By Heather & Jenny | Soul Sister | Women’s Wellness
Key Takeaways
There’s a reason some wounds stay tender long after they should have healed. A reason certain situations keep pulling you back into the same feelings, the same frustration, the same quiet ache.
After years of running women’s wellness retreats and personal growth workshops, we’ve seen a clear pattern. It almost always comes down to one of three words.
This is the belief that because of something that happened — or didn’t happen — you’ve lost something precious.
Love, time, respect, a version of your future you’d already imagined. As long as your mind holds onto the illusion of permanent, total loss, suffering follows.
Here’s the gentle truth: most of the time, what we’ve actually lost is the expectation of how things were supposed to go. That’s real, and it’s worth grieving. But it’s not the same as losing everything.
This one is subtler, but just as powerful.
It’s the feeling that because of what happened, you now have less — less worth, less joy, less love available to you, less of whatever you value most.
Less is particularly sneaky because it often disguises itself as realism. I’m just being practical. But there’s a difference between honest assessment and a mind that has decided, on your behalf, that you’re running out of something important.
This is the belief that because of what happened, you will never have what you truly want.
Never be loved like that again. Never fully trust. Never feel that confident, that free, that whole.
When the mind lands on ‘never,’ it isn’t making a prediction. It’s building a prison. And it keeps women stuck in a way that loss and less simply don’t.
We see this often at our retreats for women — women who have been living inside a ‘never’ story for so long, they’ve forgotten it’s a story at all.
The antidote isn’t positive thinking or pretending things are fine.
It’s a genuine shift in focus — from what’s wrong to what’s still right. From what’s gone to what remains. From what might never be to what is already here.
That shift starts with appreciation. Not forced gratitude, but real, honest noticing of something good — even if it’s small, even if it exists right alongside the pain.
When you appreciate something genuinely, you step out of your head and back into your heart. And from that place, the grip of loss, less, and never begins — slowly, surely — to loosen.
Sarah came to one of our women’s wellness retreats in Ontario carrying a ‘never’ story she’d been holding for over a decade. She was convinced that after her divorce, she would never feel truly at peace again.
By the end of the weekend, she hadn’t erased the pain. But she had started to question the story. And that questioning — that small crack in the certainty of ‘never’ — was the beginning of something new.
That’s what personal growth actually looks like. Not a dramatic flip. A small, courageous shift in the story you’re living inside.
Loss, Less, and Never are three of the most common hidden triggers of suffering. They feel like facts, but they’re stories — and stories can be changed.
Take a moment today and ask yourself honestly: which of these three is showing up most in my life right now?
You don’t have to fix it today. Just naming it is a powerful first step. Share it in the comments if you’re comfortable — there’s something quietly healing about saying it out loud. 💛
For deep grief or real loss — no, 90 seconds won’t make it disappear. Nor should it. Some things deserve to be felt fully.
But what this practice does, even then, is give you a way back to yourself. A way to interrupt the spiral before it takes you somewhere you don’t want to go.
We’ve seen this work at our women’s retreats in Ontario, through our online Soul Full Woman Collective, and in our own lives — especially on the hardest days.
Think of something that’s been sitting uneasily in the back of your mind lately.
Now — place both hands on your heart. Breathe slowly. Notice what comes up without judging it. Then think of one thing, just one, that you genuinely feel grateful for right now.
Feel the difference? That’s not magic. That’s just your heart doing what it already knows how to do.
The 90-second rule — breathe, notice, appreciate — is a simple, evidence-informed technique for interrupting anxiety and stress before it takes hold. The more consistently you practise it, the faster it works.
Have you tried something like this before? Share your experience in the comments below. 💛
Jenny McKee and Heather DelRosario are the co-founders of Soul Full Events and passionate community builders and retreat facilitators who help women reconnect with their authentic selves beneath the noise of everyday life, with no fixing or pretending, first through their own journeys past burnout and now through the intentional wellness gatherings they create.
