Welcome, Dear Quester.

If you've landed here, chances are you're feeling stuck. Scared. Maybe trapped in something that feels impossible to name, let alone leave.

You are in a labyrinth. This work is about the escape hatch out of it.

I know these halls intimately — not because I read about them, but because I lived inside one for years. Nearly ten years into my own spiritual path, financially independent, and pretty darn sure of exactly who I was. None of that made me immune.

At 38, after nearly a decade questing, I fell in love with a charming French surfer in the jungles of Costa Rica. Cosmic synergy, or so I thought. Together we built a retreat center. I had two beautiful babies. I published a bestselling memoir and was, by every outward measure, living the dream.

There was just one detail derailing my utopia: the Frenchman was unhinged, and I couldn't see it clearly, because he was also devoted to me, brilliant, present — a hands-on father who cooked like a chef and spoke three languages. My mind couldn't reconcile the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of it. So I explained it away. He needs to be the captain of the ship, I told myself, so let him. That's just his passionate culture — and I affectionately nicknamed him my fiery Frenchman.

I was conditioned to believe abuse happened to someone else — a lipstick-smeared woman in a trailer with few options, not to university-educated women, not to healers, not to mindful mamas who say "nervous system" in casual conversation and wear linen. So even as my light dimmed, my voice disappeared, and my body screamed at me through UTIs, shingles, and insomnia, it didn't occur to me that I was living with an abuser.

Here's what I eventually learned, the hard way: narcissists don't prey on the weak. They seek the resilient, the bright, the deeply empathetic women who see potential in everyone and everything. My spiritual self gaslit me into having compassion for his trauma. My intellectual self rationalized it as cross-cultural misunderstanding. So I stayed, and gave, the way a "good woman" is supposed to — while he raged on me, hit the children, and forced us all into the same bed with a gun under the pillow, for our "protection."

That's how confusing it was — I literally believed we were soulmate lovers, for years.

The night that finally broke it open, I stuffed a few things into trash bags and fled with my children to the capital city, San José.

What followed was its own labyrinth — a protection order, a crooked legal system, a smear campaign, an immediate rescue mission to remodel our retreat center, which had been neglected, all while solo-parenting through summer vacation. My nervous system ran on a frazzled adrenal gland for the better part of a year.

And here's the twist I still can't quite get over: one arm of my work at the time was teaching women to call in love by learning to love themselves. I'd already helped hundreds of women transform their lives. And there I was, inside an abusive relationship myself.

So I did the thing everyone told me not to do — I shared it publicly. And the response taught me the truth underneath all of this: this is not rare. Women from every walk of life are waking up to the same knowing.

Today, I write this from the other side, where I won primary custody of my children, my home, and the retreat center I've now reimagined as a small community of families, for the time being — single mamas need community! I am recovering my creative spirit, word by word, note by note, and each kitchen dance party at a time. I feel a peace that makes me weep with gratitude just to be here. I haven't been sick in over a year. Not even a sniffle.

If you've made it this far: you are not alone. So many brave, now-wise women have walked these dark corridors. I'm just one of them — but my hand is here for you to hold. I will lie down in the dirt with you and wipe away your tears. We'll rage, together, at the injustice, the betrayal, the systems that failed you. I will mirror back your brilliance, your strength, and your wild, unnamed gifts. And we will map a way forward — because there is freedom, and there is sanctuary, no matter how deep the labyrinth goes.

I am here to guide you to your own sweet sanctuary of liberation. And on a planet hellbent on controlling women, real liberation is a revolution.

Not sure yet where you stand in the labyrinth? [Take the two-minute quiz →]

With love and true understanding,
Emily