Before You Can Fly, You Need Ground Beneath Your Feet

On Goddess Gaia, healing after divorce, and the part of recovery nobody puts on a vision board.

May 12, 2026

A woman walking alone along a quiet neighborhood pond — It wasn’t as nice as this, but this is representative.

There was a pond near my old house that I used to walk around.

It wasn’t a dramatic nature trail. It wasn’t a forest retreat or a silent meditation garden. It was a pond, circled by streets, in the middle of an ordinary neighborhood. Some days, I had headphones in and music that somehow knew exactly what my nervous system needed. Some days I didn’t. Either way, I walked. And something about the water, the trees at the edges, the light—something just kept meeting me there.

At the time, I didn’t have a name for what was happening. Now I do.

That was Gaia.

In the Goddess Method, we move through five phases of healing—SEE, SHIFT, SHED, SELF-CARE, and SOAR. Right now, we are in SHIFT. And the first guide of this phase is Goddess Gaia—the Earth herself. The great mother. The original ground.

If you are somewhere in the middle of your post-divorce life, you may have already done the first, hardest work: you’ve started to SEE. You’ve let yourself feel things you didn’t want to feel. You’ve stopped pretending everything is fine. That takes enormous courage, and if that’s where you are, I want to say clearly: that was enough. That still is enough.

The SEE Phase Guide at $27

But now there is a next step. And it’s not about getting inspired, finding your passion, or redesigning your life. Not yet.

It’s about finding solid ground.

Healing doesn’t begin when everything finally feels beautiful.

It begins when you finally feel safe enough to be still.

Gaia’s medicine is not exciting. It doesn’t sell well as a headline. It’s not a breakthrough or a revelation. It is, quite simply, this: the Earth holds you. She always has. And when we are in the middle of the kind of pain that divorce brings—the kind that doesn’t announce itself cleanly, that shows up at 2 AM and at the grocery store and in the middle of a work call—the most powerful thing we can do is let something hold us.

That something is nature.

I want to be honest with you about what “connecting with nature” means, because I know how it can sound. It can sound like advice for people who live near forests, who have the luxury of time, who don’t have kids to pick up or jobs to show up for or a body that’s exhausted from simply holding the pieces of their life together.

So let me say it plainly: you don’t need a forest. You don’t need a retreat. You don’t need an hour.

You need a pond. You need a sidewalk with a tree at the end of it. You need to notice the sky on your way to your car. You need to feel the sun on your face for thirty seconds before you go inside.

These are not small things. These are Gaia’s invitations.

She is patient. She has been here far longer than our pain. She does not need us to perform our healing—she only asks us to show up. And when we do, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But a little. And a little is everything when you are healing.

One of the practices that grounded me most deeply during this time was starting each morning with Reiki—hands on my own body, energy moving downward into the Earth, a conscious act of saying: I am here. I am held. Whatever comes today, I am not untethered.

Reiki Precepts:

Just for today, I will not be angry.

Just for today, I will not worry.

Just for today, I will give thanks for my many blessings.

Just for today, I will do my work honestly.

Just for today, I will be kind to everything that has life.

You may not practice Reiki. That’s okay. What matters is the intention behind it: the choice to connect with something larger than your fear, to hand your hardest moments to something that can hold them. Many traditions call this prayer. Some call it grounding. Gaia simply calls it coming home.

If there is a moment today that is particularly heavy—a thought that spirals, a memory that catches you off guard, a feeling with no clear name—try this: step outside. Put your feet on the earth if you can. Take a breath. And imagine that heaviness moving downward, through you, into the ground. Let her have it. She can take it. That is what she does. She transmutes what we cannot carry alone.

The Earth does not ask you to be healed before she holds you.
She holds you so that you can heal.

The Shift phase is not about transformation. Not yet. It’s about something quieter, about moving the needle just slightly, so that you can begin to see your life from a new angle. Gaia is the one who makes that possible. She slows you down enough to see clearly. She stabilizes the ground beneath you so the shift doesn’t feel like falling.

Walk. Notice. Breathe. Go outside, even briefly. Touch something that grew from the earth. Drink your water slowly. Let nature be your therapist between sessions.

She has been waiting for you.

The pond is still there. I don’t live near it anymore. But I carry what it gave me—the understanding that healing doesn’t require a dramatic setting. It requires presence. And the earth, in her quiet, patient way, is always offering it.

Wherever you are reading this, she is there too.

Go find her.