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On the first leg of the Homecoming journey, we make our way down off the mountain. Rather than strain to see our next summit, the next feather in our cap, the next achievement to check off our never ending list, we climb down into the valley of the soul.  We quiet.  We remember how to listen for and tend to the sweet matter of our bodies, exhausted from years of outer activity. Season and after season of our life spent in perpetual summer.  We peel back the layers of patriarchal conditioning that tell us that we must sacrifice ourselves for others.  That this is what it means to be a woman. That this is what it means to be “good”.  [...]

Today I wanted to share some of my favorite sacred, creative, and playful winter rituals for this time of year. The Word of the Year I have been choosing a word of the year for the last several years (2023 was the year of enlivenment). If you have a similar practice, I invite you to reflect on the past year through the lens of the word that you chose.  What did it teach you? How did it inform how you moved through the world? What were its gifts and its challenges?  In addition to reflecting on 2023, I also use this time to start mulling over my word for the coming year. To choose a word, these are some [...]

Today’s post is about money. If you’ve been here a while, you know this is a topic I rarely venture into.  But in a recent session with a dear client, I mentioned how the word money actually comes from the name of Roman goddess Moneta, meaning that money once belonged in the realm of the feminine, the realm of relationship.  These days that is difficult to imagine.  Money has taken on a life of its own. The main goal seems to be to make something from nothing, to have money that grows without being tied to anything in the tangible world. That’s the dream we are sold (and I will admit that sometimes it sounds pretty damn good).  But [...]

I have a propensity to get ahead of myself. In Qoya Inspired Movement classes, Qoya’s founder Rochelle often states how our modern world operates at the pace of mind. The mind is a beautiful aspect of who we are as human beings. It has this amazing capacity to dream and imagine, to jump forwards and backwards in time, to travel from the here and now to lands far, far away in an instant. But we are not only our minds. Eric and I spent the last week fostering a four year old pittie mix named Reba (pictured above). We had no idea how it would feel to have a little four-legged in the house again. (As it turns [...]

Opening to Receive Earlier this year, I decided to gift myself a Qoya retreat in Costa Rica to ring in my 40s. The retreat was happening right after the new year, so it also felt like a wonderful way to invite in the energy of enlivenment that I was seeking to embody in 2023 (enlivened being my word of the year).  The theme of the retreat was Open to Receive, and that theme has continued to both unfurl and deepen throughout this year.  When I originally read the name of the retreat, I thought of receiving as the counterpoint to giving. And as I wrote in a previous letter, learning to release the culturally-approved role of giver and leaning [...]

On Grief, Gratitude, Meaning & Community On the evening of Tuesday, August 15th I was notified that my book Homecoming was live and ready for purchase on Amazon. Less than four days later, in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 19th, we had to say our final goodbye to our beloved Sophie. Our companion for 14 ½ years. My soul mate and teacher.  The house feels so quiet now. There are no snorts to listen for in the morning or the sound of her nails tap dancing across the floor. No one who comes to nudge me that it’s time to step away from the computer and take a break. For the last several weeks, we would often sit [...]

On the cusp of turning 40, and knee deep in attempting to start seeds for the first time ever, I had a dream that has turned into my mantra, an anthem of sorts, for this decade.  In the dream, I am seated at a picnic table with a group of people that I don’t know in real life. We are discussing my garden.  A middle aged man asks me, “Are you going to grow corn? You have to grow corn. What would be the point of even having a garden if you’re not going to grow corn?!” “Listen,” I said, with just enough force in my voice to let him know I meant business. “This garden is not a [...]

I used to think of a "balanced life" like a pie, with all these different wedges that I had to somehow make into roughly the same size. Or like a scale where I was trying to find the elusive sweet spot in the middle.  Balancing time spent socializing with time spent in solitude.  Balancing time spent caring for others with time spent caring for myself.  Balancing family, work, creative pursuits, and more.  I rarely felt like I was getting it right, and to be honest, it was often more stress-inducing than stress-reducing.  This view and experience of balance felt like such a precarious thing, always teetering on the edge.  There was constantly some valuable aspect of my life that [...]

I had a conversation with a client recently about how often we only celebrate the product, not the process. It can be so easy to put all of our emphasis on achieving an external goal and completely disregard celebrating the journey.  With that said, I would like to celebrate the journey that I have been on since first leaving my corporate job to start coaching full time eight years ago. At so many points, this journey has held surprises, twists, and turns; rarely has it looked the way that I thought it would. In fact, three years ago I went back to working a day job while continuing to grow my practice so that I wouldn’t have to bring [...]

  Marketing tells us that we need to be able to sum up our work and who it is for in under 30 seconds.   The work itself is best if broken down into a series of linear, actionable steps.    We are told that people want messages that are quick to grasp, easy to digest, and entertaining.    I don’t want that, nor do I want to create it, but lately, the idea has been haunting me. That I “should” be able to create a pithy, three-word phrase that sums up the work that I do so that people “get it” immediately. The fact that I had been unable to do so, despite numerous attempts and marketing classes, I [...]