Threshold Moments

What if the thing you think is driving your growth is actually urgency?
In this Mini Musing, Sarah explores one of the sneakiest patterns of urgency: how easily it can disguise itself as dedication, productivity, ambition, or the desire to grow.
Sarah shares a personal example of catching herself in urgency while preparing for her upcoming work—and realizing that the feeling of "I have to do this now" was making it harder to access creativity, choice, and clarity.
She also explores the difference between urgency and agency, why moving quickly can cause us to repeat old patterns, and how stepping away from the problem—even briefly—can change what we are able to see.
The goal isn't to eliminate speed or become slow all the time. It's to develop more choices about how we move, so that urgency isn't making the decisions for us.
In this episode, Sarah explores:
How urgency can disguise itself as growth and dedication
Why moving fast can cause us to repeat familiar patterns
The difference between urgency and agency
How to recognize when you've lost a sense of choice
Why small pauses can change our perception and creativity
Moving between fast, medium, and slow rhythms
How nervous system regulation creates more possibility
Why small, doable pattern interrupts are more sustainable than all-or-nothing changes
What it means to ask, "What is the next right step?"
⭐️ If you enjoy this episode, sign up for my free 3-day nervous system workshop — Opting Out of Urgency — happening live on Zoom September 10-17. RSVP here: https://www.sarahtacy.com/opting-out-of-urgency
Connect with Sarah
Opting Out of Urgency — A free 3-day nervous system workshop to help you move beyond urgency and reconnect with your energy, clarity, and rhythm.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahtacyt
Learn more about Sarah's work
Join Sarah's email list

In this episode of Threshold Moments, Sarah Tacy sits down with her dear friend, breathwork practitioner and coach Jeannine Yoder, to trace the origins of Opting Out of Urgency—including the moment Jeannine first spoke the phrase that would become the name of Sarah's workshop.
Jeannine Yoder is a New York Times–featured feminine leadership coach, breathwork teacher, and Broadway-trained performing artist. For over 15 years, she has trained coaches, healers, and facilitators while guiding transformational breathwork experiences, retreats, and private sessions rooted in nervous system regulation, somatic healing, embodiment, and ritual. She is the founder of Huntress House, a sacred studio for feminine awakening in Easton, Connecticut.
Jeannine shares how urgency once functioned as the fuel source of her life. Coming from a childhood where her nervous system learned to respond to a lack of safety, she became exceptionally good at identifying problems, mobilizing quickly, achieving, and creating solutions. But over time, that pattern became a cycle of desire, intensity, achievement, depletion, exhaustion, and then finding something new to mobilize around.
The surprising part? Even after her external circumstances became safer and more stable, her nervous system didn't automatically slow down.
Together, Sarah and Jeannine explore what it means to opt out of the internal experience of urgency—not necessarily to move slowly, do less, or give up ambition, but to stop manufacturing pressure in order to feel alive.
They talk about:
Why urgency can feel like safety, motivation, and even creativity
What it feels like to have nothing urgent to solve
The difference between genuine energy and the feeling of "I need to handle this so I can finally relax"
Why opting out of urgency can feel disorienting before it feels peaceful
How black-and-white thinking keeps us locked into urgency
The power of finding a "sacred third" instead of choosing between two extremes
How co-regulation can help us access choices we can't see when we're activated
Why our relationships can change when we stop responding from old patterns
Learning to leave things unfinished without feeling unsafe
The practice of "exhale first, and then respond to what actually needs me"
Why creating spaciousness can allow grief, desire, and other feelings to surface
How small, digestible steps can help us build capacity for a different way of living
At the heart of the conversation is a simple but radical question:
Can I have a beautiful, meaningful, creative life without manufacturing pressure in order to feel alive inside?
And perhaps an even deeper one:
Who am I when nothing urgently needs me?
⭐️ If you enjoy this episode, sign up for my free 3-day nervous system workshop — Opting Out of Urgency — happening live on Zoom September 10-17. RSVP here: https://www.sarahtacy.com/opting-out-of-urgency
Connect with Sarah
Opting Out of Urgency — A free 3-day nervous system workshop to help you move beyond urgency and reconnect with your energy, clarity, and rhythm.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahtacyt
Learn more about Sarah's work
Join Sarah's email list
Connect with Jeannine Yoder
Follow Jeannine on Instagram

Today I'm welcoming back my friend Ginny Muir for a conversation about what it really takes to step out of urgency culture.
After a big life transition and international move, Ginny discovered how to slow her pace, honor her capacity, and build a life rooted in presence.
If you've been craving more spaciousness in your days, this episode offers both inspiration and practical wisdom for releasing urgency and finding your own rhythm — no matter how hectic your life may feel.
⭐️ If you enjoy this episode, sign up for my free 3-day nervous system workshop — Opting Out of Urgency — happening live on Zoom September 10-17. RSVP here: https://www.sarahtacy.com/opting-out-of-urgency
Connect with Sarah
Opting Out of Urgency — A free 3-day nervous system workshop to help you move beyond urgency and reconnect with your energy, clarity, and rhythm.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahtacyt
Learn more about Sarah's work
Join Sarah's email list
If this episode resonated and you're wanting deeper support, come join us inside Juice — Sarah's monthly membership where we practice this work together in real time. This is a space to build capacity, stay connected, and integrate what you're learning—week by week.
Connect with Ginny Muir
Follow Ginny on Instagram @ginnymuir
Subscribe to Ginny's newsletter
Listen to Ginny's past episode of Threshold Moments: The Ripeness of Midlife

What if the root of overwhelm, urgency, and burnout isn't that you're doing too much—but that your nervous system learned that your safety depends on everyone else being okay first?
In this episode, Sarah explores one of the most common patterns she sees in women: "I'm okay when you're okay." While this response once served an important survival function, many women now find themselves trapped in cycles of hyper-responsibility, people pleasing, urgency, resentment, and exhaustion.
Sarah unpacks why the female nervous system often defaults to tending, managing, soothing, and caring for others before caring for ourselves—and why healing isn't about becoming detached or uncaring.
Instead, it's about building the capacity to return to yourself first.
Through personal stories, nervous system insights, and practical examples, Sarah explores what it means to move toward a new paradigm:
I'm okay when I'm okay.
We can care about others, without abandoning ourselves.
In this episode:
Why women are wired toward "tend and befriend"
The nervous system roots of people pleasing
Hyper-social behavior and hidden freeze responses
Why urgency and burnout are often connected
The difference between caring and over-identifying
What happens when your child's pain activates your own wounds
Practical nervous system tools for emotional regulation
Clean anger, boundaries, and self-trust
Why healing isn't about becoming unaffected
Moving from reactivity to sovereignty
Connect with Sarah
Opting Out of Urgency — A free 3-day nervous system workshop to help you move beyond urgency and reconnect with your energy, clarity, and rhythm.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahtacyt
Learn more about Sarah's work
Join Sarah's email list
If this episode resonated and you're wanting deeper support, come join us inside Juice — Sarah's monthly membership where we practice this work together in real time. This is a space to build capacity, stay connected, and integrate what you're learning—week by week.

What if the hardest things you've lived through are invitations into your life? Ruthie has survived what most bodies are never asked to hold. I wanted the details, and she gives them. What I did not expect was how present she stayed while telling me. No performance of having healed. Just a woman living from right now, with a grace that makes a listeners body settle.
In this deeply honest and expansive conversation, Sarah sits down with writer, speaker, coach, and beloved internet friend Ruthie Lindsey to explore the thresholds that have shaped her life—and the wisdom she's found on the other side of them.
Ruthie shares the story behind the pain narrative that defined much of her public identity: a devastating car accident at seventeen, a wire accidentally left in her brainstem, years of chronic pain, addiction to approval, the collapse of a marriage, spiritual deconstruction, nervous breakdowns, and the long journey of learning who she is beyond what she's survived.
This may sound devastating, but somehow Ruthie lifts us all up during her story telling. She gives us home and holds up a light for anyone navigating their own threshold.
Together, Sarah and Ruthie explore belonging, identity, chronic pain, somatics, spirituality, relationships, and the tender process of becoming more fully human. They discuss the difference betaween healing and fixing, why some thresholds never fully end, and how life can become richer, simpler, and more meaningful when we stop waiting to arrive somewhere else.
This conversation is filled with laughter, honesty, and the kind of wisdom that can only come from living through what once felt impossible.
In this episode:
Growing up addicted to approval and external validation
The emptiness that followed becoming homecoming queen
The car accident that changed the course of Ruthie's life
Living with chronic pain and redefining healing
Why pain can become a portal rather than an obstacle
Spiritual awakening, deconstruction, and Richard Rohr's concept of order, disorder, and reorder
Learning to descend more fully into the body through somatics
Letting go of identities built around suffering
Finding joy in ordinary moments, sunsets, plants, and neighborhood cats
How Ruthie met her partner Eric and the healing power of being deeply seen
The role of relationships in co-regulation, repair, and transformation
Why thresholds aren't always about reaching the other side
About the Guest
Ruthie Lindsey is a somatic coach, speaker, and author of There I Am: The Journey from Hopelessness to Healing. After surviving a near-fatal car accident at seventeen and navigating decades of chronic pain, Ruthie has devoted her life to helping others reconnect with themselves through compassion, embodiment, and self-trust. Through coaching, retreats, writing, and speaking, she guides people through life's thresholds with humor, honesty, and a deep belief that every part of us belongs.
Connect with Sarah
Opting Out of Urgency — A free 3-day nervous system workshop to help you move beyond urgency and reconnect with your energy, clarity, and rhythm.
Follow Sarah on Instagram @sarahtacyt
Learn more about Sarah's work
Join Sarah's email list
If this episode resonated and you're wanting deeper support, come join us inside Juice — Sarah's monthly membership where we practice this work together in real time. This is a space to build capacity, stay connected, and integrate what you're learning—week by week.
Connect with Ruthie Lindsey
Ruthie Lindsey - www.ruthielindsey.com
Join Ruthie on Instagram, where she shares reflections on how to fall more in love with your life.
Learn more about events she is hosting and teaching at this year.
Read her longer writings on Substack - it's a space for deeper thoughts on healing, relationships, and being human
And if her work resonates with you, she invites you to work with her!