Today April Kaiserlian, LMSW joins us on the podcast and shares with us about her hard journey into motherhood and the realization that her path was not going to look like the traditional path. She opens up, telling us about her early years of motherhood spent in anxiety and anger. But found hope and healing after taking a Mindfulness course. April describes as she completed that course, that she finally saw some cracks in the pain she had been feeling for so long.  She continued to grow and learn coping strategies, but was sent into despair when her husband decided they needed to divorce. April describes the mental image of drowning and having to hold onto other peoples docks as she was so uncertain during that initial time.  But her story doesn't end there, she encourages us to welcome despair and spend time understanding what you are experiencing as a way to learn about yourself and begin to move forward. April shares such wisdom and encouragement as she courageously recounts some of her life's toughest moment. She quotes William Blake - "Excessive sorrow laughs and excessive joy weeps."  Please share with all of your friends, especially the ones walking through a fresh divorce. They need to hear what April has to say!! 

Ways to Find April
FB: @aprilkaiserlian
Instagram: @aprilkaiserlian
Website: www.aprilkaiserlian

April's Bio:
Before I came to the practices of mindfulness and self-compassion in 2008, my life felt serious and heavy. I didn’t know how to laugh. It was as if my sense of humor went missing somewhere in my childhood.

Thankfully my sense of humor reappeared on my first 7-day retreat of silence when, after listening to my own mind loop ‘round and ‘round for days on end, I realized my own thoughts ranged from absurd to insightful and everything in between. I was relieved that I didn’t have to take everything I thought so seriously. In fact, I began to play with how I thought about life, love, and learning. A new sense of playfulness and creativity emerged in my life.

As I began to lighten up and slow down, I made the crucial connection between the importance of stillness and silence, movement and expression as tools of learning how to turn toward sticky patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. I began to learn how to take seriously that which was serious in my life and to let the rest be beautiful in its simple ordinariness.

After a 7-year stint as a stay-at-home mother to my 3 children, I returned to the professional world when I began teaching Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. I went on to co-found the Grand Rapids Center for Mindfulness in 2010. I opened my private psychotherapy practice in 2013.

Using the tools that have helped me learn how to turn toward both the pain and the joy of life, I welcome people from all walks of life to join me in the process of learning to show up for the fullness of life.

I promise we will laugh and cry together along the way.

Embrace, Live, Thrive
FB: @embracelivethrive
Instagram: @embracelivethrive 
Website: www.embracelivethrive.com