Meet Laura
experience designer
The Beginning of Wild Awake Woman
For much of my life, I believed what many women are taught to believe: if I worked hard enough, achieved enough, and checked all the right boxes, fulfillment would naturally follow.
So I did what was expected. I built a career as a CFO, raised a family, embraced every role, and kept moving forward. From the outside, my life looked successful.
Then I hit 45 and lost my job.
I was dazed. Lost. Numb in a way I did not have words for yet. And underneath it was a question I had been avoiding for a long time.
Where have I left myself?
I asked it in the ordinary places, because that is where the answer lives. My calendar. The yes I gave too fast. The project that stopped being fun and kept going anyway.
What I found was that I had not lost myself all at once. I handed myself over in pieces, one reasonable decision at a time.
I wasn’t fully living my life. I was managing it.
Like so many women, I had become incredibly skilled at meeting expectations while slowly losing touch with myself. I was constantly doing, rarely being. Always moving, rarely pausing. I had built a life that worked, but it no longer reflected the woman I was becoming.
Midlife didn’t feel like a crisis. It felt like an invitation.
An invitation to question the definitions of success I had inherited, to step away from the noise, and to discover what was actually true for me.
That decision changed everything.
I stopped searching for the next answer and started creating space to hear my own.
Instead of trying to do more, I chose to slow down. I immersed myself in nature, spent time with the horses, traveled with intention, and embraced experiences that invited reflection instead of distraction.
What I discovered was simple, yet life-changing:
Transformation begins when we intentionally create the conditions to reconnect with ourselves.
It wasn’t overnight. Letting go of a lifetime of expectations and proving took time. But with every intentional choice I felt more like myself, and eventually I could see the shape of what I had been doing.
Release what no longer fits.
Reclaim what has always been yours.
Rise into what is next.
I call it The Wild Awake Way.
Today, I live differently.
I no longer measure my life by how much I accomplish, but by how present I am within it. My work is no longer something I do; it is an expression of who I am and what I believe.
Wild Awake Woman grew from that realization.
Every conversation, gathering, retreat, and experience is designed to create the space for women to reconnect with themselves by remembering who they’ve been all along.
That is the life I choose to create.
It’s also the invitation I extend to every woman who steps into a Wild Awake Woman experience.
Most importantly, I believe that your story is not over and you have what it takes to live your most audacious life starting NOW!
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver