health at every size

Boundaries at the gym

I’ve had the privilege of working with personal trainers at several points during my life, always finding this to be an enjoyable and worthwhile investment of time and money. It’s not so much that I don’t like working out; in fact, I really love it, finding workouts (especially weight training) to be empowering. I build …

books

Best Books of 2018

This is my third annual best books post (see 2016 and 2017, respectively), and it’s a doozy! This year, I began using Goodreads to track my books, which has become WAY more addictive than I would’ve guessed. (In the same way my DVR is like a to-do list for entertainment, Goodreads has become a to-do …

frayed wire

I hate hatred.

I remember being scolded as a child for using the word “hate,” a word with such emotional charge my mother assured me it was not warranted … probably ever. “Stupid” had the same charge and was banished from my vocabulary. (As a teenager, I also was told not to use the word “suck” as an …

broken glass

This is what I believe

On this cloudy Friday, I believe a few things to be true: I believe Christine Blasey Ford. I believe Brett Kavanaugh is a basically good man. Notwithstanding his behavior as a teenager and his petulant performance yesterday, which reeked of entitlement. I also believe Kavanaugh doesn’t remember what Blasey Ford accuses him of doing because …

sunflowers

Le Tournesol

Until I came across the word tournesol in a novel I was reading on my Kindle app the other day, the memory of the word — and the context in which I learned it — was distant and fuzzy in my memory, happily relegated to a zone of neurons I might well never have happened upon …

long shadow

The longest shadow

There’s this part of my life, this whole era of my adult experience, that lies just outside my day-to-day view. And because it’s just outside my view, it’s really easy for me to forget about those years. When something happens that calls those days to mind, the experience of remembering feels out-of-body, like I’m watching an …

Self-care instructions, long overdue

My friend and yoga teacher Anna Guest-Jelley (she of Curvy Yoga fame) did some work in early 2016 around writing self-care instructions (she had an email newsletter issue on the topic, then she did a couple of podcast episodes around it, especially this one [starting around 3:30]). Only about 2.5 years later, I finally heeded …

Stay on target

A three-point test to ‘yes’

One of the benefits of training to be a life coach is getting access to a bunch of talented, smart-as-hell, intuitive, incisive coaches-in-training to help you sort through any obstacles before you. I’ve been coached up, to the tune of about 50ish hours so far, by some brilliant women in the Courageous Living Coach Certification …

let's be friends

Finding ease becomes finding your people

Here’s what I’ve learned: When you can be out in the world fully as yourself, when you refuse to let the judgments you feel from others (real or imagined) limit what you’re willing to do around other people, and when you’re committed to living a life filled with ease … when you can do the …

helping or serving?

The helper learns to serve

If neurons audibly clicked when they found a connection, my brain was a spectacular fireworks show last night. Somehow, just hearing one line from an Esther Perel conversation caused this incredible ripple effect of connections to all fall into place. Bear with me, please. I have much to say. Over the weekend, I went to …