By Heather & Jenny | Soul Sister | Women’s Wellness
Key Takeaways
We’ve run women’s wellness retreats, weekend workshops, and personal growth events across Ontario and beyond. And in all of that time, one thing keeps coming up — over and over — from the women who walk through the door.
Most of them are suffering. And most of them didn’t fully realise it until someone gave it a name.
Suffering doesn’t always look like a crisis. It doesn’t always announce itself.
Sometimes it looks like chronic worry that lives quietly in the background. Sometimes it’s frustration that flares faster than it should, or a sadness you can’t quite explain, or an anger that sits just below the surface of everyday life.
If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not alone — and you’re not broken.
Here’s something that shifted things for us, and for so many women we’ve worked with at our retreats in Ontario and across Canada:
Suffering is almost always rooted in unmet expectations.
We have expectations of our partners, our kids, our careers, our bodies, and ourselves. When reality doesn’t match what we hoped for — we suffer.
That’s not a flaw. It’s how the human mind works.
But once you can see it clearly — I’m suffering because something isn’t meeting my expectation — you start to have a little more power over it.
This distinction matters more than it might seem.
Pain is the sharp, real feeling of something hard landing in your life. A loss, a betrayal, a disappointment.
Suffering is the story that comes after. Why did this happen to me? Will I ever be okay? What does this say about who I am?
The story is the suffering. And unlike the event itself, the story is something you can actually work with.
Through our work running women’s wellness retreats and health and wellness programs, we’ve seen three core beliefs at the heart of almost every form of suffering.
Loss. The belief that something has been taken from you — love, time, worth, safety. As long as your mind holds onto the illusion of total loss, suffering follows.
Less. The feeling that you now have less of something you value. Less joy, less energy, less love available to you. It’s a quiet scarcity that colours everything.
Never. The heaviest of the three. The belief that because of what happened, you will never have what you truly want. Never trust again. Never feel that free or whole.
Write those words down: Loss. Less. Never. The moment you can name which one your mind is stuck in, you’ve already started to loosen its grip.
This is the most important thing we want you to hear: suffering is something humans do. But you don’t have to live there.
The first step is deceptively simple. Decide.
Decide you are not going to make a permanent home in suffering. Not because life will stop being hard — it won’t. But because you are capable of finding your way back.
That decision, made over and over again, is where personal growth actually begins.
Suffering is a normal part of human experience — but it doesn’t have to be your baseline. Understanding what’s triggering it (Loss, Less, or Never) is the first and most powerful step toward something better.
Which of those three words feels most familiar to you right now? Share it in the comments. You might be surprised how many women are right there with you. 💛
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.
