If there’s one thing you remember the next time you get on your mat to practice yoga (or lace up your running shoes or get on a machine at the gym), let it be this: If it hurts, change it. You are welcome to challenge yourself to your comfort level in class, but please don’t connect suffering through painful movement with yoga. You can find suffering in plenty of other areas of life! During our first yoga lesson together recently, a client told me, “squats always hurt my knee

Back in November, I took a break from my daily cup of coffee and was a little surprised to find that within just a few days, my vocabulary had halved and my ability to finish a sentence seemed to be on the fritz. I’ve always been sensitive, so it made sense that caffeine withdrawal could make me feel fuzzy and tired. But months later, my brain fog hadn’t gotten even a bit better and I was still super tired. Mid-sentence I lost my train of thought, never to catch it agai

It’s hard to believe that holiday season is right around the corner! That happened fast, huh? You might be excited for really fun family time, a “friendsgiving,” or a relaxing break from work when you can finally catch up on Stranger Things. Or maybe holidays tend to bring with them a bit of stress. You may even be dreading some really hard stuff. Maybe you’re bracing for rough conversations with family or anticipating Aunt Susan railing on about her diet and giving you th

There's a weird self improvement philosophy that takes positive thinking to the extreme by suggesting that we only experience negative feelings because our mindset is messed up. The idea is that if you can just look at the world through a positive lens, you can be done with negative feelings and transform your life for the better! That simplicity sounds tempting, right? Unfortunately, the positivity-or-bust approach can start to look less like stepping into a transformed li

A lot of the phrases I hear when I talk to super busy people about self care are, "I should," "I need to," "I have to," plus extremely loud sighs. If you're already overworked, having a laundry list of the stuff you've GOTTA do to take care of yourself can be overwhelming! How on earth can you get all of your work done, take the dog to the vet, run your errands, get the trash to the curb, pay the bills, drop off food for your sick neighbor, call your mom, AND feed yourself

A lot of my coaching clients come to our first session with a long list of abandoned self care goals and an inner critic who is pretty revved up about it. Many of these strong, wise, highly-motivated people used a popular strategy for changing habits: setting highly specific, measurable goals. Super detailed goals can be helpful for some behaviors for some people. Many times, though, rigid goals set us up to fail. In the real world, people have a hard time meeting

I’m writing you this letter from my front step. It's an unusually warm February day and I'm wondering how I’d like to spend the rest of my afternoon, after I hit send. It’s my birthday, and I’m stepping out of work early and taking tomorrow off to enjoy the sunshine and be quiet with myself. Maybe I’ll roll out my yoga mat on the lawn. Or I might curl up on the couch with my journal and a cup of tea. Or just sit outside and daydream. These are not the kind of things that

Prefer to listen? Click here. Maybe the rug in the living room was always hot lava and you had to leap onto the couch to keep from burning your feet. Maybe you had a mischievous invisible friend to blame for losing library books or trimming off the cat’s whiskers. Perhaps Barbie and Ken selflessly gave up their dream house to nomad My Little Ponies. Maybe you enlisted your neighbors to help you protect the backyard from the attack of nearby pirate ships. Hours could be los

Exercise used to be my unhealthy obsession. It usually felt joyless, but I gave it hours every day. I’d jog alone at night and lift weights so aggressively that I was nearly always sore. If someone delayed my "workout" (a term I rarely use now!), I would get so anxious that I wanted to cry. My friends called me a health nut, but when I was honest with myself, I wasn’t exercising for my health. I was willingly sacrificing my safety and mental health to shrink my body into OK-n

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing with you a few of my favorite body image action steps! They’re a taste of what we’ll work on in the Body Peace series at Carrboro Yoga in August, and the tip of the iceberg of what my body image journeying clients celebrate in coaching. There’s so much body judgment we consume every day, that we’d probably need to hole up in an power-free cabin in the woods to escape all of it! Since that’s not realistic, and you’d never finish Orange I