Remember Your Way to Freedom
You don’t have to hunt for joy, manufacture it, or figure out how to lead a stress-free “perfect” life. You can ALLOW joy to live alongside whatever else you’re experiencing. You can WELCOME it into the messiness of your life in every season. You can learn to expand your capacity for joy.
Learning to expand our capacity for joy – to hold space for joy and allow it to live in our lives alongside whatever else we’re experiencing – isn’t only about joy specifically, though. The benefits are further reaching.
It’s really about expanding our ability to experience and not run from all emotional experiences. It’s about living resilient, present, empowered, showing up fully to life in every season (within our capacity), navigating grief or trauma or other stressful life transitions with better outcomes, and ultimately reconnecting with and befriending ourselves.
Expanding our capacity for joy or for other emotions is also not ONLY about emotional experience. Our emotions don’t live in isolation. We have embodied experiences: we experience life through the wisdom of our mind, emotions, and body. And what’s more, we have a nervous system wired to keep us safe and alive that is always at work gathering information beneath conscious awareness, deciding if we’re safe or unsafe, and impacting the ways we engage in life and relationships.
In order to live self-aware and on purpose, and walk in greater freedom, we need to reconnect with our true selves and bring awareness to what’s going on in these bodies of ours. We need to befriend ourselves and this includes befriending our nervous system so that we can show up brave, whole + with joy in every season (even the hardest of them).
Inside: In the liminal space of emerging from winter into spring, it’s important to resist urgency, to give ourselves ample space and nourishment and compassionate tending as we slowly unfurl. This is the third time I’ve been sick in the past five months. I didn’t get sick once all the years I was advocating for …
Inside: Honour your wiring in a noisy and busy world by crafting strategic, honest, and values-aligned goals that help you walk out your Life Vision. This post includes a Life-Vision Flow-Chart to help you get started. Slow and steady is my favourite speed. A slow-moving body does not mean I’m not a goal-oriented person. Part …
Inside: Journey to Freedom – there’s an inextricable connection between truth-telling and unshackled living. We cannot know freedom without being real. And freedom is, largely (NOT solely), an inside job. This post includes a referral link. My intuition or inner voice is telling me to allow this season of my life to be less about to-do’s …
Inside: If you’ve ever felt stuck in fear or pain, if you’ve spent time hiding or procrastinating on what matters most to you, if you’ve felt despondent about the state of your life or the world, perhaps what could have helped is a dose of fierce self-compassion. Fierce self-compassion is about taking action to relieve …
Inside: Learning empowering ways of navigating stress puts us back into the driver’s seat when our life feels unmoored or shaken. We can continue building our resilience toolbox so we can show up brave, whole, and on purpose in every season (even the hardest of them). This post contains referral links. Learning empowering ways of …
Inside: When you’re stressed out remember your stress reactions are biologically the same whether it’s to literally save your life or if your stress is due to a triggering, annoying, or frustrating situation. That’s not your fault. That’s biology. This post contains a referral link. We can’t avoid all stress (not to mention that not …
Inside: What you need to know about stress: This is part one in a three-part series to help you feel more empowered as you navigate stressful life experiences. Would you agree that right now life feels more hectic and stressful than ever? That there are fewer times when you feel amazing in-the-moment clarity and confidence …
Inside: If you genuinely want to step off the hamster wheel and enjoy an unbusy life, then you will need to go nose to nose with fear. This post includes referral links. I have never felt that I fit well in this noisy, competitive, frenetic world; fear told me that I didn’t have what it …
References for these three posts 1 – Canadian Mental Health Association. (2016, February 28). Stress. https://cmha.ca/brochure/stress/ 2 – National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). 5 things you should know about stress. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/stress 3 – US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. (2021, June 10). Manage stress. My healthfinder. …
Inside: There is freedom in a relationship with healthy boundaries. Boundaries are not a punishment but a kindness to you and those you love. The word boundaries sometimes has a negative connotation. There seems to be an idea that only stern or cold people are good at setting boundaries. Or that boundaries only need to …
Inside: What if all I really want is a small, slow, simple life. A mediocre life. A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough. What if all I want is a small, slow, simple life? What if I am most happy in the space of in-between. Where calm lives. What if I am …
Inside: Media offers us quick fixes, spiritual gurus sell us bypassing, our own fear nature beckons us to hide under the covers or jump on the next shiny bandwagon; all feel preferable to slow, soul-stretching, deep work. But sustainable growth takes time. Don’t rush who you’re becoming. In the summer each year I listen inward …
Inside: You don’t have to hunt for joy, manufacture it, or figure out how to lead a stress-free “perfect” life. You can ALLOW joy to live alongside whatever else you’re experiencing. You can WELCOME it into the messiness of your life in every season. You can learn to expand your capacity for joy. You don’t have …
Inside: This is real life – joy and pain, beauty and suffering, uncertainty and delight, messily woven together to form a beautiful whole. TW: grief, child loss, suicide loss I’ve spent this weekend in Calgary, AB, with my friend Kathy Escobar who flew in from Colorado so that we could hug and talk for hours, …
Inside: We have a right to rest simply because it’s a human need and we matter, not only as a means to an end goal! If you feel overwhelmed by life, one of the kindest and wisest things you can do is to gift yourself an abundance of rest. This post includes amazon referral links. …
Inside: Should you quit? An exploration of the the difference between pivoting and quitting and 9 questions to help you examine if you should quit or stay the course. This post includes referral links. I quit things all the time. I pivot, shift course, tweak, stay responsive to my body and life, and build a …
Inside: A collection of favourite resource recommendations to help you handcraft a compassionate and sustainable life. This post includes referral links. On this page, I offer a collection of 30 resource recommendations to help you handcraft a compassionate and sustainable life. I’ve set a boundary for myself of 7 resource recommendations per section which motivates …
Inside: Craft a hope map for a brave and beautiful life: There are countless ways to handcraft a brave and beautiful life but if the Brave + Beautiful Community has piqued your curiosity, you can reach out for a chat to ask questions, or learn more and register here. Years ago I gained great courage …
Inside: It’s never too late to build the life you want, one that you’re delighted to show up to each day. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. Isn’t it odd that we judge ourselves for not having life all figured out while we’re yet on the journey? We don’t …
Inside: I’m turning 50! The past decade of my life has been full of sorrow, emotional and physical pain, joy, adventure, growth, and day upon day of ordinary beauty. It all came tangled up together. I’ve decided to embrace it all. TW: suicide, grief, depression The past decade has been a wild ride. As much …
Inside: I sat down to write today and this poem came out. Recently my clients have been telling me that my work is helping them find their way home to themselves. A beautiful testimonial. The journey home is a hard and messy one but it’s also the path of freedom. This is who I am. …
Inside: How to navigate self-doubt in your creative life and work with gentleness and kindness. This is a guest post by Nicole Gullota. The post contains referral links. In my second year of college, I signed up for a publishing workshop where a handful of hopeful writers were eager to learn the secrets to securing …
Inside: We must build resilience to equip us for the storms of life. Every one of us will experience stress, loss, or hard life circumstances in varying degrees. This post offers 7 ways to build resilience in the storm. This post contains referral links. Life is messy. You’re imperfect. Show up anyway. This has been …
Inside: Can we unlearn busy and learn to slow down instead? Guest author Julia Ubbenga spent a year in Spain and shares the lessons she learned from the Spanish culture about a slower pace of life. The way I viewed time shifted in 2007. It was the year I quit my desk job, threw some …
