When I was a kid, I would have nightmares - horrible dreams that someone was chasing me with the intent to hurt me. After weeks of experiencing the same dream over, and over, my mom told me, “Turn and face it. Whatever it is that you’re running from, turn and face it?”

Maybe it’s grief.

Maybe it’s fear.

Maybe it’s anger.

Maybe it’s shame.

Maybe it’s guilt.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of them.

Your subconscious mind represses negative memories until it’s ready to process them. It does it because it loves you. It does it to keep you safe, to protect you. It does it because it loves you. 

In times of crisis, sometimes this repressed, hidden, shadow side comes out. It gets triggered. The sleeping giant awakens. 

You fear it’s too big. Too powerful. Too strong to face. 

You’re David and it feels like a mother-fucking behemoth, roided-out version of Goliath.

BUT YOU’RE STRONGER THAN THAT, LOVE. 

It doesn’t take much to face the shadows. But it does take courage…and maybe on...

Ever look back on an event in your life and see EXACTLY why that happened to you?

You see the lessons, the learning, the growth. Maybe you see how it shaped you as a human to be more compassionate or more ambitious or more organized. Maybe you look back on that thing with appreciation, or gratitude or just a deep satisfaction that you were strong enough and had the resilience to pull through, even when things looked their bleakest. Maybe you’re just fuckjng grateful you survived, because, there were times when you didn’t think you could...but you did. 

You’re here. Reading this. 

THE THING IS YOU DIDN’T HAVE ALL THAT KNOWLEDGE WHEN YOU WERE IN THE THICK OF IT. 

When you were in it, you didn’t know how it would turn out. You didn’t know you’d be okay, days or decades later. 

You did the best you could with the information and the resources you had at that time. 

Looking back now, from this new place of courage or boldness or motivation, is NOT who you were back then. 

You’ve ch...

In times of crisis, whether it's COVID-19 or the threat of another financial recession, what do you do with a problem?

It is in the face of chaos on and crisis that who you are, who you have been working on becoming comes to light.

This is when the rubber meets the road, sweetheart.

WHO DO YOU BE WHEN THE WORLD FEELS LIKE IT IS FALLING APART?

Who do you BE when fear smacks the world in the face with a two-by-four?

Coronavirus is one thing. Yes, it is contagious and there are fears when it comes to that. 

And, sure, you may have some fears about staying at home for a few weeks cooped up with the fam.

But, the financial impact of shutting businesses and schools down when 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck will hit...hard.

The fact that the stock markets just hit their largest dip worldwide since 1987. 

The fact that the Federal Reserve just 96 hours ago invested $1.5 Trillion dollars in short-term loans. (HINT: the last time they did that...it was 2008.)

THE FEAR OF A GLOBAL CRISIS IS ONLY BEGINNING. 

And, the mentors, experts, doctors and top-level investors that I listen to are saying...

In times of crisis, whether it’s COVID-19 or the looming financial crisis, where is joy? Where did that illustrious angel of vibrancy go? Did she disappear?

No. You just missed her. 

Joy is only found in the present moment, really being 100% fully in the present moment.

She is rarely found in the past for she is either tainted with “what could have been” or “what should have been” or “what would have been.”

And she is rarely found in the future, where Fear is a stakeholder in monopolizing your thoughts. 

No, joy is in the present. She lives and breathes there, praying that you will tap into her.

She’s in the whisper of the wind against your skin. She’s in the experience of your partner’s touch as he passes you. She’s is in the burrowing of the large bowling ball of your child’s head into your chest as he says “mama, cuddle me.”

Yes, joy lives in the moment - in being fully fucking in it, present in the experience of life, both in what you do and who you be. 

You’re breathing ar...

The creative process is a lot like eating shit.

How do I know? I've literally tried it. Obviously this was not an intentional thing...

Over a delicious Sunday breakfast of waffles and jam, I was sitting with my son on the couch, reading as we gloriously reveled in carby goodness - okay, I was the one doing the reveling. Declan was enjoying the usual.

He’s recently discovered textures - bumpy, sticky, gooey, rough, smooth, tickly. So, when it comes to food we’ll normally play a game if his hands are sticky with jam. He’ll hold out his hand with a whine, saying “dirty” and I’ll be the vacuum cleaner and gobble up his fingers. Cute, right? Right.

Until it’s not…

I missed the moment in our interchange - it was probably in my own moment of bliss, closing my eyes and savoring the sweet, figgy taste of waffles - when Declan stuck his fingers in his diaper.

It was him saying “dirty” and the whine that followed that jolted me out of my mouthful of meditation.

Mom was ready to play the “L...

I see it, day in and day out. Women who are overwhelmed, overworked, over-stressed, and underappreciated. With so many things hanging over our heads these days, it's no wonder we can some times feel like "It's killing us."

But is it really?

As a coach in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, when I work with my clients, I take what they are saying LITERALLY. So, sometimes, like in the case of a client saying "it's killing me," it may sound extreme, but I take them seriously. You see...

Your language is a command to consciousness itself.
 
If I ask you to create a picture of your dream life, and you say you can't "see" it. In NLP, I take it as, you LITERALLY cannot make a picture of your dream life in your head. You don't see the snapshot of that vacay photograph of you sipping a latte across from your lover while working on your laptop after some damn good lovemaking. You can't see it. 

If I ask if you understand the concept, and you don't, I haven't given you enough logical evidence to help you gai...

I was pretty opposed to sleeping at all since birth. My poor mother said I only slept for about an hour and a half a night as a baby. (She’s up for sainthood in my book for that alone.) And, napping was never my thing as a kid. I used to be so paranoid that I would miss something. That if I slept, I wouldn’t finish a project. I’d miss a deadline. I’d miss a client. But, as I got older, and more and more sleep deprived, I realized how desperately my body craved catching up on my sleep. Ironically, because of my lack of sleep, my fears came true. “The longer, more continuously, and later at night you work, the less efficient and more mistake-prone you become,” states Schwartz in my latest book-obsession, The Power of Full Engagement. 

“In addition to its energy renewing function, sleep is also a period during which substantial growth an prepare occurs — most of it at the deepest level of sleep, when slow-wave delta brainwaves are dominant. During those periods, cell devision is most act...

A few weeks ago, I was dangling my feet in my friend’s pool, rocking out to an amazing Chilean + Japanese reggae trio at a fabulous party in the nestled in the Hollywood Hills. The only child at the party, a sharp little six-year old, plopped down next to me, wearing a T-shirt that said, “Trust me, I’m a unicorn.” She and I ended up having the most imaginative conversation about how to throw a killer tea party on the ocean floor, what running like a cheetah feels like, and what kind of unicorn we each were. My right brain left the party satiated with creativity. 

TWO THINGS I ABSOLUTELY LOVE ARE CHILDREN…AND UNICORNS.

However, it took me a long time to learn to embrace my love of unicorns. (I’ve always loved kids. I’m one of those women who’s always wanted to be a mom.)  But, unicorns on the other hand…

You see, since I was eleven, I was obsessed with acting older. I always felt I had to prove myself, prove how smart I was, prove how grown up I was. I set aside my imagination in ord...