When the Path Asks You to Pause
There are moments on this path when clarity doesn’t arrive as confidence. It arrives as discomfort.
The last two months have been that kind of season for me. I want to share this not as an update, and not as a justification, but as a lived lesson in what it actually means to work with intuition, not around it.
When I first realized that 105 Church Street might not work the way I had envisioned, it wasn’t abstract. It was practical. It came in the form of plumbing quotes, water flow upgrades, bathroom code restrictions, and seat limits. And while those details may seem mundane, the impact was not.
It was heartbreaking.
I had seen that space so clearly. And for the first time, I questioned not just the logistics, but my intuition itself. I found myself wondering how I could have felt something so deeply and still be facing such resistance.
Around that same time, the Board of Health entered the picture. The requirements were far more extensive than I had realized, pages and pages of documentation before a layout could even be reviewed. And somewhere in that process, a single thought took hold: If I have to do all of this just to cut a lime, why not add a café?
That sentence quietly changed everything. What began as a simple desire to offer mocktails snowballed into a full café vision, and with it, a complete shift in how Thrivewell was being shaped. Suddenly, every decision revolved around food service. The archetype reading nooks were getting moved to make space for a dishwasher. The apothecary began shrinking to meet clearance requirements. The soul of the space was dissolving, and I didn’t immediately realize that I was the one dissolving it in an effort to comply.
When I finally walked away from 105, it wasn’t clean or empowering. It was emotional. I felt grief, embarrassment, fear, especially the fear of being seen as someone who couldn’t pull it off. My ego had plenty to say in that moment.
Looking elsewhere didn’t bring relief. The spaces grew larger. The leases grew harder. The financial responsibility grew heavier. And instead of feeling expansive, I felt desperate. That was my first real signal.
The stuckness that followed was different from anything I’d experienced before. Normally, when I release something I’m forcing, freedom comes almost immediately. This time, it didn’t. The chains didn’t loosen. And that told me something was still deeply wrong.
At one point, I even accepted the idea that I might need to walk away from a physical storefront altogether.
What haunted me most in that thought wasn’t my ego, it was the people. The conversations I’d had with individuals who said they needed a space like this. The knowing that healing is already hard enough without having to do it alone. I know what Thrivewell offers is rare, and I know creating it is part of what I’m here to do with this life.
When I realized I was still stuck even after letting everything go, I understood something important: This wasn’t what following intuition feels like.
So I went inward. And what returned to me was immediate and undeniable. The café had always been an afterthought. And somehow, I had made the afterthought the center of my entire business model. For the first time in this journey, decisions were being driven by revenue potential rather than by time, by the quiet urgency to do more instead of the deeper need to create space.
Nothing about Thrivewell has ever been born from chasing dollars. Time is our most precious asset. And healing requires time.
When I stripped everything back to its core, what remained was the original vision: the philosophy I’ve been developing through lived experience, the tools to support it, and a space where people can practice, together, whatever path they are walking.
That is what Thrivewell is.
This letter now lives inside the introduction of my future Intuition Workshop for a reason. Because intuition is not about getting it “right” the first time. It’s about recognizing when you’ve drifted, having the courage to stop, and choosing to return, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it humbles you.
If you’re reading this and finding yourself at a similar crossroads, know this: clarity doesn’t always come with certainty. Sometimes it comes as a quiet insistence that asks you to go back, not backward, but inward.
That is where the truth waits.
With gratitude for the path and the pauses,
Kelley