I've been doing a daily practice to retrain my brain for 78 straight days and counting. 🌟 The results have truly been incredible and humbling. Back in episode 10, "My Nervous System is Making Me Sick & Keeping Me Small" I spoke about this program that I've taken on and made the most important thing I do every day.

In this episode, I go into greater depth about my anxiety around health, food, illness and physical symptoms in my body, as well as some other ways my nervous system was keeping me from peace. 🙈 🙉 🙊

Let's talk about how crucial the nervous system is to ANYTHING we want in our lives - better health, a thriving business, beautiful relationships, nourishing friendships, more money, etc. We can dream up our most perfect and exciting lives in all of these areas, make all the vision boards we want, journal our desired lives every single day, say affirmations until we're blue in the face, but if our nervous system doesn't FEEL SAFE achieving these thing, boom, you're out of luck. 🙀

We've got to change our brains FIRST to have the life we want, no matter what that want is.

Listen in to hear all that I'm learning about the nervous system, and how, 78 days in, I'm experiencing a freedom that I had only dreamed about (see what I did there?). ✨

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I'm guessing you're thinking that I'm going to give you a rundown of the top actions to take, affirmations to make, and other ways to love your shape.

But I'm not.

It's too sticky, and it's not deep enough. We often avoid truly trying to love our bodies anyway because we think:

1. That we won't make the changes we want to make in our bodies if we love them as they are (whoa)

2. That people will make fun of us for loving the parts of us that we "should" be rejecting (whoa)

Basically, we find it easier to REJECT OUR BODIES than to choose to love them in order to FEEL INCLUDED in a culture THAT FUNDAMENTALLY REJECTS US. We do this by hating on ourselves, carving ourselves, denying ourselves nourishment, playing small and shying away from our gifts and our full self-expression. How effed is that, y'all?

There is so much tied up in our physical presence that it can feel daunting and outright impossible to love our bodies. But what if we looked at it from another standpoint? What if our bodies are the pen and ink that write upon our souls? And what if we gave ourselves over the the spirit and saw our bodies not through the lens of what culture thinks of it, but through the lens of it being the medium with which we indelibly mark upon our sprit? How could this change our view of our bodies and the ways we move through the world?

Let's dive into this radical perspective and what it means for YOU.

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Time blocking. Color coding. AI schedulers. Building in time for distractions. An hourly planner. A monthly planner. A guided planner. YOU NAME IT, if it's a framework for how to create schedules and daily structure, I'VE TRIED IT. And none of it has worked long-term, lots of it falling off within the first couple hours of the day.

I've got a business. I'm working on my faith and rewiring my brain. I've got kids who want breakfast at different times and who sometimes want to hang out for hours and sometimes don't want anything to do with me. I've got a dog and laundry (ugh) and meals and dishes and errands and admin...and it's summertime to boot. Those endless days of non-structure that sound like a great way to relax when you're looking forward to them, but can become a wandering mess of madness when you're in them.

Desperation was creeping in. Throwing it all to the wind and putting trust in the hands of who-knows-what to simply "create the time I needed" to do the things I wanted each day left me feeling like NOTHING got done, having checked off MAYBE one thing on my list and feeling like I hadn't been present for ANYTHING.

And then time-blocking - "Ok, I'll work on marketing from 10-12 and then lunch from 12-1 and then family time from 1-2," even that felt too rigid to my ADHD / Sagittarius / enneagram 7 brain and I'd cast it all aside 30 minutes in in a giant act of rebellion.

So, where was the middle ground? There HAD to be something that works for me, works the way my brain wants to see things and function. Something that has some structure but also feels spacious and flexible. So, I created a master list of things I want to touch on each day and each week, and I sat down with ChatGPT (AI) and I wrote this:

I need help creating a flexible schedule that has some semblance of structure, but also takes into account the fact that it's still summertime and I have my 11 and 14 year old daughters at home and not much of a set schedule. I have a variety of categories that I've laid out of things that I'd like to make time for daily, weekly and monthly. Can you help me create this? What do you need from me so we can collaborate on this? Basically, if I find myself with a random pocket of time (say 1-2 hours), I want to feel like I know exactly what to do to keep all the areas of my life moving.

The result is what I'm calling my Flexi-Schedule System. It's spacious. It's flexible. It has room for all the things. I hope you find some inspiration to customize your own FSS and that it allows you to take so many deep breaths and enjoy being present for everything, knowing you have time. (Also, maybe we need a half-day workshop on this so people can create their own Flexi-Schedule Systems?! Let me know!) -----------------------------------

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There have been a lot of deaths in and among my community in the past two months. I have found myself in the role repeatedly of being part of a community that uplifts, prays, holds space for and even howls into the wind with those who suffer and grieve.

And it's also been a season of needing to find the words. We often say "there are no words," but I tend to feel like that's not good enough for the people we love most. Even if we can't find the right words, we need to find SOMETHING.

This episode contains two of the stories I have been sharing with those walking through unimaginable grief in an effort to offer some peace as well as an expansive view that connects us to things well beyond the failing bodies around us.

These stories don't simply apply to death, but to any time we wish to believe in and surrender to the idea that there is SO MUCH MORE, as shrouded in mystery as it is, and to choose to believe in the mysteries.

In this recent season of my body blowing up and things going haywire, I found my way to a nervous system retraining program after a friend said to me, "I recommend a fight/flight course." She, like all the specialists I was seeing at the time, picked up quickly on my stressful and anxiety-ridden perma-state.

I spent about six weeks inside the course learning about the nervous system, how it can become impaired, and its affect on the body. At that point, I learned about the daily practice and have been doing it for 30-60 minutes every day now for 30 days (goal is 9 months - whoa!) and it's already a game changer.

But the other thing that has opened up for me in going through this process is not just how the nervous system affects physical symptoms, but how it affects our BEHAVIORS - showing up in friendships, partnerships, our passions, purpose and even spirituality. As the days went on and I really began to integrate some of my other knowledge and strengths in this work (visualization, movement, spirituality), I truly started to see the waterfall of negative patterns and cycles all stemming from an initial subconscious belief (offten coupled with a trauma that doubles down on that belief).

So, what I offer you in this episode is a rundown of that waterfall in hopes that, if this is alive in you, you'll feel less alone and less like you're stuck, and hope for the future.

There are 8 Cyclical Phases to this waterfall - I've rudimentarily identified them if only to give some sort of structure to it all:

Fear

Forgetting

Cry for Help

Running in Circles

Idealization

Looping / Stagnation

Body

Freeze

Let's discuss what causes the waterfall, the details of each phase and provide some hope that there's more to life than living this day in and day out.

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DNRS (Dynamic Neural Retraining System) - check out the program I'm doing and see if it might work for you. (No affiliation.)

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Many of my friends were harmed by the church from the inside. Years of giving their blood, sweat and tears to a place seemingly established in the name of God (ie: love), only to find themselves spit out on the other end disillusioned, disheartened and, in some situations, downright traumatized.

Me? My harm was from the outside. Being the outsider looking in. Feeling like it was a club too exclusive to join, and eventually seeing with my own eyes that I would *never* want to join this club anyway - it was judgmental, self-righteous, damming, shaming, and not at all above exiling. People were unabashedly using the name of God and Jesus to do SO. MUCH. HARM, and somehow justifying it and getting away with it at the most perverse levels all because they say it's God's will. (Yes, I'm purposely mixing past and present tenses.)

And while I've always had a connection to God, the Universe and an active spiritual life, I let all that keep me from getting to know God more deeply or pursuing my curiosity about Jesus (a name that still feels triggering, but I'm trying to neutralize it for reasons that serve my own heart) for 44 years.

But just as I shouldn't let stingy, asshole rich people keep me from wanting to make money, I shouldn't let these people keep me from getting to know perhaps the greatest source of love, joy and hope available to us.

Let's dive into my story, my righteous anger (That's right, I said it!), and why these people might be doing so much harm and placing their actions squarely on the head of Jesus. (Ooooh, am I saying they're placing THORNS on his head? That's for you to decide.)

WARNING: Lots of F bombs in this one.

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We've all heard the lines of Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day" that ends in, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" And we feel inspired! Ah, the possibilities! Ah, don't let it go to waste! I must live! I must laugh! I must love! I must have the most incredible life!!

But have you ever linked YOUR BODY to this? In all of the dreaming and planning of your "one wild and precious life," have you ever thought to yourself, "In order to live the most full life I can, I must absolutely LOVE my body!" My guess is no. And why not? Isn't it the only thing we have to experience this life with in the first place? Can we, in fact, live, laugh, love, WITHOUT our bodies? Can we do any meaningful, purposeful work? Can we experience the love of a romantic partner or the hugs of our children without our bodies?

Nope.

And yet, this number one tool, this thing that we are gifted with as God brings us into the world is something many of us are constantly at war with. We walk around both with the rejection AND the thing we are rejecting at all times, day and night. Do you truly think you're going to be able to have the most fulfilling "wild and precious life" if you're walking around with a bag of rejection hanging at your side?

It's direly important we learn to love our bodies. NOW. As they are. Not when we lose 10 pounds, not when we get that surgery, not when we "finally get our act together and get to the gym," but RIGHT NOW. And THEN move toward health from a place of love - don't you think loving a thing is a greater motivator than shaming it?

Let's discuss here in this episode all these things and more.

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Learn to love your body and see yourself as beautiful with Lens of Love, my signature powerful group offering.

Listen to my podcast episode about my boob journey.

It's interesting. I'm realizing that, much like we all have a "money mindset" that we need to heal if we want more abundance in our bank accounts, that we all also have a "Jesus mindset" (or a "faith mindset) that we have the opportunity to heal if we want more spiritual abundance. To be clear, I don't think this is the only way to achieve more spiritual abundance - there are thousands of spiritual paths that bring people close to God - but I do think many of us have a mindset based in our upbringing that COULD actively be keeping us from something beautiful. And I think that because I've been living that.

I've shared on Instagram that I'm on a faith journey. Meaning, I'm looking to know more about God (per the Bible) and Jesus. It even feels weird typing that because I rejected this path for so long lest I be lumped into the people who use the name of Jesus to judge, condemn, and exile.

My hair dresser today asked me how my faith journey was going. She told me how her mom was running way too deep into it, which was making her run away from it.

As I shared in my "I Just Can't Anymore" episode, I have been on a "faith journey" these past 6 months. Really, it's been about the past 32 years, but this particular leg feels deeper, more urgent.

In this episode, I share what it's looking like. Why I'm searching, what I'm searching for and how I'm going about it. Check it out if you're also searching, looking for a way in where it feels like there hasn't been one before, or if you just want to know what this is looking like for me.

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