At the library last week, Londyn and I checked out this book:

Goldilocks and the 3 Dinosaurs, as retold by Mo Willems.


It’s a super adorable, super enjoyable little book in a lot of ways. It updates and retells the classic children’s Goldilocks story from the premise that the house Goldilocks breaks into actually belongs to these 3 dinosaurs who love to eat chocolate-filled little girls. 

These dinosaurs set the “poorly supervised” Goldilocks up. 

So instead of her sticking with the script and going to the 3 bears’ house, the dinos reroute her into their house, trick her into stuffing herself with chocolate pudding and … you can imagine the rest. 

Kind of sinister. Kind of dark. Kind of cute. Kind of like all good fairy tales. 

BUT. This book is kind of deep, too.

For one, there are all these hints throughout the book that something ain’t right. 

And Goldilocks just misses one hint after another because she’s so motivated by the pudding and the idea of a post-pudding nap.

She moves through the house overruling the evidence before her and, ostensibly, her own Wise Inner Being… her own Inner Intelligence… until just before the story ends. 

A page or two from the end, she overhears the dinos plotting to eat her as soon as she falls asleep. 

With one eyebrow cocked up, she takes a sacred pause.

And she considers the long list of things she had encountered in the house that had felt a little off. 

Disharmonies within her Inner Guidance system that she had been overruling:
… the “Home Dinosaur Home” sign on the wall becomes more apparent. 
… the incredibly tall height of the kitchen counters, which she’d had to climb up using a ladder…. goes from being weird to being a clue she almost missed.
…and the fact that the chairs and beds all seemed way too large, even for bears, starts to glare. 

In a moment of clarity, Goldilocks realizes that this house wasn’t the three little bears’ house. It is a dinosaur house. 

And she hightails it out of the place, just as the dinos burst in to devour her. She is saved by her own belated, but accurate, Inner Guidance system.

Theeee End. 

Well, that page of the book says The End.

But if you turn one more page, like Londy and I did, you see this note from the author: 

“The moral is that if you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.”

Hunh. 

That doesn’t sound like a little kid lesson, does it?

But I’m pretty sure Mo didn’t put that line in just for kids.

That was a word for someone reading or listening to this today.

The moral of Goldilocks and the 3 Dinos is: if you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.

Leave the story.

I don’t care if you’ve been overriding your own eyes and ears for 20 years.

I don’t care how much of your life or career you have sunk into this situation that you know ain’t right and ain’t your story.

None of that matters.

Someone reading this today needs to hear this, so forgive me if that’s not you but also… WE ALL need this permission sometimes.

If you find yourself in the wrong story, leave the story.

And… let me say this. 

The love-and-light brigade won’t want me to say this, but it’s true, so here it is anyway: You did not personally write every plot point of the story you have lived and are living right now. 

This culture, this world’s toxic power structures and your spiritual and genealogical ancestors set some stuff in motion years before you were even born that impacts you and your life today. 

And right now today, your this-life traumas, your conditioning, your unconscious patterns, your disappointments, your relational templates with the world and with life and (blessedly) your sacred contracts may be more active in creating your reality than you’re aware of.

But spiritual maturity begins when you stop resisting the truth that you have near-limitless power to upgrade, create and rewrite your own story starting now. 

And the more you mature spiritually, emotionally and psychologically, the more skillful you get at not just fixing situations and relationships… and not just tolerating disharmonies… not just reframing stuff in your mind, but also at seeing necessary endings that need making and making them bad boys, skillfully or not. 

And sure, sometimes you can leave the story by changing the story.

Sometimes you can change the story by accepting something you’ve been resisting about the story. 

But sometimes, in a very real, very literal way, you need to stop telling yourself that leaving the story is failing or would be catastrophic and leave the story by… well, by actually leaving the story. 

You dig? 

I think you do. 

With so much love and respect I hope you can feeling it coming off your phone or laptop or speakers or however this is coming to you.

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

At any given moment in life, there is a choice you can make. 

Scratch that. Let me say that differently.

In EVERY moment of your life, you are making a choice. 

That choice  — I call it The Choice — is whether to fulfill your potential or whether to hinder your own highest good.

This is spiritual law. It’s one of what I’ve come to call The House Rules of the Universe. 

There’s no super simple, absolute, black-and-white decision rule to help you make the right choice when you make The Choice. 

Sometimes, The Choice in favor of your highest good is to gear up, go all in and do the damn thing. 

Other times, The Choice that supports you reaching your full potential is to do nothing. To take a break. Take a vacation. Take a nap. 

Fortunately, you always have the ability to know whether the choice you’re making is a vote in favor of your good or not by how it feels when you are about to do it. 

If the thing you’re thinking about doing feels good, shackles off, energizing or expansive, it is a step toward your highest good… even if the thing also makes you feel nervous, afraid or vulnerable. 

If the option before you feels shackles on, depleting or like you’re letting your own self down… that’s a signal that it’s against your highest good and fullest potential.

The first step to getting skillful with this House Rule of the Universe is this: Get in a place of radical self-acceptance and self-love first. 

Do not decide that you love yourself enough to work on your choices and then hate yourself for the choices you’ve made or are making. 

That just feeds your Inner Critic. And that defeats the whole purpose. 

I’m not big on convincing people to do anything ever, but here’s a super-short list of my arguments why you should suspend self-judgment while you look at your choices:

1. Self-judgment never creates self-liberation so it’s 100% counterproductive.
2. You have no ability to change your past choices so judging yourself for them is wasted energy you could be using to make self-actualizing choices now.
3. Almost any wise human you ever meet will tell you they got that way, in part, by making choices they wouldn’t repeat and reflecting on those choices and how things turned out. 
4. When wise humans reflect on their lives backwards, they see both the unwanted consequences of their past choices and the wonderful things that came to them despite or even through the unwanted seasons or upsetting moments in their past. 

Listen: You have to decide not to judge or criticize yourself when you start to see the choices you’re making or have made in the past, or you’re not allowed to keep reading, watching or listening to this message. 

I’m serious. If you can’t agree to suspend the need to judge yourself for the choices you make, no problem. I love you. Close this email. Have a beautiful week. See you next time. 

Oh, you CAN commit? No self-judgment? No self-criticism? 

Can you take a step outside yourself and become an objective observer of your own choice-making for even a day? 

Ok cool, then you can keep reading. 

Now. The second step is to become aware that you’re making The Choice all the time, and to become aware of how you are making the Choice. So much of our decision-making is habitual, that it’s very easy to unwittingly find yourself in a downward spiral, living the results of autopilot decisions you made (and are still making, out of habit) that limit the extent to which the genius within is ever allowed out. 

And the third step is to get intentional about The Choice more and more of the time, making Choices that feel better and better to you over time and then watching the net level of freedom, liberation, wholeness, joy, health, wealth, wisdom, abundance and unfettered self-expression rise as you make The Choice over and over again, in the small things and in the big ones. 

But that part kind of happens automatically if you really dive deep on Step 2: Awareness. So let’s go back there.

Just becoming aware that you are voting for yourself or against yourself in every moment helps to break the pull of those habit patterns. 

So I want you to start to see the many, many ways this choice … this vote for your highest good or vote for your inner critic… can look in your everyday life.

Catch this principle: Your opportunities to make The Choice number in the thousands every day. 

Here’s what they can look like: 

You get to choose whether to think a self-judging thought or a self-loving thought.

You get to choose whether to make an excuse or whether to reclaim your power by taking responsibility, even if that’s uncomfortable. 

You get to choose whether to have uplifting or complaining conversations. And every time you find yourself in a complaining conversation, you get to choose whether to keep participating in it, or shift it, or end it… at any time. 

You get to choose whether, what and how much to eat (most of the time).

You get to choose what food to even have on hand, in your home. (Most of the time.)

You get to choose whether to select your food based on what truly nourishes your body or to eat your emotions. 

You get to choose whether to binge one more show or to read something beneficial before bed. 

You get to choose whether to hate on your job or to bloom where you’re planted, even when you decide it’s time to move on. 

You get to choose whether to gossip or to praise. 

You get to choose whether to keep overcommitting your calendar  x and overextending yourself or whether to practice saying no and create more space and time in your life. 

You get to choose whether to build a rich inner life or whether to avert your eyes from looking within because you’re afraid of what you’ll find. 

You get to choose whether to ask for what you need or to play the martyr.

When your kids feel bad or can’t access their neurological impulse control centers, you get to choose whether to connect and soothe or to yell and threaten. Up to you. 

You get to choose whether to do the inner work to heal your family’s patterns or to keep perpetuating them.

You get to decide whether to let your this-lifetime trauma, your traumatized ancestors and this toxic culture be the boss of you or whether you’re ready to turn within, shine light on your shadows and reclaim your sovereignty and your life. 

And… you get to choose whether to rush and judge the pace and progress of your Inner Work or to make peace with yourself, let things take the time they take and start living the wide-open, spacious life you came here to live. 

In any given moment you get to choose whether to stop disrespecting, overruling and overriding the voice of your own Inner Intelligence or whether to start recognizing it, honoring it and obeying it because it is the voice of Infinite Intelligence sending you a text message like “NO don’t do that. Don’t go there. Yes! Raise your hand for that. You’re ready for this. I’ll help.”

Every freaking moment of your life, you get to decide whether to be stingy or lavish with yourself.

… and that’s just off the top of my head. 

Catch this principle: 

All day, all throughout the day, every single day you are making The Choice to receive or resist your highest good, over and over again.

I don’t want you to feel terrorized by this.

I want you to feel the power in this.

And I want you to know what they say in Tibet, that “if you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.”

If you make The Choice to step toward fulfilling your potential this minute… and then in the next one… over and over again…

If you make The Choice to follow your Wise Inner Guidance in this minute…

If you close your eyes and sit with the question of what kind of human you really want to be, then you open your eyes and make a decision to show up as that person in this minute… 

And if you make The Choice in this moment to stop participating in anything other than  what you want… 

The years will take care of themselves. 

The seemingly Big Stuff will take care of itself. 

The stars will align. 

And so will the rest of your life. 

I dare you. Try it. Start now. 

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI
Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

I’ve spent the last couple of months in a cloister of my own making, deep in Monk Mode.

First in Mexico, then back here as Londyn and I got COVID, quarantined and reemerged better than before. (I’ll tell you that part next week.)

Stillness begets clarity. So does illness, for that matter. 

So I got a double portion of clarity. Heaping. Overflowing. 

Clarity that my life’s work is helping smart, successful people do their dreams.

Clarity that the way I do it is by helping them understand, unpack and undo their lifelong self-sabotage patterns.

Clarity that all self-sabotage is rooted in the Inner Critic within. 

Clarity that my unique method for helping transform the Inner Critic is what I call Spiritual Strategy, rooted in neurobiology, depth psychology and spiritual law (aka “the House Rules of the Universe”).

Clarity that I don’t want to work that hard anymore. 

Clarity that I’m getting away from a lot of the writing, consulting and services I’ve done in the past… so I can focus on writing and podcasting and speaking the deep, liberating messages I’m called to share.

Clarity. Clarity. Clarity. 

It’s so delicious. 

And it’s so contagious. 

My team… my clients… my vendors… my partners… everyone involved in the ecosystem of my business has been getting a contact high off all this clarity. 

It’s kinda like in the Bible where it says to “write the vision and make it plain, that they may run who read it.”

Kind of like that. 

They running. Actually, they’re FLYING. We’re all flying, all in formation… all in sync, even as things shift and change, like a murmuration of starlings. 



(Side note for leaders, entrepreneurs and parents: If your “team” is not running or if some are flying in circles or running the wrong direction, YOU might need to take a Monk Mode moment and reset your own clarity, then come back. When you come back, communicate the new vision starting with your why, and ending with all the things you won’t be doing anymore so you can focus on the new. And just watch what happens. Actually, email me so I can hear what happens.)

But back to me. 

Still on this clarity high, I went on a joyful rampage this morning, journaling the breakthrough questions I would share with someone new to me. Someone who wants to take Step 1 on the journey into fulfilling their dreams.

Inspired by the old Diana Vreeland column in Harper’s Bazaar, I started with this suggestion phrase: WHY DON’T YOU…

And then I filled in the blanks.

I loved what flowed next, so I thought I’d share it with you. 

Next time you get an inspired idea or you have a jolt of inspiration to start doing your OWN dreams, consult this list. 

TARA’S MANIFESTO 

SPIRITUAL STRATEGIES FOR DOING YOUR DREAMS

Why don’t you…?

… speak only of what you want today.

… stop complaining. No, for real.

… give your Inner Critic, Inner Censor and Inner Editor the day off today.

Stop seeking approval or permission from anyone but your Wise Inner Being.

Radiate calm while all around you lose their heads.

Decide that you can be, do and have ANYTHING you want. 

Then, let yourself want what you really want. 

Pick the subject of your wildest dream and ask yourself “how easy can I let this be?”

Receive your Divine Inheritance.

Stop performing, conforming and achieving to get love, attention, affection or approval. 

Stop trying to be so damn productive. Start being fruitful instead.

Start with why.

Commit to becoming the person you came here to be. 

Do less. Receive more. 

Stop acting impoverished. You’re not. And you aren’t serving those who really are by fondling your fear fantasies.

Decide what you really want and stop participating in everything else. 

Get rid of ⅓ of what you own. 

Stop looking for love in all the wrong places and start seeing how much love is all around you and available to you. Not later… now. 

Lose track of time and lose yourself in blissful, single-minded absorption in something that delights you just because. 

Delight in the life you’ve created up to now.

Give yourself the benefit of the doubt. 

Stop overruling your inner guidance. 

Make peace with yourself.

Heed your own inner voice. 

Start living your unlived life. 

***END MANIFESTO (FOR NOW)***

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

Listen, Brilliant One. 

I heard there are some gurus out in the guru-sphere reminding you that you can do hard things.

And when I heard that, I thought…

“It’s true. We can. But my people don’t need to be reminded of that. They do hard things 13 times before breakfast. 

In fact, that’s the problem. 

Because hard things can get you pretty far in life. But the most meaningful, beautiful, joyful things in life don’t come that way. 

They come through the power of our focus. Our attention. Our willingness to listen when Inner Intelligence is speaking and go where Inner Guidance says to go. 

My people have been rewarded for performing…conforming…achieving… being productive… and doing hard things their whole lives. 

And 9 times out of 10, that’s what’s blocking the magic! 

That addiction to hard becomes a relational template with the whole Universe, where you can’t even see the wondrous unlived life that is waiting for you because you’re so used to everything good being so damn hard…”

That was my thought process. 

And just as I was thinking those thoughts, my student and client Meredith Vaish, the Creator and CEO of Pause Box, shared this:

And that was the tipping point, that last little thing that fell into place and reminded me to tell you something I’ve been meaning to tell you (again) for the sake of emphasis. 

Brilliant One, please, for the love of everything sacred:

Let it be easy.

Let it be easy. 

Let it be easy. 

Let it be easy.

Whatever it is. 

Try that on in your spirit. 

Get curious about it. 

If the idea that it could be easy feels like a spark of relief, immediately followed by a spark of argument (Easy is not real! That’s not how the world works! You don’t know my life!) then… you’re on the right track. 

If the mere phrase “let it be easy” sparks within you the temptation to pull out your struggle portfolio and start litigating the case for how real your struggle is… good. Let’s go there. 

If the idea that some stuff you’ve been doing the very hard way could actually be way easier sparks a frisson of terror in your heart, like it still occasionally does in mine, you might be on the trail of a radically liberating insight.

Here’s that insight: Very early in life, you might have learned that to get love, attention or affection, to avoid catastrophe or to be seen as valuable, worthy or a card-carrying member of your family, you have to be any of the following things: 

• Extraordinary
• Perfect
• Longsuffering
• Martyr of the Month
• The Director of the Universe*, spinning all the plates, all the time and smiling all along the way
• Busy
• Better than others
• Over-achieving
• Valiantly plugging away, doing hard things in every area of your life (even, in your relationships and hobbies)
• Never quitting or imposing boundaries on how hard you’ll go
• Never all the way “off” 
• Constantly putting forth super heroic effort.

If you had to be heroic to get your needs met as a child, your toxic penchant for struggle might be rooted in those very early life family patterns. This is what the author and psychologist Alice Miller deems the Drama of the Gifted Child. The “gifted” part describes how good the little You was at repressing your True Self to get what you needed. 

If the struggle “feels like home”, you will re-create it, over and over again as you go through life.  You will re-create that repression of your True Self, over and over again as you go through life. and you’ll even find that struggle just feels more comfortable, available and “right” than ease does. You might not even like people who seem to live on Easy Street, and you might reject, ignore or blow up opportunities for your own easeful, spacious life, over and over again.

But let me tell you something. Your True Self and your true life are not all about the struggle. I mean, have you ever met a toddler who was a martyr? 

Didn’t think so. 

So anything you were taught that says you must struggle to be worthy of love or to thrive is what I call a “lie”. These are the lies of well-meaning family members, and the lies of culture. 

But over a lifetime, these lies get wired into your worldview. They become internalized into the voice of your own inner critic. Your own imposter syndrome. Your own self-judgment and self-criticism. Your own harsh standards for yourself and the false prerequisites you place on your own joy. Your own harsh worldview and negative mental narratives about what kind of life is possible for you and how hard it has to be.

If your thoughts say that all of life is struggle, not struggling doesn’t even occur to you. Doing things the very hardest way feels like it might even endanger your existence. When things feel easy, you feel lazy. Like you’re courting catastrophe if you go all the way on vacation without checking a single email for a single week. 

A spacious, easeful lifestyle without constantly living on the clock might spark existential dread in your soul.

If struggle feels like home, you’ll create hard, to feel alive. You’ll take on difficult relationships or make easy ones difficult, because that just feels more “right”. That feels like home. 

The struggle lies, the unworthiness lies, are the lies that stop you from taking a nap. From taking a break. From getting the help you need. From taking things slow. 

These are the lies that stop you from saying no when everything within you wants to say no. 

These are the lies that cause you to overrule your own inner guidance, to push through that feeling of “shackles on” that would keep you out of depleting, joyless relationships, jobs and patterns if you only listened to it. 

These are the lies that cause you to take on more and more new obligations, without first ending old ones or getting help.

Please be aware that I’m using the harsh word “lies” with great intentionality here. 

That you must produce to have value is an absolute, bald-faced lie.

Because you need never prove your value.

You need never perform to have value.

You need never conform to have value.

You need never achieve anything – be it a certain weight, a certain income or a certain level of status or “success” – to have value. 

You might want to do those things and you might even be destined to do them, but that’s not how you “earn” your place on this planet. 

You need never produce superhuman output to have value.

That’s the lie of the oppressor, in the guise of productivity culture. 

You didn’t come here to check a bunch of tasks off some never-ending, ever-growing to do list in the sky.

You came here for joy.

You came here for ever-increasing wholeness, as you start reclaiming all the parts of yourself you had to shut away, repress and disown just to make it through life, when you were young. 

You came here for radical liberation from inner conflict, from a life of struggle, from the repressive lies of culture and of your own inner critic, imposter syndrome, and self-sabotaging, negative thoughts.

You don’t prove or earn your value by achieving, even though that’s what culture wants you to think. 

That might feel real, like it’s how the world works.

The struggle way feels real. I know it does, y’all. But it’s not true, [First Name].

What’s true is that you are valuable, valued, cherished and beloved of All That Is, not because of what you do, but because you exist. 

You can’t earn your worth, because it’s not earnable. And you can’t lose it, because it’s not lose-able.

Your value is absolute. Your worthiness is, too. You deserve a wonderful, blessed life not because you work your heart out, but because you exist. 

Theeee end. Actually, no… I’m not done.

You are not an asset to be tracked, measured and “valued” like a commodity. 

You are a radiant, magnetic soul and spirit. 

You are made of stardust and mystical, scientific miracles.

You are offspring of the limitless love, the infinite intelligence and the creative power that formed all worlds.

You are a droplet of that.

And you weren’t made for constant, chronic struggle. 

So. 

What are you willing to let be easy today? 

And if the idea of “easy” comes hard to you, ask yourself this breakthrough question all throughout the day/week/month/year/decade, anytime your struggle switch flips on: 

“How easy can I let this be?”

And just watch what lights up. 

Let me flag something for you: You can expect your inner critic to talk you out of the opportunities for things to be spacious and easeful that will start lighting up when you start asking yourself “How easy can I let this be?”

Your inner critic will chime in. Your imposter syndrome will flare up. 

I dare you to gracefully do things differently than you ever have before, and let it be easy anyway.

Head up + heart out,

P.S.: I’ll share more about the struggle switch within you soon.

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

The Adlerian psychologists have a few wise things to say about so-called “defiant” children.

They say all misbehaving children feel misunderstood. 

And they say all children — behaving or misbehaving — have two buckets they need filled every day: an attention bucket and a power bucket.

Fail to fill either bucket and acting out occurs. 

And this usually becomes an unholy, unruly cycle of defiance, whereby: 

1. Kid doesn’t get attention.
2. Kid acts out.
3. Kid gets attention, even if it’s negative attention.
4. Kid learns that the way to get attention is to act out.

It’s almost ridiculously simple.

Most of the people I work with have identified that they have a problem with self-motivation in that they struggle to stay focused, to be all in and to stay on course when it comes to the things that matter the most to them. They get chronically blocked by conscious fear and self-doubt, and unconscious forms of fear and doubt that usually manifest as distraction. 

Most of the people I work with are also high-achieving, which means they have a pretty incredible track record of actually doing things, just not the things that matter to them. They have a great track record of doing things that get them validation, status, money and approval in the eyes of other people.

Sometimes it’s helpful to think of this kind of self-motivation impasse — this inner resistance —  as kind of like having a defiant inner child that acts out when you ask it to help you do something that matters to you.

When you’re in a season of trying to get into action on your own callings, dreams, self-improvement aspirations and creative projects, and you hit that wall of Inner Resistance, ask yourself these three questions:

1. What within me feels misunderstood right now? Extend an open, warm, listening opportunity to your own emotions and thoughts. 

Write them out freely without censorship and without self-criticism. Delay and suspend your own judgement of your own self. 

Don’t try to reframe anything or talk yourself into feeling something you don’t feel. To do so is to divorce and abandon yourself. Just listen to yourself. If you feel sad, feel sad. If you feel afraid, feel afraid.

Feel your feelings, and let them do their work within you, and they’ll leave you alone before too long. 

2. What within me needs attention right now? I mean this on every level. Do your feet feel cold? Put socks on. Need to pee? Go do that, not in 15 minutes. Now. Are you hungry. Stressed. Anxious? Angry? 

Do you need more sleep? Do you need better nutrition? More physical activity? 

Do you need to stop pushing parts of yourself away? Do you need to stop hiding your own light? Do you need to start grieving or mourning something? 

Do you need to get some help?

3. What within me needs to be empowered right now? You have so much more power than you’re likely exercising. We all do. So make it your practice of regularly empowering your inner child – the playful, innocent, eternally hopeful core of your own inner being — to have some power and call at least some of the shots of your life.

You can do this by devoting more time to playing with dogs and babies. By devoting more time to playing, period. By dressing up when you have nothing but Zoom calls on the calendar. By being lighthearted and playful. By giving someone or giving yourself the (unearned) benefit of the doubt, just because. Or by taking a chance on some endeavor that the hardened, cynical part of you would think is foolish.

You empower your inner child by creating a life that doesn’t make you dread getting up in the morning. You do this by taking things off your plate that you hate to do. By reducing the number of things you hate to do that you have to do on a recurring basis, as part of your everyday life.

If you fill your inner child’s buckets with “credits” for attention, power and understanding today, you can cash those credits in weeks or months in the future. So if you make a habit of filling your inner child’s attention bucket and power bucket a little (or a lot) every day, you will hit less resistance and less defiance when you try to self-motivate. 

Back in the 1900s (lol), they used to call “defiant” children “spirited”. I hate that phrase, because it sets up this idea that the parent is the opponent of the child’s spirit, and the goal should be to surgically extract the spirit from the child. And that’s exactly how so many adults you know had all their brilliant, spirited edges filed off, dulled down and locked up when they were young.

So if you have what feels like a defiant inner child, change the way you think of it. There’s not something within you that’s defiant. You have a  “spirited” inner child. And your goal is not to take the spirit out. You don’t want a spirit-less inner child. You want to unlock that spirit. You want to team up with that spirit. You want to get to know it and let its brilliance infuse everything you ever do. You want to give the reins of your life to that spirit.

And you do that by giving your spirited inner child some understanding, your attention and the power to control a little bit of your everyday life.

Try it and let me know how it goes.

Head up + heart out, 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

Carl Jung is the source of my current favorite spiritual mic-drop.

He said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Meaning: Deep-seated beliefs and parts of your personality that you aren’t even aware of are controlling the events of your life, and you don’t even know it.

Until you make them conscious, you’ll just think that life is hard, that the struggle is real or that the world is an unfriendly place.

We call the most pervasive, most deep-seated, unconscious beliefs that pave the landscape of our lives “trances”, because:

• they are constant and absolute
• they are so unconscious that they run in the background of all our waking — and sleeping — moments, and
• they direct our own actions, emotions, decisions, perspectives and even the events and circumstances we create or attract.

Here are just two of the most common, most devastating trances:

1. The trance of scarcity. This is the trance of “there’s not enough to go around” and “life is hard.”

The trance of scarcity is opposite of the truth that, actually, billions of miracles occur every single day simply to support your personal, individual survival, existence and thriving.

It also opposes the reality that this world is totally riddled and abundant with resources, that there are plenty to go around, and that actually the less we strain and struggle the more easefully the resources we need flow our way.

You can make your own unconscious trance of scarcity conscious by noticing the storylines in your head that chronically go like this:

“I didn’t get enough sleep.”

“I never get enough sleep.”

“There’s no time for that.”

“The struggle is real.”

“Adulting is hard.”

“I’ve got to be perfect or act perfect or work my heart out or over-perform to keep Really Bad Things from happening.”

You can also notice how often you clench your teeth, grind your jaw, hunch your shoulders as though bracing for catastrophe or (and this used to be my personal go-to) hold your breath.

2. The trance of unworthiness. Any belief that you “should be” different than you are is a page from the book of unworthiness. The trance of unworthiness will convince you that it’s not okay to relax all the way, ever. Or that there’s a little bit something wrong with you, so you have to be perfect. Or that people will reject you if you’re anything but totally beyond criticism, 100% of the time.

This often shows up in perfectionism, self-criticism and the resulting symptoms of overeating, over-drinking and over-working.

The trance of unworthiness also shows up as what John Welwood calls the “mood of unlove”: the failure to understand that you are deeply lovable, exactly as you are. This can make it very hard to let love all the way in.

Welwood says people with a mood of unlove “imagine that they are insignificant, unattractive, deficient, lacking in some essential way. And all human greed, jealousy, aggression, and violence arise from there.”

You wake up from the trance of unworthiness by radically accepting yourself, your history and your life and even the way the world is and works.

This does not mean you can’t transform your life — and impact the world — in wonderful ways.

In fact, the most powerful platform for changing your life is to practice being what one of my teachers describes as “satisfied with what is and eager for more.”

Waking up from these trances is possible. Just by making the unconscious conscious, you begin the process of learning to see the world very differently and upgrading your beliefs.

Upgrading these beliefs is a journey of moment after moment of clarity, as you see the inner narratives that have been guiding your life (These stories might even have been controlling your whole family or culture, sometimes for generations.)

Upgrading these beliefs is a process. And it takes time. And you must be gentle and easy with yourself along the way. Because each step of this process feels a little like the end of the world as you know it .

Let me rephrase. Each step of awakening from these trances is, actually, the end of the world as you’ve known it if the world as you’ve known it has been cold, mean or struggle-filled.

This can be disorienting, and can even make you occasionally yearn for the comfort of your old, harsh, limiting, stressful worldview.

But then one day, or maybe a little bit at a time on a thousand different days, it will occur to you that you’ve acquired the ability to intentionally choose how you live your life.

Albert Einstein laid out our options for choosing how to live very clearly.

He said, “there are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

Head up + heart out,

A Quick Note from Tara: 

It’s August, so I’m in Monk Mode. Working on my book, remodeling my business and … letting some new places woo me. 

I’ll fill you in on that later….

While I’m gone, I’m re-sharing some all time favorites from the Transformation Tuesday archive. Enjoy! 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

I’m not one of those “life is short” people.

Because you are eternal. Your soul is eternal.

And so are all the elements of your body: the carbon, the nitrogen. They’re not making any more of that stuff you know. In our Universe, matter just shifts form. It never dies.

So you can never, really die.

That said, some of us are in these physical bodies for a shorter season, and others for long, leisurely extended ones.

Yet I’m not a big fan of fetishizing death as a cudgel for motivation.

“Hurry up and get it all done!” that story goes. “Check all the boxes off on your bucket list!”

“Achieve, accomplish, life is short”!

Eh. That’s not my jam. Because that’s not why we’re really here.

We’re here for freedom, growth and joy. For connection. For love and wisdom.

Yet, all the same, we are only in these beautiful, intelligent meat-covered skeletons made of stardust for a season.

A precious and powerful season.

We can find love and energy, satisfaction with right now and eagerness for more, when we meditate on the impermanence of life.

We can find freedom from the fear of death during our lives when we follow the words of Ram Dass, who advises us to “keep death on your shoulder and identify with your soul.”

In preparing for one of my talks, I found myself re-reading the old Steve Jobs commencement speech, which had several passages about the brilliance of our mortality.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

He went on:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Everything else is secondary.

Inner peace lets you hear your own inner voice.

Another reason to release any inner struggles or self-judgment.

Another point in favor of lavish self-love, which reverses inner judgment and creates an atmosphere of inner peace.

Another argument to wholeheartedly engage with the subjects of your fears. To have the courage – the heart – to follow that inner voice.

So today, let’s take an Inner Retreat to become more at peace, more open and more at ease in your own beautiful, resilient and temporary body.

Take three deep, delicious, leisurely, grounding breaths.

Inhaling, filling your lungs all the way up, and exhaling, emptying them out.

Two more breaths just like that in your own time, as you allow your body to begin to ground down and sink in for today’s Inner Retreat.

Slowly scan down your body from the top to the bottom, just noting how it feels as you go.

Don’t try to change anything. Just note.

Today, I want you to do the exercise of focusing on your body’s different muscle groups, one by one, and shut the active energy in them down, one by one.

Start with your feet and your lower legs, shutting them off. Letting them sink in.

Then your upper legs and thighs, and your pelvis. Turn the power off. Shut the tension off.

Sinking in.

Now your belly and your chest, powering any active energy of holding or tightening down.

Next your lower arms, then your neck and your shoulders: power them down. Turn all activity in these muscles off.

Shut it down for these moments.

And finally your jaws, your face, your cheeks, your forehead and the crown of your head, even your eyelids and your gums, power them down. Turn any activity in those muscles off.

In this space, muscles fully relaxed and body sinking all the way in, all the way down, for the rest of your time this morning, focus on the word AT on the inhale, and EASE on your exhales.

Noticing how, even when you are fully unguarded, fully relaxed, fully deactivated, the breath of life still flows through you.

With no effort required from you.

Your lung still breathes.

Your heart still beats.

No effort needed at all.

The entire Universe continues to collaborate in your survival and thriving, even when you let yourself be in the state of ease.

When your mind wanders, come back to these words: AT EASE.

Allow yourself to hear the sounds and smell the smells around you, as you inhale and exhale, opening yourself to more and more ease.

Head up + heart out,

A Quick Note from Tara: 

It’s August, so I’m in Monk Mode. Working on my book, remodeling my business and … letting some new places woo me. 

I’ll fill you in on that later….

While I’m gone, I’m re-sharing some all time favorites from the Transformation Tuesday archive. Enjoy! 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

The #1 word people use when describing their vision, intention or goals to me is this: “SCARY”.

#2 is “BIG” and #3 is “terrifying”.

I’ve definitely detected a fear theme here.

My general rule is that if you have a deep calling to a thing like being drawn to a magnet and it terrifies you a tiny bit, you should definitely be trying to do it.

See, anytime someone mentions fear as they describe a thing they’d like to do in their next season, I’m reminded of what Tara Mohr says when she lays out the traits of a true, deep, soul-level calling.

She says you know when something is truly a calling when, among other things:

1. You aren’t yet who you’ll need to become to fulfill it, and

2. You don’t yet have what you’ll need to have in order to carry it out.

The gap between who you are now and who you’ll need to become to answer your soul’s callings is precisely the part people find scary.

But that gap is also how your callings transform you. 

Catch this principle: Your callings call forth your greatness.

But you can’t become who you need to become to do your callings by:

• sitting in a room thinking about them 
• talking to your friends about them, or
• making plans to do them after you handle whatever the Life Issue of the Day happens to be today, or this week or month or year

You can only become who you need to be to do your callings by doing your callings.

I also like to point out to those who are feeling the urge to retreat on the brink of stepping into their callings that it’s very easy — tempting, even — to confuse fear with awe.

It’s easy to confuse fear with the exhilaration that meets you on the precipice of your expansion. 

It’s even easy to interpret your deep, thrilling excitement at the adventure before you as fear. 

The only way to integrate that excitement is to do what Dave Richo teaches, which is to “pretend you’ll survive” and do the scary thing anyway… to wholeheartedly engage with the subjects of your fear. 

That’s the Spiritual Strategy I use and teach.

As a practical matter, for me that means that when I look at my own vision for my own season, when I see the components and subjects that take my breath away or seem the most daunting, those are the ones I’m already beginning to:

• Explore,
• Learn more about,
• Upgrade my beliefs about,
• Speak into existence and 
• Build skills and team and resources for right now, 

…even for projects I envision being 1, 2 or 3 years out.

Here’s a playful way to do this for yourself: 

Just envision the character you want to become in the next chapter of your life story. 

Just put yourself in the shoes of the author. 

As the author of your own life story, ask yourself: What will this character need in the next chapter?

Ask yourself: What skills, tools, guidance and mentoring will your character need? 

Then: Start resourcing the character you are becoming… now. 

And as you put these resources in place, occasionally consult this poetic roadmap for navigating fear from Khalil Gibran: 

It is said that before entering the sea

a river trembles with fear.

She looks back at the path she has traveled,

from the peaks of the mountains,

the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,

she sees an ocean so vast,

that to enter

there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that’s where the river will know

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,

but of becoming the ocean.

Head up + heart out,

PS

My teacher, Florence Shinn, said that “All big ideas are met with opposition.” 

So what feels like opposition is actually validation. 

A Quick Note from Tara: 

It’s August, so I’m in Monk Mode. Working on my book, remodeling my business and … letting some new places woo me. 

I’ll fill you in on that later….

While I’m gone, I’m re-sharing some all time favorites from the Transformation Tuesday archive. Enjoy! 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

My general rule for moving forward on your most important projects, soul callings and life goals with ease and spiritual alignment is this:

Stretch, not struggle.

Start living your intentions by creating goals that feel delicious to you — like a gift you’re giving yourself  — and also feel like they would stretch you to new levels, sparking joyful growth and learning.

Here’s the deal: Your eternal soul came here, into this meat-covered skeleton of yours, specifically for three things. 

Growth and joy are two of the three.

Stretching yourself to do the callings you’re not yet ready to do facilitates growth and joy. (And, as quiet as it’s kept, the only way you can become ready to do your callings is to actually start doing them.)

But the lie of our culture says you’re unworthy of living a wonderful life — with meaningful work you love, beautiful surroundings, financial wealth, a thriving family, and a delectable love life — unless you prove your worthiness via hard hustle or grind. The kind that creates burnout.

And the lie of our culture says even if you do work your heart out to do what you love, you have to continue keeping all those plates in the air in a perfectionistic way or the other shoe will may drop.

So you’d better not take a break.

Better not sit still too long.

Better not enjoy yourself too much. Or celebrate your life too much. Or even allow yourself to spend a little money without fretting and worrying about it.

And you’d certainly better not act too happy without placing exceptions, limitations and caveats all over your own joy.

When all is well with you, you’d better take pains to make sure everyone knows that you know how hard life is for other people or how hard it used to be for you, how far you come, how hard you’re still working or how difficult your life still is.

Celebrating your life without caveats seems like tempting fate, when you are still under the influence of this trance.

Catch this principle: All of that is all a lie of culture. 

Even though everyone you know might believe it: all lies.

That’s why we call it a trance… most people you know believe it because it seems that’s the way the world works.

But here’s the truth: You are worthy of wonderful things, now, with no further ado.

No further delay.

No further conditions.

No further performing.

No more struggle.

No more prerequisites.

You can relax now.

Relax into this truth: You were born to be joyful, loved, and to breathe life into your beautiful ideas… and you’re not just worthy of feeling wonderful when you check the boxes of your Big Goals off of that bucket list in the sky.

You’re worthy of a wonderful life now… and all along the way. 

But until you wake up from the cultural lie – the trance of unworthiness – it feels normal and even virtuous to set your vision and goals in ways that flip your struggle switch straight to ‘on’.

Sometimes, struggle-switch goals are goals you don’t even care that much about, at soul-level. You just set them because you think you should or you are supposed to.

And sometimes, struggle-switch goals are goals you do actually have some innate soul-level desire to do, but you set your action plans for realizing them in such a restrictive, harsh way that just thinking about them sucks all the life force right out of what was originally a beautiful, inspired idea.

So YES. Growth and joy are your objectives, as a being of soul and spirit in this electrical, chemical, beautiful physical body.

But there’s one more spiritual strategy objective of the human experience, and it’s really important: Freedom. 

When you set struggle-switch goals for yourself, you basically exercise your freedom in the direction of creating more bondage for yourself.

You fail to honor your own Inner Guidance.

You divorce your own sweet self when you fail to honor the reality of your own feelings: the voice of the Divine that speaks to you and within you.

You also set yourself up for failure when you set struggle-switch goals because, catch this principle: Whatever you force or restrict, you fixate on.

(Want to know what happens when you decide to eat no carbs? Not only do you want to eat all the carbs, you think about all the carbs all the time.)

On the other hand, when you meet your own inner experience with 100% openness, warmth, approval, hospitality and compassion…

When you say “YES, ok Self, that’s real, I hear you”, when the struggle switch flips on, and you dial back all that forcing so you can focus on inspiration instead…

When you practice radical self-acceptance, radical self-compassion, radical self-care, and radical self-love, even as you take steps toward building your transformational business empire, writing your book, co-creating an elevated family, or creating a platform of personal financial wellbeing…

Then, you can expect two things to happen:

First: Your goals will quickly start to seem beside the point. Because you’ll have already started living in freedom, growth and joy.

You’ll realize you’re already living in a paradise of your own creation.With no further delay.

No further ado.

No further hard hustle.

No further conditions.

No further prerequisites.

And, second: Your goals start happening.

Fast.

Your daydreams and childhood dreams start to become your actual real life, by grace and in perfectly wonderful, surprising and delightful ways. 

Your whole world starts to change because when you practice radical acceptance and self love you are getting into agreement with your Source, who lovesyou.

As you team up with the creative power that forms all worlds, everything in your Being that is not consistent, compatible or aligned with your soul’s desires either get fully on board with your desires or shed like a snake’s molten skin.

You are worthy of the very best in life.

You’ll begin to receive it the moment you release resistance to your own magnificence… the moment you stop believing in your own unworthiness.

You are worthy of the very best in life. 

And that life it begins now.

Head up + heart out,

A Quick Note from Tara: 

It’s August, so I’m in Monk Mode. Working on my book, remodeling my business and … letting some new places woo me. 

I’ll fill you in on that later….

While I’m gone, I’m re-sharing some all time favorites from the Transformation Tuesday archive. Enjoy! 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

Our culture likes to tell scarcity stories:

“There’s not enough for everyone.”

“You’ve gotta fight for what you have.”

“Money comes hard.”

“You’d better be damn near perfect and hustle very hard or you might lose everything.”

Lies.

Propaganda.

Should you need some evidence that this Universe of ours is *actually* wildly abundant in resources, LOOK UP.

Look at the leaves on the trees. That’s what the creative power of this Universe does.

And it flows through you.

But back to those leaves.

As I drove home from the gym this morning, I looked at all the trees around me and wondered: How many leaves are in Oakland?

Then: How many leaves are in this world?

So I asked Google: How many leaves are in the whole wide world?

Estimates ranged from 120 quadrillion and 1 quintillion.

Guys: 120 quadrillion was the low end.

The same Power that created all those leaves flows through you.

That same Divine Creative Power is waiting for you to stop resisting and let it flow through you.

It wants to team up with you to turn your ideas and your dreams into your real life, creating whatever it is you came here to be, do, have, delight in, create and (most importantly) learn.

But wait: there’s more.

You know what this Universe has even more of than leaves?

Bugs.

If 1 quintillion leaves seems like a Very Big Number, wait till you get a load of this: There are an estimated 10 quintillion bugs on the planet at any given time.

That is 10 to the power of nineteen.

That is this many bugs: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000.

And you think there’s not enough money, love, happiness, success, or whatever else in this Universe for you????

For real?

Nah.

This Universe is limitless.

And so are you.

I have it on Divine Authority.

You can stop telling that scarcity story now.

Use every excuse possible, every leaf on every tree or bug you see, to tune yourself to the station of abundance.

Do this and abundance will become the story of your new reality.

Here’s a micro-challenge:

For the next 24 hours, act and make decisions as if you will have access to everything you need, exactly when you need it.

Act and make decisions as if everything is always working out for you.

Act and make decisions that you feel called and led to make as if you’ll survive if you do them, even though the fear and voices in your head make you feel a tiny bit like you’ll die.

Hit reply tomorrow and let me know how it goes.

Head up + heart out,

P.S. Few quick caveats:

1. You might find that reading this stirs up some thoughts you have to the contrary, like the belief that the world cannot be as abundant as this. 

If so, excellent . Those thoughts of lack can’t come with you into your season of abundance. Best that you see them now, so you can release them sooner than later. 

2.  Lest you be tempted to argue with this evidence of abundance by pointing to all the poverty in the world, keep this in mind: The solution is never found on the same level as the problem.

In other words, you can’t eliminate lack by focusing on lack.

In other words, the most helpful you can be to the poor is to live a generous and abundantlife, taking inspired action to be part of the solution whenever you feel called and led to.

3.This worldview ain’t for everyone. It’s only for people who want to enjoy their lives and are willing to set down their struggle portfolios in exchange for a shot at joy.

4. One of the number one reasons we keep our struggle stories around is that we think we’ll be all alone in the world if we give them up.

You will, indeed, seem weird to others around you if you adopt this point of view.

Some of them won’t be able to deal, and they’ll opt out of your world. Try this Dave Richo mantra to cultivate independence from other people’s opinions: People go and people stay, and I’m okay. 

Others will see your life change unfold over time, and they’ll want what you’re having.

And many others, the other joy trippers of the world, whole squads of people you didn’t even know were right there, will become attracted to you, like a magnet. 

A Quick Note from Tara: 

It’s August, so I’m in Monk Mode. Working on my book, remodeling my business and … letting some new places woo me. 

I’ll fill you in on that later….

While I’m gone, I’m re-sharing some all time favorites from the Transformation Tuesday archive. Enjoy! 

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.