It is the phrase at the centre of this practice. The one that appears in the pull quote, in the tagline, in the brand guide. And the one I am most frequently asked to explain.
You were always sovereign. What does that mean, exactly?
"Sovereignty is not something you earn. It is something you remember. And grief, as brutal as it is, is often what makes us remember it."
The word sovereignty carries a lot of weight — political, historical, contested. In the context of this practice, I mean something specific by it. I mean that you have always had authority over your own experience. Over your own body, your own grief, your own process of moving through the world. That authority was not given to you by anyone else. It cannot be taken away. It belongs to you.
Why grief makes sovereignty visible
One of the strange gifts of grief — and I say gifts carefully, knowing how brutal it is — is that it strips away the performances. The personas we maintain. The way we manage how we appear to others. Grief is too heavy to carry and perform simultaneously. Something has to go.
What often goes is the performance of having it together. Of knowing what to do. Of being someone who copes. And underneath that performance is something more honest — a person who is in pain, who does not know what to do, who is navigating the most demanding terrain a human being can cross.
That honesty is sovereignty. Not the composed version of yourself. Not the version that has answers. The version that is actually here, actually in it, actually present to the reality of what has happened.
Sovereignty is not strength
This is important to say clearly: sovereignty is not the same as strength. Sovereignty is not the absence of pain or vulnerability or confusion. It is not stoicism. It is not coping without help. It is not any of the things we are taught to associate with self-sufficiency.
Sovereignty is the recognition that your experience belongs to you. That you get to grieve in the way that is true for you, not in the way that is convenient for others. That you do not owe anyone a particular version of your recovery. That you can ask for support — not because you are broken, but because this is hard, and you were never meant to do it alone.
You were always sovereign. That is not something I am granting you. It is something I am reminding you of. And the work of this practice — the grief coaching, the Usui Reiki, the tarot, the plant wisdom — is all in service of that remembering.