Before I Knew I Was An Empath About 40 years ago, I read a story in the Philadelphia Daily News that shook me to my core. A three-year-old girl had been locked in a bedroom and left there. Alone. For months. When she was finally found, her small body was kneeling beside the bed in […]

We were never meant to become whole alone. We were meant to become whole together. Awkwardly, slowly, and with great tenderness. Solo healing was never was never the plan. Life will always move us. It draws us close and then asks us to lean back. It gives and it takes. It invites us in and […]

“When something small feels big, it’s usually not about the small things. Not everything you feel started today.” Have you ever had a reaction that didn’t match what just happened? Someone says something small, or responds in a way you didn’t expect, and something in you shifts. Sometimes it shows. Sometimes it doesn’t. But you […]

“Peace is not the absence of chaos. It is the refusal to let chaos rule your inner world.” This is not a calm season. There’s a lot happening in our country right now. You can feel it in the air. It hums in conversations, in headlines and social media feeds. It shows up as tension […]

I know it feels like you missed your chance sometimes. When you look back and see years that didn’t go the way you thought they would. Or when you measure where you are against where you thought you’d be by now. It’s easy to believe you missed something. And I’m not going to tell you […]

I was at the lowest point in my life in 2011. Dealing with the devastating loss of my granddaughter, my job, my home – the very foundation of my life. Anger, grief, shame, and guilt were my live-in companions. And most of my days were spent catering to them. But every now and then Hope […]

You can’t release what you haven’t allowed yourself to feel.The only way through is through. You’re angry. And people love to tell you to “let it go.” As if anger is something you’re choosing to carry out of stubbornness. As if you haven’t already tried to release it. You’ve meditated on it, journaled about it. […]

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from self-abandonment: from spending years making yourself smaller. It’s not the tiredness of physical labor or even emotional strain, it’s something deeper, more fundamental. It’s the weariness of constantly editing yourself before you even finish a thought. Of swallowing your needs before they fully form into words. […]

Renewal is the foundation that makes everything else possible. And the longer we treat it as optional, the more brittle we become. I used to believe that exhaustion was just part of the deal. That if I cared deeply about my work, my people, my purpose, feeling depleted was simply the price of admission. Rest […]