Rewilded Wellness

7 years ago I was gearing up to take my final exams to become certified as a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner. I was both nervous and excited.

Listen to the podcast version of this post- Episode #47 : Find A Joy To Be Me on iTunes, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or Spotify 

Nervous about the exam itself, but more so about how on earth I would pave a path to turn my training and certification into an actual money-making career. Excited to leap and see what was possible, excited to do what my soul had called me into.

Let me hit the rewind button for a minute…

Just 3 years prior, (2009) I was getting my resolve to leave my ex for good, and I did. I had become emotionally beaten down, physically drained to my core and somehow had to get up every day to lovingly take care of my 4 boys. My ever declining health made it incredibly hard to figure out how to leave and how I would care for myself and my kids.

I honestly didn't know how bad it was until a month and a half after he was...

*Listen on the podcast: How to relieve chronic stress so you feel fantastic

I've shared my story, here on the blog in numerous posts, about how unrelenting chronic stress in my life nearly took me down. It got so bad, I ended up in total burnout and experienced PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder).  PTSD is a psychological and emotional stress disorder that causes someone to believe that they are unable to cope with the demands placed on their inner world. It is a negative perception of highly stressful or traumatic situations that manifests itself through emotional and physical symptoms.

I'm hear to share more about how chronic stress can be overcome before it's too late. Truth be told, this applies to everyone, whether your circumstances were as intense as mine or not.

That said, I am seeing more and more women, especially single moms struggle with the severity of stress induced to PTSD. In fact, 7 million people in the United States suffer from PTSD.

Unmanaged stress is at...

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I love to get up when the house is quiet in the morning, long before anyone else awakes. I brew my coffee in my stainless steel french press and cozy up to my ceramic owl mug, savoring the comfort of every sip. It's a gift I give myself every chance I get.

This sacred ritual allows me to just BE. To journal my thoughts, to reflect on things, to use the extra intuition found in my tarot spreads and then to write, hike, meditate - whatever I feel compelled to. I may jot down some to-do's for later, but the first matter of affairs is attending to my soul, my inner self. This is what I choose to nourish with because I truly want to love and care for myself.

It wasn't always this way for me... mind you, I've always been a deep...

Over the years of my work as a Nutritional Therapist, I’ve had many clients come to their sessions telling me that they kind of ‘fell off the wagon’ with their healthy eating. Or I've had people tell me before doing my detox, that they were fearful they wouldn't be able to stay the course without 'falling off the wagon'.

It might be the #1 shame and fear most people have when it comes to establishing good habits around eating well for their health.

First off, I want to expel the myth of the wagon. It doesn’t exist.

There is no wagon, there is only choice and a path. Your path is your journey and it's up to you to choose the trajectory of that path. How bad to you want where that path is leading you to is the real question. If you falter, will you choose to get back up and keep going?

What people are usually referring to is that that feel they won’t perfectly sustain whatever dietary framework they’ve been recommended OR they chose for themselves....

Every season I do a focused time of 'detox' because of my past experience with overcoming decades of chronic fatigue, allergies, sinus infections, extreme bloating and gas pain, eczema and asthma.

For years I treated each symptom separately with pills, supplements, naps, heating pads -- anything that worked at the time. Then I went through a traumatic divorce. The verdict from my first HTMA: I was in total burnout. My doctor couldn’t help me recover all she ever offered me were more medications. This was when I realized there had to be a better way.

So the journey began. I detoxed my life. It wasn’t overnight and it took a lot of trial and error. The real change began when I started to understand that food did more than impact my weight; it was also a trigger for many of my aliments, cravings, moods and emotional eating.

By doing my spring detox, which is based on what I learned from many experts in the fields of health and nutrition, I have been able to use food to help...

Have you ever been at war with your own body? Missing out on life because you didn’t like some aspect of yourself or how you felt inside your own skin? Ugh, me too.

I used to have such anxiety about my belly, my gut also know as the dreaded ‘muffin top’. My belly was flabby and stood out on my otherwise long, leanish body. It made me feel frumpy and unattractive, but also it was uncomfortable being so bloated people mistook me for being pregnant. Nope… I was just bloated and couldn't lose the belly weight or flab. So embarassing.

This happened at least a dozen times over many years. People would literally congratulate me and say, when are you due? Eye roll... I'm pretty sure we all know the take-away lesson there.

To be honest, over those years my life was overwhelmingly unfulfilling. I did not love my life. There were many reasons for that, however I can recall a such deep disgust for my mid-section. I was a slave to my own misery. Often all I could think...

Anxiety is, unfortunately, becoming much more prevalent in our modern society. Anxiety disorders are listed (statistically speaking) as the most common mental health issue currently in the US.

I’d like to re-frame this a bit to say,  anxiety does not define you. Nor is it a separate mental issue. It’s a whole-person-life-experience. Anxiety can impact all areas of your life : mind-body-emotions-soul-spirit. It impacts your relationships and your work too. Every aspect of life.

I know if you are here hanging out reading my stuff that you are looking to bring balance and harmony to your health journey. You want to feel more whole, more complete.

The truth is, you already are (we’ll get to that more in a bit or you can read more HERE).

But for right now, let’s clear some space for new mindsets and opportunities to emerge for you, shall we.

I believe something within you is likely ready for integration, ready to be healed.

If you struggle with anxiety in any...

Happy Super Full Moon in Virgo (my sun sign) !!! Today I was encouraged to express a side of myself that I normally don't share. My free spirited side.

So, here she is ...

The only time I ever dyed my hair in my whole life.

I think I was 20.

I've always loved this photo because it.just.felt.like.me.

Feisty, fierce, passionate, a little silly, empowered, daring, bold.

I was working on a portfolio and working with a photographer named Kevin Brown at the time. He had me me step WAY out of my comfort zone in so many of the shoots we did together.

And as scary as it felt, and as I secretly judged myself, he helped me push away all that crazy chatter and feel so comfortable letting myself be SEEN, EMPOWERED & FREE!

The photos we took together helped me to embrace the 'why not me' story and let myself go and just be and just express myself and have fun!

I think so many times we take life so seriously, we hold ourselves back and don't shine our souls out for the world to see. We shrink...

Let's be honest, most of you are on a quest to feel at home within yourselves. You are looking for answers outside of yourself and feel incredibly overwhelmed as you reach for inner peace, joy and clarity. You are looking for a magic key to unlock the door to feeling stuck for good.

I sure was for most of my life.

Even still, if I listen to my own unkind, perfectionist, inner chatter that tries to inundate me with self-doubt - and forgetting WHO I REALLY AM - I can get totally side-lined and overcome with crippling overwhelm. How about you?

I shared more of my own story about turning my overwhelming breakdown into my breakthrough and how learning radical self-love was the catalyst, in a recent podcast. Be sure to check that out HERE if you haven't already.

Overwhelm is incredibly dis-empowering. It's negative impact shows up in every area of your life when it's allowed to run rampant. Society does perpetuate this if we think we have to fit into it's norms, but I think it goes deeper...

I am excited to share a podcast episode that I was invited as a guest speaker; The Everyday Wellness podcast(episode #34). I talked all about radical self-care and self-love. You can check out the podcast episode HERE.

In this podcast, I talked more about my own personal health journey, my recovery from intense burnout. As well as my journey in my health and wellness practice with my clients.

Working my way through the mess after divorce, I found I wore strength as a mask to how I was really feeling deep down. I was thrown into learning self-care and self-love to literally survive at first. Eventually, it felt radical to need to give myself so much time and attention. The more I prioritized it, the more I realized I had needed it all along. I had to learn how to cut out anything and everything that did not serve me.

I've shared much of this before, so be sure to go back and read through the blog, but what my journey has taught me BIG TIME is to keep showing up for myself every day....