All Relationships have expectations and rules - mostly unspoken and even more often we don’t realize we have them. These rules aren’t malicious - we have habits and patterns in relationships because as humans it makes sense that over time, there are predictable behaviors from one another.

Surrendering your autonomy

Loyalty to someone other than yourself is breeding ground for inauthenticity and for surrendering your autonomy. Loyalty from others as a core value says that no matter what you need, being their support, on their side, in their lane is the priority. This means ignoring your own inner voice, your independent and individual needs. Autonomy is, by definition, the the quality or state of being self-governing especially. It is the ability to make your own decisions about your own person. It’s the freedom to decide what happens to you, with you and around you physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Autonomy is the antithesis of codependency...

Let’s continue the journey to release and unleash the gratitude hoarded in our hearts and our journals to amplify and affirm the impact people have on each other’s lives. Taking a closer look at what stops us from sharing it, we are going to look at the rules we have in how we share gratitude. 

 After receiving a dismal prognosis on Nov 11, 2017

I started asking different questions. This curiosity started a few years prior when I first became symptomatic. Having surrendered, finally, to my body’s begging to rest, I found myself seeking answers for all aspects of life. I had been teaching and preaching gratitude within our team and my community well before I started the journey to writing a book about gratitude. But as I was lying in bed, cataloguing all the ways my life was positively impacted by the people in my journey, I realized how few knew it. And by my count, I had done a pretty good job reflecting back and sending messages of gratitude to the...

What would happen if we stopped hoarding our gratitude in our private journals? What stops us from activating our gratitude? This is a life changing conversation.

This experience

On July 16, 2009 my son’s father, my former husband, died unexpectedly in a
motorcycle accident. This experience, this loss, highlighted for me the many reasons to
express gratitude with urgency and with a whole heart. Despite the intense grief, fear,
sadness and many other emotions we experience when someone’s life story ends without our permission, I was incredibly grateful that I had continuously shared my gratitude with him for his presence in my life. Many of us know someone, if not you yourself, who has deep regret for not acting on the gratitude in their hearts.

The pain of a lost opportunity to express love and appreciation has completely altered the path of many people’s lives. I will venture to guess that you could easily name a dozen people that if they died tomorrow, you would...

We all crave peace, ease and a sense of purpose that fills us up and energizes us. And what we actually have oftentimes is a day-to-day experience of reacting and responding to the world around us and being on call for the other shoe to drop.

We have no idea who we are.

We have no idea what we want or how to feel peace and ease, most of us have a hard time even remembering when we felt that ease or that peace. We start looking at what’s wrong with us because we've tried to fix this a bunch of times, right? You've probably tried to put boundaries in place. You've probably incorporated some health and wellbeing practices and still you're not feeling okay. And so what we have to do first is acknowledge that perfectionism is more than just wanting things to be perfect and acknowledge that for the last several decades of your life, in order for you to feel safe enough to exist you've had to do these other things. Your energy and your attention has been placed somewhere else rather...

A lot of us grew up with the mindset that you have to set a goal. You go achieve it, move on to the next thing. The problem with that is if you are over-focused and you have tunnel vision for achieving a specific goal, there becomes a never ending cycle of trying to produce that. 

It doesn't allow you to actually experience the moment that you're in. 

And it requires when you're constantly going after goal, what could I be doing next? What could I be doing right now to get me closer to that goal, rather than looking at the practice of living the life of the person who will have achieved that goal. The intention is to switch from being goal oriented, which is where I lived most of my life to becoming someone who is practicing their life, practicing what it actually looks like to be this person that you want to become. Think about who you want to become. 

Who do you want to be remembered as? 

What kind of mom do you want to be? What kind of partner do you want to...

We hear these words a lot, with each passing year within the spiritual community and those steeped in quantum physics, talk more about energy, the law of attraction and manifesting.

We hear about alignment and abundance but what does it really mean?

Alignment is things in line.

Arranging pieces to be in the shortest path, a straight line… Alignment in terms of choices and decisions made that are congruent and supportive of the vision and goals you want to achieve and realize. Before we can talk about alignment, we have to get clear about having a vision. Because you can’t make aligned choices that will benefit you long term if you don’t have a consistent vision about the life you want. Having a clear vision of your business goals or your health goals exclusively is how so many of us burn out on any particular area of life. Balance sends those of us who are working on pulling away from people pleasing and overachieving and productivity addicted  into a...

The idea of purpose - having a meaningful impact that drives you from within - has been discussed for thousands of years. Why do what we do every day? What will it have all meant at the end of our physical lives?

These are big ideas, heady questions, and ultimately, there is not a “right” answer.

But, the need for a sense of purpose (for every human) remains to be crucial to our joy and happiness. This has been evident in research from the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The purpose is the profound "Why?" 

Having it creates a sense of mission to do something worthy. It's your significant "yet-to-do" in life. Purpose integrates who you are with what you do. It inspires us to renew our commitments and stretch further to manifest them, which is why having a sense of purpose in your work is so powerful! 

There are books, courses, and speeches calling us to fulfill our purpose. I am part of that community that is calling you to stand tall and...