Which isn’t surprising when I think about how often I’ve offered the same invitation to clients, friends, even my children.

Hold it gently. Hold it lightly.

I say it when I see their sweet faces redden from gripping too tightly.

Funny how life has a way of handing your own words back to you.

Because I’ve reddened too these last thirty days.

With anger.

With tears.

With fear.

Sitting on my big blue couch, legs crossed in anticipation and dread.

“It looks like cancer,” my husband says softly.

My grandmother blinks hard, thinking I don’t notice her anxiety.

But I always notice.

In fact, I’d argue that for the last two years, hypervigilance has been sitting in the front seat.

Is she okay?

Am I okay?

My heart skipping beats, keeping me awake in the middle of the night, bracing for the worst thing.

The thing that’s here.

We’re still in the early days of GG’s cancer diagnosis, and there’s so much we don’t know.

What we do know is that our time with her is narrowing.

And somehow, her bucket list is widening.

So this weekend we drove to Mount Rushmore because she’s wanted to see it since she was a little girl.

My husband loves a road trip.

I love adventure that’s married to urgency.

GG and I have talked about death more in the last few weeks than we probably did in the previous twenty years.

And strangely, it’s become one of the most comforting balms in the heat of her prognosis.

“Where will I find you?”

“In the flowers.”

“Will you be okay without me?”

“I promise I’ll never stop trying.”

Grief isn’t new to me.

I’ve studied it intimately, especially these last four years.

In fact, over the last four months I’ve been working with a dear friend and longtime client, helping her expand her work around grief and spirituality.

So, when I found myself sitting beside GG’s hospital bed, holding her hand while texting my client, asking her to remind me of my own words, neither of us missed the full circle moment.

That, I had spent years teaching the very things I would need to hold closest in the months ahead.

The mantras that once anchored her, now becoming mine again.

Life as labor.

Look for the signs.

Hold it gently.

It all feels impossibly full circle.

I wish I could write to you from solid ground.

But the truth is, I’ve never felt so afraid.

It feels as though every crack in my foundation has suddenly been illuminated, and I’m frantically searching for a way to repair something that hadn’t felt broken in so, so long.

The other night I whispered to Matt through deep, aching sobs, “I’ve just been so, so happy. And I’m afraid to be this sad again. I’m afraid to lose my life jacket. She was always my life jacket.”

He didn’t try to save me. He simply let me collapse into the grief. A gift you’ll understand if you’ve ever known a sadness that feels incredibly physical.

But the next morning, when the sun found my face and my body softened just enough to take a full breath, something quietly came into the lens.

I am surrounded by so much love.

I live a life I genuinely love.

Maybe that’s my life jacket now.

Maybe joy never erases grief.

Maybe that was never the job of joy anyways.

Maybe it simply keeps us afloat.

The fear of drowning remains.

But fear isn’t the same thing as reality. Because what’s real today is this:

Grandma is still here.

We made it to Mount Rushmore.

And I swear the hug she gave Matt before we started the drive home will live inside me forever.

The little girl in her…

Still alive.

The little girl in me…

Still alive.

Her past.

My past.

Our futures.

All braided together in ways I could never have imagined.

She is here.

I am here.

And somehow…

I think the signs really do outlive us.

I had imagined her birth a hundred different ways.

A peaceful home birth, much like my son’s. My birth team moving confidently around me. Candlelight. Familiar hands. The steady beat that comes from believing your body remembers the ancient wisdom of birth. 

I had prayed for it.

Journaled about it.

Visualized it until I could almost convince myself I’d already lived it.

But underneath all those beautiful visions was another voice.

A quieter one.

One that whispered, This birth will be different.

A few days before labor began, I looked at my husband and simply said…

“I’m just so tired.”

Not pregnancy tired.

Life tired.

Because honestly the two years before Elli’s birth had changed me in ways I was only beginning to understand and unravel.

A decade of therapy in, and I found myself with new layers. Meeting parts of myself I only knew on paper. Parts of myself I could analyze at a distance. Yet when I was really honest, the distance was keeping me in a loop of silent suffering. Wearing masks to the world, that said “I’m doing great.” But beneath that, I was afraid to change in ways I needed to change. 

The rescuer.

The woman who believed love meant overextending.

Who believed worth was earned through usefulness.

Who knew how to care for almost everyone except herself.

Little by little, I started letting that woman rest.

I stopped trying to save people who weren’t asking to be saved.

I let disappointment belong to other people.

I built firmer boundaries with the family I came from so I could become more present with the family I was creating.

I still loved them.

I still do.

But love was no longer going to require abandoning myself. 

And yet, despite all the inner work, I kept saying the same words.

“I feel stuck.”

Stuck in a house that looked beautiful but never quite felt like home.

Stuck in old patterns that no longer fit.

Stuck believing that if I could just work a little harder, produce a little more, then maybe I’d finally arrive somewhere that felt like enough.

Looking back, I think I was already in labor.

Not just with my daughter.

With my own life.

So hours into labor with Elli, after every remedy we’d hoped would help, I found myself sitting on the edge of our bed.

The room was quiet.

I was exhausted.

Afraid.

And feeling stuck. 

The home birth I’d envisioned was slipping away, and I was about to make a choice I never wanted to make.

We were transferring to the hospital.

And in that moment of choice, it felt like my body had betrayed me. Why can’t I do the thing I so badly want to do. 

Stuck. Stuck. Stuck. 

I felt stuck in labor. 

But as I often recite to a dear client of mine, life is labor. 

The irony, pointing to truth.

A year later, I see something entirely different.

My body was never betraying me.

She was asking me to receive help. 

To rest.

To surrender.

To let myself be carried instead of carrying everything alone.

The hospital became another unexpected teacher.

I’d spent years believing it was a place where I would lose my voice.

Instead, it became the place where I found it.

My husband and I asked questions.

We advocated for ourselves.

We protected what mattered most to us while remaining open to the care being offered.

My birth team never left my side.

And despite some really difficult choices and challenges, we birthed on our own terms. My husband quite literally barefoot in the hospital room (pic to prove it). 

The year that has followed Ellis birth feels less like postpartum and more like initiation. An entrance into an entirely new life. 

A few months after she was born, Matt and I started looking at land in the mountains.

The dream we’d kept pinned to vision boards for years suddenly refused to wait for “someday.”

We realized that the right time isn’t something we discover.

Often, it’s something we decide.

So we sold the house though it didn’t feel logical.

We moved to five acres beneath the pines.

I stepped back even further from chasing success that required me to outrun myself.

We slowed our days.

Our children found room to wander.

Because ultimately what’s become so crystal clear with each birth of my babies — death is on the other side of birth. 

And the dance between the two is life.

I have to lead them by example. 

That is my work now. 

And the rich life I desire can only grow from fertile soil. Which means I must nurture myself to nurture them. 

So all of this to say, our sweet Elli, our sunflower baby — 

Thank you.

For all of it. 

You are everything & more

Here’s to another year blazing our own trail 🌻🌞

I’ve been feeling that more than usual lately.

Not in a dramatic, burn-it-all-down kind of way… more like a subtle drifting. Like I’ll open my phone with a clear sense of Self, and close it feeling just slightly off center.

And, so I keep wondering… if there’s anything designed to disconnect us from our intuition, isn’t it this?

A place where we’re inundated with countless opinions, countless times a day.

As my dear friend Erin reminded me recently, we weren’t meant to live this way.

And yet, I stay.

Because I believe in permission slips.

I believe in them so much I’d go as far as to say they can change a person’s life.

The year before I birthed my oldest baby, I felt like I was drowning in my own suffering. My husband left me a long permission slip on the bathroom mirror that essentially said, “Permission to be gentle with yourself.”

Still, five years later, on my hardest days, I hear those words and my body softens.

And I think about how many of my life decisions have been shaped not by instruction, but by permission.

Lately, my healing has been circling something deeper.

The men in my lineage.

Their idea of success was proving. Competing. Acquiring. The textbook of patriarchy. The opposite of what my husband and I dream of co-creating. 

There was a quiet, ever-present pressure to dominate in my family system. To win. To also point out who loses. 

And I see how that lived in the air I breathed as a child, clutching to my grades as a measure of my worth. Quite literally wearing gold stars on my shirt as a plea for affection. 

My mom, doing her best to remind me I was enough as I was, but still feeling unsettled. Walking through the classroom too young to see both the familial and cultural burdens I was carrying in my backpack. 

What’s so hard to sit with lately is that now at 34, with three children of my own, I am still some days blending with the young girl waiting for her father to be proud. 

And it’s uncomfortable to admit that parts of him wouldn’t be.

The parts of him that measure success by lack of mistakes.

The parts of him that measure strength by lack of vulnerability. 

And all of the parts that measure success by following rules. 

Which brings me back here.

To this space. To all of the spaces that make a person believe there is a right or wrong way to exist. 

And to the tension I feel about the “put yourself into a box” way of thinking. 

Because sometimes I truly don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.

And yet… I stay.

Not because I have a clear strategy.

Not because I feel certain.

But because I’m learning how to be here without abandoning myself.

To stay rooted in my own voice, even in a space that can so easily pull me away from inner wisdom. 

Because I remember what it felt like to receive permission, at the exact moment I needed it.

And how that can quietly change the trajectory of a life.

So maybe I’m not here to influence.

Maybe I’m here to be permission.

Permission to choose a different rhythm.

Permission to question what you’ve been handed.

Permission to build a life that feels like yours… even if it doesn’t make sense to everyone else.

Permission to live as an expression of your own truth… not a performance of someone else’s.

Because it’s fleeting.

Because your time here matters.

And because the most fulfilled people I know are the ones learning to tune into their inner voice, break generational patterns, and claim freedom as their birthright.

I find it incredibly hard to be online.

Not a monumental realization in an era where flip phones are trending again and families are moving to small, rural towns in record numbers.

We’re tired.

I’m tired.

The polarizations of the world are being mirrored in our homes.

And in our hearts.

Sometimes I wish I could do more to fix what’s in front of me.

And then I remember…

what’s actually in front of me doesn’t need fixing at all.

And that might be my greatest blessing.

I want to buy a landline.

I want to write my closest friends letters… with stickers and printed photos picked up from a local store.

I’d say I ache for the 90s, except I don’t, really.

I was a terribly anxious child.

My mind oscillates between gratitude so intense I never want to leave my husband’s side, because wow… to be this in love after a decade feels rare.

And then the fear arrives.

For the future.

For the world.

For the suffering that eventually becomes sickness.

Presence is the pill.

The medicine that actually heals.

The only form of success that lasts.

I want to make art.

I want to slow down.

I want urgency culture to loosen its grip and slip away like a dream fading at morning.

But if we’re going to be urgent about anything—Be here now.

Be here now becomes the phrase I return to, the one I let land fully in my body when I’m washing the dishes and hear my children giggling. Giggling that so often turns quickly into shouting, into little punches, into chaos that demands my attention. Be here now so the “I have to” softens into “I get to.”

Be here now, I remind myself, as I witness us healing backward. As I feel the quiet ache of breaking generational patterns that were handed down with good intentions but heavy consequences. As I parent in ways I never saw modeled. As I choose repair over perfection, presence over performance.

Be here now, I tell myself, as my husband and I rake debris from a chicken coop that’s been standing for more than forty years on our little slice of heaven. Five acres of land. To some it might seem like abundance. To others, barely anything at all. To us, it feels like everything. There is so much work ahead of us, but we feel ready in a way that surprises me. Tired, yes. Uncertain, always. But ready.

Be here now, I whisper, as we look at the plans we make for the years ahead. Bedrooms added. Perhaps another child. Animals arriving and leaving the land. Businesses imagined, built, and maybe abandoned. Heartbreaks that will crack us wider. Expansions that will change us forever. Be here now, I tell myself, slowing my breath, because while the future excites me, it is not promised. And that truth visits me at night more often than I would like to admit.

Be here now, I remind myself, as my grandmother mentions another headache, another ache behind her eyes. As I notice her gait becoming more careful, more fragile. Her body teaching me, without words, what it means to slow down. What it means to witness time rather than outrun it.

Be here now, I say softly, as the wind chimes sing outside my window. As I remember that just a year ago our soul pup was still alive. That Elli was still in my womb. That my babies felt even more like babies. Time moves quickly and quietly, and if I don’t stay present, it slips past without asking permission.

Be here now, I tell myself, when my mind drifts to the last ten years of therapy. To the blocked phone number. To the grief that comes with boundaries that protect but still hurt. To the forgiveness hovering nearby, something I long to give but haven’t quite reached.

Be here now, I breathe, as I trust the process. The process of raising children. The process of staying in love after a decade. The process of being human while walking a spiritual path. The process of breaking cycles that were never meant to be broken easily.

Be here now, I repeat, as I feel time moving through my changing body. And I know this much with certainty— nothing lessens regret like presence.

Nothing softens loss like having truly been with what’s in front of you today. Nothing lasts except what we notice while it’s happening.

If urgency must live anywhere, let it live in this very moment.

In the fruitful ordinary days.

In the unfinished book.

In the life that is already rich in its unfolding.

“When I’m an adult,” she said, “does that mean I won’t live with you anymore?”

Her questions have been getting deeper as she grows.

She’s a highly sensitive soul, the kind who feels the undercurrents before the water even moves. Her intuition is sharp and beyond her years. 

She asked the question, and I sat with it, knowing there’s a chance my answer might land in her as deeply as the question landed in me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll probably grow up and want to leave home one day. But Mom and Dad will always be your home.”

I continued, “In our family, we can do hard things. Sometimes that means going to faraway places. Sometimes it means being brave before you feel ready. But it always means we are safe for each other.”

“So you will always be my home?” her eyes showing me she was really listening. 

“Yes. And I will always be safe for you.”

She smiled at me through her eyes, the kind of smile that doesn’t ask for anything in return.

Then she said, “I think I want to be your neighbor when I’m older.”

We laughed.

“Well,” I said, “Good thing we bought more land.”

She turned to the window.

I kept looking back at her, watching the way her mind wanders and wonders.

After a while she said, “When you’re an old lady, I’ll take care of you… like you’re taking care of Gigi.”

“You don’t have to do that, love,” I said. “But I’m sure I’d like that. And I’m sure you will.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Mama,” she said.

“Family means keeping each other safe,” she declared with an almost gleeful conviction. 

Before I could respond, the tears came hot and fast. There was no well. But instead a dam that broke. 

Warm. Aching. Healing.

The kind of tears that feel like truth finally finding a way out of the body.

Raising three little ones, especially in the world we’re living in, isn’t easy.

But it is profoundly worth it.

Every hard moment brings me closer to my purpose, not farther from it.

Everyone I have ever loved has only truly blossomed from safety.

From softness.

From internal roots strong enough to hold them steady.

And yet our culture glamorizes toughness and resilience, forgetting that gentleness is the foundation where real strength is grown.

Gentle parenting gets mocked.

Snowflakes, they say.

But when I look at the children raised with celebration of soft hearts, sturdy spines, brave questions, compassion that eclipses so many of their elders, I wonder why anyone would mock a snowflake.

As Bobbi says, there’s nothing more beautiful than falling snow.

Every day holds miracles, not the loud, cinematic kind, but the unsuspecting ones. Ordinary. Sacred.

The kind you don’t chase or buy or earn.

We’re taught we must do more, become more, acquire more in order to access meaning.

And yet, driving my minivan on a snowy winter morning, I realized the miracle has been riding with me all along.

In my three children.

In the snow falling without effort.

In the questions that stir something deeper in me than any textbook or podcast or personal development course ever has.

Life, quietly teaching.

Gentleness, quietly holding everything together.

It isn’t often celebrated, but it is always true.

Just a nudge from my heart to yours: Where might the miracle already be living inside your home?

What conversation is waiting for you if you linger a little longer?

If you scroll a little less.

If you soften into what’s already in front of you.

Because I’m learning this slowly, imperfectly, daily, that the more you be, the more you see.

Onward and inward dear friends. 

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And yet, the book Wild by Cheryl Strayed changed my life.

Ten years ago, if you knew me, you’d laugh at the idea that I’d live on a mountain… hike one… let alone do it nearly every day. Back then, I was a twenty-something in a cubicle, spending my lunch breaks writing instead of eating. Writing about ache. About memory. About the quiet grief that pulsed between my rib cage.

I left a very real, very respectable nine-to-five because something in me knew, with an urgency that felt almost feral, that if I stayed… time would slip through my fingers and I’d live with regret gnawing at my skin. So I applied to grad school for creative writing. People laughed. Some praised. Someone even snarked, “So what do you actually even do with a creative writing degree?”

I didn’t know.

I just knew I was a writer. I’d known it since I was a little girl. No intention to be famous. Not even to be impressive. But a writer because feeling deeply and making meaning of it felt like the most sacred prayer I’d known. 

Leaving for my flight to Denver, a move across the country, knowing no one except my mom, who bravely leapt alongside me, I picked up Wild at the airport. It practically chose me. The cover feeling like a nod to the journey we were about to take. 

Reading the first few chapters of Strayed’s words, it dawned on me that maybe I had been grieving my entire life. Not because I was broken, but because I loved deeply. Because I felt everything. Because I carried grief that wasn’t only mine— lineage-deep, tender, unfinished. 

Cheryl’s wilderness wasn’t my trail, but her willingness to meet grief head-on cracked something open in me. I decided then that this move, this life, would be the chapter where I stopped running from pain and learned how to sit with what hurt the most. Where I’d become braver. More myself. Even if I didn’t yet know who “myself” was.

I’m 34 now. I barely recognize that girl on the plane.  But do bow to her. Her courage that never left. It just matured.

My wilderness didn’t look like switchbacks and blistered feet.

My wilderness looked like howling grief.

Rewiring the nervous system.

Letting old identities fall away.

Becoming a mother when roots at first felt as horrifying as a mountain lion on the trail. 

And then learning that my greatest calling lives in the roots I feared. An ordinary miracle of raising children, loving my husband, and choosing a quiet mountain life over boxes that never fit.

It looks like sun on my face, barefoot babies, and my daughter saying, “Our life feels like vacation,” without knowing how hard I once searched for peace.

I don’t know what the next decade holds. I don’t know what book might fall into my lap and undo me all over again. But I do know this:

I will stay wild.

For myself.

For my family.

For the girl who got on that plane with grief in her carry-on and hope woven into her being.

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A life that waited until the signs screamed loud enough that ignoring them became impossible.

I still remember the day I first walked this property.

Alone.

Just me and a realtor I’d never met.

For weeks the listing had sat pinned on my Zillow account, a quiet whisper in the background. But that morning I woke with an urgency, a knowing—that I needed to see it. That the land wanted me to walk it.

I toured the house, stepped onto the grounds, and immediately felt a familiar ache in my chest. I called Matt afterwards and said, “It looks like the cabin.”

His grandparents’ mountain cabin in Golden— the one where we spent so much of our early love. The place with stories tucked into the wood grain. Freddy the three-legged fox his grandfather fed by hand. The day his grandfather got lost in the trees. The bear he once fired a warning shot at when it wandered too close.

Morning coffee on the old wooden deck.

Hummingbirds flashing emerald.

Sunsets glowing over city lights.

Nights spent so high above the world that the clouds stretched below us like a white sea.

A sky full of stars.

A house full of memory.

That cabin made my soul feel safe in a way few places ever have. And the unexpected gift was that parts of my story lived in that home long before I married into it.

It’s where Matt and I dreamed up our vows  before our wedding. Where we imagined mountain babies, slow mornings, and a life rooted in what mattered most to us—freedom.

But life, being life, detoured.

And for the last five years we lived in a foothill suburbia that had beauty, community, and necessary healing in its own right. But it wasn’t our golden mountain. It wasn’t the place our souls exhaled.

So we stayed in a house that made sense on paper but felt misaligned in the heart.

We scrolled Zillow separately and together.

We toured homes that weren’t quite right.

I think both of us, without saying it aloud were chasing the same feeling:

the feeling of being home in our bones.

The truth we had voiced to each other years before:

Space is medicine.

Nature is clarity.

Land is belonging.

We wanted to raise our babies rooted and reinless, their feet in the dirt, not on engineered turf.

We wanted a window view of nothing but sky and trees.

We wanted a driveway where you wave at neighbors but don’t hear them breathing through the walls.

We wanted a life that felt like an exhale.

But fear kept us circling.

Fear of selling the big home we had just bought.

Fear of downsizing.

Fear of choosing a smaller space with fewer bedrooms when we have three loud and wild children.

Fear of choosing intuition over logic.

Yet every time we’d talk, it came back to one sentence:

“We’ll find a way.”

We’ve said that to each other since the beginning, before kids, before marriage and every time we’ve said it with conviction, we’ve meant it. And it’s been true.

Then one morning, the house that is now our house appeared as a notification on my phone.

In the exact part of Sedalia we had prayed we’d end up “someday.”

I toured it alone.

Called Matt.

Told him he needed to see it the second he got back.

And when he walked the land, I saw it happen.

The shift.

The falling in love.

The lightning in his eyes, the same look he has when he looks at me or at our babies.

That look of pure love.

We hugged on the property and whispered, almost at the same time:

“We’ll find a way.”

So we did.

We’re selling our previous home while living in our new one, financially imperfect, spiritually exact. A move that makes no logical sense and every emotional one.

And now, each morning, I walk through our small mountain cabin listening to the fire I built with my own hands, drinking hot coffee before my children wake, staring at a sky so full of stars it feels like a painting.

More stars than I’ve seen in years.

In those moments I know:

The last month has been a full return to alignment.

A settling back into the truth we drifted from, maybe because parts of us needed to explore, experiment, “try on” the lives everyone else said made sense. The big house. The suburb. The proximity. The friendships that didn’t always fit.

And so I hold compassion for those parts.

Those versions of me that needed to taste other ways of being.

I gather them gently.

And I show them this new reality:

This is what it feels like to live in your truth.

This is what it feels like to come home, not to a structure, but to yourself.

Brené Brown calls it braving the wilderness.

Stepping into the unknown without a map, directed only by alignment and desire.

Choosing soul over logic.

Land over image.

Freedom over perfection.

And I think that’s what we’ve done.

We braved the wilderness.

And the wilderness opened its arms…

and called us home.

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There is a kind of grief that doesn’t wait for an ending. It shows up early, quietly, like a shadow just a few steps behind you. It visits while you make coffee, while you watch your babies scatter toys across the living room, while you fold blankets she once folded for you. It’s the grief of knowing that life is changing long before anything has actually changed permanently just yet. A kind of “before grief,” a whisper of what will one day break your heart even though today, she is still here. 

I’ve been living inside that space lately. That in-between. The place where love and fear sit beside one another like old companions, touching elbows, trading long breaths. It’s anticipatory grief, but that phrase feels too clinical, too neat. What I’m feeling is more like a slow tide that moves in and out, carrying memories on its back. Moving me moment by moment between sorrow and worry, gratitude and peace.

My grandma, the woman who helped raise me, the woman who steadied the child version of me when the world around felt so unpredictable… is still here. She lives with us, in fact. Right now, sipping her morning coffee, soon fussing about the thermostat, checking in on my kids with her familiar blend of devotion and worry.

She is still part of the fabric of our daily life. Yet something inside me feels the shift as it’s happening. I feel her aging in a way I didn’t before. I see the fragility behind her eyes, inside her voice, inside the stories she repeats more often now. 

It’s like my heart knows we’re moving closer to an ending before my mind can fully catch up. And that knowing has weight.

There’s a version of anticipatory grief that looks like dread, but this isn’t quite that. Mine looks like sneaking in a second and third hug before she gets ready for bed. It looks like memorizing the cadence of her laugh when she watches my toddlers dance on the coffee table. It looks like letting the irritation melt when she worries too much, because beneath her worry is a lifetime of loving me the only way she knew how.

Some days I find myself grieving the girl who needed her so fiercely, the girl who was shaped by her steadiness. Other days I grieve the inevitable truth that one day my children won’t hear her telling stories about her angels, or watch her knit a hundredth scarf. It’s a double grief, really. The grief of what’s coming and the grief of what already shifted.

But there is also intense beauty here. A sweetness, too. A tenderness that wasn’t possible in my twenties when I lived on adrenaline and survival. 

I’m softer now. I’m rooted in ways I couldn’t have been back then. And because of that, I’m letting myself feel this before-grief fully. Not to rush any ending, but to honor the present. To honor her. To linger in the moments I was unable to notice before. 

I’m learning that anticipatory grief can be a teacher if I let it. It teaches me to slow down. To listen more closely. To let the moments stretch before me like a soft sunrise. It teaches me that love isn’t all light, that sometimes love comes with ache and that the ache is proof of what mattered. A receipt for a love that’s unconditional. And the gift of legacy. 

Grief doesn’t always arrive at the doorstep with a single event. Sometimes it walks with you for years and years, brushing its shoulder against yours, asking you to pay attention to the people who have loved you into who you’ve become. 

Sometimes it asks you to remember that you can hold joy and sorrow in the same breath. It makes you a warrior of noticing. Noticing the shape of their eyes, the small curves of their smile, their scent that becomes an imprint of comfort.

I don’t know what the timeline of her life looks like. Though young parts of me beg and pray for answers. I’m gentle with them as I move into the Birds Eye view and remember we’re all on borrowed time. Not just grandma. Me too.

And so I do my best to slow the internal rush to predict and control. Trusting that her stories, her love, her fierce level of devotion is cemented into my bones. And now, my children’s. What a gift to be loved this well. What an honor to slowly walk her home. 

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We haven’t crossed the threshold into our new mountain home. And yet, there it was, waiting for me, tucked inside a simple graphic on an evening Instagram scroll: “Protect your whimsy.”

And just like that, something in me softened. An internal laugh with that deep, knowing, of course. There it is. That’s my word.

Last year, my word was pause.

Pause before I spoke.

Pause before I reacted.

Pause before I spiraled into the old buzzing patterns that lived in my nervous system for far too long.

I chose pause because I was pregnant with Elli, suspended in the most liminal womb-space of my life—between birth, between identities, between chapters. And I knew I didn’t want to carry old reactivity into my next season. I wanted to practice a new way of being. I wanted my anxious parts to feel the bravery of waiting, the courage of not knowing, the safety of choosing stillness.

And in many ways, it worked.

Pause became my anchor.

Pause became my medicine.

Pause became my prayer.

But this year, something different has been rising. Something lighter. Something wilder. Something mischievous in the best possible way.

Maybe it’s the birth of Elli, my third baby, who looks so much like my own mother that sometimes it feels like a memory wrapped in new skin. 

Maybe it’s the way she completes a lineage pattern I didn’t realize I was tracing. Maybe it’s this word legacy that keeps showing up at my doorstep, like a reminder that life really does move in full circles when we’re paying attention.

And then, there is also this new home.

This mountain property that feels like a fairy tale without the pretense.

A landscape that feels enchanted, like the land itself winked at us and said, “Welcome home.”

And a few weeks ago, I described it to my mom as whimsical.

Not purposeful.

Not practical.

Not full of lists and logic.

But whimsical.

Then, I remembered a close friend once saying something that landed in my chest like it was meant to live there forever. She said:

“You’re such a whimsical mom.”

I asked her what she meant, and she didn’t hesitate.

“You’re not the crunchy mom. You’re not the hyper-researched mom. You’re the mom who follows her intuition. You parent outside the norms. It’s magical to watch.”

Her words held me. They felt like a gift, one of those gifts women give each other in passing, not even knowing how deeply it will root.

And then I saw this meme, the one I’ll share below.

And it hit me.

This is my word.

This is my anchor.

Whimsical.

Not in an “avoid reality” way.

Not in a “float above life” way.

But in the way the graphic describes, protecting that soft belief that life can still surprise me. That there are guides, or angels, or alignment. 

In a world that keeps trying to harden women, staying enchanted is its own quiet revolution.

To me, being a whimsical mother, a whimsical partner, a whimsical homemaker, a whimsical lover of life means this…

It means choosing magic even when the sink is full.

It means believing in beauty even on the days that feel brutal.

It means holding wonder alongside the new wrinkles, the exhaustion, the crumbs in the minivan.

It means keeping a soft heart in a world that profits off women becoming cynical.

It means trusting the unseen, trusting the process, trusting the timing, trusting myself.

A whimsical mother isn’t naive.

She’s actually deeply rooted.

Deeply intuitive.

Deeply attuned.

She holds the darkness and the light together.

She knows her shadow and her softness.

She keeps the potions in her diaper bag.

She believes that things are happening for her, even when she can’t see the bird’s-eye view yet.

She’s the good witch.

The hearth-keeper.

The enchantress of her own home.

The woman who makes her life sparkle not because it’s easy, but because she chooses to see the wonder anyway.

And so this year, my anchor, my theme, my guiding word is whimsical.

My home will carry that energy.

My friendships will hold that energy.

My mothering will breathe that energy.

And I will protect that part of me fiercely, the part that still believes in good things, even after life has shown me its harder edges.

Whimsy is not denial.

It’s resistance.

It’s softness as strength.

It’s hope as rebellion.

And I want more of that this year.

For myself.

For my family.

For the legacy I’m building with each intentional breath.

Here’s to a whimsical year.

A year of magic.

A year of trust.

A year of believing in the good things,

again and again and again

Not intentionally, at first, just the kind of quiet that happens when life tilts, pivots, and asks you to stretch into a new shape.

Parts of me feel shame about that silence.

The part who wants to show up perfectly, the part who worries I will abandon this space just after I started, the part who whispers, you should be able to hold it all.

But the Mother Self—the highest, clearest, rooted place within me—knows the truth:

Motherhood moves in seasons.

There are seasons of creation and birth and wild momentum.

And there are seasons—sometimes surprising, sometimes inconvenient—of pause and reflection.

Seasons where we hang suspended in the liminal, not quite who we were, not quite who we’re becoming.

This has been one of those seasons.

Over the last month, our family has been making a decision that feels less like a choice and more like a timeline hop. We are leaving our six-bedroom suburban house—our “we tried to make this work at all costs” home—to move onto five acres in the foothills of Colorado. A mountain home shaped by simplicity, intentionality, nature, and every value that Rooted & Reinless was built on.

What most people don’t know, though, is that this desire flickered within us seven years ago.

Soon after we got married, we felt the pull toward land. Toward trees and sky and space. We actually imagined raising our babies on Matt’s grandfather’s property—a dream that shifted for numerous reasons. Some of which, for many years, brought grief.

Since then, we’ve lived in houses that met our needs on paper but never in our bones. Homes that gave us comfort and even beauty, but not space.

And space is what we need more than anything:

Space to grow.

Space to breathe.

Space to create.

Space for our children to live feral and barefoot and unhurried.

Space to not feel the restrictions of rules that were never ours (shout out to our most horrible HOA)

As this next chapter began writing itself into our lives, something unexpected surfaced:

Imposter syndrome.

Who are we to live our dream?

Who are we to choose a life that looks different than the one we’ve been living?

Who are we to step out of the expected and into something that feels like more freedom?

These parts of us—mine and Matt’s—are young, tender versions who learned long ago that safety comes from blending in. That “different” is risky. That “aligned” is suspicious.

We’ve been tending to those inner children. Sitting with them. Helping them see that living in accordance with our values isn’t selfish or frivolous—it’s necessary. Especially when those values swim against the cultural current.

And the thing that has helped those parts settle the most?

Our inner circle. Our village. Our mentors.

The friends and family who hold our vision with us.

The people who remind us, over and over, this has been your dream. This is who you are. This is the home that fits the shape of your family.

It has been a gift to be seen in that way.

All of this to say, friends:

As I give myself constant permission slips to pause, and shift and evolve, I am also giving you one giant permission slip, too.

Permission to create a life that feels holy and true.

This mountain move feels like the physical expression of the values we’ve carried for years:

Rooted.

Reinless.

Wild.

Intentional.

Alive. 

And though I’m not traditionally religious, I hold a deeply spiritual belief that the most sacred life path available is the one that leads to liberation. 

I like to think our values are like cobblestones guiding us down that path, laying a foundation for the dreams to come to fruition without force. 

As we pack up the last of our boxes and give thanks to the wisdom this home did bring, I’m reminded again and again what a miracle it is to be alive and awake for all the present synchronicities. 

Full circle moments that don’t necessarily close a chapter, but rather become a gift of deeper meaning. 

Thankful for all of it. And thankful for you. 

More to come soon. 

I recorded this one tired — bone-tired, the kind of tired that hums in your bones but still somehow sings. I’d been up since 4:15am with my newborn, coffee gone cold beside me, the moonlight touching the mountains.

And yet, even in the exhaustion, I felt so alive.

Motherhood is a constant paradox. You can be depleted and overflowing at the same time. You can lose yourself and still be more you than ever before.

Before I hit record, I had to pause.

My mom parts were buzzing — worried about the kids downstairs, worried that my husband (a little sick this morning) needed me. I called him, and admitted that those parts were loud. And when he told me, “I’ve got you. Take your time,” I could feel them unclench.

That’s what working with my parts looks like most days: naming them, listening, letting them exhale.

There’s this narrative that good mothers don’t lose themselves, but I think that’s wrong. I think it’s sacred to lose yourself for a while — to merge, to attune, to let the “mom parts” live everywhere. The work isn’t to silence them; it’s to know them.

This week’s prompts were about freedom — the parts of us that crave it and the parts that still feel threatened by it.

For me, freedom looks like a barefoot house full of laughter and crumbs, kids who question everything, sticker-covered glass doors, and a bath that’s never really clean. It’s living unpolished and unperforming. It’s teaching my children that belonging doesn’t require fitting in.

But there are parts of me — the good girl, the people-pleaser — who still whisper, “Are we doing this right? Would it be easier to blend in?”

Those parts still want gold stars. They still think safety lives in sameness.

So I remind them:

We don’t have to fit in to belong.

We can spill over the edges of the box and still be held.

Connection isn’t something we earn — it’s something we remember.

That’s the heart of this episode: the dance between freedom and fear, between our wildness and our roots.

Because the truth is, being rainless — living free — doesn’t mean we never feel afraid. It means we keep coming home to the parts of us that do.

Listen to today’s episode of Rooted + Reinless to see what else resonates. I see you. I’ve got you. I am you.

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Rooted and Reinless babes.

And other parts that ache to feel safe—held, anchored, rooted in an internal home.

Rooted & Reinless was born from the dance between those two energies: the rooted parts who know how to belong, and the reinless parts who know how to roam.

Every week, I’ll share five journal prompts to help you meet the parts of you that may be running the show—the perfectionist, the pleaser, the protector, the wild one, the dreamer, the exhausted mother, the inner children.

You’ll get space to write, reflect, and reconnect.

And I’ll share my own responses—raw, real, and in process—because we’re walking this path side by side.

Think of this series as a standing date with your Self.

A place to notice: Am I living rooted and rainless today?

Meeting the Parts That Shape Freedom

Prompt 1:

When I think about being “free” what part of me gets excited—and what part of me gets scared?

When I think about being free, the part of me that loves to explore and roam without a destination is LIVE. She pins images of foreign lands and impulsively says YES to any and all adventures. A mid-day drive into the mountains? YUP. A last minute flight to the Grand Caymans? Why not! She is not concerned with planning or budget or even the future. She is all in for what sounds exciting right now.

The part of me that gets scared feels more mature, more parental. It worries about our families budget, it worries about life without routine. It worries that chasing freedom means abandoning anchors that keep me steady everyday. Freedom to this part actually feels like a threat.

Prompt 2:

What part of me feels responsible for keeping everything together—and what does it fear would happen if it let go?

Oooph. So many parts of me feel like they need to keep it together right now. They say, “We’re a mother, so many little hearts depend on me right now.” They are concerned with making sure the people around me feel safe. They are the ones that put the oxygen mask on others first. When I close my eyes and see these parts, they are rigid and quite afraid. They are clinging to the idea of predictability and control.

Prompt 3:

When I feel most “rooted,” what sensations do I notice in my body?

Warmth and softness.

When I feel “unrooted,” what sensations show up instead?

Heaviness in my chest and shoulders.

(You can think of this as tuning into your internal landscape—how safety and fear live in your body.)

Prompt 4:

Which parts of me learned to perform, please, or perfect to earn love—and what might it feel like to rest those parts, even for a moment?

Many of my young parts still perform. They know how to get love through action. It’s worked so well for so long. They are tired, though. So so tired. They imagine sleeping on a cloud. They imagine resting on warm grass. They long for the sun on their face.

I invite you to share your answers with me in the comments or anything that lands. And expect more prompts in your inbox next week!

Onward and inward - always.

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Postpartum is not six weeks. We know this definitively.

It’s not a finish line you limp toward with the hope of “getting back” to something or someone you used to be.

It is a season that stretches before you like an endless horizon— months, years even.

And if you’ve birthed back-to-back like I have the past four years, it can feel like one long unbroken thread of leaving, then coming home, leaving, then coming home.

I used to believe that if I could just muscle through the chaos, everything would fall back into place. Each previous postpartum, I met parts of myself who deeply believed, “You must do this on your own.” And, “You are the family fixer.”

These parts of me were so used to doing their roles and so afraid of giving those roles up.

But now, three months postpartum with my third baby, I’ve learned that no part of me has to do it all.

That integration is actually an energy that allows all of our parts to work together in harmony.

Chapter Three: A Vision of Calm

During my pregnancy with Elli, I anchored myself in one guiding word: Calm.

Calm in my body. Calm in my home. Calm in my nervous system, even when life “lifed,” as it always does.

I’ve learned that when we hold a vision of how we want to feel, it carries the choices we make in the moments that matter.

Some choices I made differently this postpartum:

• Freezing meals weeks before birth.
  
  

• Roleplaying boundary-setting with my therapist.

• Hiring a revillaging coach to help me consciously assess my village

• Protecting the first six weeks from the weight of too many visitors.
  
  

• Hiring a neighborhood teen as a mommy’s helper so my toddlers had laughter and crafts and FUN routine while I rested.
  
  

As I shared in part 3 of my postpartum episode:

“Calm was the anchor and, when things hit the fan, when things got really unpredictable, we kept coming back to: how can we restore that calmness?”

Rebuilding the Village

So much of this smoother postpartum has been about finding, creating and nurturing my village. , a revillaging coach, asked me a question that cracked everything open:

If you could dream up an ideal village — what would it look like?

At first I imagined women just like me, validating me with their sameness.

But through my work with Emily, she helped me see that the validation I longed for needed to come from within. And the community I wanted to build could be a constellation of people, and their parts, woven together even in differences.

What I truly needed was reciprocal energy. Predictability. Aligned-enough values. And the humility to accept that a village doesn’t have to parent exactly like me, to support me. And vice versa.

We don’t need to validate each other. We just need to witness each other and hold space.

When I loosened my grip, incredible women began to appear. Not carbon copies of my parenting beliefs. Just wholehearted companions.

Onward and Inward

People ask if I’ll have a fourth baby quite often. And the question doesn’t bother me or carry any density.

What it sparks in me rather is curiosity: Could we hold onto this calm and connection if another little soul joined us? For now, we are sitting in the question. Assessing. Trusting that if we listen closely enough to our values, we’ll know.

Because that’s what this season has taught me: we cannot control all the variables of postpartum, but we can always turn inward and ask, what do I need to feel the way I long to feel?

Postpartum is messy, scrappy, often raw piece-work.

But it’s also expansive beyond words.

It’s a chance to parent not just our babies, but our inner world, our parts — the hungry ones, the grieving ones, the hopeful ones.

And from that rooted place, we glimpse towards our future Self.

Clear. Connected. Calm.

Slow down. Take a breath. Feel the sun on your face.

Stay anchored in the way your future Self wants to feel.

Grow in the direction of wholeness.

Onward and inward,

Lindsay

New life. Elli Christina. Our third soulmate.

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There’s a moment after every storm when the air shifts—still charged, but quieter, clearer, even. That was the second chapter of my postpartum story.

After the turbulence of my first birth and the NICU days with Bobbi, my husband and I found a rhythm again, a place of repair. And in that tender quiet, I felt it—a soul waiting at the edge of our lives, pressing through like sunlight under a door.

This episode is the story of welcoming that soul, my son Patxi King, into our world.

I share how I stepped into pregnancy with him, determined to do things differently—choosing midwives, welcoming a new doula, and reclaiming the freedom and voice so often handed away in medicalized birth.

I talk about what it meant to prepare not only for a child, but for one of life’s greatest thresholds: birth itself. I even immersed myself in doula training, and that knowledge became fuel for the most empowering birth I could have imagined.

But birth is only one piece of the story.

Postpartum with Pax brought lessons I couldn’t have prepared for:

• The ache of shifting from one child to two, grieving the intimacy Bobbi and I had while learning to hold space for both her and a newborn.
  

• The surprising wisdom of guilt—how it isn’t always something to push away, but sometimes a signal, a part of us whispering that something needs to slow down, shift, or be rebalanced.
  

• The art of boundaries. As my family grew, so did the demands on me—friends, extended family, even my grandmother moving in. And I kept trying to give what I once could. Until I couldn’t. Until my body and my spirit demanded truth.
  

This episode is as much about grief as it is about growth. It’s about the paradox of a redemptive, glorious birth followed by the painful practice of saying no, of being honest about what I had to give, of losing friendships and even setting hard boundaries with my father. It’s about how my husband and I learned to practice radical ownership, the “U-turn” of looking inward first, and how that reshaped our marriage and our parenting.

And it’s about the seed that was planted in those years—the seed of Rooted & Reinless. Because in the cracks of postpartum, I still owned what it meant to live rooted in attachment and in an unruly devotion to freedom.

If you’ve ever felt guilty for not being enough, if you’ve ever wrestled with boundaries, if you’ve ever stood at the edge of a new season and felt both grief and glory pressing in at you at once—this story is for you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode below and let me know what lands:

Onward and Inward.

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I’m three months postpartum with my third baby. To say I am feeling all the feels would be an understatement. Over the last few weeks, one of those common questions to enter my orbit has been, “How is it going this time around?” And I think it’s because when you look my way, it does look like a lot. Two toddlers tugging at my pants and a baby strapped to my chest quite literally at all times. The needs are high. Their voices are demanding.

And yet, and yet, and yet: I’ve never felt more whole. More alive. More at peace, even. Which is a welcomed surprise. But maybe it shouldn’t be? When I look back on these last four years as a mother, I can see the pieces fit together in a way that makes sense now. I’m more confident, clear, calm than I’ve ever been because I’ve stayed focused on our family vision and connected to my intuition.

There are seasons that carve you into someone new before you even realize it’s happening.

Postpartum has been that season for me—messy and sacred, tender and beyond transformative.

When I think back to the birth of our first daughter, the bright rush of her arrival, swallowed quickly by the quiet hum of NICU machines and queasy stomachs as we watched her body be poked and prodded, I remain proud. Because as scared as we were in those early days, we leaned into the lessons, long before the wisdom became clear.

And though both my husband and I carried postpartum anxiety like a second skin, we clung to our love. We steadied ourselves with this truth: we knew how to love our baby better than anyone else. Her heart was our compass. Her security? Our reason.

Each birth since then has written another chapter of confidence into our souls. Confidence to be intuitive parents, to break generational patterns, to trust ourselves even when “what’s popular” didn’t seem right.

This three part series begins there—in the ache and the beauty, in the cracks that become openings, in the way parenting leads us to our most profound truths.

If what I am sharing lands or sparks curiosity, tune into the third episode of Rooted and Reinless for a three part series on Postpartum wisdom. I’ll be back tomorrow with part two and eager to hear from you!

Onward and inward, friends.

Photo from my Mother’s Blessing as we prepare to welcome our third baby.

I used to believe I wasn’t made for motherhood.

That belief lived in my body like a warning siren:

Don’t open the door too wide, don’t trust life to stay, don’t risk the tenderness and security it will require.

But the truth was this—

I wasn’t afraid of motherhood.

I was afraid of my own inner world.

The Truth That Found Me

Internal Family Systems (IFS//parts work) found me when my inner world felt loud and unrelenting. From the age of 5 to 27, I was suffering from constant panic attacks, feelings of dread and even depression.

My trauma therapist, Jelal (who you will hear so much more about in future episodes) introduced me to IFS. What I took away from our first session back then:

Inside of me lived a whole constellation of personalities. There are parts of me that protect, parts that perform, parts that carry grief like stones in my pockets.

And there is a Self—

The steady, intuitive center that cannot be harmed.

The essence of me that knows without explanation or prescription.

And that’s what I had been missing as a child.

When we have a relationship with our Self, we no longer abandon ourselves the way the world may have abandoned us. Security blooms from the inside out. And most of us—underneath the striving and self-protection—are terrified of being alone.

IFS gave me a map home and the security to trust: I would never be alone again.

It said: Talk to your parts. Listen to them. Let them soften. Let them grow.

And slowly, the walls I had built to survive started to come down.

Mothering the Inner Children

Here is what surprised me most:

You don’t have to mother children outside of you to be a Mother.

Inside all of us are inner children who need the warmth, the security, the I-will-not-leave-you kind of love only we can offer ourselves.

Becoming that mother on the inside was the first step.

The parts of me who were afraid…

The ones who felt small, or too loud, or too needy…

I began to sit with them like an intuitive mother sits beside her child.

I told them: You belong to me. I will stay. I will protect you.

And slowly, something shifted.

The idea of mothering on the outside became less terrifying because I had learned to mother on the inside first. I knew what it meant to nurture the ones within.

The Power of Intuition

There is nothing more powerful than a mother who leans into her intuition—

the quiet knowing that lives beneath the noise.

Not the perfection-seeking voice.

Not the overthinking voice.

But the one that says this way, love.

Motherhood, after all, begins here:

With the willingness to trust the Self.

To trust the wisdom that rises when we stop abandoning ourselves.

Security & Healing

Security is possible.

That’s what IFS—and similar healing modalities—offer us:

a relationship with our Self so deep and steady that life can shake, but the foundation doesn’t crumble.

When we feel connected to our Self, it’s harder to abandon ourselves.

We no longer feel as alone because we know how to stay with what hurts.

We know how to return to center.

If This Spoke to You

Listen to the second episode of Rooted and Reinless audio Podcast below. I share more in-depth on my journey to Motherhood through IFS. Share your thoughts in the comments if you feel called. Onward and inward!

My three wildlings. The sum of our healing.

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I am so excited to finally share the first episode of Rooted and Reinless.

This space has been on my heart for a long time— a space to talk about mindful parenting, healing, identity, and living a life that does not always fit neatly in the boxes society has handed to us.

In our first episode together, I chat about:

• What Rooted and Reinless means and why I created this space

• How Mindful Parenting begins with parenting ourself first

• The connections between security and freedom in how we love, live and raise our babies

• Breaking generational patterns and living the way you needed when you were young

• What to expect in future episodes

  Thanks for reading Rooted + Reinless! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

And, here’s the thing: you don’t need children for this podcast to matter to you. Because guess what? Inside of ALL of us are inner-children in deep need of healing and witnessing.

If you feel a pull towards living a life against the grain, and raising children (or inner-children!) who are wild and rooted, this community is for you.

Listen to episode one below! And subscribe to be a part of our community and enjoy 1 month of complimentary episodes.

I smiled and felt a familiar warmth move through my body.

Familiar, because honestly, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard that sentiment.

During our wedding vows, our best friend joked, “Your vows just made half of us re-evaluate our current relationship. Your love is so fucking special.”

Now, in case I’ve made you squirm with the concept of a perfect relationship, let me be clear: Our marriage is far from perfect and we’ve been through seasons of deep and dark work.

It was only a few months into our marriage that my “nervous system collapsed” (a direct quote from my therapist) and I was referred to an intense regime of trauma treatment.

During that time, I was suffering from daily panic attacks, vertigo and a sudden case of agoraphobia. I quite literally could not leave my house unless I was with my husband.

As you can imagine, those first few months of marriage put a massive strain on our us. Because the truth is, in uncovering my own childhood pains, I also met my husband’s triggers in a completely new way.

As I crumbled, so did he. And so did we.

I spent days feeling panicked and afraid, and he spent days feeling dissociated and numb.

Though we had been together for a few years at this point, and our bond was undeniably strong, we also lacked an understanding of each other’s pasts, of each other’s core wounds, and how most of our fights were happening from our inner-children. A pattern rooted in some memories we ourselves couldn’t even recall.

At our lowest, we agreed to find a couples therapist. And by the Grace of God, this woman became a pillar of strength and clarity in our life. Six years later, and we still see her once a month.

Within our first session, she saw the way my husband and I’s attachment styles were dysregulating us both. I, extremely anxious, and my husband Matt, extremely avoidant. What we didn’t expect to uncover right away, was the reveal that while I was the one in trauma therapy for anxiety, my husband was also experiencing severe anxiety in his own ways.

Mine just looked more apparent because of physical symptoms. But he was suffering silently, and had been for a very long time.

Our therapist could see quickly that we were at a rock bottom.

It feels impossible to function when two people who love each other deeply cannot accurately describe what they need or what feels wrong.

We met twice a week for a year.

She gave us language for what was being felt.

She helped us each meet the wounded inner-children inside of us both, and taught us how to show up more compassionately and honestly to each other.

In the same time period, I also began my training in IFS (Internal Family Systems).

If you’re new here, IFS is a therapeutic model that looks at the mind as being multiple. It says every emotion is actually from a part of us, and these parts are like real people, with their own wants, and needs and desires. When trauma occurs, these parts inside of us can get extreme and almost child-like.

Learning about my inner-world, from this perspective, gave me a clarity I had spent nearly my whole life searching for, and it also gave me deeper clarity around Matt’s inner-world.

As I dove deeper into my IFS training, Matt began seeing an individual IFS therapist as well.

Between our couples therapist and our individual work in IFS, we now had a common language. One that was rooted in curiosity, compassion and connectedness.

Instead of saying, “I’m so angry at you. I wish you wouldn’t…”

We said things like, “I’m noticing a part of me is feeling triggered. And that part of me is needing…”

In IFS, we call this a U-turn.

Instead of attacking or blaming your partner, you u-turn during an experience to see what’s happening inside of yourself. You speak for the PART of yourself that is hurt, and by doing so, you’ve already separated a bit from your trigger.

That bit of separation can create more compassion towards your partner in a heated moment.

Six years ago, we first learned our shared language of IFS. It was clunky at first, even strange at times, but it always brought us closer to each other.

Since that rock bottom, we’ve had two beautiful children with another on the way. We’ve started two businesses. Purchased three properties. We removed ourselves from financial debt. And, most importantly, showed up countless times for the ones we love with the kind of compassion and hope we needed back then.

I don’t think our past selves could have envisioned a life as full as we have today.

A life where we are called Mentors.

A life where we are called Momma and Dada.

A life where almost every time we are in the company of friends, new and old, they comment on the genuine warmth of our love.

And they feel it’s real, because my god, is this love real.

It’s been tried and tested and worn in, and sewn back together.

But we committed to being a testament of healthy love.

And healthy love isn’t without work.

Healthy love is about mirroring.

Healthy love is about exploring.

Healthy love is sometimes staying when you want to go.

And going when you want to stay.

Healthy love is possible for you, and for me, and for all of the inner-children inside waiting to be saved.

Nurture yourself, to nurture each other.

Onward and inward, friends.

I love you.

Since the birth of my first baby, I felt the departure. Almost as if her birth brought my own.

The reckless and undeniably beautiful selfishness of my twenties dissolved with each of my daughter’s milestones.

The more she needed me, the less I needed me.

Our Western culture warns us this is wrong.

But my intuition told me again and again, this was necessary for my growth.

I had to be utterly obliterated by motherhood, completely devoted to my daughter, to build the confidence I now hold today.

I had to wake for every feeding and stare into her eyes the way my mother could not.

I had to commit to not just months, but a lifetime of attachment-first parenting, in ways my parents weren’t capable.

I had to allow previous dreams to shift. Morphe. Flow. Even die.

And while I mourned what needed to be mourned, I held the strongest intention of surrender; I refused to let myself fight against what felt most natural and true.

It’s been three and a half years of motherhood.

Three and a half years of baby wearing. Co-sleeping. Breastfeeding.

Three and a half years of slowness.

Three and a half years of colds and stomach bugs. And contact naps. And their warm tears against my cheeks.

Three and a half years of claiming my way of motherhood as the right way for me.

The reality of motherhood today is that there are a lot of voices claiming their way is the only way.

Work. Don’t work.

Sleep train. Don’t Sleep train.

Formula. Breastfeed.

The list goes on.

I will never be in the business of telling a mother how she should parent.

But I will always be the mother claiming to follow her own intuition above anything or anyone.

I am not who I was.

My voice is stronger. But there is less to prove.

My circle is smaller. But there is much more depth.

My purpose is simpler. But there is real clarity.

My faith is fluid. But it’s never had more meaning.

Whether you are a mother or not, let this be a loving reminder that freedom starts the moment we accept who we are today.

Even if, and maybe especially if, you’re saying good-bye to parts of yourself.

Evolution can be both gentle and poignant.

We can choose to say good-bye with gratitude.

Onward and inward friends. And happy (almost) new year.

I’m writing to you now from the pool at our gym. My husband is out of town as I hold down the fort. I’ve been wiping butts, noses, and a lot of strawberry juice off the floor. 

And I feel safe. Even peaceful. My heart’s steady rhythm proves there is no immediate threat. Almost a luxury of senses after decades of panic attacks and moments of deep dread. 

I can be present with my babies in the middle of chaos. 

I can anchor myself and let them borrow that steadiness.

But it wasn’t always this way. I have no memories of being a secure or confident child.

I was a shell. 

And it’s taken me the last decade of loving and nurturing and witnessing all of my wounds to be able to reach my truest nature.

I told my dear therapist years ago, “I just want to feel free.” But that vision felt so far out of reach.

It was through his consistent commitment to compassion that I began to experience safety. Alongside my husband who even in my darkest moments, never wavers in love. 

Today, the irony is this – I call myself an Inner-Freedom Guide and over the last six years have led over 100 women in their own healing journeys. The most common testimonial that I receive  is that our work together creates more safety and security so that they too can feel more free. 

I think it’s also worth noting that I believe freedom can mean different things to different people. But the view that I continue to hold is that freedom is integration.

It’s allowing all of our truths to be true without hindrance or suffering.  

It’s harmony among all parts of our inner-world.

And celebrating our unique human design. 

Security comes with self-trust and self-compassion and self-witnessing. 

Do you see the common thread here? Our higher self leads the way and says, “I’m here. I’ve got you. You are no longer alone.”

Because the freedom so many of us seek actually starts by going inside and creating the safety that you needed when you were young.

The path as they say will not be linear.

But it can become the path that leads to the most liberated, true, you.

Onward and inward freedom seekers.

I’ve got you,

Lindz