How to Find Your SoulName(Without AnotherWorkshop)

I used to sit up at night Googling “how to find my soul name” like it was going to save me. As if one article, one workshop, one certificate would stitch me back together.

Meanwhile, I was living under names that weren’t mine: healer, musician, good girl, coach. Roles people clapped for. Titles that looked holy on paper. But every time I said yes when I meant no, every time I swallowed my rage because I didn’t want to be “too much,” I felt my own name slipping further out of reach.

On stage, I looked like power. Inside, I felt like I was suffocating.

I thought achievement would fix it. I dropped an album. I collected another degree. And when the applause came, all I felt was nothing. Not relief, or pride; just that dead space in my chest, like the room had gone silent even though people were still clapping. That was the day I realized I’d built a whole empire of false names. A life so polished it didn’t even have air for me inside it. I wasn’t broken. I was misnamed. Shapeshifting had become muscle memory.

Walk into a room? I’d adjust my voice, my posture, my words. Not because I was fake, because disappearing had become safer than being seen. If I looked like myself, maybe I’d trick myself into feeling like myself. I decorated the performance. Aesthetics that got me approval. Fonts that whispered “healing.” Instagram vibes that made people trust me. None of it was me.

And I’m telling you this because I know you’ve done it too.

You name yourself from fear, not memory. You pick the word that will get you hired, chosen, praised—not the word that makes your stomach clench and your hands shake. You call it “clarity,” but it’s just another mask. A safer mask.

I joined circles, lit candles, smoked to shut myself up, and even there, in sacred rooms, I was still performing—speaking in tones that got nods, never in the one that would make the whole room recoil, because I knew if I ever spoke from that pitch, I’d burn the whole performance down.

And there was a truth I didn’t want to face: to name yourself is to kill the girl who kept you loveable, the one who smiled soft so she wouldn’t scare anyone, the one who built businesses out of unfinished wounds, the one who made money but never made it out alive. That girl doesn’t make it through. She burns. And maybe that’s why most women never get named. They want the workshop, not the funeral.

And I keep seeing her everywhere.

The woman whose eyes glimmer but never land, the one who can talk trauma, lineage, integration—but her voice still sounds like survival, the one who posts reels with candles and captions them “healing,” but hasn’t sat in her kitchen at 2 a.m., shaking, face in her hands, wondering how someone so ‘healed’ can still feel this empty. She’s successful, yes. Admired, yes. But she’s circling, managing a brand that was built on a mask, haunted by the suspicion that she doesn’t belong in the life she made.

Your mentors or coaches will tell you you’re spiraling, that you need another session. It took me a lifetime of sitting in the back seat of my own life to finally grasp this: you’re not confused. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. You’re unnamed.

THE COST:

Naming costs something; Not money. Not another program.Those are irrelevant; it costs your masks, it costs the polished voice that kept you safe, it costs the version of you that survived by shrinking, it costs the empire you built from wounds. When the real name surfaces, that woman dies and you finally land.

I’ve sat with women whose voltage could split stone; brilliant, intense, and spent. They keep circling the same lessons because the mask sells faster than the name. They know it. I know it. When the mask finally burns, grief hardens into structure and you start building instead of collapsing. Your breath steadies. You stop scanning faces before finishing a sentence. You stop writing to prove you’re deep or deleting the drafts that sound like war. You stop explaining. You finally land. I can’t hand you another mirror or another workshop. Your real name is already in your throat; the one that tightens when you try to say no, and the moment you speak it, the spell ends.

So ask yourself, who dies when you stop performing? Because that’s where your name is hiding.

You already know the words. You’ve named your wounds, learned the language, built the altar and still, the loop pulls you back.
That’s what The Arc maps: the seven loops that keep spiritually fluent women circling the same pain dressed in new language.
Download it, read it in silence, and mark the loop you’re still trapped in. Once you name it, it loses its hold.