Love Letter: A Lot Can Change in a Year (12/6/23)

Happy December! I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that this time of the year is always reflective for me. And I’ve been thinking a lot about past holiday seasons. 

Just one year ago, we had just moved into our new house, lost Andrew’s Mom, and had a 5-month-old baby. Candidly, it was a very hard holiday for us.

This year, I am breathing a little better, and there is more room in my heart for the shifts and changes, even though my grief certainly has not gone away. 

Madelynne is a different baby now (a toddler!), and I am different too. We are always changing.

Consciousness means MORE FEELING, not less. It means you have opened your heart to it all. 

I have been thinking a lot about my work, too, and the things I am supporting women in doing (like heart expansion), are the ability to feel their feelings, honor their feelings, and take care of their NEEDS. That is my hope for you this holiday season. 

You’ll hear today in this email about how the worst breakup of my life happened around the holidays in 2013 and how I really do always remember that time as one of the biggest turning points of my life.

Your midweek mantra is, “I trust the unfolding of my life, the seasons I am in, and the seasons that are coming. I love where I am right now and where I am going.”✨

I want to tell you a story about how fast things can change…

Christmas of 2013, I spent crying in my room after the hardest breakup of my life. I spent that winter vowing never to end up in that position again – of dating an unavailable person who wanted different things than me.

Spring of 2014, I made the decision to go on a retreat in Hawaii and ended up living there for a month. I spent that summer dating from an embodied and confident place, committed to radical self-love and my vision for partnership.

Cut to Christmas of 2014, I moved in with my new boyfriend (who is now my husband!) after five months of dating. 🤯

Life is one big wild adventure. 

Everything changes, we are always evolving, and we always have the opportunity to greet life on life’s terms and decide who we will be when there are difficulties and challenges. 

That breakup in 2013 really almost broke me, and it did in many ways. 

It broke the ways I thought about “love,” it broke the trauma bond I was living in, and it woke me up to the work I knew I needed to do to heal and transform my life. 

We always have the opportunity to face our healing, and many people don’t choose that; many people continue the same pattern over and over again, thinking that it’s up to external circumstances to give them something different. 

Yes, one year later, after that breakup, I had a completely different life, and that’s because of the work I did on myself, the risks I took, and the commitments I made to BEING different in how I showed up. 

What you also might not know is that one year after I got married in 2017, my husband’s health fell apart, and he spent two years healing from chronic pain and autoimmune disease. 

That wasn’t part of the “plan,” and it wasn’t something I wanted for us, but his illness also gave him a new life; it gave us the path to Charlotte, NC, and now the new home we are living in. 

It fueled our decision to choose new things for ourselves and create the life we are living now. Life is both / and. 

Heart-centered consciousness is the ability to say YES to what life brings and YES to what we want to bring to LIFE. 

Pain is a part of life; there will always be challenges, and there will always be beauty. This is why it’s so important to choose a partner WELL. 

Choose a partner who will handle the truths of life with you, who wants to create something beautiful with you, and who isn’t afraid of being there with you when challenges arrive. 

When you are at home with yourself, when you know who you are (and I knew I chose someone willing to grow, ready to face challenges, who had already overcome so much adversity and believed in the beauty of life), and you’ll be able to see a partner clearly, rather than trying to change someone into who you want them to be. 

There are billions of people on the plane. 

There IS someone for you, and there ARE people with whom you’ll be in alignment when you do the difficult work of healing your heart, facing your pain, and courageously choosing the life you want to live. 

It takes courage to envision MORE for yourself and believe in what’s possible, and that’s something I am most proud of – I never gave up on believing in great love. 

Check out The New Truth podcast episode from this week,“Choosing A Path of Growth.” In this episode, we share what it actually takes to choose a path of personal growth, to embrace and live from the truth of who you are – and how to build conscious relationships in your life. Making courageous choices and following your own heart -especially when it’s against the grain, is not always an easy path, but will enrich your life in ways you can’t fathom. If you are tired of feeling like a victim and are really ready to show up fully for yourself and in your life, this episode is for you! 

I love you,