Would you like to receive the blog directly in your email inbox?
Sign up below!
Search the Blog:
Write Your Own Story
I was sitting in a restaurant last week surrounded by friends, and we were all laughing, eating, drinking, and toasting the guest of honor. The long table was filled with people from all over the world who I didn’t know just a few short months before moving to Italy.
As if art imitated life (or life imitated art?), I zoomed out from that table scene and thought of the film “Eat, Pray, Love.” While there are so many uncanny parallels to my own story, there is a scene where Elizabeth (who has come to Italy to start her new journey) finds herself sitting at a table with the new friends she’s made, and they are all eating, drinking wine, and laughing. I’d thought of that scene so often since first seeing the film, and I remember wishing one day to live my life just like that.
A Home of My Own
As an interior designer, I have helped countless clients create the places where they live their lives - the places they call home. Through the process, they came to understand their physical and emotional needs and gained the confidence to express their own sense of style. From there, I set about finding the fabrics, furnishings, and artwork that brought their concept of home into a physical manifestation, but they were merely the props that allowed them to align with what matched their unique frequencies.
The Pause
This month, I started working with a new holistic coaching client. We’ll call her Jill. Like many of us, Jill is having some recurring issues and situations that are unpleasant and have plagued her most of her life. She knows she is ready to finally bring them to the surface and then purge them once and for all. Wanting to escape or circumvent the pain is a natural human reaction, so you can imagine her annoyance when I said that this would be our starting point. If we don’t look at our pain, we have no idea where we are wounded, and if we can’t identify our wounds, how can we ever know where to start the process of healing them?
No Regrets
When I sit down to write, I often reflect on what is happening in my own life or what is swirling around the collective. Lately, I’ve been having many conversations with friends and coaching clients who are expressing regret that they didn’t make certain decisions in life when the opportunities to do so presented themselves. These regrets can be relatively small - “I should have taken that great apartment when it became available,” “I wish I had stuck with playing the piano,” “Why did I buy that expensive dress I’ll never wear?” - and don’t impact one's life trajectory too much. But then there are the regrets that have much deeper consequences and leave us with lifelong wounds.
The Open Palm
When I was a young child, I couldn’t wait until I was an old person (which I was sure all 40-year-olds were). I thought the years of working would be finished, and there would be financial security, a solid relationship with the person I would grow old with, and a house full of children and grandchildren. Naively, I thought that all of the trials and tribulations of life would be behind me. But as I have exceeded the doddering age of 40, I have come to see that the picture doesn’t always look the way it was envisioned in youth and that those lessons, and the pain that often accompanies them, do not stop.
The Birth of a Venus
I have been thinking a lot about the energy of spring. It is a time of year when many people start to feel excitement as they shake off the dormancy of winter and prepare for life to start to sprout up again. Personally, this spring feels more like a time of renewal than ever before as I leave to find a home in another country and prepare to give birth to a new life.
Permission
I’ve been asked a lot lately about what possessed me to make the radical changes to my life I’ve made this past year and the even more radical ones I am embarking on in the next couple of months. What made me leave the comforts of the life I knew is a question I get from people (particularly women) excited to see me designing a whole new life but seemingly resigned to not daring to dream themselves.