That high holy day of elementary school...
The class trip.
I’m guessing there’s a place near your childhood home that still means those words to you.
In New Haven County, Connecticut, where I grew up and live today, that place was the Peabody Museum at Yale University. For most of my formative years, a trip to the Peabody was somewhere on the calendar between September and June.
There was a whole lead up to a class trip that added to the anticipation.
Picking a partner, finding out which chaperone group you’d be in, deciding what you’d wear, and cracking open the piggy bank to see what was available for gift shop money.
Class trip day was also the only day of the year that my brother and I were allowed actual junk food in our lunches.
There would be a cold can of soda wrapped in tin foil at the bottom of the brown lunch bag.
I think it’s intended role was to refrigerate the contents of the bag. Which of course it didn’t do - and I could never understand why my sandwich staying cold on trip days was a thing when every other day it just sat in my locker until it was time to eat it.
In addition to the SODA, a sandwich on a ROLL and an absence of a piece of fruit, there was always a bag of CHIPS and, drumroll…
A HOSTESS FRUIT PIE.
My brother and I still talk about those lunches.
We also still talk about the pencils the Peabody sold in the gift shop. The bottom half was a regular pencil - painted white - and the top half was a clear plastic tube filled with tiny polished stones in every shape and color imaginable, held in place by the eraser which served as a stopper.
We may not have had phones to distract us, but we could pour out those tiny stones and fiddle with them for an entire math class.
They don’t make those pencils any more because now we protect our kids from eating rocks by not letting them have any instead of teaching them not to eat rocks - but that’s another story.
Walking into the Peabody, the first thing we wanted to see were the dinosaurs in the Great Hall.
And the teachers knew it.
Regardless of what we were studying that year - regardless of what they brought us there to learn about - they knew that they could never have our attention until we saw those bones.
Giants.
Towering.
Real.
And they were ours.
The brontosaurus with her head almost at the peak of the ceiling, her tail dragging far behind her…she belonged to us in a way that was bigger than our third grade minds could wrap around.
These were not exhibits.
They were facts.
They were part of the internal architecture of our childhood.
We believed in what we saw - what we were told - what the experts presented as known.
And so we were certain.
This is not unique to childhood. As adults, we organize the world similarly.
What do we see?
What have we been told?
What do our most respected sources have to say about it?
And, most importantly, what has our own experience proven to us?
In this way we learn what is good and bad, safe and unsafe, possible and impossible, real and imagined.
This is a highly valuable process.
Except…
When something gets filed in the “known” category of the mind, we tend to stop looking at it - stop wondering - stop asking questions.
And of course that makes sense.
It’s efficient.
It’s protective.
It’s comforting.
We walk into the Great Hall at the Peabody Museum and all is right with the world.
Until…
The labels change (yes, my beloved brontosaurus was relabeled apatosaurus for a bit).
Her bones have since been rearranged - representative of new fossil records unearthed throughout the decades.
Even the stegosaurus’ is altered, his tail spikes reduced from eight to four.
When a “fact” changes, we feel a bit shaken.
Facts are facts.
But what is a fact, really?
I cringe every time I hear Oprah say, “what I know for sure.”
Because unless we fully understand that what we know for sure is only what we know for sure right now, we doom ourselves to remaining locked in time like a pile of mislabeled bones.
And you probably think…of course…things evolve…we keep learning…
But it’s sneakier than that.
The labels didn’t change because science failed.
They changed because science kept looking.
And that’s the whole point of rigor.
Not certainty.
Not finality.
Rigor is a willingness to stay in relationship with evidence.
Being rigorous means you are willing to rearrange the spine when a new bone turns up.
Being “right” means you get to stop looking.
And we mix those up constantly.
Sometimes when we say “science has proven,” what we really mean is, “I would like this question to feel settled now.”
Which is a natural inclination. Not knowing is uncomfortable.
It’s uncomfortable to not know why you’ve achieved some things with such ease while others remain seemingly unattainable regardless of how hard you work at them.
It is uncomfortable to sense something before you can explain it.
To feel pulled toward something before you have a plan.
To trust a pattern before you have proof.
So we tend to close the door in one of two directions.
We decide it’s god/universe/magic and we close the case on the side of faith.
Or we decide it’s coincidence/cause and effect/occam’s razor and we close the case on the side of science.
Either way, we’ve stopped being rigorous.
Both are doors shutting.
I see this all the time when I ask people to interrupt their patterns of certainty.
Manifesting.
Following signs.
Trusting timing.
Listening to the body.
Paying attention to what seems to keep presenting itself.
Say any of those phrases out loud and you can feel the room divide.
Some people find certainty in the direction of faith, wonder or magic.
Some people find certainty in the direction of science, proof, or permission.
Neither path will move you forward - not because of the path, but because of the certainty.
I’m not asking you to believe in any one thing over another.
I’m asking you to notice what happens when you stop dismissing your own experience simply because you cannot fully explain it yet.
Because so much of being human lives in the space between what we can prove and what we can honestly say we have experienced.
We know when a room feels safe.
We know when a conversation drains us.
And when a choice expands something inside us.
We also know when a decision constricts us.
Even when we choose to ignore it, we know what a longing is asking of us.
We know when something inside us is trying to get our attention.
And no, every feeling is not a fact, every sign is not an instruction, and most coincidences are just coincidences.
But our unexplained experiences are not meaningless.
We can learn to live in a state of being that allows for multiple truths to be held at once - that leaves space for the evolution of information - that allows for opportunity to exist in some form in all places.
A place of discernment.
A place of curiosity.
A place where we can observe what happens without needing to turn it instantly into doctrine or nonsense.
That’s what I mean by living in a manifesting state.
Not making demands of the universe.
Or thinking every feather on the sidewalk is a secret message.
Certainly not by bypassing responsibility, effort, or evidence.
A manifesting state is a way of being that keeps you open to possibility and capable of taking action.
It changes what you notice.
It changes which doors you are willing to approach.
It changes how quickly you act when something feels aligned.
It changes how much evidence you require before you stop abandoning your own self-trust.
And most of us have already experienced this.
We can look back and see the person we met at exactly the right time.
The decision that seemed inconsequential but changed everything.
The appearance of a ‘sign’ in the very moment you were seeking an answer.
The opportunity that appeared only after we became someone who could recognize it.
We have manifested things before.
We may have called it luck.
Timing.
Instinct.
God.
Coincidence.
Universe.
The name matters less than our willingness to stay in relationship with the experience.
To notice.
To test.
To observe.
To update.
To become better scientists of our own lives.
Not rigid.
Not gullible.
Not cynical.
Not naive.
But endlessly curious.
Which brings us back to the Great Hall.
Some of what you know for sure is a brontosaurus - her bones are (mostly) real.
But some of her has been rearranged.
We hadn’t known that something so humongous could stand in such elegant balance. Her spine stretches out horizontally across the Great Hall now - no more head reaching, no more tail dragging behind her.
So we must rearrange what we know of her.
And some of what you know for sure was never a fact at all.
It was a placard someone official-sounding wrote a long time ago, hung in the Great Hall of your mind, and you’ve walked past it so many times you stopped reading the words.
This is where so much of the work begins.
Not with deciding what you believe once and for all.
But with becoming curious again about the places where certainty may have replaced perception.
The desires you dismissed too quickly.
The patterns you called personality.
The limits you called reality.
The signs you explained away because you did not yet know what to do with them.
So, I ask you…
What are the bones you’ve stopped looking at because someone with a title, a platform, or enough authority told you the looking was already done?
Manifest is a yearlong journey for women who can sense that something in their lives is asking to be seen - and lived - differently.
Together, we look with curiosity at the old conclusions, identities, and patterns that may be shaping what you believe is possible. You learn to trust what you know beneath the noise, experiment with new ways of being, and take the steady, aligned action that allows your next chapter to emerge.
Manifest 2027 is now open with Future Self Pricing through July 31.
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