These wintry days are chilly and dark and the holidays can be tough, so I thought I'd send you a little inspiration to nurture yourself through the end of the year! Although the reminders below are particularly relevant for tending to yourself during the winter holiday gauntlet, they apply year-round. Especially if you are grieving or low (and even if you’re not), please give yourself permission and tenderness to continually check in with what’s right for YOU. 1) You don’t

Something I often hear from clients after private yoga lessons is, “I wish I could do this right before bed. I would sleep so well!” That’s where one of the best parts of private yoga comes in: the personalized “homework” between sessions. Yoga homework can be poses, breathing practices, meditations, and/or relaxation exercises that feel manageable for your schedule and intentional for your needs. Sometimes that’s a few poses you can do in the office or a brief meditati

I was a theater kid in high school. One of my favorite parts of performing was the moment of darkness at the opening of the show, just before light beamed onto the stage. The audience was quiet with anticipation and the actors were in our places. Worries over what was to come, whether it was my first note, the hazards of wobbling in costume heels, or enunciating the tricky part of my monologue, all of it disappeared. During that still and silent pause between preparing an

No matter what side you’re on, the U.S feels more divided than ever, doesn’t it? The people you love most may be divided, too. When people are at odds with each other, it’s natural to feel anger, concern, fear, or grief. Yet here you are, big-hearted soul. And you are still breathing. Take a moment to place a hand over your heart or your belly, directly onto your skin if you can. Feel the warmth radiating from your palm and fingers onto your chest or the softness of

Before I started my business, I rarely took a break from technology. My phone screen was the first thing I checked when I woke up and the la

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

Quick: describe your body in one word! Don’t think too hard, just spit it out. Now that it’s out in the open, how do you feel about how you described your body? Does it feel like a celebration of what it can do? A criticism of how it looks? Neutral? I’ve asked this question on Facebook more than once, and the public comments are mostly positive words. But later, in private, I hear words of struggle and resignation. If that’s the case for you, know that you aren’t

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

Every day, the news is full of yet another layer of heartbreak. So many kind, loving hearts are grieving around the world. Because of this, I’ve been second-guessing whether to write what I’d planned. I worried it might be petty to talk about making peace with our bodies at a time when violence seems to be everywhere we turn, and our action feels urgent. Then I attended a webinar led by the powerful Sonya Renee Taylor, the founder of The Body Is Not An Apology, and I was

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