Your Desired Feelings Are the Compass, Not a Reward
This audio lesson is from my program Sacred Systems.
This post was transcribed and edited with the help of Castmagic.
The Lie of "I'll Feel Good When..."
Most of us are operating from the same exhausting paradigm: work hard, sacrifice, grind it out — and then you'll get to feel the way you want to feel.
Then you'll feel abundant. Then you'll feel free. Then you'll feel at ease.
However, that "then" moment never comes. And it's not because you haven't worked hard enough. It's because that paradigm is a lie.
Your right to feel GOOD isn’t the reward at some distant destination point. It’s the compass that guides you there.
Start With How You Want to Feel
In Sacred Systems, before we set a single goal or intention, we identify how we want to feel in every area of life.
Not what we want to have. Not what we want to achieve. How we want to feel.
This matters because those feelings are the truest voice of your highest self. When you say I want to feel strong in my health or I want to feel intentional in my home or I want to feel worthy in my personal growth — that's not wishful thinking. That's your inner self telling you what she actually values.
A screenshot from my personal Notion system.
And when you build your life and your goals on top of that? Everything changes.
You might realize that a goal you've been working toward for years was never really yours. It was your parents' goal. Society's goal. The goal you inherited without questioning. But now that you have a filter — does this make me feel the way I want to feel? — you can let it go. And replace it with something real.
The Trap of Postponing Your Feelings
Here's where most of us get stuck.
We treat our desired feelings like a destination: I'll feel abundant once I have $100,000 in the bank. I'll feel at ease once my business is running smoothly. I'll feel worthy once I've achieved X.
This feels logical. It even feels noble — like you're being disciplined, patient, putting in the work. But what it's actually doing is placing you in a constant state of scarcity. You are telling yourself, over and over, I don't deserve to feel good yet.
And you cannot create an abundant life from a place of scarcity. You cannot build a peaceful business from a place of chaos. You cannot arrive at self-trust from a journey of self-abandonment.
The destination is shaped by the journey. Always.
Free Notion Worksheet
Use this free Notion worksheet to work through the lesson — just duplicate it to your Notion workspace and start filling it in. 😊 No subscription required.
What Happens When You Feel It Now
When you stop waiting and start prioritizing feeling the way you want to feel now, something shifts.
The desperation lifts. The grip loosens. The goal you were white-knuckling toward starts to feel like a cherry on top rather than the thing standing between you and your happiness.
And paradoxically? You move toward it faster. Not because you're working harder, but because you're no longer working against yourself. You're a match for what it is that you desire. You can see opportunities you couldn't see before. You make decisions from clarity instead of fear.
This isn't just spiritual philosophy — it's practical reality. Abundant people attract abundant opportunities. Peaceful people create peaceful businesses. Ease is built through choices made from prioritizing ease.
This Isn't About Bypassing Hard Emotions
Feeling the way you want to feel does not mean you’re suppressing the hard stuff, performing positivity, or pretending everything is fine.
In fact, choosing to feel the way you want to feel will require you to feel a great deal of what you don't want to feel — things like rage, shame, and grief. I've come to believe that underneath most of our numbing, coping, and over-working is a reservoir of unprocessed grief, grief that was never permitted to complete its passage through the body.
Most of us avoid these deeper, difficult emotions by staying busy. We hyperfixate on goals, pile on tasks, stay in constant motion — and call it productivity. But that busyness is often just buffering. It's avoidance in disguise. And the more we avoid the emotional work, the more external work we pile on to compensate.
When you finally do the emotional work, the external work gets lighter. You stop doing things that don't serve you. You stop overworking. You start making choices that are actually aligned — not just busy. And you start feeling MORE of the way you WANT to feel.
Your Feelings as a Filter for Every Decision
Here's where this gets beautifully practical.
When you know how you want to feel, you have a filter for every decision you make. And that filter protects you from defaulting to what everyone else is doing.
Take creating community in a business program, for example. The default move is a Facebook group or a Slack channel — always on, always buzzing, always requiring management. But if your filter is ease and peace, you'll ask a different question: how can I offer community in a way that aligns with how I want to feel?
That's exactly how one of my programs - Say Yes to Desire - came to be structured the way it is — one 90-minute call per month, women on video together, real connection, and then space. No group chat. No 24/7 engagement. Just intentional, bounded community that honors everyone's time and energy.
That decision required processing some uncomfortable feelings: the fear of not doing enough, the guilt of saying no to what people were asking for, the discomfort of doing it differently than everyone else.
But it was made possible by having a clear filter: this is how I want to feel.
An Invitation
Stop postponing your feelings to some future version of your life that you haven't built yet.
Feel abundant now. Feel at ease now. Feel intentional, worthy, strong, light — now.
Not as a performance. Not as a denial of reality. But as a practice. As a compass. As the way you make every decision, build every system, and move toward every intention.
Your desired feelings were never meant to be the reward. They were always meant to be the way.
Liked this episode? You’ll LOVE Sacred Systems.
If you're tired of postponing your life to some future version of yourself, then join us in Sacred Systems. You deserve to prioritize your well-being TODAY.
