What happens when life looks good on the outside, but you can't actually feel it?

In this episode, Sarah reads one of her personal essays, “I Could Have Been on That Boat and Felt None of It,” and reflects on a season when she had so much of what she thought would make her feel better—but still felt flat, exhausted, and disconnected from herself.

She shares her experience of recognizing functional freeze and realizing that her nervous system had been running on survival and goal pursuit at the same time: pressing the brakes while the gas was still on the floor.

From there, Sarah describes the slow, unglamorous process of coming back online—first through resuscitation and pacing, then learning what actually brought her joy, followed by movement, expression, boundaries, and resourcing her nervous system enough to feel the full range of emotions again.

And eventually, the smallest things began to bring her alive: a black squirrel in New York City, sheer blouses, coaching lacrosse, a composting machine, sunlight through autumn leaves.

This is a story about burnout, functional freeze, joy, and the deeply embodied process of finding your way back to yourself.

What actually changes when you stop simply learning about your nervous system and begin practicing a different way of being?

In this episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah does something a little different: she shares the words and stories of women who have gone through Resourced.

These aren't polished success stories. They're reflections from women navigating real lives—businesses, relationships, parenting, health challenges, limited bandwidth, and moments when old patterns would normally take over.

What happens when the life you built — the career, the identity, the pace, the version of you who could hold it all — no longer works?

In this episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah sits down with Emily Evans, a former Resourced student and founder of The Wander Years, to talk about functional burnout, identity shifts, nervous system work, and what it looks like to enter the “fertile void” without rushing to figure out what comes next.

Emily shares how she walked away from a decade-long career she loved after her body began sending signals she could no longer ignore. What followed wasn’t an immediate reinvention. It was years of slowing down, letting identities fall away, learning to follow small “micro yeses,” and discovering who she was when she stopped measuring herself by her output.

They also talk about Emily’s recent trip to Mongolia, where she experienced a powerful real-life moment of trusting her body, honoring a clear no, and realizing just how much had changed.

Sarah and Emily explore the difference between urgency and sustainable aliveness, the discomfort of not knowing what comes next, the importance of play and joy, and how slowing down can create space for a version of ourselves that has been there all along.

Emily also shares how her own season of wandering eventually inspired The Wander Years — a space for women over 40 to connect, travel, move, read, play, and discover what might emerge when they don't have to have everything figured out.

What if the goal of nervous system work isn’t to become calmer—but to become more alive?

In this special episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah is joined by Kate Northrup for a conversation originally recorded during an Instagram Live about Opting Out of Urgency in 2025.

Kate shares how Sarah’s work helped her begin unraveling a deeply ingrained pattern of running her business on adrenaline, and together they explore what becomes possible when we stop treating urgency as the only way to get things done.

Sarah shares why urgency can be so difficult to step away from—especially when it has been rewarded with success—and why opting out isn’t about abandoning ambition, productivity, or the things that matter to us. It’s about bringing agency and choice back into the equation.

They also explore why nervous system regulation doesn’t always mean “calming down,” what can happen when unexpressed fight-or-flight energy gets stuck in the body, and how creating the right outlets for that energy can lead to more clarity, creativity, joy, and aliveness.

And when you find yourself caught between “I must” and “I can’t,” Sarah introduces another possibility: the Sacred Third—the option we often can’t see until our systems have enough support to recognize that another way exists.

What if the thing you think is driving your growth is actually urgency?

In this Mini Musing, Sarah explores one of the sneakiest patterns of urgency: how easily it can disguise itself as dedication, productivity, ambition, or the desire to grow.

Sarah shares a personal example of catching herself in urgency while preparing for her upcoming work—and realizing that the feeling of “I have to do this now” was making it harder to access creativity, choice, and clarity.

She also explores the difference between urgency and agency, why moving quickly can cause us to repeat old patterns, and how stepping away from the problem—even briefly—can change what we are able to see.

The goal isn't to eliminate speed or become slow all the time. It's to develop more choices about how we move, so that urgency isn't making the decisions for us.

In this episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah Tacy sits down with her dear friend, breathwork practitioner and coach Jeannine Yoder, to trace the origins of Opting Out of Urgency—including the moment Jeannine first spoke the phrase that would become the name of Sarah’s workshop.

Jeannine Yoder is a New York Times–featured feminine leadership coach, breathwork teacher, and Broadway-trained performing artist. For over 15 years, she has trained coaches, healers, and facilitators while guiding transformational breathwork experiences, retreats, and private sessions rooted in nervous system regulation, somatic healing, embodiment, and ritual. She is the founder of Huntress House, a sacred studio for feminine awakening in Easton, Connecticut.

Jeannine shares how urgency once functioned as the fuel source of her life. Coming from a childhood where her nervous system learned to respond to a lack of safety, she became exceptionally good at identifying problems, mobilizing quickly, achieving, and creating solutions. But over time, that pattern became a cycle of desire, intensity, achievement, depletion, exhaustion, and then finding something new to mobilize around.

The surprising part? Even after her external circumstances became safer and more stable, her nervous system didn't automatically slow down.

Together, Sarah and Jeannine explore what it means to opt out of the internal experience of urgency—not necessarily to move slowly, do less, or give up ambition, but to stop manufacturing pressure in order to feel alive.

Today I’m welcoming back my friend Ginny Muir for a conversation about what it really takes to step out of urgency culture.

After a big life transition and international move, Ginny discovered how to slow her pace, honor her capacity, and build a life rooted in presence.

If you’ve been craving more spaciousness in your days, this episode offers both inspiration and practical wisdom for releasing urgency and finding your own rhythm — no matter how hectic your life may feel.

What if the root of overwhelm, urgency, and burnout isn't that you're doing too much—but that your nervous system learned that your safety depends on everyone else being okay first?

In this episode, Sarah explores one of the most common patterns she sees in women: "I'm okay when you're okay." While this response once served an important survival function, many women now find themselves trapped in cycles of hyper-responsibility, people pleasing, urgency, resentment, and exhaustion.

Sarah unpacks why the female nervous system often defaults to tending, managing, soothing, and caring for others before caring for ourselves—and why healing isn't about becoming detached or uncaring.

Instead, it's about building the capacity to return to yourself first.

Through personal stories, nervous system insights, and practical examples, Sarah explores what it means to move toward a new paradigm:

I'm okay when I'm okay.

We can care about others, without abandoning ourselves.

What if the hardest things you've lived through are invitations into your life? Ruthie has survived what most bodies are never asked to hold. I wanted the details, and she gives them. What I did not expect was how present she stayed while telling me. No performance of having healed. Just a woman living from right now, with a grace that makes a listeners body settle.

In this deeply honest and expansive conversation, Sarah sits down with writer, speaker, coach, and beloved internet friend Ruthie Lindsey to explore the thresholds that have shaped her life—and the wisdom she's found on the other side of them.

Ruthie shares the story behind the pain narrative that defined much of her public identity: a devastating car accident at seventeen, a wire accidentally left in her brainstem, years of chronic pain, addiction to approval, the collapse of a marriage, spiritual deconstruction, nervous breakdowns, and the long journey of learning who she is beyond what she's survived.

This may sound devastating, but somehow Ruthie lifts us all up during her story telling. She gives us home and holds up a light for anyone navigating their own threshold.

Together, Sarah and Ruthie explore belonging, identity, chronic pain, somatics, spirituality, relationships, and the tender process of becoming more fully human. They discuss the difference between healing and fixing, why some thresholds never fully end, and how life can become richer, simpler, and more meaningful when we stop waiting to arrive somewhere else.

This conversation is filled with laughter, honesty, and the kind of wisdom that can only come from living through what once felt impossible.

This week is a little different.

Instead of interviewing a guest, Sarah shares a deeply personal reflection adapted from her newsletter. This one was called, The Gap. Inspired by her daughter's missing tooth and ever-widening empty space in her smile, Sarah explores the seasons of life when something has fallen away, but what comes next hasn't fully arrived.

Through stories of leaving a successful business, navigating parenthood, grief, identity shifts, the pandemic, and years of rebuilding, she reflects on what can be learned in the uncomfortable space between endings and beginnings.

If you're in a season of uncertainty, waiting, or wondering when the next chapter will finally emerge, this episode is an invitation to trust the process of becoming. Please pass this along to someone who could use the metaphor of “the gap.”

How do you know when it's time to let go of a version of yourself that once worked?

In this rich and deeply reflective conversation, Sarah sits down with returning guest Sara Avant Stover to discuss the seasons of life that require us to slow down, dismantle old identities, and listen more closely to what wants to emerge.

Since their last conversation, Sara has experienced a profound period of transformation. She stepped away from a thriving business, deleted social media, got married, moved to France, navigated grief, and entered perimenopause—all while learning to trust a slower, more sustainable pace.

Together, Sarah and Sara explore Internal Family Systems (IFS), intuition, nervous system regulation, entrepreneurship, self-trust, and why healing often looks far less dramatic than we imagine.

They also discuss the cultural differences between American productivity and the French art de vivre—the art of living—and how learning to value rest, pleasure, and spaciousness can become its own form of healing.

If today’s episode resonates, go back and listen to witness the earlier threshold where this journey began.

In this solo episode of Threshold Moments, we explore the powerful relationship between vision and the nervous system. Most of the sensory information entering our brains is visual, yet stress can dramatically narrow our field of awareness, creating both physical and psychological tunnel vision.

When we enter fight-or-flight states, our gaze often becomes fixed, our attention narrows, and our ability to perceive new options decreases. This episode offers three simple practices designed to help expand awareness, support nervous system regulation, and create a greater sense of safety and possibility.

What happens when you stop outsourcing your worth and finally learn to trust your own voice?

In this deeply honest conversation, Sarah sits down with voice trainer, author, and podcast host Vasavi Kumar to explore the transformative power of speaking your truth. Together they unpack the hidden cost of suffering in silence, emotional perfectionism, people-pleasing, conflict avoidance, grief, recovery, and the journey back to self-trust.

Vasavi shares her personal story—from childhood bullying and addiction to recovery, relationships, loss, and ultimately finding the freedom that comes from radical self-honesty. She offers practical tools for moving through rumination, regulating emotions, navigating conflict, and accessing what she calls the "Feeling, Friend, and Sage" voices within.

This conversation is an invitation to stop abandoning yourself, start listening to your inner wisdom, and discover the clarity that emerges when you finally say it out loud.

In this solo episode of Threshold Moments, we explore the powerful relationship between vision and the nervous system. Most of the sensory information entering our brains is visual, yet stress can dramatically narrow our field of awareness, creating both physical and psychological tunnel vision.

When we enter fight-or-flight states, our gaze often becomes fixed, our attention narrows, and our ability to perceive new options decreases. This episode offers three simple practices designed to help expand awareness, support nervous system regulation, and create a greater sense of safety and possibility.

In this deeply expansive conversation, Sarah Tacy sits down with creative director and co-founder of the Prism House, Kristin Burgess, to trace the long arc of a relationship that began at the very start of Kristin’s wedding planning career and unfolds into a story of identity, creativity, partnership, motherhood, and personal truth.

What begins as a nostalgic return to Kristin planning Sarah’s wedding quickly opens into a much larger exploration of thresholds—those quiet, often disorienting moments where life asks us to outgrow who we’ve been.

Kristin reflects on the early days of building her wedding business while working full-time, the instinctive trust that shaped her creative path, and the evolution from wedding design into storytelling for brands through The Prism House. Along the way, she shares how motherhood, partnership, and creative expansion reshaped everything she thought she knew about capacity, identity, and leadership.

The conversation deepens as Kristin speaks candidly about burnout, over-functioning, and the long process of shifting out of survival-driven patterns shaped in childhood. She names the moment she began to move from constant doing into creative clarity—and how that shift quietly changed her marriage, her work, and her sense of self.

A pivotal part of this episode is Kristin’s time in a remote A-frame in Vermont, a self-imposed retreat that became a turning point for reflection, grief, and truth-telling. From there, she shares the unfolding of a major life transition, including divorce, the complexity of love, and what it means to choose alignment even when it disrupts everything familiar.

When people hear nervous system work, they often imagine something slow, dry, or even boring. But what if healing wasn't about forcing yourself to sit still—and what if regulation could actually feel alive?

In this solo episode, Sarah Tacy demystifies nervous system work and shares why slowing down isn't the opposite of vitality—it's the pathway to it. Drawing from her weekly movement class inside Juice, Sarah walks through the practices that help women move from depletion and over-functioning into greater expression, stability, and joy.

From lubrication and balance work to playful release, receiving, and community, she explains why nervous system healing doesn't have to be serious to be transformative.

Sarah also explores why many of us resist slowing down, how our default patterns lead to burnout, and why small, doable steps matter more than getting it "right."

What if understanding your menstrual cycle could transform not only your relationship with yourself—but your parenting, partnership, and entire household?

In this deeply practical and eye-opening conversation, Sarah sits down with women's hormone health practitioner Kate Nguy to explore how chronic stress, the invisible mental load, and nervous system dysregulation impact women's hormones throughout midlife.

Kate shares her personal journey through burnout, perimenopause, grief, and overwhelm, and how those experiences led her to create a radically different way of living—one that honors the natural rhythms of the female body instead of fighting against them.

Together, Sarah and Kate discuss cyclical living beyond the clichés, including the color-coded family calendar that helps Kate's children understand her changing needs, supports healthier communication at home, and teaches body literacy from an early age.

This episode is a powerful invitation to stop treating yourself as a machine and start listening to the wisdom your body has been offering all along.

What if more is supporting you than you realize?

In this mini-musing, Sarah reflects on an art installation she encountered over twenty years ago that transformed the way she understands effort, support, and nervous system regulation. Inspired by an assignment asking students to notice what was “75% done without their effort,” this episode becomes an exploration of the unseen forces that sustain us every day. In a world where we are often asked to do more than we feel is possible, widening out to include all that is being done without our effort can be wildly stabilizing.

Through stories of lint in the dryer, changing seasons, organ systems, pregnancy, spring growth, and the intelligence of the natural world, Sarah invites listeners to widen their perspective beyond survival mode and hyper-responsibility.

When we live as though everything depends entirely on us, our nervous systems tighten, our stress increases, and our perception narrows. But when we begin noticing the “unearned majority” — the countless processes already unfolding without our management — something in the body softens.

This episode is a gentle reminder that while responsibility is real, we are not alone in carrying life.

In this deeply reflective conversation, Sarah Tacy sits down with Therese Jornlin to explore a life shaped by threshold moments—those irreversible openings that change how reality is perceived and lived.

Therese shares her early experiences of profound awakening following the sudden death of her father at age 15, describing a piercing sense of love, continuity, and the dissolution of fear around death. From there, her life unfolds as a series of inner calls that eventually lead her to Calcutta at age 21, where she lives and serves alongside the Missionaries of Charity.

In Calcutta, Therese encounters the raw edges of human suffering and devotion—an experience that strips away narrative, identity, and mental certainty. What remains is presence, service, and an embodied confrontation with what it means to be alive in a world of profound disparity.

What if losing tolerance isn’t a problem, but an invitation to be more sensitive to our truths? And, if we do take active measures (through hormone support or nervous system work) to improve our range of tolerance, can we use that to stay steady in our selves while standing up for what really matters?

In this mini-musing, Sarah explores the deeper meaning of “tolerance” through the lenses of perimenopause, nervous system regulation, relationships, hormones, breathwork, and emotional truth. As many women move through midlife and begin noticing less patience for what once felt manageable, Sarah asks an important question: are these shifts something to support so they don’t feel so hard, or a threshold to really to listen to? Or, perhaps is there a sacred third where we can find support and keep our sensitivity to truth.

This conversation weaves together the science of estrogen, CO2 tolerance, nervous system capacity, relational dynamics, and emotional authenticity; all pointing toward a deeper inquiry about truth, integrity, and what happens when our bodies stop helping us override ourselves.

Rather than framing increased sensitivity as dysfunction, Sarah invites us to consider how support, regulation, and greater capacity might help us attune more honestly to our lives instead of bypassing what’s real.