Befriend Your True Self + Walk in Freedom, Health and Joy
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 and show up brave to your messy and beautiful life in every season. Even the hardest of them.
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: Episode eight of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. “What if joy is not only entangled with pain, suffering, and sorrow but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?” – Ross Gay, Inciting Joy SUBSCRIBE TO THE ALIP PODCAST Be sure to listen and subscribe on iTunes to make …
Inside: Episode seven of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. After my son died, I was thrown head-first into a deep and dark winter season. The years that followed were incredibly painful and I longed for spring or light to come again. One day I heard in my spirit, “you have to live the end …
Inside: Episode six of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. When I’m driving on the highway and someone zooms past me at high speed or weaves in and out of traffic to ‘get ahead’ I always wonder, “where are you rushing to?” And is putting your life and mine at risk worth shaving a few …
Inside: Episode five of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. We are wired for community and need each other. “We learn from an early age that ‘masked and armored’ is the safe and sane way to live” writes Parker Palmer in A Hidden Wholeness. We are wired for connection – we need each other. Yet …
Inside: Episode four of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. Make peace with messiness to make space for joy. Life ‘shouldn’t’ be neat and tidy. If your life feels challenging, you’re not doing it wrong. It’s the belief that you ‘should’ always know what you’re doing, and that your life ‘should’ always feel easy and …
Inside: Episode three of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. Do you know your core values and do you walk them out with intention? Do you have a clear vision that lights your path? At the end of your days, how will you know you’ve lived well? Palliative nurse Bronnie Ware recorded her patient’s end …
Inside: You cannot shame yourself into wholeness. Instead, practice self-compassion like your life depends upon it. It does. Episode two of The ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. You cannot shame or bully yourself into wholeness. My inner critic was vicious. It bullied me, held me back, pointed out all my flaws 24/7, and told me …
Inside: You are not bad, wrong, or broken, or a problem to be fixed. All of you is welcome here. Episode one of the ALIP Podcast: Rebranding Middle Age. All of you is welcome here. Your strength and struggle, your grief and pain, your creativity and joy. You are not bad, wrong, or broken but …
Inside: Seasonal living is empowering. This post walks you through an overview of seasonal living as I practice. It includes a variety of resources to support you including a joyful cycle pdf and an audio recording. It may contain referral links. Seasonal living is empowering. It helps us befriend ourselves, practice a soul-honouring way of …
Inside: When we can put a face and name to an experience, we understand it better. Perhaps you’ll see yourself in some of my experience as an HSP. This post contains referral links. Personality typing and deepening my roots of self-awareness and self-compassion in different ways over the decades has helped me, layer by layer, …
Inside: Lunar tracking and Seasonal Living in general help me witness my growth and show up fully – with joy and on purpose – in every season. This is the final new moon before my birthday visioning week which marks a sacred time of year for me. Early summer each year, I look back to …
Inside: You can learn to embrace your gifts as an HSP! Learning about the trait of sensory processing sensitivity changed my life. I realized that I was not broken or wrong but a highly sensitive human navigating a messy world without much support or understanding of how my brain and nervous system are wired. This …
Inside: Understand different types of autumn seasons, common characteristics of autumn seasons, and learn to thrive in the autumn seasons of life. A practice of Seasonal Living teaches us that the natural world, biology, and human experience are patterned around cycles and seasons and change is constant. As one revolution comes to an end we begin again. …
Inside: Understand different types of winter seasons, common characteristics of winter seasons, and learn to thrive in the winter seasons of life. A practice of Seasonal Living teaches us that the natural world, biology, and human experience are patterned around cycles and seasons and change is constant. As one revolution comes to an end we begin again. …
Inside: Use these free worksheets to map out your year or goals in a seasonal way to reignite your creativity and build a brave and beautiful life. I’ve been life visioning for decades and the impact has been powerfully life-giving and has spilled over into every area of my life and work. You can learn …
Inside: Understand different types of summer seasons, common characteristics of summer seasons, and learn to thrive in the summer seasons of life. A practice of Seasonal Living teaches us that the natural world, biology, and human experience are patterned around cycles and seasons and change is constant. As one revolution comes to an end we begin again. …
Inside: The way to be okay is not for life to be all one thing and not the other, but to practice opening ourselves up to joy in the middle of the storm. Or the wildfire. I want to be clear about something right from the start: I prefer control, everything neat and tidy, my ducks …
Inside: Many midlife women wonder if boundaries are selfish. Boundaries are actually compassionate and in this post I share why. In conversations with midlife women, a common question that arises is “are boundaries selfish?” We’ve been taught that to be a good mom, a loving partner, or a compassionate person that we should be ‘self-less’. …
Inside: We need to declutter our lives frequently. This includes decluttering our relationships. The Circle of Impact exercise will help you practice. If you’re into simple living, minimalism or decluttering, you’ve probably heard tips around how futile it is organize stuff that you don’t even want/like/need. Professional Declutterer, Julianna Wilkes of The Simplicity Habit writes …
Inside: Befriending True Self is available to us all. No gatekeeper or shortcut can confer the deep wisdom received through years of healing and stripping away, saying yes to personal growth work, and lived experience that makes possible a meeting and befriending true self. The journey to meeting and befriending True Self is layered and …
Inside: What is hope? It’s not wishful thinking or fairy dust. It’s practical, action-oriented, and has a lot in common with resilience. In its simplest sense, hope is, I believe, the ability to envision a new joyful possibility. To hold a vision for where we’re heading or where we want to go, and then choosing …
Inside: Understand different types of spring seasons, common characteristics of spring seasons, and learn to thrive in the spring seasons of life. A practice of Seasonal Living teaches us that the natural world, biology, and human experience are patterned around cycles and seasons and change is constant. As one revolution comes to an end we …
Inside: An overview of a rich and powerful practice that allows us to glean from the wisdom of our four life seasons and embrace the season we’re in. I’ve included simple ways to start practicing along with Seasonal Living resource recommendations. I started cycle tracking at 34 years old, initially to help me regulate my …
Inside: You may feel weary and a little beat up by life but you can map a new joyful vision for the next season of your life. Just being human can be hard work at times! But layer on grief, trauma, messy and vulnerable life transitions, a lifetime of pouring out for others while neglecting …
