The Year I Stopped Efforting (And Everything I Lost Because of It)

I woke up one morning in March and said something to my husband that stopped me mid-sentence.

“It’s so nice to just be focused on one thing.”

I said it the way you say something you didn’t know was true until you heard yourself say it out loud.

Because six weeks before that, I didn’t know if we could make our car payment.

And now I was lying in bed, genuinely calm, talking about spaciousness.

Same woman. Same life. Same business.

Something had shifted… and it wasn’t a strategy.

I Started the Year With Two Biz Partnerships and a Goal

At the beginning of 2025, I was running two business collaborations, scattered across more offers than I could count, and holding onto a dream I’d been carrying for years: move my family to Southern California.

I thought I had to do so many things to get there. Build the right offer. Find the right identity. Hit the right income number. Say yes to the right opportunities.

I was doing what I now recognize as efforting toward my own life.

If you read my last piece on being a yes-aholic, you already know what that looks like from the outside. Half-hearted yeses. Mounting resentment. A body that’s quietly pulling back while your mouth keeps agreeing.

This is what it looks like from the inside over an entire year.

The Identity Experiments

For most of last year, I was trying things on.

A custom GPT that coached people to become the highest version of themselves. A content app I abandoned when the code troubleshooting frustrated me. An MLM-adjacent project that went nowhere. It was nn old identity I borrowed from 2019 to see if it still fit.

It didn’t.

What I was really doing, and I can see this now, was asking my mind to solve a problem that only my body had the answer to.

Who am I now? What am I here to build? What actually works?

My mind kept generating options. My body kept sending quiet “noes” I kept overriding.

I was running the same pattern I described in my last article, just at the scale of an entire year instead of a single decision.

Then Binah Came for Everything

If you’re not familiar with the Tree of Life from Kabbalistic tradition, here’s what you need to know: I’ve been ascending the Tree as a year-long spiritual practice with a teacher and community. Each sphere, called a Sephirah, corresponds to a different quality of divine energy. Binah is the great mother. The one who strips… except

… she doesn't take things from you randomly. She takes what was never actually yours because Binah is a womb. She strips so she can contain. Think of steam, for example: without a container, it dissipates into nothing. But contained, it runs trains. It moves machinery. It builds entire civilizations. Binah takes the raw energy of what wants to be born through you and gives it the only thing that makes it powerful: FORM.

But, the thing is, I didn’t know any of that when I felt her arrive in the fall.

Here’s what happened…

The first biz partnership ended at the beginning of this journey. I realized I’d been holding onto it because it represented consistent income. Letting go was way overdue. I’d known it for longer than I was willing to admit.

Then the second one ended too. This one after I ran a live sacred sexuality program that sold out in five days. Five women. Fastest money I’ve ever made. Most aligned I’ve ever felt in my work. The messaging came through me, not from a strategy doc, and I could feel the difference in my body the entire time.

After that cohort ended, it became clear that my business partner and I were heading in different directions. We ended it mutually, amicably, and we’re genuinely better friends now than we were when we were working together.

But the aftermath felt like ground zero.

By February, I was staring at a calendar with no consistent income, a husband who and I were having some of the most honest and difficult conversations we’d had in years, and a car payment we weren’t sure we could make.

I remember thinking: I’ve done so much work. I’ve invested in my growth. I’ve said yes to things that scared me and no to things that didn’t feel right. And I’m still here?

Binah, I felt, was taking all my toys away.

I was right. She was.

What Arrived in the Middle of the Stripping

This is the part I didn’t expect.

In the middle of all that pressure, I had a flash of insight. A clear internal nudge to look for projects on Upwork.

I’d actually recommended it to someone else in a networking group I’d recently joined, and the moment the words left my mouth I thought: why haven’t I done this?

Within one and a half weeks of sending proposals, I landed a part-time role at an hourly rate I genuinely didn’t know anyone paid on that platform.

My first reaction was humiliation. I’ve failed as an entrepreneur. I’m back to being a contractor in someone else’s business.

My second reaction arrived a few days later, sitting in a study group where my Kabbalah teacher said something that broke me open:

I sat with that for a long time.

The partnerships. The identities I’d been trying on. The efforting. My attachment to the label of entrepreneur as the only acceptable version of who I could be professionally.

None of it was actually me.

It was scaffolding I thought I needed. And Binah, in her precise and unglamorous way, had taken it so I could finally see what was underneath.

What Was Underneath

A body that finally had room to breathe.

The Upwork role wasn’t a consolation prize. It was the first evidence that when I stopped efforting, provision could arrive in forms I hadn’t approved in advance.

Then the networking group started sending me business automation projects. Three simultaneously, at one point, without me chasing any of them.

In February, I hosted a small in-person mini-retreat and Light activated four people. It was intimate, it was powerful, and it was the kind of work that I can only do when I’m not exhausted from managing the fallout of misaligned yeses.

I launched a Spring New Moon meditation series. The container came together easily. The right people found it.

And I noticed something strange: I was busier than I’d been in years, and I felt more spacious than I ever had.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about flow. It doesn’t feel like nothing is happening. It feels like everything is happening and none of it is costing you something you can’t afford.

The Morning in March

Back to that morning in bed.

When I said “it’s so nice to just be focused,” what I meant underneath that was:

I’m not efforting anymore. And things are still showing up.

My body knew before my mind did. It always does.

The work isn’t gone. The clients are real. The income is real. The agency projects are real. But I’m not white-knuckling any of it. I’m not overriding my gut to keep something afloat that was never meant to stay.

I’m responding to what comes toward me with a full-body yes.

And then something happened that I want to tell you about, because it’s the thing I couldn’t have planned.

The Goal That Was Always Real

At the beginning of this year-long journey, I set an intention: move my family to Southern California.

As the months went by, it started to feel impossible. Like maybe it was coming from my ego and not my soul. Like maybe I’d been wrong about what I wanted and why.

Then, at the end of March, something shifted. The move stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling close. Real. Within reach.

A friend told me to look at my astrocartography for the first time. I didn’t know what it was. When I looked at it, I understood immediately why my husband and I have been pulled to Southern California for over a decade. Our shared activation zone is there. Not Austin, where I’d been considering as a stepping stone. Not where it was convenient. Where it has always been.

I’d spent a year wondering if I had to earn my way to the life I wanted.

Turns out I just had to stop efforting toward it long enough to let it find me.

What This Year Taught Me

The Yes-Aholic piece I wrote in January was about one decision made at a bathroom sink that changed everything. This is what happens when you build an entire year on top of that way of making decisions… from your body.

It doesn’t get easier in a linear way. It gets stripped first. Then it gets spacious.

The body leads whether you let it or not. The difference is whether you’re fighting it or following it. When you’re fighting it, you end up in February wondering how to make your car payment. When you’re following it, you end up in March telling your husband that everything feels like it’s just flowing.

Same woman. Same life.

One where you’re efforting. One where you’re not.

If You’re in the Stripping Phase Right Now

Here’s what I want you to know:

If Binah has come for your toys, she’s not punishing you. She’s clarifying and cleansing you.

What’s being taken was never actually you. Your body already knows this even if your mind is still arguing with it.

The provision that arrives in the middle of the stripping is real. It just doesn’t come in the form you approved in advance. I found that it’s usually bigger or greater than your mind can evern come up with on its own.

And the spaciousness on the other side of the stripping is not emptiness.

It is the feeling of your life finally having room to be what it was always meant to be.

Your body has been trying to tell you that the whole time.

The question is whether you’re listening.

~ Anna

If this landed, I’d love to know: what has this season been taking from you? Reply here in Substack or find me on Instagram @annadornier_

The Spring New Moon Series runs April through June — a monthly meditation container for people who are ready to build from their body’s intelligence rather than their mind’s anxiety. Details in my IG bio.