Galia Collaborative

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Galia Collaborative

Galia Collaborative supports women and girls to deeply know and grow their power through psychotherapy, coaching, and leadership development.
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01/09/2026

We can't wait to see you at our first workshop on wintering. ✨ ❄️ 🕯️

Join us as we enjoy an afternoon of nourishment, including restorative practices and creative expression, to help turn inward. We explore how to approach these darker seasons with care rather than bracing ourselves or wishing them away.

A few spots are left. ✨

01/05/2026

First Monday of the new year but make it memes.

01/04/2026

We all want to know when we can expect to feel better. While the answer is nuanced when it comes to therapy, we do know that consistency and connection with your therapist are key. The great news is that we have lots of evidence that therapy works for the majority of people in helping them improve their lives. 🖤

01/02/2026

Those who have spent our lives attached to the idea that good things come primarily from hustling, grinding, and exhausting ourselves, can find it scary and immensely vulnerable to let life live us.

For individual reasons, we arrived to the idea that it’s only through hard work and clinging – which often means constant hypervigilance – that we could achieve or keep what is good. We didn’t learn to trust in anything or anyone to keep us safe. We had to stay on top of it.

We learn that we can achieve quite a lot – which we imagine will make us feel safe, but if halt our vigilance, it will all go away. So we never feel real safety.

It is an act of profound vulnerability to begin practicing trust. And it is indeed a practice. It doesn’t come all at once, but rather through micro-experiments of turning over control, letting things be, letting ourselves rest.

When we actively practice trust, we begin to see that we can actually enjoy the things we achieve and the gifts of our life. We can begin to feel the safety that we always craved but believed only came through our own hustle.

I seek only what I can hold in trust.
I release what I have chased in fear.

(I saw 's reel on this concept a couple months back and it resonated so much I made it my home screen background.)

12/29/2025

It's been real, 2025 ✌️

12/24/2025

Thank you for all you do to bring beauty and goodness and magic to your corner of the world. Thank you for making your people feel seen and known. Wishing that for you, too.

12/22/2025

memey monday holiday(ish) edition. wishing everyone peace & rest.

12/21/2025

There’s a huge difference between awareness and integration.

And how we get to integration doesn’t come from disparate pieces of information flashing in front of us (1.7 seconds on average).

On a recent podcast, Tara McMullin described the difference in content today as dust versus seeds. Seeds get planted in us and have the opportunity to be fertilized and grow through intentional engagement with them. Dust is the noise of the thousands of flying particles streaming in front us, perhaps even obscuring our vision of what’s most important. We want seeds, but all we are getting is dust.

Taking in hundreds of quotes, hacks, and data isn’t getting us any closer to real transformation. Even the really good stuff - the ideas and information that could mean something to us and our healing – it gets lost in the volume and the structure of the medium.

A long time ago I wrote about how to more effectively engage with self-help content on social media and gave all of these tips. At this point, though, I’ll concede they are essentially useless for most of us. We can no longer counter the tsunami.

Think about the way you feel when you read a chapter in a book or a strong essay. There is a narrative arc. It connects ideas and has a thesis that leaves you at the end feeling a sense of satisfaction. When I finish reading something like that, I feel slightly changed. I close the book or browser and sit for a moment in contemplation.

Even a wonderfully important and well-constructed post doesn’t do that, because before we can really digest, the dopamine machine is pulling our attention to the next thing. The information we just took in was usually disparate and disconnected and then we’re on to a cat video or teeth whitening ad. It’s just not the way that we are built to learn.

We need time to simmer. We need time to reckon with an idea, not just scan it in 1.7 seconds. We need a narrative, not just one anecdote or disembodied point.

It’s a major reason why I’m spending less time here and spending more intentional time crafting narratives and essays. I’ve been holding out, really hoping that there was a way for social media to restore its ability to add meaning when it comes to making us healthier and better. But I think it’s time to acknowledge that this just isn’t it.

This isn’t a goodbye post by any means. It’s just some thoughts about the limits of these apps and an invitation for us to notice. It’s not an ad for the Sunday Letter either – though of course I’d love for you to join me there. I used to think that both social media content and longer-form writing were what could help give people ideas to change. I’m not so convinced on the former anymore.

If you’ve made it this far, I invite you to notice how you feel. I’m posting this on social media, so there’s the irony.

Do I expect this land in a way that will change something? I’m not sure. But if there’s a call to action for those who do want to grow, it’s to seek out longer-form writing or content. I know our brains resist it these days, but that’s exactly why we need to engage with it.

(And because anything critiquing these apps tends to get suppressed, share/like/send if this resonates with you.)

12/18/2025

Take a walk. Read a book. Stetch. Play with kids. Things are working themselves out. >>

We tend to think that we can only fix things or find solutions through conscious control – applying our deep thinking, ruminating, or problem solving.

But our minds are flexing the challenges in all sorts of ways as we sleep, paint, walk, connect.

We don’t have to ‘work’ so hard to make things better. Sometimes stepping away from conscious focus on an issue is what actually moves the needle.

12/17/2025

I wanted to tell you one of my absolute favorite stories: A woman is at a beautiful lakeside retreat center, grateful to finally have time and space for quiet reflection. During some downtime, she takes a canoe out onto the small lake. She rows a hundred feet or so, sets down her paddles, closes her eyes, and breathes in the fresh air, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face.

As she exhales the burdens she’s been carrying, she suddenly hears the loud crack of wood colliding and her boat rocks hard. Her eyes remain closed, but irritation and anger rush in instantly.

Why would someone row so close to her? There’s no way they couldn’t see she was trying to meditate. How careless, rude, or self-absorbed. She finally finds peace and even here someone ruins it. This is just like…

Still narrating internally, she feels another bump and snaps her eyes open, ready to confront the selfish person who disrupted her.

But in front of her floats an empty boat.

She immediately understands what happened: the canoe she untied had been holding this one in place. When she loosened hers, the empty boat drifted free and bumped into her.

As she takes this in, her anger dissolves. She laughs—at the situation and at her reaction.
What’s revealed in that moment is how deeply our reactions are tied to the intentions we assign to events. When she believed another person was responsible, she felt anger and offense. When there was no one to blame, her emotional experience shifted completely.

This story is my adaptation of an old Sufi parable. It illustrates this truth: our experience of anything is shaped by the stories we tell about it. Sometimes those stories align with reality; often they don’t. Either way, they shape how we feel—and how we respond.

We react to a partner not saying hello, a curt cashier, a distracted teacher or coworker, based on what we believe it means. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have feelings or that our reactions are wrong. The woman might still have felt fear when her boat rocked—that wasn’t about intention.

But it can be powerful to notice the stories we’re telling when emotions run strong. So often we do this with only part of the picture—our eyes closed. And when we open them, we might just see an empty boat.

12/15/2025

This year has been long and I'm so glad other people still have funny things to say.

12/14/2025

Jacqueline Harpman’s spare and haunting novel begins with forty women imprisoned underground, their lives stripped of history, freedom, and even touch with the outside world. When they are suddenly released into a desolate landscape, survival becomes only part of the journey—the deeper challenge is how to make sense of existence itself.

Our discussion will open space to consider the novel’s profound themes: isolation and community, memory and identity, and what remains of our humanity when everything else has been taken away. Stark yet deeply poetic, this story promises to spark a rich and searching conversation.

Register to join us at the link in comments. 🪴 📚

Address

2245 Gilbert Avenue
Cincinnati, OH
45206

Telephone

+15132160068

Website

http://www.galiacollaborative.com/

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