What if uncertainty isn’t something to fix, but something to feel?

In this July check-in episode, Nancy and I reflect on what happens when life throws a curveball you didn’t see coming. For me, it was a literal flooded basement, a denied insurance claim, and a hard week that made me question everything. For many of us, it’s the deeper collective pressure of these uncertain times: fewer referrals, unpredictable sales, and a sense that we’ve lost the path forward.

Nancy and I unpack the personal and collective weight of not knowing about money, about business, about what’s next, and we explore how to shift from the panic of powerlessness into the peace of possibility. Together, we explore how choice can be a form of healing, and why letting go of the need for certainty may be the most freeing move to make this summer.

If your July feels a little upside down too, this episode is here to remind you that you’re not alone, that reframing this moment can be powerful, and that you’re more resilient than you think.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• When everything hits at once: Maegan’s basement experience (05:03)
• Why trying to “think your way out” of grief doesn’t work (11:32)
• How to find small moments of power in uncertain seasons (17:16)
• A look at business pressure, scarcity mindset, and selling from fear (23:58)
• Surrendering control and letting mystery guide you (30:11)
• Concrete examples of how choice can help us discover the mystery (56:11)

If you’re navigating a season of unpredictability or feeling like your plans are falling apart, this episode offers comfort, perspective, and practical wisdom for finding your footing. Tune in for an honest conversation about letting go, leaning into mystery, and trusting that your path is unfolding, even when it’s hard to see.

To watch this conversation, check it out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/gWS-9lQKWgc

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[00:00:51] Nancy: Hello, Meagan.

[00:00:55] Nancy: Can't believe it's July already.

[00:01:10] Nancy: Yeah. You've been through it lately.

[00:01:38] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:01:45] Nancy: Yeah. I'm doing well, and I feel like your experience these last couple weeks, undulating between dumpster fire and life is beautiful, it speaks to life in general, there's just so much going on all the time. It's so easy for all of us to feel a little bit of that undulation,

[00:02:09] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:02:26] Nancy: I just went camping this past weekend and took my paddleboard out for its inaugural paddle at my favorite camping spot, outside of Portland. And I needed it. And it felt lovely and I'm really latching onto those feelings of summer because it's like thriving to me. That's how I thrive.

[00:03:10] Nancy: Yeah. Sorry, I had such a great weekend.

[00:03:52] It's why so much of the work that we do is with groups, small groups. So I really do believe that when you are in a group, when you're doing work with people, everyone is holding something that is needed in the moment. I really appreciate the preciousness of that, that yeah, I am in a darker spot right now. And you are coming in refueled and connected to nature, and there's a balance. There's a balance in those two things that feels really beautiful, and I'm grateful for it. And I'm glad that you had a good weekend. Yay.

[00:04:31] Maegan: I did, before I launch into the catastrophes of this moment, do a couple of very nice things this weekend. So I went to the tea festival. Portland has a tea festival, which I've never been to, and it was really cute. You got there and you check in, and with your entrance fee you get this beautiful little ceramic tea cup. Beautiful. And then you walk around to all the vendors and they pour little tea samples in your cup.

[00:05:01] Maegan: You walk all around and you're sipping different teas. And, it was really a good vibe. And yesterday I got this big head of Napa cabbage in my CSA box last week, and I was like, what am I going to do with this big ass head of cabbage? What does one do with an enormous amount of cabbage in a two-person household? So I made sauerkraut yesterday.

[00:05:29] Maegan: I had a very Portland weekend. Okay. So that's where we are coming into this conversation, coming into the beginning of July. I'm going to be honest, the last couple of weeks I was, I'm looking at my calendar on the wall.

[00:06:08] if I had the, not if I wanted to... but if I had the capacity to do this at all. And we can talk more about that today. 'Cause I think that's also a meta process that so many of us find ourselves in when we're really sitting on that threshold of, do I need to give myself permission to opt out of this?

[00:06:49] Put a pen in that this choice that I have made for this moment, we're going to come back to that. The funny thing is all through June, I'm always just open. I'm open to receiving. What is the theme for the next month? What should it be? I think of my life, I think of my business, as a co-creative process with the universe, with spirit, with source, with the divine, however you want to think about it.

[00:07:37] And usually when we're prepping for these monthly episodes, something comes through that feels really resonant. Last month we were talking about balancing play and productivity. That just came through and felt potent for the moment. And then we had a great conversation about it and we really got to live it all through June.

[00:08:25] And it felt like that theme was being validated for me from so many different angles. Our Council gatherings, our mastermind group. So many people right now are talking about economic uncertainty.

[00:08:40] Maegan: Fewer client inquiries, fewer sales. It's really sending people to an anxious place, not knowing what's coming next, not knowing how it's going to impact us. I'm hearing it with my one-on-one clients. I'm seeing it in the therapy center that I own, right? Our referrals are way down. People are getting grippy. Because they're getting scared. People are getting scared; they're getting grippy. What can we hold onto? What can help us feel safe in this moment of uncertainty?

[00:09:48] Nancy: Yeah. We're going to have to invite it into your home.

[00:10:15] Nancy: Yeah, tell us what happened.

[00:10:44] And I had finished working, so I came upstairs. My important piece of context here, my office is in the basement of my house. I live in a 1940s Portland bungalow-type house. My office is in the basement. So I finished working, I came upstairs, and then Jonathan went downstairs into the basement to start cleaning and preparing for our niece to arrive. And I come upstairs and I'm like, okay, it's been a big week. There's a lot of transition happening. I'm going to do a little bit of energy clearing. So I do this nice long meditation, just clearing myself out. I'm getting nice and centered. I'm preparing for the weekend. And then I'm like, okay, I'm going to invite, I'm feeling a little heavy this week.

[00:11:55] Nancy: Oh yeah.

[00:12:37] Life is so great. And then Jonathan starts hollering up at me from the basement, “Meagan, there's an emergency!” And honestly, I did try to ignore him for two seconds.

[00:12:56] Maegan: I was like, don't pop my joy bubble now. I did not want to know what he had to say, do you know what I mean? I did not, I was like, can you just deal with it? I'm having a really great time right now. And he's trying to talk really loudly and the record is playing and it's a process. I couldn’t get the thing to stop playing music. He's yelling, ugh. And I finally get the music turned off and then I hear him saying the basement is flooding. He says the basement is flooding. And I was like, “Motherfucker, no.” My immediate response was, no. And apparently that doesn't really work.'Cause I did say no, and she did keep flooding. So long story short, it's the end of the day, which means everybody's closing, right? Like our homeowner’s insurance company is closing.

[00:13:50] Maegan: A Friday afternoon, like everybody's leaving for the weekend. We have family coming in. He was literally cleaning the room, the guest bedroom that they were going to be staying in. And it's just this spiral chaos. And, I have to say, like we handled that day pretty well. Like we tag-teamed, we did what needed to be done. We got the problem under control. By midnight, which if you've known me for longer than five seconds, is way past my bedtime... By midnight, the situation was under control and we were like… We had booked an Airbnb for our family coming the next day. We were like, you know what? This is what it is. We are still committed to giving them a great time here in Portland. We are committed to having a great time with them, and it's going to be fine. So we proceed through the long weekend. They're here till Wednesday. And, I'm not going to lie, it was stressful. I loved having them here and I want them to come back all the time, but I was compartmentalizing like a boss, and that takes a lot of bandwidth.

[00:15:00] Maegan: Oh my God. It was this hat switching, of being a host and then I'm trying to figure out why the insurance hasn't called us back. And it's this back and forth. And meanwhile, you and I have these big projects. We are working with some people behind the scenes to help us with our messaging and podcast 2.0. There is some really big creative stuff happening tha feels like we're at this pivotal point.

[00:16:17] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:16:40] And I'm not swimming in money at this moment in time. I've really been, the last couple of years, surrendering to letting the next thing come forward and learning to trust. And to trust that what I need is going to show up when I need it. And, this is a moment that is really testing that significantly. Not going to lie, on Thursday I did have multiple meltdowns, and just needed to let that happen. And that felt good. 'Cause historically, I think my response to these moments of extreme uncertainty would be to over-function.

[00:17:21] Maegan: To go into here's the silver lining and here's how we're going to handle it and everything's going to be fine, seems helpful on the surface, but actually isn't really an effective emotional process long term. And that's something I want to talk about today. It's like when we are going through these times of deep uncertainty, if it's something acute, like your basement's flooded and your foundation is probably cracked, and your insurance leaves you high and dry, and you don't have a bunch of money set aside to deal with it. Or if it's just the chronic uncertainty of living in this world at this moment in time, it doesn't really matter. It all kind of lands in the same place, and it lands in the place inside of us that makes us feel afraid.

[00:18:15] Maegan: Like anxious.

[00:18:17] Maegan: We get, yeah, we get scared, we get anxious, our scarcity stuff comes to the surface. We feel really afraid. And we feel really afraid. And on the other side of that is grief, right? There's so many things that we're grieving and so many things we're angry about, and being in this experience right now has really reminded me that, it's reminded me of so many things that I want to talk about here, but it's reminded me that the best thing we can do is give ourself permission to just ride the waves.

[00:18:56] Maegan: Ride the waves of emotion, ride the waves of sensation, ride the waves of fear ride... there's so many waves to ride. Okay. I have more to say about that, but I've been talking for a long time now, so I'm pausing myself and I'm just curious. I don't know, do you have any reflections for me or you want to poke around in?

[00:19:45] I'm curious, was that a more of a conscious decision that you came around to, and Part two of that question is how does it feel different this time not doing those things, not silver lining, like not relying on silver linings to make yourself feel better. I wonder if you can tell me if there's a felt sense like there's something different about it this time.

[00:21:20] Nancy: Was this a distraction from the problem?

[00:21:30] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:21:52] I grew up in the theater and community theater and all of my social group was always significantly older than me. So I had this experience growing up where I was feeling like I was around people who had so much more agency and autonomy over their lives than I did.

[00:22:13] Maegan: And it really was like salt in a wound for me. 'Cause I'm around them all the time and I'm like, but wait a minute. This is a very small example, but I remember when I was 14, 15, feeling deeply envious of people who could drive. And I wanted that freedom. I wanted to be able to drive myself. I wanted to be, this is like when I should have known I was an introvert. I thought the coolest thing about people who had a car and could drive was that they could be alone.

[00:22:48] Maegan: I was like, wow, to be in a car by yourself, that must be amazing. No, you don't have to talk to anybody. You could listen to whatever you want to. And as soon as I got a driver's license, I started finding every excuse possible to be on long drives by myself. I just loved it. Okay. So that's a very small example, but I'm realizing as I'm in whatever this kind of portal is that I'm inside of right now, I'm realizing how much of that is still in me.

[00:24:22] So I started creating all these countdown timers, right? Countdown to when I can drive, countdown to when I can go to college. Countdown to, I would do all these countdown timers, and then I would look at them every day. How many more days until, how many more days until… I think that became a way of not feeling powerless, not feeling like I was swimming in uncertainty about what was happening in my life.

[00:25:23] Nancy: Sure. Yeah.

[00:25:36] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:26:11] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:26:27] I'm going to be evolved about this. But look at this and this, and then... I think because I had this experience for so long growing up where I was not letting myself feel the shittiness of certain situations, I didn't learn, my body hadn't learned yet how to do both. How to claim my power and autonomy in a situation.

[00:27:19] I'm really feeling the depth of how much this sucks and how scary it is, especially the financial piece and not knowing what that's going to mean for me and my family. And letting myself feel that, and then counterbalancing it with a greater trust in life and a sense of I do have a deep sense that everything's going to be okay and that something greater will be revealed on the other side of the shitty situation, but only if I let myself feel the shittiness of it first.

[00:27:53] Maegan: Wow.

[00:28:07] And it's like you were projecting to a time where you had, where you would have control of your own life, where you would be in control. And I think it's interesting to think about that in terms of looking forward to the next time that I will have control over this aspect of my life. And thinking about that in terms of uncertainty and certainty, right?

[00:29:25] Maegan: Wow. So well said. Yeah. I want to talk in a second about the difference between control and choice. This is a lesson that's really so alive in my own process right now, and I want to completely agree with what you're saying. That I truly believe with every fiber of my being, that certainty is an illusion. Stability is an illusion. These things don't exist in nature. Certainty. What does that even mean? Certainty is a story we tell ourselves so that we don't have to feel afraid of change.

[00:30:04] Maegan: And change is the only constant, as we know, but yet we all are so good at defaulting to thinking that we should live in a world where things feel certain and stable and secure. And back before this happened, when I was thinking about talking about uncertainty from a more cognitive, philosophical place, I was thinking about that. I was like, yeah, everybody's feeling so uncertain right now. But certainty isn't even real. And how do we justify the two, these two things?

[00:31:09] We want it. And this is weaving in here, what we're hearing from our clients right now, what we're feeling behind the scenes in this business, that collectively, collectively, we're in a moment of uncertainty. As a world, as a people. We're in a moment of uncertainty. And if we can, for the purposes of this podcast, zoom in to the experience of the small business owner, we are in a profound economic moment of uncertainty. And we don't want to live in this place emotionally. It doesn't feel good, and it's not helpful, right? It's not helpful to live in fear, to live in scarcity.

[00:32:24] But even that is grasping, right, when we're trying to control, let me do these things that make me feel better in the short term. And that's what silver lining does for me. When I'm constantly finding the silver lining about everything, it makes me feel better in the short term, but then I'm just kicking the can down the road because the uncertainty is going to follow me.

[00:32:47] Maegan: Wherever I go because that is the reality of life is to be. To be constantly uncertain about what's going to happen next. So control doesn't work. And I see a lot of people right now trying to control by putting a lot of energy into marketing their businesses. That's something I'm witnessing right now. And I'm not saying it's a bad idea to market your business, but there's a level of scarcity behind it that it feels so fear-driven.

[00:33:46] And I am like, hold on a second. That doesn't feel right to me. That doesn't feel aligned with what I believe about life, and it doesn't feel good in my body. So something I'm playing with right now, in this moment, is really noticing where I default to trying to grasp for control, and instead releasing my need to control and instead getting really curious about where I have choice, where are there choices available to me now?

[00:34:41] That is what it is. I don't get to choose that in the therapy center, the referrals are really low right now. Yeah, that's what is happening. I can't control that in this moment. And I don't get to that. That's not... I can't just say I'm going to choose that referrals aren't low. I'm going to choose more referrals.

[00:35:01] Maegan: Okay. Good luck. That's not how that works. Okay. So I'm surrendering the places where things are happening that make me feel, this is my personal process. Something shitty happens, I feel powerless. The powerlessness makes me feel helpless. The helplessness makes me feel scared.

[00:36:06] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:36:10] Nancy: Yeah. I feel that's a really...Shifting your mindset from that place of feeling powerless and helpless and shifting it in an expansive way to say okay, where do I have choice? That's reclaiming some of your power and you're exerting a little bit of control over the situation, right? Because you're deciding, I'm going to make a choice in these places. But I'm curious how that feels. I would love for you to talk through things, like how making choices, finding where you have choice in these situations, and using the power of choice without being grippy, and too controlling about it.

[00:37:31] And what does feel right for me is I'm really... I think I said this earlier, I'm really trying to approach my life as a co-creation, trusting that there is something bigger happening here that I can't see with my human eyes that I'm a part of. I am a thread in this collective tapestry. And there's so much happening in so many ways that is unknown to me.

[00:38:24] So I think what I'm really working with right now is I'm looking for all the places where I have choice, and I'm making choices instead of saying I am making these choices so that I feel less uncertain, right? I am making these choices so that I feel like I have more control. I'm saying actually that I am totally surrendered to always being uncertain and never having “control.” But the more choices I make, the more I feel like I am participating in this co-creative process that is my life.

[00:38:57] Maegan: And then I feel I have more agency,

[00:39:01] Maegan: It's okay, I am here, I am participating. And it can't just be me. There's nothing I can single-handedly do that's going to make everything look stable and secure. At least I'm participating and I can participate, and I need to teach my body probably for the rest of my life, that you get to participate. What do you think?

[00:39:59] Maegan: I like that word for it, too.

[00:40:18] Maegan: Okay. So I was telling Nancy earlier that all weekend I'm really sitting with choice. And Jonathan and I are working with a coach for our relationship, which is, she's amazing and I love talking to her. We see her once every four or six weeks, and we just so happened to have an appointment scheduled with her on Friday.

[00:41:03] And then I kept procrastinating on canceling the session. I wasn't planning on telling the story, but now I think it's totally connected to this quote. So I kept going to email her to cancel the session, and then I would not want to do it. And I have learned that for me, procrastination is not a sign that I'm a lazy failure. Thanks, patriarchy, capitalism. But procrastination is often the way my intuition communicates something to me. If I'm procrastinating on taking an action, it's usually because there's some reason why that action isn't aligned or it's not time yet, or whatever, fill in the blank. So I'm learning to be way more curious about my procrastination.

[00:42:34] And that to me is really the image of this more controlling, it's me against the world. And he said, I kind of want to try this time to just turn towards each other, and we actually don't fight it. What if we don't fight what's happening? Part of that means that we don't let this situation postpone the beautiful things happening in our life, which connects to choice, right?

[00:43:29] I could choose to say, actually, that's the thing that matters the most to me. So I'm going to choose, I'm actually going to prioritize the thing that matters to me, the thing I feel called to do, and I'm going to give less energy and attention to the things that are scaring me. And so we had this session, we went to the session with Kat, and we had this really beautiful conversation about choice.

[00:44:13] And usually if you look at it, you have choice about an infinite number of things all around you. So I was really sitting with choice, and I was like, okay, oh, I'm going to try to release the part of me that's freaking out. I'm going to meet the catastrophic dread and feel it and then release it and not make decisions from that place.

[00:44:56] And she was talking about The Alchemist being her favorite book. And I was like, I've actually never read that book. I should read it. So I've been reading it. So this morning I flipped open to where I left off and I literally only read three paragraphs because they were the exact perfect paragraphs I needed for this moment. So I'm going to share them with you now. Alright. "He still had some doubts about the decision he had made, but he was able to understand one thing. Making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

[00:46:04] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:46:26] That when someone makes a decision, let's say choice, when someone makes a choice, she is really diving into a strong current that will carry her to places she has never dreamed of when she first made the choice.

[00:47:32] Maegan: The current, I love it, too, and I do think it's here's another point where we have a choice. Are we going to view the world as something? I feel uncertainty, for me, it evokes fear. There's probably people who are way smarter about words and etymology who could explain why that is, but when we say uncertainty, it immediately suggests that there's a thing there, that there's certainty.

[00:48:40] But, the lens of uncertainty, I think it's gotta go. For me, at least, in my process, I think instead I want to look at my life through the lens of mystery. Because mystery feels like there are infinite possibilities inside of a mystery.

[00:49:00] Maegan: And the mystery feels more like part of that co-creation, that there's something mysterious that's unfolding here. There are so many unseen forces at play, and it's very mysterious. And what's happening with my life is a mystery. And when I let myself relax into being a part of the mystery, I feel held, I feel connected in a way that when I'm in uncertainty, I feel separated. Alone. I feel isolated. I feel like something is happening to me that's not happening to other people.

[00:50:01] Nancy: No, it feels much more spacious. Uncertainty feels a little constricting, mystery, like you were saying. Mystery immediately invites in possibility, immediately invites in potential opportunity, because it's a mysterious thing, whereas uncertainty feels very closed off. When I think about living in uncertainty, you were saying, I want to isolate and I want to come over here and cower in fear and do my thing to be fearful and anxious. Whereas if I'm living in mystery, I'm like, oh, that makes me want to go out and explore. Or that makes me want to go out and look for possibility. It feels like a more engaging and better place to live. As you were saying. Like you feel more held in that co-creative space.

[00:51:29] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:51:38] Nancy: Right.

[00:52:09] And that's what's really been illuminated for me since the basement flooded. Last week I was deep in uncertainty, scarcity, fear, and catastrophic dread. And I'm still fluctuating in and out of that place because the waves are still waving. I'm still dropping into that place and I notice every time I drop into that place,

[00:52:57] They fight their way out. And that's why I'm not going to make any good choices from that place. I'm just going to feel bad. But if I switch into this reframe, actually life is an unfolding mystery. And I am here, and I'm a part of it with everyone, and everything's going to be okay. And just breathe and be a participant, an active participant in your life.

[00:54:08] Nancy: Yeah.

[00:54:12] Nancy: Feeling better is just... Who would say no to that, right?

[00:55:02] Nancy: Yeah. ugh. I feel like it all... it's so interconnected, right? When we all get our agency back, we're reclaiming our power, reclaiming our freedom. We're reclaiming our humanity. And if we were all able to do that, I feel like it's such a connecting thing between us.I might be doing all of those things here on my own. And you might be doing all of those things on your own. And when we're doing those side by side, we get that much more connected in our humanity. And I think that connection and being held in a community is the way that we get through all sorts of things.

[00:56:30] Maegan: Yeah, for sure. A couple I've already mentioned, I think the first big choice that changed the direction of the current that I was swept up in was choosing not to cancel that session that Jonathan and I had scheduled the day after the bad news. I think that was, I'm so grateful to the me of June 26th, 2025 noticing that I was procrastinating, and getting curious about it, and making a different choice.

[00:57:27] It's so okay to cancel things when you don't have the bandwidth or the resources to do them. And I think that's really the precipice that I was balancing on over the weekend where I was like, okay, hold on a second. Do I not have the bandwidth and the resources to do the podcast this month? Or am I just default reacting to a shitty response. And I realized that I did have the capacity and the bandwidth and that it mattered to me enough to stick with it and to do it anyways. There were other things that I did cancel, so maybe we can talk about that as a choice, right? Because sometimes the choice is what do you need to say no to, give yourself some breathing room.

[00:58:25] I was like, okay, do I need to spend the weekend in my cocoon at home, or do I need to get out into the world? And I gave myself permission not to decide until the moment of the tea festival I was telling you about. Someone had invited me to go with them on Friday, and I said, You let me know on Saturday what time you're leaving.

[00:59:11] So there were a lot of small decisions like that too over the weekend. And I think the next kind of frontier around choice and this process that I'm in is as we start getting, I know as we start getting estimates and invoices, for tens of thousands of dollars, it's going to trigger me a lot.

[00:59:58] But every moment is an opportunity to take a deep breath, to honor the fear, and then to ask, where do I have choice right now about this situation, or about something else entirely? And where do I have, where can I make things beautiful? I think that is another thread that I like to tug on in moments when things are challenging.

[01:00:43] Nancy: Yeah. No, that's really great. Thank you for sharing all of that. And I love what you're saying about injecting moments of beauty into. This entire time, because I think that even when we are feeling so uncertain, when we can just gift ourselves a little something beautiful, or maybe a little something delicious or, giving ourselves those moments of a sensory gift has such power to, make you feel better, even if it's just for a little while and that's worth it.

[01:01:49] Nancy: Yeah. Yeah. We can't do any of this stuff alone, and it's ludicrous of us to even try to ask ourselves to.

[01:02:03] Nancy: You did it. We did it. We recorded an episode. That's right.

[01:02:35] Nancy: Yeah.

[01:02:40] Nancy: Oh yeah. Thanks for sharing your story and fingers crossed that everything goes well for you.

[01:03:37] Nancy: Yeah,

[01:03:41] Nancy: Find one beautiful thing, too.

[01:03:57] Nancy: Sounds good.

[01:04:00] Nancy: Thank you.