Empowered Way Podcast

About Empowered Way Podcast

Your being informs your doing. Who you are underneath the roles, the achieving, the constant holding-it-together, is where everything real begins. The Sovereign Voice is an invitation back to that place. When you connect inside, you meet a larger presence that begins to guide you. Your heart opens. You begin to know the depth of the love that made you, and the sacred power that was always yours. The Sovereign Voice lives in two forms: the essays you read and the voice you hear. Both move through sovereignty, the body, love, grief, and the practice of belonging to yourself. There is no urgency here. Only depth, when you are ready. The Sovereign Voice. On Empowered Way. empoweredway.substack.com (https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Kathryn Eriksen

Category

education · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Dec 2021

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

206 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   I Built a Women’s Circle Using My Own Intelligence. No One Came.

   Dearest Sovereigns: Every morning since 2017 I have sat down in the same chair with one intention, which is to connect with Divine Love. Some mornings my mind arrives busy and insists on reviewing every worry before it will consider settling. Breathing intentionally and slowly, I release them to Love, one at a time, as my body loosens and my thoughts clear. Other mornings I bring nothing but myself, and that has always been enough. I came to that chair one morning carrying something I had been carrying for months. The empty room I wrote the novel, “Sovereign Women (https://a.co/d/080RpXEN)” to add Love back into a conversation that had lost it. I wanted a woman facing an impossible decision to know she was still loved, whatever she chose. Then I built the Sovereign Women’s Circle, a monthly gathering for women who wanted to go deeper into those questions. I advertised it and mentioned it everywhere I could. I believed the women who needed it would find it. What came back was silence. My friends came, and their presence was a balm I did not expect and have not forgotten. But the online room I had created stayed empty. I spent a great many hours after that asking what I had done wrong. I watched other women fill their circles without apparent effort, and the comparison did what comparison always does. I stopped asking what had gone wrong with the launch and started asking what was wrong with me. That is the question I carried into my meditation chair. The answer wasn’t what I expected. The answer came on one of those quiet mornings, and it was three words. I was early. I was not flawed, and I was not insufficient, and I was not missing whatever the other women seemed to have. I had simply moved into action before it was time. Then the harder part arrived, which was, “Why did I jump in before it was time?” As I sat in the silence, I already knew the answer. I had built the Circle with my own intelligence. I had watched other women gather women, I had seen them do it well, and I took that pattern and ran it. I reasoned from what I had already observed, which is the only thing a mind can do when it is working by itself. My mind believed it could manufacture relationships. My heart had been saying wait, and I had been treating that as hesitation to push through rather than as an instruction to follow. That is the whole of the mistake, and I could not see it until I stopped moving long enough to see it clearly. The relief of it lasted about a day. Underneath was something larger that I have not been able to set down since. I did not create myself. So many times in my life, I have tried to control the direction and outcomes. The Sovereign Women’s Circle was one of those times. I had decided when it should happen, who should come, and what it would prove about me when they did. Sitting there, in the quiet of meditation, I could feel my own heartbeat, which I have never once arranged. My breath was arriving without instruction. Everything essential about me was already running, had always been running, and none of it was my doing. I did not create myself. And if I did not create myself, then I was created. Something intended me. That is the sentence that dismantled the question I had been asking for months. A woman who was intended cannot be a mistake, and her timing cannot be a verdict on her worth. The empty room was never evidence about me. It was information about timing. I have spent most of my life trying to prove myself. It never occurred to me that I was already proven. Someone made AI, and someone made you I have spent a lot of this year thinking about artificial intelligence, mostly because I use it and because the women I work with are using it for answers to questions they have held for too long. Here is the thing about Artificial Intelligence. It had a maker. A company, a building full of engineers, an enormous amount of electricity and money. Everything inside it was put there by people, and when it answers you, it is handing back an arrangement of what human beings already thought and wrote down. Its ceiling is us. It cannot exceed the humans who built it, because there is nothing in it that did not come from them. I recognize that pattern, because it is the one I used on the Circle. I took what I had seen other women do and produced the most probable arrangement of it. I was running on a borrowed pattern, and I called it discernment. Now sit with the obvious next question. Who made you? Not your parents, who also did not make themselves. Not your upbringing or your education or your hard-won competence, all of which shaped you and none of which created you. Something is running underneath all of that, and it was running before you had an opinion about any of it. AI has a maker and a ceiling. You have a Source and no ceiling at all. Some people will not find that comforting. When you consider your source, it can be disorienting. That may be why we avoid it. A circle drawn by a mind has an edge A circle has no beginning and no ending. That is what drew me to the shape in the first place, and it is still the truest thing I know about how women gather. But the circle I built had an edge, because I was the one who drew it. I drew it with my own intelligence, out of what I had already watched other women do, and my own intelligence is a finite thing. It can only work with what it has already collected. So the circle came out the exact size of what I already knew. A circle like that cannot grow. It can only be redrawn, slightly differently, by the same hand. When Divine Intelligence is allowed into the circle, the circle expands, because what is inside it has no edge. You are not adding anything to Divine Intelligence, which is not possible. You are letting something without limits into a space you had been holding by yourself, and the space changes shape to accommodate it. Why this changes your relationship with yourself Everything in your life is downstream of what you believe about your own origin. I did not understand that until recently. I know this arithmetic because I ran it on an empty room, and I would have kept running it. Divine Intelligence is what made you. Divine Love is what it feels like to be made from Love. If you believe you are an accumulation of your history, then your value is a running total. You will spend your life auditing it. You will measure yourself against women who seem to have accumulated more, and you will treat your failures as withdrawals from an account you are afraid is already low. This is the arithmetic most of us learned, and it is exhausting in a way that no amount of self-care addresses, because self-care does not touch the arithmetic itself. If you believe you were brought into existence by the same Intelligence that organized the galaxies, then your value is not a total or an accumulated from your efforts. Your worth was established before you did anything, and nothing you do adds to it or subtracts from it. I want to be sure you do not take this as permission to stop trying. When your worth is not at stake in your work or relationships, both get better, braver, and considerably more honest. You stop performing competence and start actually serving. You were touched by God because you exist. Your existence is the evidence. There is no second qualification. When that lands, something reorganizes on the inside, and you can feel it happen. The urgency goes out of your self-improvement. The defensiveness goes out of your conversations. You stop negotiating for a place you were never in danger of losing. How you actually do this I am not going to pretend there is a sophisticated method, because there is not one. You get quiet, every day, on purpose. That is meditation, and the word has collected so much mystique that people think they are failing at it when their mind wanders. Your mind will wander because that is what minds are designed to do. The practice is not the absence of thought, and it is not a particular posture or a particular length of time or a particular tradition. The practice is the daily decision to stop adding input and let what is underneath the input become audible. There is one more reason adding meditation to your day matters more now. AI can answer any question at any hour, in your own vocabulary, and the answers always sound like wisdom. But using AI to answer your deepest questions misses the point of why you are asking. When you accept a machine’s answer for soul-level questions, you have handed over the keys to the meaning of your existence. When you ask Love your deepest questions, it opens a line of communication with Divine Intelligence. You are connecting with the source that created you, not a machine created by a bunch of engineers. Here is what I would tell you if we were sitting together. Start before the day gets its hands on you, after you have taken care of what your body needs and before you have looked at your phone. Ten minutes is enough, and five is enough on the mornings when ten feels impossible. Sit where you can sit again tomorrow, because the sameness of the chair does more work than you would expect. Then stop trying to produce anything. You are not generating an experience. You are becoming available to one. Some mornings nothing will happen. Those mornings still count, because they are the ones that build the relationship. And then one morning you will be sitting there, and you will notice your own heartbeat, and you will understand in your body rather than your mind that you did not create it. Your heart, body, and even consciousness was given to you. And you have been carried this whole time by something that has never once asked you to prove you deserved it. That is the moment the relationship with yourself changes. Not because you learned something new, but because you finally stopped overriding who you already were. I will be in that chair again tomorrow morning, before the light is any good, not to reach anything and not to produce anything. The machine will be awake too, and it will have something ready to say about anything I bring it. I am going to the chair first. You do not meditate to reach Divine Intelligence. You meditate to stop interrupting it. Tell me one word in the comments for what arrives when you get quiet. One word is enough. Many blessings on your journey, Kathryn P.S. One of my most popular meditations is the Astonishing Light of Your Being (https://insig.ht/zC6TnMQGZ6b). It’s free on Insight Timer. Please like and and follow me :-) Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please share this post with another woman who may need a gentle reminder of who she really is. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com (https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Your Soul Has Never Needed An Audience

   Dear Sovereigns: We were watching Ted Lasso the other night. The club needed players, and someone raised the idea of an open tryout, the kind where anyone can walk in off the street and be seen. In the middle of that conversation somebody said the name, Susan Boyle, and Ted had no idea who she was. I did. I spent the rest of the episode only half watching, because a name I had not thought about in years had put me back in front of a laptop in 2009, watching a video that everyone I knew was sending to everyone else they knew. Before She Opened Her Mouth Susan Boyle walked onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage in 2009, forty-seven years old, unemployed, from a small town in Scotland. Her hair was unruly and her dress was ordinary and her manner was a little awkward in a way that was genuinely lovely if you were not in a hurry to judge it. Simon Cowell asks her age. She tells him. The camera finds a young woman in the audience rolling her eyes. There are smirks. When Susan says she wants to be a professional singer like Elaine Paige, the room laughs at her. Then the music starts, and she sings. What changed in the next five seconds was not Susan Boyle. It was everyone watching her. The link to the famous video is at the end of this newsletter. Her story is usually told as transformation, but I believe it’s really about the world seeing you as you are. She Was Already Her Susan Boyle did not become talented on that stage. She had been singing since she was a child, performing locally, attending acting school, making earlier attempts at the industry. She spent years caring for her mother, who died in 2007. She auditioned after that. The voice the world congratulated itself on discovering had been in her the entire time. The world had simply not been paying attention. There is something in that worth sitting with, particularly if you are a woman past forty. Consider how much of your life you have spent trying to become worthy of a room you were already standing in. More polished or secure. Collecting evidence and submitting it, hoping something would eventually come back that said you are finally enough. I know the shape of that because I have done it my entire life. I am embarrassed to admit that I have tried to be worthy enough in three different countries. I have flown to Paris, Bali, and Sedona, Arizona for women’s retreats, and I walked into every one of those rooms doing the same thing. I scan the faces and make myself useful early, so that by the second day I would know where I stood. By the time I said anything that mattered, the room had already formed its opinion of me. What troubles me now is not that they formed one. It is that I had already agreed to it. Susan Boyle walked out on that stage carrying none of the usual credentials. She was not young, she was not packaged, and she had not been made easy to consume. What she had was real, and real carries its own frequency. What Sovereignty Actually Is I define sovereignty as the lived experience of Divine Love. That does not make a woman fearless or impervious to what people think, and I want to be careful here, because there are too many descriptions of the spiritual life that quietly promise otherwise. I still feel the room and I still notice when someone has decided something about me. Sovereignty is quieter than immunity. It is the remembering that who you are is not finally determined by the room you are standing in. The room can applaud you, laugh at you, misread you, or ignore you for twenty years, and none of that reaches the thing itself. Susan Boyle had the same voice five minutes before that audition as she had five minutes after. All that changed was who had heard it. Then the Money Arrived Her life changed with a speed most of us cannot imagine. The debut album became the biggest-selling record in the world that year. Before it, The Guardian described a woman living on about thirty pounds a week, buying discounted food and saving for inexpensive clothes, who knew exactly what it was to worry about the gas bill. Then she did not have to. What interests me is what did not happen next. She stayed near her hometown. She kept shopping at Tesco and taking the bus. She kept the people she already had, and she said this was deliberate, that she wanted her life to stay recognizable to her. She has also said there is nothing worse than worrying about money, and that this is exactly why she never became much of a spender. She did not become a different woman with money. She became Susan Boyle who had money instead of Susan Boyle who did not. That distinction is harder than it sounds, because we ask money to do work it was never built for. We want it to certify us, protect us from shame, and demonstrate at the end that our life amounted to something. When money is carrying all of that, no figure is ever sufficient, since the question underneath it is not financial. Money is a reliable pain portal for exactly that reason. It presses on the place where you have outsourced your worth and keeps pressing until you notice what you handed over. Susan Boyle’s money let her stop worrying about heating her house. It was never asked to make her someone else. Changing Is Not the Same as Losing Yourself Authenticity does not require you to refuse transformation, and I want to say that plainly, because women in spiritual circles sometimes use authenticity as a reason to stay small. Susan changed her hair and her clothes. She traveled, performed for audiences she could not have imagined, and learned an industry from the inside. She has joked about the outward transformation while making clear that inwardly she remained the same woman. That is what authenticity and sovereignty look like in practice. You are allowed to evolve, to earn more, to become visible, to live somewhere beautiful, to enjoy what your work has built. Sovereignty does not ask you to reject the world. It asks you not to misplace yourself inside it. What If She Had Believed Them The audience thought it knew exactly who she was before she sang a note, and they were wrong about all of it. Consider what would have happened if Susan had agreed with them. If she had absorbed the raised eyebrows, the old insults, the cultural instruction about what a woman of forty-seven is permitted to want. If she had decided the dream had a shelf life and hers had expired. The world would never have heard her. And here is the part that matters more: neither would she. There is likely something in you that has not been witnessed yet. Perhaps you have taken the world’s silence as a verdict on whether it is real. Sovereignty reverses that order. Worth does not arrive with the applause, and it does not arrive with the money. You were already that woman when the room was still laughing. The applause is only the moment everyone else catches up. Your Soul Has Never Needed an Audience She walked onto that stage an ordinary woman from Scotland and walked off an international phenomenon, and underneath the cameras and the contracts and the millions of records was the same person who had walked on. That is why the story still moves people all these years later. It is not only the voice. It is recognition, the part of us that has been underestimated, or arrived later than expected, or never fit the packaging, or quietly wondered whether the moment had passed. Sovereignty does not begin when the world finally sees you. It begins when you stop requiring the world to see you before you are willing to. The world did not make her extraordinary. It finally heard her sing. What in you has not been heard yet? Or what used to be unheard that you now show to the world? Please share one line in the comments. Many blessings on your journey, Kathryn Empowered Way | Where women remember their sovereignty. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com (https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   No One Has Ever Seen Your Rainbow

   Dear Sovereigns: I have loved rainbows my entire life. Every time one appears, it is always unexpected and a reminder that we live in a world where magic is all around us. I have seen rainbows in Hawaii, the British Virgin Islands, and in my own back yard. Each time a surprise and a delight. One day, I became curious about why the colors in a rainbow are always in the same sequence, how they form, and what am I really seeing when these vibrant colors stack themselves across the sky. The answers were surprising and enlightening. The perfect exploration of why we are here. You don’t see the same rainbow as the person next to you. You have never once seen the same rainbow as the person standing beside you. That’s an astonishing statement that is a measurable fact about how light behaves. The rainbow you see is assembled from light bending out of particular droplets at a particular angle to your particular eyes. The woman next to you is receiving her light from entirely different drops. If she takes one step to the left, the rainbow she is looking at is rebuilt out of new water. There is something else, and this is the part that stopped me. Every rainbow is a circle centered on the shadow of your own head. The sun comes from behind you, passes over you, and throws your shadow out into the rain. The point directly opposite the sun, the exact center of that arc of color, is the shadow of you. The bow is organized around where you happen to be standing. Move, and it moves with you. You cannot walk to the end of it, because it has no end and it is not out there in the way you thought it was. What Actually Happens Inside the Drop Light arrives at a raindrop as one thing. We call it white, which is misleading, because white is not the absence of color. It is every color traveling together, not yet separated. The light strikes the surface of the drop and slows down as it crosses from air into water. Slowing makes it bend. That bending is refraction, and here is the mechanism the entire rainbow depends on: not every color bends by the same amount. Red is lazy about it. Violet turns hardest. The rest fall in between, each one taking its own angle. The light travels through the drop, strikes the far inside wall, reflects back, and exits, bending once more on the way out. By the time it leaves, what entered as a single beam has been fanned open into its parts. Red emerges at about forty-two degrees. Violet at about forty. Those two degrees are the whole difference between a color you see at the top of the arc and a color you see at the bottom. The raindrop did not make any of this. It didn’t contribute pigment or add anything that wasn’t already in the light. All the droplet did was be clear enough to let the light pass through it and round enough to send it back. The Color Order Never Changes Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. Always the same order and the same sequence. Every rainbow that has ever appeared over every field, city and ocean on this planet has arranged itself in that same order. Why? Because each color has its own fixed angle of bending, and the angle does not deviate, change, or negotiate. Violet cannot decide to come out first this time. The structure is built into the light itself. I find that steadying, and I think you might too. Whatever is in you arrives in an order you did not choose and cannot rearrange. Some part of you will always come out first, and some part of you will always come out last, and the impatience you feel about the sequence does not change the physics. What is being revealed in you is being revealed according to something reliable. You are not disordered. You are refracting the light as the dominate energy of your being. Why You Need the Storm A rainbow requires two conditions at once, and this is the part everyone tends to resist. There must be light behind you and there must be rain in front of you. Clear skies produce nothing. A storm on all sides produces nothing. You only see the rainbow when you are turned toward the weather with the light at your back. I have wanted, more times than I can count, to wait until the rain passed before I felt I had learned the lesson. Life doesn’t work that way. The storms come so you can discover and remember who you are. The storm is not the obstacle to the light. The storm is the instrument the light uses. Every woman I know who carries something luminous acquired it in weather. The Ones Who Let Everything Through Some people seem to have almost nothing in the way. Mother Teresa spent decades in Calcutta with people nobody else would touch, and after she died, her private letters revealed something that startled the world. For most of those years she had felt no presence of God at all. She described a long interior darkness, an absence where the warmth had been. She kept working anyway. She kept showing up for the dying without the consolation of feeling the Love she was transmitting. I cannot think of a better description of a clear drop. She did not generate the light. She let it move through her even when she could not feel it. Gandhi titled the story of his life an account of his experiments with truth, which tells you he considered himself unfinished. He documented his own failures in detail. He was wrong about important things, and people who study his life closely have to reckon with that. He was not a different species of human being with a different quality of soul. That is exactly why he matters here. If these people were made of some rarer light than the rest of us, their lives would be inspiring and useless. They were not. The light was ordinary light, the same light falling on you this morning. What distinguished them was how little they put in its way. And most of the people who do this have no names you would recognize. The nurse who stays past her shift. The woman who has visited the same friend in the same facility every Sunday for nine years. The teacher who noticed one child. They are refracting continuously and nobody is writing it down. What This Path Asks of You The work is not to become more colorful. You have everything you need right now to allow the light to move through. You are not lacking pigment. The work is clarity, which is the least glamorous spiritual assignment there is. A water drop refracts because nothing inside it is cloudy enough to stop the light. Resentment makes a woman opaque. So does the story you keep telling about who wronged you, and the identity you built to stay safe. The fear that if you let the light all the way through you will be consumed by it. You will not be consumed. The water drop is unchanged by what passes through it. It gives no substance away and loses nothing, and the entire sky fills with color because it was willing to be clear. You have a spectrum in you that has never been separated out where anyone could see it. Divine Love is the light. Your life is the angle. What comes out the other side has never existed before in exactly that arrangement, and when it is gone from the world, that particular bending of the light will not occur again. A Blessing for the Clearing May the light find you facing the weather with the sun at your back. May you stop waiting for the rain to end before you agree to be beautiful. May you become clear rather than impressive. May you let Love pass all the way through you on the days you cannot feel it, and may you trust that it is arriving on the other side regardless of what you feel. And may you remember, when you are certain no one sees you, that the arc is centered on the shadow of your own head, that it has always been centered there, and that it was never going to appear anywhere else. Many blessings on your journey, Kathryn Empowered Way | Where women remember their sovereignty. Tell me which color you think comes out of you first. I would like to know what you think the world sees before it sees anything else. Thanks for reading Empowered Way: Where Women Remember Their Sovereignty. Please share this post with another woman who may need it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit empoweredway.substack.com (https://empoweredway.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)