My Personal Yoga Story - Yoga is the Ultimate Rough Draft, Work in Progress
I want more people to experience the ripple effect: you come to yoga for your tight hamstrings and you leave with better boundaries. You come to manage stress and you leave with a spiritual practice. You come for one reason and you stay because you've touched something real: the integration of body, breath, and mind. The lived experience that you're not broken, you're not separate from yourself, you're not supposed to be thinking your way through everything.
I want more people to know that a practice that evolves with you is a practice you'll never outgrow. That being a forever student isn't a failure to master something. It's an acceptance that growth and learning and deepening are the actual destination.
How Sobriety Made Me Realize I'd Been Meditating 'Wrong' All Along
If you're newly sober and trying to meditate, please know: it's supposed to feel hard right now.
You don't need to achieve some zen state. You don't need to feel peaceful or calm or blissed out. You don't need to do it "right." You just need to show up. Sit down. Notice what's here. Breathe.
Some days that will feel manageable. Other days it will feel impossible. Both are okay. The practice isn't about feeling better, it's about being willing to feel, period. And that willingness is everything. It's how you stay sober. It's how you heal. It's how you rebuild trust with yourself.
One breath at a time. One moment at a time. One day at a time.
That's the practice. That's the path. That's enough.
Postpartum Anxiety vs. New Mom Worries: How Mindfulness Can Help You Tell the Difference
If you're wondering whether what you're experiencing is "normal," here's what I wish someone had said to me:
Trust yourself. If it feels like too much, it probably is. You're not being dramatic. You're not overreacting.
Postpartum anxiety is incredibly common. Up to 15-20% of new mothers experience it. You're not alone, and you're not broken.
It's not your fault. This isn't about not being strong enough or grateful enough or calm enough. It's a medical condition with biological roots.
You can get better. With the right support: therapy, mindfulness practices, possibly medication, community, you can feel like yourself again.
You don't have to suffer through it. There's this toxic narrative that motherhood is supposed to be overwhelming and miserable. But constant, consuming anxiety isn't a required part of the experience.
A 3-Minute Meditation For Sanity in Early Motherhood
This practice didn't just help me survive the hard moments. It helped me actually experience the good ones too. Because when you practice being present with discomfort, you also get better at being present with joy. With the weight of your baby on your chest. With the miracle of their tiny fingers. With the fierce love that sometimes feels too big for your body.
Three minutes taught me how to be here. Not in my anxiety about the future or my regrets about the past. Just here. And on the hardest days of early motherhood and early sobriety, being here was the only way through.
What Is Meditation? A Beginner’s Guide to Finding Stillness
It took me a while to realize that this isn’t about “shutting off” your thoughts. Rather, it’s about changing your relationship with them. And while the outline or exploration of the process might seem simple, it can take time to have breakthroughs, time for a ha moments, time for realizations. But like we say in yoga, “practice and all is coming”.
The Fourth Trimester
There's a kind of peace that only comes after you've been through something intense. You've survived birth. Your baby is here and healthy. You're alive. For a few seconds at a time, that's enough. That's everything. I'd be feeding my baby and suddenly feel this wave of gratitude so big it almost knocked me over. I'd look at my partner holding our baby and think: we made this. we're doing this. this is real. We prayed and waited and wished and now it’s real.
The Third Trimester
I think there’s a general misunderstanding between many moms-to-be and their providers that could be overcome with good communication. I had a great team that wanted to position my delivery and the baby for our best chance at success and I believe that. I could advocate for myself, ask questions, and gain clarity on the logic and process.
The Second Trimester
Here’s the thing. If I felt good in my first trimester, I somehow felt even better in my second. The reassurance of every passing week added to my stability, joy, energy. I got out in the sun more and more days and felt strong and happy to venture out. I didn’t really turn down any invites these months but I sure did sleep and rest a lot.
The First Trimester
I was extremely fortunate to have a fantastic first trimester. I remember some headaches and being tired, but nothing out of the norm. I kept waiting for something really bad to happen, or for me to be nonstop sick or unable to do certain things, but if anything, I felt very clearheaded, serene, alive, very calm, peaceful and collected. It was kind of a welcome change from my usual, and I understand why some women absolutely love being pregnant.
Can you Keep a Secret?
After a while, I realized that all of the positive affirmations were actually making me spiral in the other direction. I found this in yoga to be true as well - sometimes going as extreme as possible pushes me too far and as a human, I need to dial it back to be rational and to manifest just the right amount and not overdo it. I was lucky to have a strong partner that would listen to me/let me bitch/hear me out, and as soon as I vented, I often felt better. So we sat. We watched. We waited. We prayed. I kept working and kept the minutes, hours, days added together without further incident. I was manifesting the little baby that could.
Before
The nuts and bolts of this process are all too obvious to anyone that has been through it before and pretty self-explanatory even if you haven’t. The cycle that you may not realize that you end up on however is the ups and downs of fingers crossed, highs and lows, and waiting for a result that continually doesn’t come. The what if, the not drinking, the casual feeling that maybe you’re sore or tired or swollen or cranky because it happened! But it didn’t. I don’t have the exact count anymore but I would guess that it was maybe two full years of month after month on that roller coaster before we decided that it wasn’t going to happen. Possibly impossible.
A Refreshing Start to the Story
Post Covid we all were shooketh, in varied ways. Hubby the cats and I hunkered down pretty seriously and started out drinking and zooming like so many, but then switched gears into crazy cooking and exercising. As a reward this time last year I was in a wonderful place. My marriage thrived, my work was going great, and I was in probably the best shape of my life when not skiing 100+ days a year. We were in some aspects newlyweds through all this but also making up time by always being together in quarantine. And then…
Joya no Kane
To me, there’s no fault in enjoying Dec 31/Jan 1 as a reset, a time for new beginnings. New year, new you may be cliché, but it’s all what you make it and any day is a good day to set an intention.