Find
Your Voice

I did the self-led journey because my schedule makes live circles almost impossible. Early starts, after-school marking, two kids of my own. I listened to the audio chapters during my commute and did the practices on Sunday mornings before anyone else woke up. It was the only time that was fully mine, and I came to guard it fiercely.

Saraswati's first week cracked something open in the voice activation exercise — humming a single tone for a minute until you feel it in your chest. It sounds ridiculous written down. I sat in my kitchen at 6am making this low, sustained sound and burst into tears. Not sad tears. More like something being returned to me that I hadn't known was missing.

I'd stopped singing somewhere in my thirties. I used to sing — all through school and university, in a community choir for years. Then life got busy and the choir fell away and I told myself I didn't miss it. Saraswati called that lie out very clearly.

I rejoined a community choir this month. First rehearsal I was terrified. By the second one I couldn't stop smiling. I've also started writing again — not lesson plans, actual writing. Essays about education and what it costs women to always be the ones holding the container for everyone else's growth. I don't know if anyone will ever read them. Right now, that's not the point.

I joined the supported circle because I knew if I did this alone I'd find a way to intellectualise everything and not actually feel it. I needed other women. I needed to be witnessed. That turned out to be the best decision I made.

There's one moment from our circle I keep coming back to. We were on a call in the third week of Saraswati and one of the other sisters shared something she'd created — just a small thing, a page she'd written for herself — and reading it out loud her voice shook. The whole call went quiet. Not awkward quiet — the other kind. The kind that means something is true and everyone knows it. I was undone by it. And then it was my turn.

I read a piece I'd written about why I became a creative person and what it cost me to put that down in exchange for a career. I hadn't planned to go that deep. It came out anyway. And the sisters just held it. No fixing, no advice, no silver lining. Just witnessing. I drove home afterwards and sat in the car for twenty minutes before I could go inside.

I handed in my notice the following month. Not impulsively — it had been building for two years. But Saraswati and those women gave me the language for what I needed, and the courage to say it out loud. I'm freelancing now. It's terrifying and more alive than I've felt in a decade.

I chose the self-led path because I needed to go at my own pace, which turned out to be slower than the suggested schedule and that was okay. Some weeks I sat with a single practice for days before moving on. Juanelle's voice in the recordings felt like a companion — warm, unhurried, never making me feel like I was doing it wrong.

The life vision work in Saraswati hit me hard. There's an exercise where you imagine yourself ten years forward and write a letter back to your current self. I put it off for a week. When I finally did it, I wrote for an hour without stopping. The woman I described wasn't anyone I recognised yet — but she felt real. Like she was waiting. Like she already existed and I just needed to grow into her.

I've started painting again. I was a painter before life happened. My ex-husband thought it was a hobby, something sweet and low-stakes. I think I slowly absorbed that assessment and stopped taking it seriously. I have a canvas on the wall of my spare room now. It's not finished and probably won't be for months and I find it thrilling every single time I walk past it.

Saraswati gave me back the sense that my creative life is not separate from my real life. It is my real life. I'd just buried it under everything else for fifteen years.