Stephanie MacKinnon

15/09/2026

Sometimes the hardest things to make space for are the ones that matter deeply, but are still hard to name.

The idea

The change

The life you can almost see

The thing you keep thinking about, then pushing further down the road because you’re not fully sure what it is yet.

And if you keep waiting for certainty, it is very easy to keep waiting.

That is where borrowed belief can help: having people around you who can hold the possibility with you, especially when it feels easier to minimise it or talk yourself out of it.

You do not need to know exactly where it is going.

But you do deserve a space to let it grow.

If ROOTED has been quietly nudging at you, maybe this is the moment to give that part of you some room. 💚

DM me or book a call by 18 September if you’re thinking about joining. We begin 24 September. 🌱

14/09/2026

Lovely ones! If you have been watching along, gentle reminder there are 5 days left to join Rooted!

Join Stephanie MacKinnon's program to build a rich life that reflects the future you believe in - without burning out or becoming what you resist.

10/09/2026

The ‘All the Feelings Tour’ was basically a fever dream for my 16-year-old self, so it is probably unsurprising that it sent me down a bit of a reflection rabbit hole.

Seventeen members of Broken Social Scene on stage, playing the angsty anthems of my youth, will apparently do that.

And somewhere in all that nostalgia, I realised just how much of the life I have now was built not by becoming someone different, but by slowly trusting more of who I already was.

Which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is a lot of what sits underneath ROOTED too.

A space for thoughtful humans to figure out what their rich life looks like, and begin building more of it without having to shrink, perform or become someone else first. 🌱

Doors close September 18th, and we begin September 24th.

If you’ve been quietly wondering whether ROOTED might be for you, it would be a joy to have you join xx

08/09/2026

I see you lovely, I know that sneaky feeling you carry that maybe you’re not quite ready yet.

That perhaps you need a little more clarity, a little more courage, or a better plan before you can begin changing things.

Maybe you can feel that something isn’t quite fitting anymore, but you can’t yet name what needs to change. Or you know what matters to you, but you’re not entirely sure how to live it within the realities of work, money, relationships, caring responsibilities and everything else that makes up an actual life.

Maybe part of you thinks wanting something different means doing something dramatic.

I don’t think it does.

In fact, I think you might be much closer than you realise.

Because the life you want isn’t only built through enormous decisions and brave reinventions. So much of it is built during ordinary Tuesdays, through the quiet choices that shape how it actually feels to be you.

It is there when you notice what gives you energy and allow that information to matter. When you honour a boundary, ask for help, stop chasing something you thought you were supposed to want, or make a little more room for the people and things that make you feel most alive.

None of those things look particularly dramatic from the outside, but together they are a life.

And you don’t need to become a more confident, more disciplined, more sorted version of yourself before you can begin. You are already carrying so much of what you need: your values, frustrations, longings, questions and all those little glimmers of what another way might look like.

🌱 ROOTED is a place to pay attention to those things together, to get clearer on what matters and explore how you might practise something different within the life you’re actually living.

You don’t need to arrive knowing exactly where you’re going.

You can arrive curious about what might be possible from here. 💗

🌱 ROOTED enrollment closes 18 September, and we begin together on 24 September.

03/09/2026

We can believe deeply in another way of living and working… and still find ourselves carrying around a whole lot of the habits we were taught by the world we’re trying to change.

⏰ The urgency.

📈 The pressure to be productive.

🙋‍♀️ The idea that we should be able to do everything ourselves.

😬 The guilt that can creep in when we rest, slow down, change our minds, or choose something that doesn’t look conventionally “successful.”

Not because we’re doing it wrong.

Because these things are deeply embedded. And noticing them is part of the work.

🌿 ROOTED is not about becoming perfectly “deconditioned” or having the right politics or making the perfect values-aligned choices.

It is much more about creating space to ask:

▪️ What actually matters to me?

▪️ What have I absorbed that I no longer want to organise my life around?

▪️ And what might it look like to practise something different, gently and imperfectly, in the life I’m living now?

That is the kind of work I want to do in community.

Not just imagining another way of being, but giving ourselves somewhere to practise it.

ROOTED begins September 24th, and sign-up closes September 18th. 💗

31/08/2026

Sometimes I think part of the exhaustion comes from holding complexity in a world that keeps asking us to flatten everything into a neat either/or.

▪️You can want security and question capitalism.
▪️You can be ambitious and reject conventional success.
▪️You can care deeply about the collective and still have needs of your own.

The goal is not to find the one perfectly pure choice that resolves every contradiction.

🌿It is to become grounded enough in your own values that you can hold the complexity without being completely pushed and pulled by it. 💫

That is the spaciousness I’m talking about.

💭 Where in your life are you currently holding a both/and?

🌿This kind of discernment sits right at the heart of ROOTED. 🌿

We begin 24 September, and applications close 18 September.

It would be a joy to have you join us ❤️‍🔥

22/08/2026

No, I do not need diamonds, but I do want 6–8 weeks of paid vacation a year. Thank you 😂

Money is useful, but knowing what you actually want it for feels much more interesting to me than endlessly chasing MORE because that is what we have been taught success looks like.

I want enough money to support the life I actually want to live, care for myself and the people around me, and contribute to the kind of world I want to be part of.

For me, a rich life looks like:

🌿 Time to actually be present in my life, with the people I love and enough spaciousness that work does not consume everything else.

🌿 A care team around me, including therapy, acupuncture, health insurance, the gym and yoga.

🌿 Access to the outdoors, good gear, and the freedom to go surfing when the waves are good.

🌿 Quality food ingredients, because delicious, nourishing food matters to me. 😊

🌿 Enough capacity to participate in community, support people I care about, contribute to causes I believe in, and have some energy left after earning a living.

And the version of a rich world I want is bigger than my own life.

I want people to have homes. I want rest, healthcare, good food, time, nature, creativity and community to be ordinary parts of being human, rather than luxuries reserved for people who can afford them.

Money matters, and material security matters, but I am much more interested in asking: enough for what?

What do I want my money, work and time to make possible?

These are not the answers. They are my answers, and they will probably keep evolving.

But getting specific enough that “a rich life” stops being a vague idea and starts becoming something you can actually make decisions around feels pretty fu***ng useful.

💭 So, what does a rich life look like to you?

This is one of the questions we’ll spend time with inside ROOTED, because it is very hard to build a life around what matters to you if you have never had the space to work out what that actually looks like. 🌿

20/08/2026

This week on GLIMMERS of Another Way of Being, I’m joined by trauma-informed thought leader, speaker and consultant Katie Kurtz for a conversation about The Everyday Choices That Build Trust.

Because we can say we value trust, safety, collaboration and care.

But how do we actually help people experience those things?

Katie talks about trauma-informed practice as, at its heart, human-informed practice, and about the small, repeated choices that help us create more trusting relationships, workplaces, communities and lives.

• We talk about trauma thriving in isolation.
• The pressure to do everything alone.
• Why receiving support can feel so bloody vulnerable.
• How capitalism rewards urgency when our nervous systems often need something entirely different.

And we get really practical too: communication, transparency, slowing down, people, pets, plants, places and play… and the very excellent advice to always hang the art. 🥹

One of my favourite things Katie says in this conversation is that trauma-informed care is actually an incredibly hopeful practice.

Because the more trust we build, the more empathy we bring forward, the more hope we have.

And the more we choose another way, the more we begin to see it.

🎙️ The Everyday Choices That Build Trust with Katie Kurtz is out now wherever you listen to podcasts.

17/08/2026

You might already have a sense of what we’ll do inside ROOTED, but I also want you to know how it will *feel*

I want it to feel like the kind of room where you can breathe a full-body sigh of relief, knowing you are welcome exactly as you are.

A space where you can bravely say the thing you’ve been quietly thinking for months and be met with curiosity rather than judgement or a quick fix.

Where we can laugh, change our minds, be unsure, dream bigger than others think is sensible, and leave feeling more connected to ourselves and to each other.

And because feeling welcome takes more than simply saying “this is a safe space”, there are concrete ways I hold the container:

✨ Your consent is always sought, never assumed
✨ You can speak as much or as little as feels comfortable
✨ You can listen, pass on a prompt, keep your camera off, pause or step away
✨ You do not need the perfect language or the “right” answers
✨ You do not have to perform vulnerability, confidence or political fluency to belong

You are welcome always exactly as you are.

You do not need to become a different, braver, more certain or more polished version of yourself before you walk through the door.

ROOTED is designed as a brave space, with room for your whole, thoughtful, contradictory, still-figuring-it-out self.

After 15 years of facilitating groups and learning spaces, helping people feel seen and heard is one of the things I
pride myself on doing well.

If that sounds like the kind of space you’ve been craving, I would genuinely love to have you with us. 🌿

We begin 24 September. You know where to find the details, or please do DM me with questions xx