Understanding the Feminine Cycle

If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I swear by understanding your phases as a woman. It will literally change every part of your life. Every. Part.

Four Ways to Avoid Depleted Energy

One of the most important things I’ve ever done for myself, is learning how to protect my energy.

3 Ways to Make Working From Home with Kids Easier

Working from home in quarantine is beginning to ease up and becoming working from home during summer. So how do we make working from home with kids easier and less overewhelming?

Quarantine Chronicles

Weeks 14-16

It’s like stopping to see life through my lens helps me see things more clearly. It helps me feel life to its core.

Here are the past three weeks of pictures and my reflections. These reflections are like journal entries. They are helping me make sense of all of this. Perhaps this is me moving through my grief and its complexities and I’m not recognizing it as that because there is a flow and a rhythm through this rollercoaster.

Week 13 | Quarantine Chronicles

Just shy of 3 weeks ago,

I received an unexpected phone call from my daughter’s school informing us that school was closing at 1pm and would remain closed Friday. I knew then this was something big; to not complete the last two hours of school? This was big; I could feel the power of it as it bubbled up from my belly and escaped as tears as I folded in half into my own lap while kneeling on the floor. Yet, there was this part of me that held hope that it would be just those two days and we could return to our normal lives that following Monday.

Weeks 11 + 12 | Quarantine Chronicles

In the past two weeks, our lives went from normal, everyday routines to being turned completely upside down because of a pandemic. I surround myself with a lot of women in my work, mostly mothers. And I hear a chaos of frantic energy, self-judgement and shame. We, as a society, somehow designed a quarantine scale. If you are decluttering, have a homeschool station and bake every day, you’re a 10. If you are anxious, hardly showered and throwing cheerios at your kids while they’re on devices, your a 1. As I watch this comparison go down my heart breaks.

Week 10 | This Week’s Love Notes

The first week of Spring and I can feel it in the air. We started the week with chilly temps and ended the weekend with near 60 degrees and no coats. My heart has grown this week, and in the joy I feel the grief as I watch these kids become bigger and bigger.

Week 9 | This Week’s Love Notes

This week’s energy was different for me. I’m grateful for what I know about how to move through different energy because it’s a week that I could have very quickly found myself in a state of burnout. I haven’t pushed or forced anything and really moved through each task with what felt good for me. It wasn’t about procrastinating, avoiding or resisting anything. It was about giving myself the permission to do things on my to do list at different times of the day, different moments, different amounts of time and just with different feelings. And because of that, I still accomplished everything, but simply FELT different in doing it all.

Week 8 | This Week's Love Notes {366 Project}

Friends, I think it’s happening. Spring is on the horizon. The sun has been coming out more often and earlier in the morning, we are finding ourselves outside and I’m seeing less and less moody window light. We survived the first week of Mercury being retrograde, we’re getting stuff done but going with the flow.

Week 7 | This Week’s Love Notes

This was a week that things felt a little harder, my energy was a little less, there were a few more tears than normal and I felt the challenges of motherhood and, well, life. The amazing part of it is that I am becoming so aware of the woman’s cycle and all that comes with the different phases that instead of falling victim to this week, I was able to truly ride it out. With awareness and knowledge, there is an ability to surrender, and so I did just that and it brought me into a weekend that felt a bit lighter and a bit easier.

Self-care isn’t pedicures and massages. Self-care is discipline and hard work.

Another week and another energy. This one felt good. It felt aligned. Clarity is arriving.

This week we wrapped up January, the first month of 2020. It seems to be a general consensus that it was a “tough year” and the more I delve into understanding astrology, it seems this was written in the stars and it’s why we’ve felt it as a collective.

And just like that we are entering into the final week of January. Doesn’t it seem wild that Christmas was only a month ago? I don’t know about you all, but if you told me it was 3 months ago I wouldn’t even flinch. We’ve been through a lot of illness, I (as always) have done a lot of reflection, self-care, reading, creating, being still, pushing forward…. it’s truly amazing what can happen in a few weeks time.

13/366. As I took this, I was thinking, "While I share so much of me in so many capacities with so many people and on so many platforms, none of these people will ever see all of me. Yet, I feel like so many of us don't recognize this and assume we know all of the person we're looking at on their highlights."⁠

In hindsight, I think I’m someone who probably experienced anxiety at a young age, but it was never identified as such by any family, medical professionals or even myself. The reason being, our society sweeps shit under the rug.

This week was full of trial and illness. Seriously, I’ve never become so frustrated and defeated by germs ever in my life. Well, that’s actually a lie. I suffered PTSD after my daughter was sick at 10 months old and this is the first year I’m responding to illness without PTSD… because I worked my ass off to rewire my brain to know that it’s not being faced with death when one of my kids gets a fever or a belly ache.

For anyone who doesn’t know what a 365 project is (or Project 365) it’s taking on the challenge of taking a picture a day. There are many ways to do this and many whys. My very first one was in 2013, the year my daughter was born. I remember taking this project on to simply help me become more acquainted with my camera, connect with others doing the same project, and build my skill. Little did I know that I’d be documenting some of the most precious days of my life being a brand new mother.

In the spring of 2015, I had my first massive anxiety attack. In the summer of 2015 - I began to dig and dig and dig and climb my way out of this hole I didn’t even realize I was in. I found that nothing in our life is compartmentalized and as much as I needed to support my mental health, I learned it was also connected to my physical, emotional and physical health, too. By 2018, after a lot of therapy, a lot of diet changes, and a lot of work, I felt like I was out of the hole. I also realized that I will always have work to do and that it’s easier to do it with others who are going through the same thing. I couldn’t get over how alone I felt whilst also learning how many women were going through the same things as me. Why were we doing it alone?