My friends, that is why I write you today. I want you to know that if I ever seem distant, anxious, a little too chatty, or unable to listen with my full attention, it is because I have reverted back to my old pain. I love you and I value our friendship deeply, it’s just that sometimes the beast of trauma appears and it is all I can see and experience.

Deep inside your heart you have soul. That soul is shining 100% of the time. The full aliveness of that soul is what you feel so profoundly when in the presence of a baby, animal, and the forest. I want you to know, that it is also in you. It is in all of us. Here are 5 simple ways to feel more loving and connected to the presence inside of yourself, others, and the world.

You cannot stop the endless stream of stressful thinking in your mind. You can try, but the more you wrestle with your thoughts, the more powerful they become. What you can do is question your thoughts. Most of the time, the stressful thoughts you think are not true. And the moment you debunk a fearful thought, it loses its power over you. This is when miracles happen, because your perspective on life can instantly change.

We are born fully connected to our soul. As we get older, we start to hear a voice in our mind that pulls us away from that connection. The voice promises that “we will be happy when…we have a better house, body, friend group, romantic partner, career, financial portfolio.” And so we let it lead our lives and we travel further away from our self. But separating from our soul hurts. And over time, we can’t keep the hurt down, so we have no choice but to go within to reconnect with our self and return home.

Emotions don’t harm us, but running from them does. When we avoid our truth, we become disconnected from our self. It is that disconnection that hurts. It is that disconnection that transforms sadness into depression, fear into anxiety, and a glass of wine into a bottle. Self-love means staying with our self as we feel the inevitable moment-to-moment waves of emotion that flow through our experience of life.

Becoming an adult means learning to be a parent to yourself. It means loving yourself by continuously checking in to ensure you are supported physically, mentally, and emotionally just like you would with your child or pet. And, just like you would with your child or pet, it means being firm with yourself when you are not committing to your values.

An emotional outburst doesn’t necessarily mean a panic or rage attack (although it can), rather it can look like a food or booze binge, reacting to our loved ones during conflict, an increase in obsessive thinking, a strong desire to run away or get wasted, suddenly feeling very fat, ugly, or old, or a bout of depression or apathy. Learn how to prevent emotional outbursts by taking care of yourself just like you care for your children, pets, or good friends…with love, understanding, and compassion.

Parents, in January, you do not need another set of rules and restrictions on your behaviour, but rather a commitment to self-love. Restriction feels good at first, but will always start to wane. The child inside of does not want to be told what to do, so it eventually rebels. It craves. It yells for attention. And the behaviour you do not want gradually starts again. If we tend to the child within and give her love by offering her consistent care, listening to her needs, and holding her through her emotions, then the insatiable need for more is no longer there. The insatiable need for more is actually an insatiable need for love. Give the child love, and the cravings subside.

Hearing children say they don’t like themselves can be deeply painful for a parent to hear. In this article learn 5 ways to teach kids to love themselves. By connecting with their hearts when they have stressful, judging thoughts, they can recognize them as just thoughts that they don’t have to believe. The more they practice self-love, the smaller that judging voice in their mind becomes.

Learn to be a loving parent to yourself; then you can best be a loving parent to your child. Because we live in a culture that does not honour emotion, feeling is a skill that needs to be learned. The more we practice feeling our own emotions, the more we can support children when they need us. The more we express a range of feelings in front of them, the more they will feel comfortable expressing a range of feelings in front of us.

When I wrote The Girl and The Sun children’s book, I never imagined I would be launching it directly in the middle of a global pandemic. But it seems that now is actually the perfect time for the book to be available to the world. While we all try to navigate this new existence, a book about kindness (to oneself and others) appears to be more pertinent than ever, especially when it comes to encouraging kindness in kids.

“Love yourself like you love your children. Always. Even when you don’t feel like it. Yes, you are annoying sometimes. You act one way when you want to be acting another. You complain when you want to be grateful. You are irritated when you want to be patient. You are human, just like your child or loved one is human. And does your love for them wax and wane depending on their behaviour? No. Love is consistent and present, and it is always there in the background while you work hard to be there for them, even when it is difficult to do so. This is the love you need to give to yourself.”

When I was 17, I decided exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Throughout high school I suffered from an intense preoccupation with food, exercise and my body. At age 16, my mom called the hospital for help. On the phone, they asked my weight, and because it wasn’t low enough to be considered an eating disorder, they didn’t have anywhere to send me.

A 12 year old girl, in one of my workshops, once asked me “If you love yourself, then why do you wear makeup?Whether I fully lived the following truth in my own life or not, my answer to her was that makeup is fun. I like to play with it. Makeup becomes a problem when you need it to be who you are. When it defines you. When you need to be beautiful to others to feel worthy.

True self-love does not come from your cloud (your ego or negative self-talk). It comes from the sun in your heart (your soul or true self). It is unconditional. And it involves having a continuous dialogue with yourself to ensure that you are emotionally, mentally, and physically supported as you move through your day.

Bullying awareness wasn’t a thing back in the 80s like it is now. If you are a parent, you can be sure that the harassment you experienced (or gave) would not fly in today’s school. But it still exists, and as parents we can support our children so that the emotional pain from it does not turn into a frozen ball that prevents them from sleeping when they are 40. Here are 10 things I wish I knew...

I started to notice that the true moments of joy, the moments that filled my heart so much my arms tingled, were moments that I was giving. Instead of taking from the world, it is giving that fills us up. I started to look around me at the masses of people, trying to find happiness in a book with 10 steps, a bottle, a better body, a new house, more vacations, and more friends, and saw that we all had been traveling in the wrong direction. It is to the heart we must go.

There is this moment in parenting when you have to separate the ‘parent part’ of you that is dealing with the moment, from the ‘child part’ of you that is feeling old pain from the past. The ‘child part’ must be put away for the time being to be tended to later. The ‘parent part’ then has to respond in an adult way while simultaneously feeling the ‘child part’ screaming somewhere deep inside. It’s quite a dance.

I don’t know what to do. I know I’m going to do or say some wrong things. And I may be scrutinized for it. But I am going to keep writing. I promise I will write from my heart. And I will do my best to be as inclusive and humble with my language as I know to be in that moment. If I make a mistake, I will correct it.

When hiking in a large group, it would be strange if the few hikers at the front, with their eye on speed and the glory of the finish line, began the hike and just kept going at their fast pace, without looking back, until the end of the trail. But this is the way we live in North America. A select few, privileged due to their white skin, heterosexuality, cis-gender (which means they identify with the gender they were assigned at birth), high socio-economic wealth, and typically male gender, tend to speed ahead with their eye on the prize rarely looking back at the others behind.

You are allowed to be angry. It is not ok that you and I, and all those who identify as girls and women in our culture, have been told we should be thin because we are meant to stay in our box and be quiet. It is not ok that we are meant to spend hours and hours of our precious life obsessing over what we are eating, feeling disconnected with other women because we are jealous, and standing in front of a mirror and hating what we see.

In the 1980s, the world was disgusted by an angry girl who should be pretty, small, quiet, and nice. So, I had to put it somewhere, and against myself is where it went. Today, I write this from a rediscovered place inside of myself. After years of traveling inward and unraveling pain, I uncovered my heart. In my traveling, I found the girl from years ago and garnered her strength, her insight, her beautiful sensitivity, her honesty, and her rage and I now own it. I now see the world through her eyes. And thanks to the medium of social media, my truth can now spill out in words.

Parents you do not need to meditate right now. Every second of your life is a meditation. You wake up in the morning to face another day of parenting, playing, teaching, cleaning, working, texting, and planning – and you feel the overwhelm approach.  It’s like a wave.  You let it crash over you.   Then you find your bearings.  You take a deep breath.  You walk to the kitchen to grab a coffee.  And you smile at your kids like the day is going to be awesome.  That is a meditation.

When we heal the pain, we are preventing it from traveling to our kids. We are stopping it. Ending it. A large task indeed. But I have found that when I look at it as a larger task of my generation then I feel inspired to commit to my own personal growth because it is bigger than me and my pain. It is huge. I imagine the ripple effect through generations, and I thank life for giving us all these curveballs. Without them we would never be forced to look within. We’d still be progressing and accumulating and escaping with Julia Roberts and double-breasted business suits forever…

As a culture, we are so disconnected from our spirits. We are so disconnected from our bodies, and from our emotions that reside there. We are like a bunch of walking heads. We are so disconnected from our hearts, which means we are disconnected from our values and knowing what is important to us. We are so disconnected from our earth, from our communities, and from each other. Because we are disconnected, we hurt.  And so we make decisions to get away from hurt and be happy.  Because we are a bunch of walking heads, we think the answer lies in our minds so we fill our brains with more information on how to be happy. 

“When I noticed his hands too tense to play the piano, I saw him slump in his chair.  He turned to me and said “Everything is gone from my life.  I am not worth anything anymore.” I remember feeling so shocked that my beautiful dad, in his wise age, could be so wrong.  He had no idea the worth he had to me.  To our family.  Just sitting there in a chair, his presence was so deeply loved and appreciated. He was worth so much.  We are all worth so much just for being here.  What a lesson I learned in that moment…”

We all know how to parent.  It’s not about reading more books to get tips on what to do.  What we need is more support for ourselves so that, in these moments, we are not pent up with stress, frustration, and anxiety that causes us to react instead of respond.  

The more I experience life the more I believe to my core that when someone is obsessing, addicted, acting combative, or feeling very upset about something trivial they are most likely not addressing an emotion that needs to be felt.  

The death of my beautiful dad in 2014 sparked my “approaching 40s” call to look within.