Birthing A New Chapter. Welcoming In the Here & Now.

Wow it feels great to be back on the pod – a little surreal, a little unfamiliar, but mostly really awesome. If you are new here, I am bringing you the Loving Your Own Soul podcast after a year and a half break! My last episode was October 22, 2021, as my intention was to take a short pause for the holiday season, recalibrate, and properly close out the year. All while gaining clarity for the next. 
 
And clearly – life had other plans, but that’s why I feel it is SO important to keep things fluid and to flow as best as possible without putting force or pressure on something that needs to sit and pause for a bit… Such as this podcast, there were many times that I could have brought the show back – but I didn’t because it didn’t feel right.  And now it feels so right.
 
So, if there’s something in your life that you might be forcing or feeling like you must do right now – take a moment to ask yourself what might happen if you just pause. (What might happen) If you stop forcing and just give some space between you and your thing you are trying to make happen. 
 
Before we hit the ground running, let me fill you in on a couple updates. After all it’s been awhile and I feel like it makes sense to first connect back to where we left off, before I fill you in on ALL the experiences, moments, and events that have transpired over the last … 18-ish months. 
 
We left off in October of 2021 which at this point feels like a lifetime ago if I’m being honest. And I’m sure it probably does for you too – life moves fast nowadays. 
 
And if you don’t keep this is a frequent practice, I highly recommend adding the tool of reflection into your wellness toolbox. Reflection is a simple yet powerful self-development and discovery tool – I’ll show you how it works in just a moment. But if you aren’t familiar with idea of reflecting back to certain periods of your life you can think of it as taking a bird’s eye viewpoint (zooming out) on a certain time in your life and looking at all that has transpired since that very moment. Honoring both the positives, the negatives, the lessons, and the gifts.
 
So, let’s take October 2021 for instance. Not just for me but for you – what I’m about to share could be some beneficial journaling prompts so feel free to take notes if you aren’t driving right now. 
 
Looking back to October of 2021 - Who were you in that moment of time vs. who are you now?  What were your future visions and do any of them match where you are now? Would you back then have ever guessed you’d be where you are right now in this very moment? What have you learned? What have you grown through? Can you count your blessings or compare your wins and losses?

• Like I said use these as journaling prompts to practice your own life’s reflection or simply pause this episode to take a moment to reflect. 

 
This is a powerful tool so don’t skip over this. I encourage you to bookmark this to practice for another time. 
 
When I look back, and to the last episode of the podcast, I can immediately timeline jump backwards to where I was in that very moment and exactly what I was desiring for the future to hold.  And because life is a constant ball of mystery, I can tell you there are several things in my life today that have manifested into creation and there are several things that me back then could have NEVER imagined would be part of my story …. but that is the paradox of life, right? 
 
Today, in this episode, I’m going to give you the cliff notes on where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to in combination with a few experiences and details that I will leave private and sacred to my own human experience too. I might end up sharing later or I may never and that’s okay.  That is my choice. It is my life and my right to choose what I share publicly – just like it is your choice too.
 
We live in a time where everyone is sharing everything all the time and for a lot of us it strengthens our connection to those around us as well as with ourselves – and that’s a beautiful thing – but on the other side of that … at what point are we checking in to make sure our life is still our life to be lived? At what point are we discerning between what the world gets to know about us and what is private to our own individual stories? 
 
I don’t have the answers here and nor do I believe there is one right or wrong way to go about things – in fact what’s right vs. wrong is actually highly subjective. What might feel right to me can feel wrong to you – and that’s perfect. That’s our own two experiences and that’s also why I always encourage you to receive what resonates and leave behind everything else. 
 
Now before I get too far along in this episode, let’s pause for a moment and do a little housekeeping for those of you who are either new to the podcast or me, or simply need a refresher on my intentions and beingness here with you. 
 
While I do not have any current offerings or programs available in this very moment – and this very moment being April 2023, I will tell you that from a career aspect I am a certified holistic wellness, health, and life coach, podcast host, and retreat creator. My mission is to inspire you to enhance your life, recognize your potential, and embody your best self. And my intention is to motivate you to fill yourself up first so that you can show up in integrity to everything else in your life. 
 
I believe we are all meant to fall head over heels in love with our life. I believe the gift of experiencing joy is not only our birthright, but the secret to total wellbeing, abundance, and vitality. I believe that your current life is made up of a series of choices and if you don’t like your current life, you just have to choose differently. Everything is a choice. You get to choose to respond or react to situations. Getting up out of bed at 5am is a choice, just as much as hitting snooze every 10min for the next 45minutes is a choice. Focusing only on what isn’t, misfortune, and all that you don’t have in your life is a choice -> just as much as choosing to focus on what is, and what you do have in your life … is a choice. Everything is a choice, every action you take (or don’t take) is your choice. It’s your life. You are the one living it. And to start making different choices, enhance your life, recognize your true potential, and embody your best self – you must connect to yourself on a deeper level than you ever have before. And I believe, right here, right now … is the time to do so. 
 
Now is the time to start filling yourself up first so that you can show up in integrity to everything else in your life. 
 
And if you need inspiration to get started on realigning your choices, I encourage you to bookmark this podcast as one of your favorites as I’ll be providing tons of motivation and inspiration so that you too can step into your best life. I will be sharing my own experiences in collaboration with other thought leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs, and everyday human beings. As I’m coming to you from a new season of life, I can’t guarantee specifically when a new episode will drop as it might be weekly, there might be a couple shorts dropping a couple days each week, or there might be a pause in content so that you can take time to integrate and drop out of constant consumption for a period of time. Whatever it looks like, know that I’m here for you, for myself, and our greatest expansion.
 
If you are brand new to me and this show I will tell you that in the middle of my Saturn return and a very pivotal year for our entire world, I started this podcast while in tangent, opened my health and wellness coaching business. My coaching business wasn’t the first business I’d opened at the time as I was also running a marketing and nonprofit strategy company, which I’ve since folded entirely. Prior to my official start as an entrepreneur, I worked my way up the corporate ladder of marketing, event management, and pr for most of my twenties before realizing I was fulfilling the dreams others envisioned for me and was at risk of completely losing any since of inherent self-worth and self-love in the process. I’ve worked with celebrities and professional athletes, flown on the private jets, attended the fancy parties, graduated top of my class, won the awards, and pretty much anything else on paper that might scream SUCCESS in our society. But for me, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t fulfill me at a core, soulful level. So here I am. Always highly ambitious, a go-getter, and at times an overachiever, I put my heart and soul into every endeavor that comes my way. And while it can be exhausting at times, I love that about myself. I have zero regrets in life as each experience and interaction has made me more of who I am today, and I can only imagine where I will be with a few more decades under my belt. Because I personally do not fear getting older as from what I’ve witnessed, life really just continues to get better and that much sweeter with every year. 
 
As I carry a massive passion for health, wellness, vitality, and expansion, I love sharing my fav well-trusted products with you guys. And when I say well-trusted, I mean I have personally vetted them out for you, and THEY work. If you are interested in checking out some of my favorite brands and wellness products, be sure to always check out the show notes for discounts and links. 
 
On the other side of reintroducing myself to you I can tell you that I am a 4/1 Generator from a HD perspective, an Aries sun, Sag moon, and Cancer rising from an astrology perspective. I am a huge wellness enthusiast ready to always try or talk about the latest and greatest, I carry an entrepreneur’s spirit, I absolutely love the water and being in the ocean, surfing is one of my most favorite hobbies. I love food, cooking, trying new flavors and cuisines, figuring out what foods my body likes / doesn’t like, and simply enjoying all that is available to us. I love a good adventure, being on a plane, exploring a new culture and part of the world. I’m very spiritual and open to constant expansion and growth. Quality time is my main love language, and the sunshine is medicinal to me. 
 
I believe that we connect to ourselves through the practice of routines, rituals, and consistently showing up for ourselves. I’ve learned that we must fill ourselves up first to show up for everything else in our life. And because our world is chaotic at times, I developed a simple yet powerful tool so that you always have a way to come back to you. This tool is what I’ve named my MAGIC Ritual. The ritual is made up of 5 simple elements that can be incorporated to your morning or nighttime routine, or daily life and they include meditation, activity, gratitude, intention, and creativity. This is all I will speak to on this for right now, but please stay tuned for an entire podcast episode, or probably several, where we will dive into this entirely. 
 
I am also a wife, and you will likely hear from my partner and husband Dan Olson a few times on the show. You can go back to episodes 89, 74, and 29 if you want to learn about him and our relationship. These are some of my favorite episodes, so I highly recommend checking them out. I also think it’s important for others to get a preview of healthy relationships as well as relationships that are by no means perfect, because perfect is really an illusion.
 
And in real time I’m currently going through my biggest transition and identity realignment of my life … as this past August (August 2022), I became a mom. For those of you who have been with me on my journey the last couple years, I can officially say I am a mom. I am a mom to a wildly beautiful baby girl who has come into this world ready to experience her best lifetime yet. At only 8 months old, she has already brought so much inspiration and learning into my life.
 
___ 
 
 In fact, I intentionally took my annual podcast break the end of October 2021, thinking I was pausing for the rest of the year to then start back up in January, when a few weeks into my annual pause, I learned that I was pregnant! And my pregnancy took me on an interesting ride of immense introspection and self-discovery paired with extreme and almost debilitating at points nausea for the first trimester. And so much more! It was an initiation like no other. 
 
Which I will get into all certain pieces of this experience in a couple upcoming episodes. However, I do want to preface that with this new transition and phase of life I will most likely be sharing more motherhood content on this show. That won’t be the only topic, but it will be very present as this is my biggest spiritual lesson of all time, it’s so multi-layered. I never understood what it would be like until now being it – it’s a ride. It’s beautiful and deeply challenging. And I’ve been shown time and time again how stress and gratitude can comfortably hang out together.  But if you feel called to tune into those more mother/parent/pregnancy/baby conversations and you aren’t yet at that stage of life, please know the context still applies to you as it’s all very metaphorical for life in general. In fact, I used to skip over podcast episodes on these topics and now I see how they probably held lots of wisdom I could’ve now used, but I also wouldn’t have been able to hear them the way I do now. 
 
Anyway – there will be several upcoming episodes to share with you ALL the magic that has transpired these last 18 months, but because I promised this at the beginning. I do want to give you a small cliff notes version, so you aren’t left hanging too much longer or feel like you are stuck in October 2021 with me still. This community is so important to me, and I cherish every single one of you, and while there are some pieces I will be keeping private, it wouldn’t feel authentic to my relationship with you if I didn’t update you as to where I’ve been. 
 
So yes, I found out I was pregnant mid-November 2021 right before heading to Puerto Rico to host my first spiritual wellness retreat and the same week of my original due date of the baby we lost back in the Spring of 2021. Talk about synchronicities. 
 
Although I was so sick for the first trimester of this pregnancy – I still had the utmost honor of hosting 11 beautiful women over 4 days of the Experience MAGIC Spiritual Wellness retreat in Rincon, Puerto Rico.  This retreat was everything I had envisioned and brought to life, and so much more. This first one was so unique in that 11 strangers from around the US and Canada showed up to a place where their souls were reconnected from lifetimes before and 4 days later left the island with friendships that will last this entire lifetime. In fact, the group still meets infrequently (virtually) to connect and several of the women have since connected in person and chat almost weekly. Truly magical. I’ll be recording an entire podcast episode on this experience, the power of community, taking a leap of self-love, being female, etc.  and will be sharing details on future retreats too! 
 
Last April, as we entered the third trimester of my pregnancy, my partner Dan received a job opportunity that arrived completely out of the blue – and of course turned out to be one of those that you just don’t pass off. This experience was such a lesson for both of us on alignment and just how easy life can be if you let it. I believe and have seen how things truly have a way of falling into place if you are open. 
 
So, at about 8 months pregnant, we ended up moving from Florida to Georgia. And I don’t know that I ever really thought I’d be living in Georgia, but I do have to say, now that I’m not sweaty and massively pregnant, I really do love the environment here. It’s a beautiful location, lots of outdoor space and things to do outside. It’s been fun having different seasons and just a change of pace in general. Just as I firmly believe travel is wildly healthy, changing up your environment can be too. 
 
In fact, at the end of this year, we closed on our new home which was another divinely guided experience and was really the cherry on top to a year of FRESH energy. All the new things, all the change, and more in 2022. I had created a vision board going into 2022 and its wild how much of it really played out and manifested into reality this past year. Of course, I didn’t visualize or know the how, but the vision and intention for newness was there and wow did the Universe deliver. 
 
With my pregnancy, aside from being so sick at the beginning, it was a pretty wonderful ride overall. My original due date was the middle end of July, and I was convinced I’d have a Cancer baby. But sure enough, my little love, decided to come in August as a full-blown Leo, waiting right up until the 42 week mark where we had to give her several pushes to get moving and make her way earthside. My labor and delivery, the birth portal, was a whole experience. I felt as though I was overly prepared for birth and truly nothing could have prepared me for what ended up taking place. I will actually be keeping a lot of this experience sacred for now, perhaps one day we will speak more openly about it as it feels good. But I did end up giving birth in a hospital naturally – no c-section. However, it wasn’t the fully unmedicated vision I had been hoping for, but it was exactly as it should have been. I’m the proudest of myself for remaining open and completely in tune with what my body needed throughout the entire process. I was able to use my voice and advocate for myself, while also listening to my own body and being open to what she needed vs. how I thought things would go. My birth plan shifted a lot and I continued to remain in full trust the entire time. And after about 30 hours of labor, in the wee hours of a Thursday morning in August, I gave birth to a marvelous baby girl whom we named Sage. And our worlds have been changed and deeply challenged in the most beautiful way ever since. 
 
And ever since Sage’s arrival into our family unit, I have been moving through the experience of motherhood to the best of my abilities. I’m not going to lie the transition hasn’t been easy. Sage is incredible, truly amazing and an awesome baby whom I’m sure will listen to this one day, so I want to be clear that my transition into motherhood has absolutely nothing to do with her and who she is. In fact, because she’s so incredible, I’m often filled with so much guilt and confusion as to why I’m struggling so much through some areas of this transition. But to be honest, this is just another part of my experience. The first 3 months, that final 4th trimester was glorious and the best step into this new chapter and then suddenly we moved from months 3 – 4 and I feel like my world has radically dropped out from underneath of me and I’ve been trying to find my footing ever since. I will share more in an episode dedicated specifically to postpartum and motherhood as this is such a multilayered topic, but as someone who has always been so fiercely independent, I naively misjudged just how much becoming a mother would radically shake up my world. And I’m not sharing this to scare anyone, but to simply speak openly about my experience because at first, I felt almost lied to in this experience. Like why didn’t anyone tell me this would be so hard? Everyone knows how independent I am, why wasn’t I informed?  Why does having someone so dependent on me (literally I’m her lifeline) feel like the hardest thing I’ve ever done? And the truth is … I wasn’t listening before. You can’t understand becoming a mother until you become one. And it sounds SO cliché but it’s the most truthful thing I know right now. I could have never in a million years known what this would have been like, and no one could have ever told me what my experience would have been like too. And it’s that simple. 
 
And yes, it’s been hard. I’ve been hit with different waves of mental and emotional instability, my hormones have been going crazy, I’ve been triggered in so many new ways paired with so many familiar ways, I feel so responsible for everything … and I’m SO in love. I’m in a different point of love then I have been before, but amidst the fog and sometimes darkness, I’ve never felt more in love with Dan, my new daughter, our family unit than I could have ever imagined. It's a different love because we are different people now. We are in a different phase of life so naturally the love we feel, and give is going to be different, but it’s so rich, so deep, and so beautiful. Becoming a mother changes your life in so many ways, it’s really the biggest spiritual lesson ever (in my opinion).
 
There are more updates I could share from the last 18 months but those feel like the main ones. My business has shifted a lot and I’m still working to see what that will look like, so stay tuned. I’ll share how my own self-care and wellness practices have shifted, and how my spirituality has evolved within me. But for now, I’m focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. We’ve got the podcast back and it feels so incredible. I’m a mom now, I live in a new state, and I’m moving through a massive identity realignment. I’m working to find my footing again and my sense of stability within myself. 
 
There’s never a timeline on a transition or what that phase will look like … so to spare yourself major anxiety and possible depression, if you are going through a transition right now yourself, don’t pressure yourself to move through it too quickly or for it to look a certain way. Allow it to be, to transpire as it should, and to remember that life doesn’t have to be so serious or planned out. Sit back, take a deep breath, and allow yourself to just be in it for a moment. 
 
And if you take anything with you today, I want to remind you of the power you hold with your choices in life. The power that comes back to you when you start choosing yourself. And I hope you will leave this conversation feeling inspired to fill yourself up first, so that you can show up in integrity to everything else in your life. ​