003: The Price of Power
EDITION: November 2025
ESTIMATED READING TIME: 8 minutes
TL; DR: Short on time? Here’s the 60 second breakdown.
FIELD NOTE: 003
I.
When Zoe* and I spoke during her pre-session, she was sitting in a corner of the airport’s children’s lounge. I could hear the soft hum of travel all around her. People rolled suitcases past the glass doors while cartoons played in the background.
She told me that after raising four children, she had learned to tune out almost any kind of noise. “Being a mom is a meditative practice,” she laughed.
She had found the quietest spot in the airport and said our time together felt like one of the few moments of peace she’d had in weeks. “This is like self-care right here,” she said. “It’s not often I’m able to stop and feel. I don’t really allow myself that luxury.”
But beneath the humor was fatigue. Her son is three years old and has leukemia. It is a reality that shapes every breath of her days.
Between hospital visits, medications, four children, marriage, and career, she does not have the time or the safety to fall apart.
What makes it all the more striking is who Zoe is. She is physically stunning, elegant in the way some women simply are. She is self-made, owns multiple homes, and walks into a room in slingback Valentinos with presence. People look at her and see success, beauty, discipline. They call her superwoman.
She hates that.
“People think I can do everything. But at what cost? My kids have never seen me cry.” She paused. “I try not to feel a lot… I don’t feel a lot. I don’t even know if being vulnerable is good or bad. It just wasn’t allowed where I’m from.”
When she described her life, she used one word: investment.
“I’m investing in everything,” she said. “My children, my husband, myself. I want to make sure that when I’m older, when I don’t have this kind of energy, I can reap what I’ve poured into.”
But investment comes with a cost.
She spoke about her husband with a mix of loyalty and weariness. “If we can keep our relationship intact through this, that would mean something,” she said. “Because right now, it’s hard. We’re struggling. The kids depend on us. Our parents and families depend on us. If we collapse, everything collapses.”
Simply put: she was holding so much, even love felt heavy.
What stayed with me was not her strength, but her awareness. Zoe realized she’d not just built her life, she’d built armor. Even inside so much uncertainty, she could feel it tightening. She didn’t want that to be the story. She didn’t want her strength to erase her tenderness.
II.
There is a particular kind of strength that emerges when a woman has no choice but to become her own protector.
Thought leader Marianne Williamson once said that women of her generation had to defend themselves so completely they grew talons where fingernails used to be.
Zoe is part of that lineage.
Before this life and this marriage, there was another one. A former marriage marked by control and violence. She once told me she used to feel like a caged animal, watching herself shrink in the presence of the man who said he loved her.
It’s not something she often speaks of. But you can hear it in the careful way she measures her words, in how rarely she allows anyone, including her current husband, to see her underbelly.
In that past life, she picked herself up from the floor and got busy rebuilding. In building a life no one could question, she worked harder, achieved more, outperformed everyone around her. She became proof of her own worth.
Brick by brick, with her boys under her wing, she became the kind of woman no one could harm again. Every success said: never again.
But the body remembers. The nervous system remembers.
III.
Across sacred wisdom traditions, love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. It is something divine, both fierce and merciful.
In the Song of Songs, love is seal and sanctuary: “Set me as a seal upon your heart… for love is strong as death.”
In the Qur’an, spouses are named tranquility and mercy for one another, mawaddah and rahmah, garments of mutual softness.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the beloved life is one “filled with offerings of love.”
The ancients understood that love burns away illusion. Their poetry gives us a compass where intimacy is both flame and shelter, passion and refuge.
Survival, by contrast, hardens perception until the world becomes a threat. It teaches the body to scan, to brace. In survival, we do not set one another as seals upon our hearts. We wear armor to bed.
And over time, the cost is steep. We lose the capacity to be quieted by love. We lose the reflex to rest in its embrace.
Zoe knew this language by heart.
We called her curriculum Reclaiming Self in the Midst of Sacred Responsibility.
Because what she carried was sacred—her children, her marriage, her career—but she was missing in it.
The question was: what would it feel like to be alive inside your own life again?
Tenderness, for Zoe, wasn’t indulgence. It was a return.
IV.
We built Zoe a curriculum that could hold two realities at once. We wanted to let power and gentleness sit side by side.
Her Voice & Vision curriculum had four modules:
The Mirror and the Map — Naming the inner architecture
We named and recognized the archetypal forces dominant in her day to day: the Alpha and the Creative. She recognized her desire to allow the creative lover more space to reign. Control, she saw, was not her essence — it was her inheritance. Authority is sacred when it serves the soul, but tyranny when it serves fear.Let Pain Be a Portal — Teaching the body that safety is possible.
We worked gently with the vigilance that arrived before thought. We explored post traumatic growth and learned how to give the nervous system a new story where safety could be felt, not just promised.Reclaim Your Relationship with Your Body — Aligning with divine lineage.
Because Zoe has a strong connection with her ancestors, we traced her emotional inheritance through ancestral lineage. The moment she felt their presence, her healing turned into recognition: I was never abandoned by love. I had only forgotten where to look.Rewrite Your Origin Story — Sustaining the sacred.
Partnership became not negotiation, but sacrament: “There is a beloved in me who wants to meet you.” Learning to speak from the heart, not survival.
As we began to bear witness to what the Alpha was protecting, a deeper truth emerged. She hadn’t learned betrayal from her ex-husband. She came from a lineage of men who betrayed the feminine.
However, we wanted to explore if there were other stories within her lineage. Through the weeks, I introduced a powerful series of visualizations called well-healed ancestors, where we look at lineage not just through suffering and endurance, but through who already created a new map, who already broke the chain.
Expecting to feel the presence of her strong grandmothers, Zoe was surprised to feel the presence of her maternal grandfather, one of the few healthy male relationships she’d known. He had always encouraged her to laugh and find joy. As she continued to feel into her lineage, she felt surrounded by ancestors who loved her deeply. She felt held, even in the worst parts of her story. She felt known, cared for, and seen.
A new story rose. One that combined strength with joy. One that invited in new archetypal forces:
Playfulness.
Curiosity.
Innocence.
In our first session, she admitted it was painful to be vulnerable, she felt a physical ache. But after our sessions, she chose to lean into vulnerability anyway, despite the discomfort.
V.
During our sessions, I’d often ask Zoe what kind of tree she wanted to be: mighty, rigid, and immovable, or supple and alive to the wind.
Lately, she says she’s learning to sway. To let storms pass through without breaking her branches, to trust that flexibility is a form of faith.
I’d like to think this is what the future of strength looks like. Not more endurance, but more permeability.
A body that can tremble and still stay open. A heart that knows how to break without hardening. A woman who can finally rest inside her lover’s tenderness.
Zoe once told me she comes from women who survived by toughness.
There’s a saying: I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.
But perhaps the higher truth is: I am their evolution continuing.
When Zoe breathes now, she gives permission for the whole lineage to exhale. The ones who endured, the ones who healed, the ones who are still learning how.
This is how we turn our talons back into fingernails.
*While this Field Note is shared with permission, “Zoe” is a pseudonym used for privacy.
MELISSA KIGUWA Future Intelligence Founder
Creator of the Future Intelligence™ curriculum—a 12-part inner training used by top decision-makers—Melissa pairs nervous-system retraining with interfaith spiritual practice. Training as a Spiritual Director with Unity Worldwide Ministries and holding a master’s from the London School of Economics, she helps public leaders unwind chronic tension and return to calm, decisive leadership.