What If This Isn’t All There Is? A Return to Voice, Self & Joy

What If This Isn’t All There Is?

I’ve been asking myself a big question lately—the kind that echoes in the quiet moments:
What if this isn’t all there is?

What if the structure I built… the brand I once loved… the routines I carefully curated… aren’t the full story of who I’m meant to be?

This week on The Voicekeeper Podcast, I share a raw and personal episode. It’s a return, not just to the mic, but to myself. After navigating burnout, a surgery I didn’t expect, and the quiet unraveling of my identity, I realized something:

I had lost my voice.

Not just as a podcaster or strategist—but as a person. A woman. A creative.

✨ The Awakening That Found Me in the Stillness

This episode isn’t about steps or checklists. It’s about truth.
And the truth is: so many of us keep going because we’re afraid to stop.
Because stopping would mean feeling. Noticing. Changing.

But somewhere between grief and rest, movement and stillness, I found my voice again.

In the episode, I share the four practices that gently guided me home:

• Joy as a compass, not a reward

• Support that doesn’t require explanation

• Movement as a sacred return

• Spiritual connection as daily nourishment

And I offer one simple journaling question that became a portal back to myself.

If your voice has gone quiet…
If your creativity feels like a stranger…
If your life looks “fine” on paper but something’s aching…

This one is for you.

🧘‍♀️ Get the Free Grounding Meditation: carolinehull.com/meditation

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The Transcript for The Voicekeeper Podcast:

228: What If This Isn’t All There Is? A Return to Voice, Self & Joy

[00:00:00] Have you ever had that moment where you look around your life, the systems, the routine, even the success and think, is this it not from ratitude, but from a quiet ache, a sense that something is missing, that you've somehow drifted from yourself? If you've ever felt that. You are not broken. You're awakening and that whisper you keep hearing, it's your voice calling you home.

 [00:01:00] Hello everyone and welcome back to the Voice Keeper Podcast. So today's episode kicks off. I don't know if it's gonna be a series like we will see what happens, but I wanted to do some conversations around returning to your voice and what that means to me. And we're beginning with the sacred question that often starts at all. What if this isn't all there is? This is a deeply personal episode for me.

So before we drop in and start talking about content, I would love for us just to arrive together. If you're in a space where it is safe to do so, pause, close your eyes, place your hand on your heart, or anywhere that feels grounding. And I want you to breathe in slowly and feel your body soften. Exhale gently.

Let's do that again. [00:02:00] Inhale. Exhale. Now, ask yourself gently, what part of me have I been ignoring? Whatever rises, even if it's quiet, honor it.

Those little energy drop-ins that I have been doing on the podcast. I've had a couple people say that they really enjoy them. And it's really funny because honestly I just started doing them for me 'cause I love them. Um, they feel so good. It feels so good, , to do that before I get into the meat of my episodes and it just kind of evolved from there.

So thank you to those of you who've reached out and said, Hey, we, we really like that part. It means a lot to me. So. I had a whole other episode planned for today and I have been working really hard on this. This time of transition in my business [00:03:00] has, has been not easy. I'm gonna be honest. Like saying, okay, I am leaving one thing behind.

I'm taking pieces of it and I'm moving on to another thing is, is really huge and hard and you know, there were things that I was planning on doing. On the other side of my business, , the podcasting side. And so it's been really interesting to drop all that. And I was telling my accountability partner this morning.

I was like, you know, I used to wake up every morning just in a panic, in a state of dread, , worried about what was gonna pop up with work that day. , It used to really stress me out, and I haven't felt any of that since I've stepped into this new role that I am creating and. That to me is a huge sign that this is what I'm meant to do.

This is what I'm supposed to do. So I just wanted to share that all with you. Like it's an all sunshine and rainbows, but when you lean into your intuition and you pull from your inner energy and strength when you [00:04:00] need to, it's kind of amazing how calming and peaceful things can be because I'm choosing them to be that.

So. We are gonna talk about some hard stuff today on this episode, and I just wanna, , do a little trigger warning. , I am gonna talk about, , not necessarily suicide, but thoughts of suicide and, , thoughts of. Wanting to not be here. And this is all a really important part of my story that I have not shared in very many places.

, I'm not even sure that I've like completely told my mom this story, so if she's listening, hi. I am. Okay. , It's really interesting. I have this, , Oracle deck that I love. And I think it's called the Cosmic Creator. It's by Jenny c Bell. And if you go to her website, it's on her website. It's a beautiful Oracle deck.

I will try to take a picture of the card and put it in the show notes, but I keep drawing a card that says, share your story. And it has a pack of wolves on it. And I [00:05:00] like, it just keeps coming out. Every time I do a cardpool, it's like, share your story, share your story, share your story. And I started thinking about it and I was like, you know, this is a really good point because.

My story is the reason that I have developed the framework that I have created, that I have decided to become a life and spiritual coach, that I have decided to help women reclaim their voice. There's a really big reason for it. , And it's, it's, I mean, it would take me probably a few hours to take you through the whole journey.

So today I wanna take you through a small part of that journey, and my hope is, is that you will listen to this and maybe you will hear something. That you have experience or you know, someone has experience. Because I don't want people to ever think they are alone. And you know, and I wanna share this because I've been there too.

So a couple years ago I had what looked like a full life. My business was running, , my family was thriving. I had [00:06:00] systems in place, and this thought kept coming up for me. I don't really wanna be here anymore. This was one of the hardest thoughts I've ever had because I was super grateful. I love my children, I love my husband.

I have a beautiful life, but I felt very disconnected from it, like I had disappeared inside the life I had built. And then in 2023, I. My second hip surgery on my left hip, so I am a former ballet dancer. The reason I am not a ballet dancer anymore is because I did injure my hip. I have what's called femoral acetabular impingement in both of my hips and my left hip gave out in college, and I had my first surgery a few years after graduating.

And then. I had to have surgery again in, , February of 23, which feels like yesterday, to be honest. , The recovery from the surgery was brutal. Like I. Physically, [00:07:00] emotionally, spiritually, , I couldn't move the same. I couldn't do the things that once made me feel like me. And I had this like really hard realization that I wasn't the same person anymore.

Like that version of me, the one who had held it all together was felt like gone. And then right after Christmas in 2024, I had. What can only be described as a full mental health breakdown. , The burnout, the pressure, the silence, it all just came crashing in and, and it was terrifying. , I just remember like feeling like this is not me.

You know, I am not this person, and I have been struggling with my mental health for. A while, but I think I had done a really good job of masking it. I mean, I, I think to this day I'm pretty good at masking it. , My husband and I have this thing now where I'll say, you know, I'm feeling off [00:08:00] today.

And he's like, thank you. Like, thanks for letting me know. But, but it's true. I felt like I had to hold it all together. I felt like I had, I had, I mean, even when I went into my hip surgery, I remember feeling like. I had to get over all of my fears and hangups about my hip surgery, so everyone else would be okay.

And I did therapy before my hip surgery. And she kept telling me like, I need you to do some things for you. And it's just really funny 'cause I think back on it now and I was like, well, you know, right now my focus is getting my mental health in order so I can come out of this surgery being a really positive for everybody around me.

And she was, you know, and she kept saying, well, what about you? You know, what about you? And I would just brush it off and brush it off and brush it off. So when that mental health crisis, I, I call it a crisis or a breakdown because it really was for me. . When it happened, it just felt, it felt terrible.

It felt like I had failed. , And then also in some strange way, I feel like it was [00:09:00] the beginning. It was like this secret moment in my spiritual journey. It was this moment of me saying like, this isn't how I wanna live. I want things to be different. I want, , I want to find myself again. In that moment, like everything broke that needed to break, right?

All of my, you know, things I, how I talked about myself, the expectations I had put on myself. For my life. Like all of that bar broke. And in that breaking, I began to return. And it didn't all happen at once, but in small sacred ways. And I wanna share how it started for me.

So one of the big things is I really started to look for the joy in the everyday. I'm gonna be honest friends, like I am one of those people where the people would say like, oh, do a gratitude list or jour, you should journal. And I'd be like, I don't need that. Like, I'm [00:10:00] super grateful for everything I have and I don't need to write anything down.

, And in this moment I was like, you know what? I, I think I do actually need to do some gratitude, , because it's really easy when you feel like. Nothing is going the way that it's supposed to, to not see the things that are so wonderful already in front of you. And this wasn't like big and dramatic joy, but it was like the quiet joy, you know, in the, the sun setting over the mountains that we can see from our backyard.

And my kids laughing in. The birds tweeting outside, like all those things reminded me that I was still alive and I still had a lot of life to live. The second thing for me that is huge is like I got help. I, I reached out, I did not do this on my own. , I did a little bit of therapy. I, worked [00:11:00] on a lot.

This was not me in a silo. This was me with, you know, my husband helping me. I had a coach at the time actually, and honestly, like, this was also around the same time that I really started thinking about like my purpose, not just in my life, but in my business, and started getting help with that as well.

So I just like, , I want that to be something that you hear from this, , it is. Really hard to make big pivots and shifts and moments of growth on our own. It can be done, but let me tell you, like letting myself be held, changed everything. Okay. Another big thing for me is that I reconnected through my, to my body through movement.

, And this wasn't movement like to lose 50 pounds or to fix anything. This was to start feeling my body to come home to myself [00:12:00] through breath, motion, and sensation. I need to pause here and remind you all that I was a ballet dancer. I danced for years in my life. My body. Remembers ballet. , But I have no desire to step back into a ballet studio that is a Substack post for another day.

, I did tell my husband the other day, I was like, I need to start writing about my ballet journey on my substack. , Because I think there's a lot we can learn from it. , But again, like how much time do we have here? So I'm not gonna go into it too deep, but I know that ballet is not the place for me.

. And not because I'm not good at it, but because I do not subscribe to the energy output that was happening in the ballet world at the time. And I hope it's changed and I hope it's different, but I doubt it. , To be honest, it's a pretty entrenched culture and I don't wanna, I didn't want to be a part of it, but my body remembers this [00:13:00] and when I was going through physical therapy.

It was incredibly difficult because, , my body remembers doing the splits. My body remembers folding itself in half, and I was having to be gentle and ginger and careful with all of that stuff because my hip had been rebuilt with, , cadaver tendons, like literally. And so I, , I felt like. My recovery and my physical, like the connection to my body had been taken away from me.

, And I was relying on everyone else to tell me how to feel about my body, how to feel about my hip. , And I had amazing physical therapists who totally got where I was coming from, but my doctor did not. His PAs did not. , And I realized, you know, I think I had been in PT for almost a year and I was like.

I can do this myself. This is one of those like intuitive moments, and I don't necessarily think this is [00:14:00] for everybody, but having all the knowledge that I do have about movement and the awareness that I have about my body, I was like, I'm gonna take this into my own hands. And it's really funny because it's like I decided that, and then the universe was like, here you go.

And one of the benefits of my husband's work was that he. Gets free access and his family members get free access to an app that's a physical therapy app. It was so funny. And, , so I started doing that and it was really crazy the change that I started to see in my body. , And I would say that that journey continues to this day.

I, so I've done yoga my whole life, but I have always done it from my home. , I've never done it in a studio. And, and then. I guess about three weeks ago, I, I was feeling this pull to start going to yoga again. Listening to that voice, right? Learning to be able to hear that voice. And so I started going to yoga a couple times a week and it has.

Been life changing [00:15:00] just in the last three weeks, I feel I can feel my body coming back to me in a way that I haven't felt in a really, really long time. And I'm not saying that you need to go out and become a ballet dancer, but you do need to start. Moving. I really think that movement and breath is so important to healing, and I don't think we talk about them enough in a way that, , says like, this isn't about getting muscle.

This is literally about feeling into yourself , and healing. , I've even noticed this with my daughter who has a chronic illness and we've been doing a lot of breathing and it's helping her so much. She's actually the reason why I got my meditation certification because. We were working on meditation together, and I was like, man, I wanna learn more about how this, , serves people, because I could already see the change that it was making in her.

So just like, please, if you're listening to this and you haven't moved or breathes in a while, give it a try. Like, even if it's something simple [00:16:00] as like, just taking a deep breath, raising your arms above your head and exhaling and lowering. Golly, it makes such a, such an impact to help you connect back to your breath and your body, which will eventually help you connect to your voice and your inner intuition and knowing, which brings me to the fourth thing that I did.

I sought spiritual guidance, but I did not seek spiritual guidance outside of myself. I sought spiritual guidance through myself. I stopped outsourcing my truth. And I began listening n word again, and that's where my voice was waiting. , For me, it was a book that sparked this, , as Mary Magdalene revealed by, , I believe it's me, Megan Waterson.

, And I read that book and it was like, oh, it was like the universe hitting me over the top of the head, but literally like, Hey. Like, we want you to go inward on [00:17:00] your own journey. , And I was so inspired by it that I, that I did and that was huge for me. , Again, this is another post for another day, another podcast episode.

But, uh, we have been deconstructing over the last few years and. When you do that, it does leave you with a sense of emptiness. , Especially when you come from a background like we did, which was very much seeped in ritual and tradition. And, , there was like this feeling of, of emptiness of I was leaving something behind.

And when I. Read that book it like, it just changed something in me. I can't even explain it, but it, it helped me to realize that like, I didn't have to seek outward, I could look inward as well. , And if you're listening to this and you're like, whoa, Caroline, you lost me. That's okay. I think everybody's spiritual journey is, is different and unique.[00:18:00] 

But I think something that we tend to forget in the wash in that journey is that. You know, we hold our own magic within ourselves. We hold the connection to whatever greater truth that we believe in within ourselves. And I think a lot of times, especially in today's world, we look for validation for all of that on the outside.

And when we lose that connection to what is inside of us and the connection that is inside of us to that greater source, that greater power, whatever that we believe in, it makes us feel really disconnected. It really does. , I feel more spiritually connected now than I ever have in my entire. Life existence being any of it.

And it literally has come from looking inward and trusting what's inside of [00:19:00] myself. So I wanted to share this story today because I wanted you to hear what returning to your voice can look like. It's not a rebrand, it's not a productivity hack, it's it's presence, it's permission, it's remembering who you are when no one's watching.

And I'm gonna leave you with a little, , journal prompt if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, man, I, I hear some of myself in this. I too feel like I have lost my voice. How can I start to find that again? And one of my favorite prompts. And I like to use this with my clients, , especially my clients who are content creators or business owners.

But I think this is also good for those of us who feel like we can't speak our truth, or maybe there's something we want to say out loud, but we're afraid to. If my voice could speak freely [00:20:00] today, what would it say to me? Don't overthink it. Even a whisper is secret. I did a meditation this morning and it was a journaling meditation, so it was like a ton of prompts.

, And it was such an experience because I think I mentioned that I'm not a great journaler. It's something I'm really working on, especially as someone who recommends journaling. , I promise to bring someone on the podcast, , soon, hopefully in the fall. Uh, who is a journaling? Just, I don't know if master's the word, , she's incredible, but I am really excited to bring her on and talk about journaling and the impact it can have on your life because I think it's, it can be pretty dang impactful.

, So I was listening to this meditation and I was journaling, and when I just let go and just let the pen write freely, it was amazing what came out of it. And honestly, like one of the things that came out of it was this episode today. So. Don't skip over that. So that prompt again is [00:21:00] if my voice could speak freely today, what would it say to me?

And if you're ready to take one small step toward your own return, , I've created something really special for you. It's just a free five minute guided meditation to help you reconnect with your voice. Not the voice that the world wants, but the one that already lives inside of you. And you can head to caroline hole.com/meditation to download it.

I'll also put the link in the show notes, and that's just a great first step, you know, no performance, just presence. So before I close, I just wanna say thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity and space to share my story. , It just know that like you are not alone and if you are in need of help, please seek it and I will put a resource in the show notes for you.

, But just know that you are not alone. You are allowed to want more, not more [00:22:00] pressure, more presence, not more achievement, more you that whisper. What if this isn't all there is? Or that whisper. What if this is all there is is not a complaint, it's a calling. This is your invitation to return to your voice, your joy, your truth, and I will be right here with you.

Until next time.

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