah & Kelly