Hi!
I’m Nicole Reilly
Welcome to my world.
I’ve always experienced life a little differently.
In a way that notices more.
For a long time, I thought that came from being adopted at birth, from growing up feeling slightly different from the family I loved.
I assumed that was why I was such a deep, reflective child.
Why I listened more than I spoke.
Why I seemed to sense things that others moved past.
But as I grew older, I began to understand
that something else was at work.
I was sensing what lived beneath the surface
before it was spoken out loud.
Emotional undercurrents.
Unsaid grief.
The quiet truth in a room that hadn’t figured out the language.
This is the frequency that lives inside me.
The unseen.
The in-between.
The moment you feel something before you can explain it.
I don’t connect to Spirit for performance.
I connect like a woman who has had to learn to listen, feel, and process what cannot be explained.
And in this process I’ve also stepped into my boldness.
I’ve been guided be true to myself.
Because what I know now is this:
Boldness doesn’t have to be loud.
The deepest most authentic kind of bold is quiet.
It’s the moment you stop betraying yourself.
The moment you stop performing “I’m fine” game.
The moment you move with confident intention,
even when nobody claps.
I was born and raised in New Orleans.
This city has always held me.
It doesn’t separate the sacred from the ordinary.
The unseen is woven into the streets.
The hush inside St. Louis Cathedral
with a brass band out its front door.
The candlelight.
The weight of prayer in the air.
And right outside…tarot readers on the sidewalk, hands turning cards, naming what people are afraid to say out loud.
Like it’s normal.
Like Spirit belongs here.
Because they do.
Since I was a child I’ve always been enamored with the Joan of Arc, the unofficial patron saint of New Orleans.
She’s famous for saying,
“I am not afraid, for God is with me. I was born for this.”
Whenever I would face struggles,
I would repeat that phrase as my own declaration.
Not knowing that one day those words would become
part of my purpose.
A recognition.
A call to be truer to myself and my calling.
A reminder that the life I’m here to live requires devotion
to Spirit, to my Self, and to the Woman I am yet to become.
And I want that kind of devotion for you too.
Seeing Clearly
Hasn’t Always Been Easy
It has made me direct.
Honest. Introspective.
Less tolerant of pretense.
Often preferring solitude.
It has also asked me to do hard things, the kind of things you don’t prepare for, and never forget.
Before this work had language, I was a Registered Nurse.
I practiced nursing in the AIDS ward at Charity Hospital,
the second oldest hospital in the United States.
Ultimately choosing a specialty as a home health nurse working with patients who had extensive wounds that struggled to heal.
I spent years at bedsides, nursing people as they healed and some as they died, holding space for their families as life loosened its grip.
I moved into hospice when I became overwhelmed,
thinking it would be easier.
I learned how to stay when there was nothing to fix.
How to be steady in rooms filled with grief.
How to witness pain without turning away
That capacity didn’t end when I left nursing.
I have been the one to carry difficult truths, to make the phone call no one wants to make, to say the words that change a family forever, my own family included.
I’ve stood at thresholds where loss arrived suddenly and without mercy, and I’ve learned how to keep my feet on the ground while everything else fell away.
When my husband lost two brothers within two weeks of one another and I lost a soul mate the week before.
When my daughter’s best friend chose death over life.
When tragedy took someone that was dearest to my heart
when I was a young woman.
When grief asked more of me than I thought I could give.
These moments shaped me quietly.
They taught me that presence is not something you offer lightly.
It is something you earn by staying.
Most recently, I learned something that stopped me in my tracks.
When I met my birthfather for the first time, we met at special place that was in his family since he was a little boy, a property on a river, a place that I would soon find out, I was conceived.
It’s land that once belonged to the Pascagoula Indians.
Sacred land.
When I found him, I was mentoring with a shaman for no other reason than I felt called to do so.
Ultimately realizing that the Universe was preparing me.
as it always has, for this revelation!
Because this has been my life: The unseen weaving itself into the obvious, over and over again, I’ve come to know
that nothing is ever coincidental or accidental.
The truth is,
I didn’t have some next plan for studying with a shaman,
or for finding my birthfather.
I just felt the pull.
I listened.
I acted…
and the day I found him was his birthday.
You see, I’m not special,
I’m just listening.
I trust myself before anyone else.
I come first.
And if you’re willing to stop dismissing
what you know deep within to be true,
You’ll feel the same and you’ll be better to yourself and everyone else, because of it.
Being “this way” has shaped my life in very real ways.
