CALLING FORTH COURAGE — MOVEMENT 1

CALLING FORTH COURAGE — MOVEMENT 1

Cor

On the forgotten root of courage — and the path that leads back to it.

There is a word I keep coming back to.

Cor.

C-O-R. The Latin root of the word courage. It means heart. When courage was first named — when human beings first reached for a word to describe what it takes to face the unknown, to tell the truth, to walk toward rather than away from the things that frighten us most — they pointed to the heart.

Not the mind. Not the will. Not discipline or strategy or determination. The heart.

I think they knew something we have mostly forgotten. That courage is not something we manufacture through effort. It is something we access. Something that lives in us already — waiting, patient, available — if we can find our way back to it.

And the path back is always through the heart.

Here is what I observe in almost everyone I work with — and what I have had to reckon with in myself. We have become extraordinarily skilled at living at a distance from our own hearts. We live from the head. From the calendar. From the expectations of others. From the version of ourselves we decided was acceptable and safe and likely to be approved of. We have learned to turn down the volume of the inner voice — the one that knows things the mind hasn’t caught up to yet — and to replace it with noise. Productivity. Planning. Performance. We have done this not because we are weak or unconscious. We have done this because it worked. Or at least it felt like it worked. It kept us safe. It kept us acceptable. It kept the world from seeing too much.

But there is a cost to that distance. And eventually, the cost becomes impossible to ignore.

When we live at a distance from our own hearts — when we manage and control and perform our way through our days — we also live at a distance from our courage. Because courage lives where the heart lives. And if we can’t feel our heart, we can’t access what’s in it.

The leaders I work with who are most stuck are not stuck because they lack capability or intelligence or commitment. They are stuck because they have traveled so far from their own center that they can no longer hear the voice that would tell them which way to go.

The women who come to me in transition — standing at the threshold of what comes next, uncertain and capable in equal measure — are not lacking courage. They are lacking access to it. The courage is there. It has always been there. The path back to it is through the heart.

Let me name what makes this hard. Because it is hard. And the difficulty deserves to be named honestly rather than glossed over with reassurance.

There are voices — external and deeply internalized — that will do everything they can to keep you from turning toward your heart. They have very convincing reasons. They have been with you for a long time. They sound, by now, almost exactly like your own voice.

There is the voice of other people’s opinions. The ones you absorbed so early and so thoroughly that you stopped noticing they were not originally yours

There is the voice of fear. The one that has catalogued every time you were vulnerable and it didn’t go well. The one that has learned to present itself as practicality, or responsibility, or wisdom — when what it is, underneath all of that, is self-protection.

There is the voice of comparison. The one that is always measuring your insides against other people’s outsides. The one that concludes — every time, without fail — that you are somehow behind. Somehow less. Somehow not yet enough.

And there is the voice of busyness. Perhaps the most effective of all. The one that simply never allows enough silence for anything else to be heard.

These voices are not your enemies. They developed for reasons. They have been trying, in their way, to keep you safe. But they are not your heart. And as long as they are the loudest thing in the room — your heart cannot be heard.

So the first movement of Calling Forth Courage is this: Open the Heart

Not crack it open. Not force it. Not perform openness while secretly remaining armored.

Simply — turn toward it. Begin to listen to it. Create enough quiet that it can make itself known. I want to be practical for a moment, because I find that when we talk about the heart in the context of courage and leadership and personal transformation, it can start to feel abstract in a way that isn’t useful. So let me name what I actually know about how the heart opens.

The heart opens in silence. Not the silence of doing other things more slowly — actual silence. The kind that makes most of us deeply uncomfortable at first because we are so unaccustomed to it. Sit with that discomfort. It passes. And what’s on the other side of it is worth the wait.

The heart opens in nature. There is something about being in the presence of things that are not performing, not pretending, not trying to be anything other than exactly what they are — that gives us permission to do the same. A forest path. A body of water. The sky at dawn. Whatever version of nature is accessible to you.

The heart opens in honest conversation. When another person sees us clearly — not the version we present but the whole thing, the struggle and the gift and the uncertainty — and does not look away. That kind of being seen is rare. And when it happens, something in us relaxes that has been braced for a very long time.

And the heart opens in the asking. In the simple, humble, sometimes desperate act of turning toward something larger than yourself and saying — I want to know. I want to feel. I want to be more than the carefully managed version of myself I have been living as.

That asking — that willingness to not already know the answer — is itself an act of courage. Small. Quiet. And absolutely essential.

I want to tell you about the day this series was born.

It was January 18, 2026. I was visiting a friend on Orcas Island and I went for a walk in the forest alone in the late afternoon. The air was cold and damp. The trail was muddy. The lake was still. I could hear my own footsteps and my own breath as I walked deeper into the trees.

I wasn’t in crisis. I wasn’t desperate. I was simply present — which, I have learned, is its own kind of radical act. And somewhere on that trail, a question came through me:

“I want to know about courage. I want to be fully open and a channel of divine courage and all that follows.”

I don’t know exactly where it came from. I wasn’t trying to formulate a question. It simply arrived — the way things arrive when we are finally quiet enough to receive them.

And what came back, in the first moments of listening, was this:

The path is through an open and vulnerable heart. Courage is always there — even when it’s hidden, buried, repressed. It’s always there. The work is simply to get quiet enough to hear it. I kept walking. And I kept listening.

And everything that follows in this series is what I heard.

Here is what I’m inviting you to do with this first movement. Sometime in the next day or two — find ten minutes of genuine quiet. Turn off the phone. Close the laptop. Sit somewhere you won’t be interrupted. And ask yourself one question:

What is my heart trying to tell me that I haven’t been quiet enough to hear?

Don’t try to answer it immediately. Don’t analyze it or evaluate it or decide in advance what the answer should be.

Just ask. And listen. You may not hear anything clearly the first time. That’s alright. The asking matters as much as the answer. The turning toward is the practice. And if you’d like to go deeper — I’ve recorded an audio companion to this essay. Six minutes. Just you, the question, and a little space to let it land. The link is below. This is Movement 1. We are just beginning.