Three stories of holiday cheer -

True facts about my mental health -

My first Christmas without my father-

and the Gift of Community Care

Intentional beauty as a practice, a spiritual practice, might be the antidote to the chaos you've been looking for. However, like most things, the key word there is practice. It is a lifestyle and a mindset shift that can nurture comfort and grow roots deep through the parts of your life that feel the shakiest. 

Creating beauty as a spiritual practice might sound like a bit, or maybe a bunch, of personal development mumbo jumbo fluffy both on the inside and outside. Implementing an intentional beauty practice is quite the opposite. It is active, practical, and comforting. 

Creating beauty, sensory beauty in all forms, is empowering. 

The act of intentionally making beauty is the most organic and essential self-care there is. 

This year, sweet baby Jesus, this year is one for the books. Two years of the pandemic with all the death, dying, illness, discord, fear, and fighting…

In the personal development world, we are constantly, in some way trying to reverse engineer how people got where we want to go.  

Yes, that might be useful. It might even be important. 

However, if understanding the habits and behaviors of people who succeed might help you get there yourself, wouldn't understanding the habits and behaviors of people who fail help you avoid landing somewhere that feels like failure?  If we can identify and avoid habits and behaviors that smell and taste like self-sabotage chances are extremely high getting where you want to go will instantly feel like a lot less work.  

In this episode, we are going to talk about the #1 place most people gamble with their happiness and lose.  

Leveraging happiness against likability.

It's a biggie and chances are pretty high you might be doing it. 

Read the blog post here. 

Sensory Self-care is Your Right Now Key to Sanity

Sermons on self-care are everywhere right now. I've given more than a few in the last few days alone myself. However, sometimes even self-care as we've known it before feels like too much, just another to do, often one more thing we feel like we're failing.

Traditional self-care is so 2019.

Nervous system care is where it's at now.

Nervous system self-care could characterize as sensory self-care.

Your nervous system will usually settle into a smooth and predictable rhythm if you curate experiences with care and attention to your sensory experiences.

Sensory self-care also changes your brain chemistry in a red hot second. Sensory self-care is all about pleasure in small bite-sized chunks. Pleasure lights up the same reward centers in the brain the happiness does. Please tricks the brain into producing happy, feel-good chemicals. Sensory self-care changes both your neuro-chemistry and your biochemistry.

I can change myself and my experience in any moment by tinkering with how my senses are perceiving my environment.

Read the full blog post and back story here.