I was fifty-nine years old, waiting tables in Florida, when my body stopped working.

Before all this I was an actress, a championship equestrian, and the inventor of a product sold to horse people around the world. Lives end and start again. That’s rather the point.

My body didn’t quit dramatically. Nothing that would show up on a scan. Just the accumulated weight of eighteen years in a courthouse, marriages that ended badly, businesses lost, grief, and the particular exhaustion of a woman who has spent decades holding everything together for everyone else.

What I think, and you can take it or leave it

We live in a world that works us until there’s nothing left, then sells us the cure. Food that makes us sick. A new name for every symptom and a prescription to go with it. A news cycle engineered to keep you agitated and worn down. And underneath all of it, the quiet suggestion that if you can’t keep up, something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are tired because it is exhausting, and because it was built this way.

That is not a failure of the system. That is the system.

So I went to Bali

Before I left I went looking online for healers to see. What I found was several hundred other women asking the same question into an empty room.

Nobody was answering. So I went.

I rented my house out to cover the mortgage and the bills. I flew on points I’d spent a year building, and forty of my fifty-nine nights were in hotels I never paid for. The rest were homestays that cost less for a week than one night at home.

I stopped in Bangkok first and spent a day at a hospital getting a full clinical baseline. I wanted to know exactly what I was carrying before I asked my body to do the hardest work of its life. That turned out to matter more than I expected.

Then two months looking for people I’d been told didn’t exist. The real, authentic healers who don’t advertise, don’t have websites, and don’t come up when you search.

What I found

One of them put his hands on my abdomen and told me exactly what was wrong inside my body. He named it and went straight to the spot. No imaging, no blood work, no history from me — I hadn’t told him anything.

A hospital in Bangkok had found the same thing weeks earlier. Confirmed by machine, in an institution with every diagnostic technology available.

Two entirely different doors. The same truth behind both. I have looked for the rational explanation and I have not found one that satisfies me.

Another is eighty years old, nearly blind, and works from complete stillness. No website, no appointments. You make the trip, you wait your turn, and when his energy runs out he stands up and walks away.

While I waited, I watched him look across the compound at a woman he had never met and tell her which places on her body needed attention. She pointed to those exact spots. Then he told her what she did for a living. He was right. She hadn’t said a word to him.

I hadn’t had my turn yet. I was still watching, thinking about what I’d just seen, and wondering what he was going to find in me.

There was one who never touched me at all. He sat me down across a small desk and talked, for hours, until every answer I’d been giving my whole life had come apart in my hands and only one question was left standing.

And one who had pages waiting when I arrived — charts built from my birth data, prepared before I walked through the door. He already knew things. Not the vague things that could apply to anyone. Specific things.

There were ten of them.

I wrote down every name, every price, every number. All ten gave me written permission to publish them, and every word of what happened in those rooms is in the book.

The book

A Waitress Goes to Bali: The Rising Tide is the whole story — what sent me there, what happened when I arrived, and what I found out about healing that nobody at home was going to tell me.

The directory is in the back. That’s the only place it lives, and it’s the reason the book exists.

And this site

Claim Your Dame helps women reclaim their health, confidence, purpose, finances, and sense of adventure so they can create an extraordinary second act.

This isn’t a travel site and it isn’t self-help. It’s built on seven pillars, and everything here sits under one of them:

Health — vitality, nutrition, movement, energy, aging well
Wealth — money, budgeting, investing, side businesses, career pivots
Purpose — meaning, calling, identity, finding yourself again
Adventure — travel, new experiences, retreats, living boldly
Relationships — family, friendships, dating, boundaries, connection
Mindset — confidence, fear, resilience, personal growth
Legacy — giving back, mentoring, leaving something behind, creating impact

It’s for women over forty, over fifty, over sixty. Divorced. Widowed. Empty nesters. Women who gave up a career to raise a family and now feel something is missing. Women burned out by careers that stopped meaning anything. Women who forgot themselves. Women who want adventure. Women who need hope. Women who know there has to be more.

It’s for the woman who has spent so long surviving that she’s forgotten what it feels like to live. Who looks fine from the outside and quietly wonders whether this is really all there is.

You have survived your first act. Now claim your second.

You are not too old. You are not too broken. It is not too late.

I know, because I was all three.

— Dame Eileen Kenney
support@claimyourdame.com