Palate Cleanser

Happy New Year!

We’re doing it! We’re about to cross over the threshold of 2025, showing up for ourselves all along the way.  Time is a totally different beast after journeying through cancer treatment and recovery these past 3 years.  I don’t take a single day for granted.  I also cherish you, my community, and family more than ever.  After what felt like my whole world being swallowed up by health for those last several years, it’s been truly amazing to have more presence as a mom, a wife, a friend, and a therapist.  

So, 2025 marks some welcomed endings and exciting beginnings!

That said, there’s always the temptation to bite off more than we can commit to when considering New Year’s resolutions.  Like I’ve said before, I’m convinced humans choose extremes over balance more days than not. We go all in, sink or swim, only to wake up a week later in too deep and gasping for air.  

So let’s ease into it. Let’s hit the palate cleanse. Let’s listen to the gentle rhythms of our desires, our longings, our needs. Let’s partner with ourselves from a place of self-compassion, like we would a loved one we believe in and want to support. Let’s speak to ourselves with kindness and curiosity, turning down that harsh inner critic that keeps us small and hustling for worthiness. Let’s breathe more—slower and deeper than usual.  I’m convinced we could all use a return to the breath and the body as a way of being present.

Let’s start small. And from that place of stillness and silence, we begin to etch out the tiny, two-degree shifts of growth and expansion that over time, create big breakthroughs. It’s often helpful to partner with a professional in order to gain greater support and accountability. If you’re looking to use the Enneagram as a part of your 2025 self-development, I’d love to help make that happen.  You’re the expert at you, and I’ve got a detailed roadmap to get you from where you feel stuck to where you long to be.  

No matter what you want to create in your life this year, I hope you’ll continue to journey with me.  I’ve got some exciting stuff coming your way that I can’t wait to share.  

In the meantime, do a little dreaming…a little playing.  It’s time to let your true self take the wheel.  She’s ready!  

A Christmas Letter to You

I have a hunch you have a lot going on this week. With Christmas tomorrow and New Years just around the bend, many of us are traveling, gathering, and hopefully…connecting.  

I’m reminded of how lonely this time of year can be as well.  I’ve had many seasons of life where the holidays were, very truly, bleak.  So I can’t help but write you today and check in.  As an Enneagram type 4, that sensitive ache is never too far off, for better or worse.  I say yes to the ache, though.  Without it, I forget how fragile and thin life’s veil is.  I learned that big time with my cancer diagnosis.  

Interestingly, I feel more connected to you as I connect to my own human frailty. This is why the practice of self-compassion is so beautiful and spacious. It invites our pain and suffering to have a voice, knowing that this is the connective tissue of this being human.  It doesn’t shut that voice out  in the cold, though. It leans in, curiously, with kindness—so as to alleviate that felt pain and loneliness. It says, “I see you, friend.  I see your pain—the weight of your heavy burden—and I love you no matter what.  I’ll stay awhile with you.”  

This season, consider someone in need.  Who might be alone?  Who may be hurting?  As you enter into the spirit of the season, invite them there with you, even in the prayer chamber of your heart.  What a powerful message we send to the world as we create space in our hearts for the ones who are broken…We overcome scarcity with generosity—lack with abundance.  

I pray this week, you would hear more love than noise, see more light than sorrow, feel more joy than fear.  In the quiet hours of the morning, I pray that you sense a palpable belonging.  

Merry Christmas, Love.

How to navigate grief through the holidays

Grief can feel thick as mud for so many throughout the holidays.  The exaggerated background of “merry and bright” can push unrealistic expectations on us to be something we’re not.  But for those who have lost loved ones, experienced drastic devastation, or merely find themselves in a life they never wanted, this  pressure can feel unbearable.  

It’s also worth noting that depression runs rampant around the holidays. It tends to be a reminder of the heavy lack we carry around from day to day.  There is such a fine line between grief and depression.  So first, let’s unpack that…

We know they are look-alikes.  Both involve intense sadness and even  despair.  Grief, however, is the normal and appropriate response to a great loss, often the death of a loved one.  Whereas they share several characteristics such as heightened emotions, fatigue, appetite disturbances, loss of pleasure, and inability to enjoy things, they are not the same.  A big contrast is depression is usually marked by a tendency to isolate from  others with little or no experience of pleasure.  The grieving person usually stays connected to others through the process and hopefully experiences pockets of joy or pleasure along the way.  

Something I learned from the grief guru himself, David Kessler, is that grief must be witnessed—loved one(s) hopefully walk alongside and see this pain integrating into our lives so we can process it better.  

There are five main stages of grief:  Denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance.  Here’s the catch though, grief is complex and not linear.  For all you type A’s out there, beware of trying to grieve neatly.  It won’t happen.  It’s messy, cyclical, and much like whac-a-mole.  

One day we can be fairly poised, the next mad as hell, and the next denying anything’s actually happening, knee deep in that hidden tin of Aunt Susan’s peppermint bark.   

As you can imagine, the real power lies in the acceptance piece.  When we are able to simply allow what’s coming up emotionally and let it move through us, we can access acceptance more quickly.  After all, the word “emotion”  is mostly comprised of the word “motion.”  That said, we must allow them to come up and move through us as they are created in our bodies.  If we don’t do this, we create bigger problems down the road.

So how do we grieve what used to be?  The lovely life you’d grown accustomed to? The lifestyle and rituals you carved out over the years?  How do you make sense of this new normal?

By assigning meaning to it.  

We must appropriate purpose to our grief.  Eventually, we must be the hero in our grief story as opposed to the victim.  This takes time. David Kessler actually built out the grief process to include meaning as the sixth stage.  How powerful is that?   

Let your grief work for you and create deeper, richer meaning in your life right now.  Your shock is appropriate, your tears are precious, your anger—valid.  We are all on this spiritual journey together as we become more real through our pain, especially during this season. 

P.S. AND…Just like Mr. Rogers’ mother told him when responding to scary news, “Look for the helpers.” If you need a safe space to process and grieve,  I’d love to support you on your journey.

My Gift to You...Perfect Timing

They say timing is everything. I’ll agree with that.  However, when it comes to deepening self-awareness and overall quality of life, the perfect timing is always now.  I used to think I had to wait for a catastrophic event to explode on the scene in order to garner precious time and energy to “work on me” so to speak.  

What about you?  Do you tend to brush minor hurts, dashed hopes and dreams, and resentments under the rug only to deal with them “when the time is right?” And who’s to say when time is right or wrong?

Obviously, we do have to compartmentalize painful stuff along the way in order to show up and meet the demands of work, parenting, and other projects we’re invested in.  The problem with waiting for the right time is we often put it off too long which in turn creates further unforeseen problems for ourselves and others.  It’s like driving your car without ever getting an oil change. Eventually, manageable maintenance issues become harrowing expenses we could’ve easily avoided. 

My point is this: now is the time to invest in you and take back the power in your life. This doesn’t have to look extreme or exhausting either.  

When we decide to show up for ourselves and work with what we’ve got where we’re at, we not only circumvent larger scale implosions down the road, we put into motion tiny two-degree shifts that over time, creating massive upgrades in all areas of our lives. 

When you board a plane in Nashville headed for London, the pilot follows a detailed flight plan that takes into account all sorts of possible interruptions.  When you’re flying, you won’t feel many noticeable deviations or sudden turns, unless turbulence becomes an issue.  In fact,  if your pilot’s navigation is even one degree off, guess what happens?  You’ll end up in Morocco or something.  (Okay, geography isn’t my strong suit, but you get my point.). I imagine Morocco is magical, yet you bought a ticket to London.  

It doesn’t take much of a shift to create the dramatic results you’re looking for over time. It does, however, require you to decide to start now, with what you’ve got.  

What holds you back from this courageous decision? 

Why is this courageous? Because to be willing to look honestly and openly at the peaks and valleys of your story is a highly vulnerable process. We don’t know what we’ll find. We can’t predict how we’ll react. To be vulnerable always requires courage.  

And yet there is nothing more vulnerable and uncertain in this life than to love.  

Take the first step today and say yes (with feeling) to the adventure.  Sign up for my Enneagram-based self-care membership program, The Practice.  It’s affordable, supportive, and you get a whole new community of folks with like minds and hearts.  

I don’t make many promises in my line of work, but I assure you, you certainly won’t be bored.  :)

3 Ways the Enneagram Can Support You Through the Holidays

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…so why doesn’t it always feel that way?  For many, the holidays can feel more lonely and anxious than merry and bright.  When we put high expectations on anything, it tends to snuff out the pure joy and wonder of it.  I know you know this, and yet it still feels awfully difficult to move through the season with a realistic, unbothered approach.  

I firmly believe the Enneagram can help.  Here are a few ways how:

1. As you well know, the Enneagram helps illuminate the inner workings of our personalities.  In showing you the motivations behind why you do the things you do, for better or for worse, it invites you into greater self-awareness and self-knowledge.  This is crucial as we move through stressful experiences (last week’s awkward Thanksgiving meal with Uncle what’s his name and his new girlfriend???) This is important because we obviously can’t control others around us but we can have the space of self-awareness to observe how we respond to the season’s events.  And I do mean respond….not react!
   

2. In step with this, the Enneagram is a map.  It shows you when you’re on the right track and when you’ve taken a treacherous wrong turn south to the land of victim, people pleaser, avoidance, isolation, martyr—even control freak (who me?).  By giving you awareness as to where you go in times of stress and security in your type, the Enneagram gives us road signs, moment to moment, so as to keep us moving in the right direction.  It’s like your very own Waze app on the open roads of holiday chaos.

3. The Enneagram helps us stay curious and compassionate both to ourselves and the collection of friends and family we’re surrounded by this time of year.  Sure, the Enneagram is  all about self understanding, but that’s just the beginning.  As we are better able to understand  ourselves and others around us, we are more likely to move towards them—to have generosity of spirit instead of a critical mind.  We learn to have a kinder dialog towards ourselves and others by helping you have greater compassion for others and why they do the things they do.   And don’t forget…sometimes this compassion looks like saying no instead of yes to that umpteenth holiday gathering…or piece of pie…or that gift you really can’t afford.  Compassion combines love and limits.   

Don’t worry, I’ll be hanging out a bunch in your inbox this season…Cheers!

P.S. If you’re looking to stay tethered to some enneagram-based self-care  this holiday season, give yourself the gift of The Practice.