Life of Wellness Institute

12/26/2025

12/23/2025

Maybe the most radical act of care this season is saying “no” to another event, not another people-pleasing “yes.”

One of my biggest pieces of advice is to take a step back from anything you know doesn’t make you feel good. For me, a big one is stepping away from my feed for a time. Or setting timers to help me reset my screen time. I’ve been LOVING the app Focus Friend by for this.

But what I really want you to take away from this post is that you are allowed to want a quiet holiday. You are allowed to skip the party. You are allowed to set a boundary, even if it causes a ripple.

Save this. Share it. Come back to it as many times as needed 🫶🏼

12/15/2025

I believe we must move beyond the static, and often performative, goal of a declared ‘safe space’ entirely.

A more honest and effective framework is that of the “emergent space.”

Unlike a declared safe space, an emergent space is not a label applied at the start, but a quality that is co-created through ongoing, trauma-informed practice.

It acknowledges that safety isn’t a stated rule or expectation, but the result of what must be built through shared goals, mutual respect, and a deep acknowledgment of power dynamics.

The performance is in the declaration; the true container for trust is built in the emergent, adaptive process.

If you’d like to learn more about emergent spaces and how you can incorporate this concept into your own practice as a yoga teacher, mental health professional, or anyone who works with people and wants to create a “safe space”, I have a full blog post that gives practical tools to help you create emergent spaces.

If you’d like to read it, comment “BLOG” and I’ll send it to you.

12/12/2025

Would you be interested in joining a book club to deep dive into these books together? If yes, comment “body grief”

We live in a world that actively and aggressively shames and disconnects us from ourselves and our bodies. And knowing this doesn’t protect us from the impact.

I have tried to navigate this on my own. To pretend that knowing is enough to protect me. That if I just try harder, I can end the grief in my body. I can heal the toxic way I engage the relationship with my body. It wasn’t until I read Jayne Mattingly’s book, This is Body Grief: Making Peace with the Loss That Comes with Living in a Body, that I felt real hope.

It wasn’t until I read this book that I truly realized it is normal that experiencing body grief feels like a mess and takes up more space in my life than I want. I spent far too many years in isolation, believing it was a failure within me. If only I were more accepting, self-compassionate, if only I worked harder to change my body, if only…

I learned that needing someone to blame and placing ourselves at war with our body is a common way to experience body grief. But what we need is compassion, grace, and a judgment-free zone to heal the relationship with our body.

I don’t have the answers. But what I do know after 51 years is that doing this alone is unnecessary and will likely lead to more self-blame and shame.

I’m proposing a weekly virtual book club. The nine-chapter book guides us through what Jayne Mattingly has called “the journey through body grief,” which includes dismissal, shock, apology, fault, fight, hopelessness/hope, and body trust.

So, if this has resonated with you. If you see parts of yourself here and want to come together as a community, I’m in.

Drop “Body grief” in the comments if you want to join!

12/10/2025

The honest answer, for most of my life, was nobody.

Because I never let them. Because I never knew how to ask. Because I was terrified that if I leaned on someone, they’d collapse, or worse, they’d walk away and prove what I’d always suspected: that I was ultimately alone.

So, now I’m practicing the most fragile, unfamiliar skill of all: letting other people hold a piece of the weight. Not because I’ve collapsed, but because I’m choosing to trust. It feels like learning to walk on a broken leg you didn’t know was broken.

And this forces the final, ongoing question, the one that defines the balance of my life now:

How do I set a boundary that honours my authentic, caring nature, without letting that terrified little girl who still needs to be needed to feel worthy, run the show?

How do I tell the difference between the generous, grounded “yes” of a true caregiver and the desperate, wired “yes” of a child who thinks her safety depends on being useful?

I don’t have a clean answer. It’s a daily negotiation.

It’s feeling into my body before I speak and ask myself, “Is this a full-body yes, or is there a tightness in my chest, a sinking in my gut?”

That tightness is the little girl grabbing the wheel.
And my job now is to gently pry her fingers loose, to tell her, “I’ve got this. We are safe, even when we’re not needed.”

If you see yourself in this, if your “calm” feels like a cage you built yourself and your “strength” is the weight that’s slowly crushing you, I see you.

I see the exhaustion you think you’ve hidden so well.

Your survival strategy was utterly brilliant. It was ingenious. It got you here. And you are allowed to be so, so tired of carrying it.

You are allowed to set it down, piece by piece, even if no one else notices, even if the only person who sees you finally rest is you.

12/08/2025

After 35 years, I'm done being polite. It's not just the diet culture, ableism, or fatphobia.

It's the guruism. The hierarchy. The co-opting of trauma for profit.

It's a system designed to make you forget YOU are the expert of your own body.

And I want to be clear, this isn't a rejection of yoga. It's a reclamation.

And the problem isn't just a few inaccessible poses or a few bad cues. It's the entire ecosystem.

It's the guruism that teaches you to outsource your intuition to someone else's "enlightenment" or “higher consciousness.”

It's the hierarchy of asanas that ranks a handstand as more "evolved" than Savasana, as if your worth is measured in inversions.

It's the wellness hustlers with zero nutritional training or intake pushing "cleanses" that are just sanctioned eating disorders.

It's the spiritual capitalism that sells you $120 leggings as a prerequisite for peace.

This model doesn't heal. It creates a new kind of mental load. It teaches you to mistrust the whispers of your own body in favor of a teacher's command or a pose's ideal shape.

Reclaiming this practice means a ruthless return to the self.

👉 It means your authority is non-negotiable.

👉 It means a pose is just a shape, and the real work is the conversation you have with your body while you're in it.

👉 It means your body's "no" is a sacred text, more important than any guru's sermon.

This is why I teach the way I do. Not to create perfect instructors, but to create sovereign practitioners. To build a different kind of space. One where the only hierarchy is the one where your body's wisdom sits at the top.

The question isn't "Can you do the pose?" The question is, "Does this practice leave you feeling more like yourself, or less?"

12/05/2025

Being highly sensitive isn’t just a feeling; it’s a neurological and psychological mismatch.

For Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), our nervous systems are literally wired for deeper processing.

We have something called Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). It’s a trait, not a disorder, marked by:

1️⃣ Deeper cognitive processing: We check, reflect, and connect dots others might miss.

2️⃣ High emotional responsiveness and empathy: We feel things deeply, both our own and others’ emotions.

3️⃣ Awareness of subtleties: We notice the slight shift in tone, the unspoken tension in a room.

When someone says, “I love your empathy, but stop being so sensitive,” they are fundamentally asking the impossible. They are asking us to decouple our radar from our response.

They want the brilliant, intuitive conclusion without the messy, deep, and sometimes overwhelming process that leads us there.

The goal isn’t to find people who just “tolerate” your sensitivity. The goal is to find your community. The people who see your depth as a gift, your processing as a strength, and your need for boundaries as wisdom. The people who don’t just want the lighthouse, but who respect the power and beauty of the entire ocean you navigate.

Can you relate? Have you ever felt like people only want parts of you? How did you learn to reclaim your whole, wonderfully sensitive self? Share in the comments, your story might be the lighthouse for someone else feeling lost at sea ❤️

I recently released a blog post where I break this down even further, so if you are an HSP and want to learn more about this, head to the link in my bio to read the full blog post.

12/03/2025

We've been told we have 2 choices:

1. Body Positivity - which asks us to love our bodies and be positive in a world that constantly tells us we shouldn't.

or

2. Body neutrality, which encourages us to feel... nothing?

Neither is enough.

Body positivity can often feel like another form of performance. Another standard we can't ever meet.

And body neutrality, while it is a powerful starting point if we're in survival mode, just isn't realistic. How are we supposed to feel neutral about the body
that holds our grief, our trauma, our joy?

So what's the path forward?

I think it's body grief and body trust.

We've been fed a narrative about how our bodies should be, how they should look, move, age, and perform. And when they don't meet that standard, whether through injury, aging, illness, or just being human, we don't just feel neutral.

We grieve.

But we don't have to stay stuck in that grief.

We can learn to trust our bodies again.

Not because they're perfect, but because they're ours. Because they've carried us through everything.

Some days that might feel like neutrality, other days it might feel like love, and some days it might just feel like showing up.

If you're ready to explore this deeper, I'd love to support you, and I have an idea...

What if we explored this together? I'm thinking of starting a book club to go through Jane Madeline's powerful work: This Is Body Grief.

If this calls to you, I'd love for you to join me in a small act of intention:

In the comments below, write the phrase "I can trust my body."

And i'll reach out to you directly to set up our first meeting ☺️

11/28/2025

This audio from Mel Robbins hits like a ton of bricks, doesn’t it? It’s so simple, and so brutally hard to accept.

We spend so much energy trying to decode other people’s silence, making excuses for their absence, or contorting our own values to fit into their world. We do this because our nervous system craves connection and predictability. The idea that someone “doesn’t have the same heart” feels like a threat to our safety, to our belonging.

But here’s the embodied truth: Your body already knows these three things.

Your gut tightens when you’re making a case for someone who has shown you their disinterest. That feeling is your inner wisdom, your “smoke detector,” confirming #1: “If they wanted to, they would.”

The anxiety of waiting for a text that never comes? That’s your system wearing itself out, desperately seeking a signal of safety from someone who has already given you their answer through silence. That’s #2: “No response is a response.”

And the profound loneliness of being in a relationship where you are constantly giving from a heart that doesn’t receive the same in return? That is your spirit bumping up against #3: “Not everybody has the same heart.”

This isn’t about blaming others. It’s about returning to the one person you can truly trust: yourself. It’s about honouring the responses you are already getting from others, and from your own body, and having the compassionate courage to act on that truth.

When we stop begging for the bare minimum, we create the space for connections that are genuinely reciprocal, respectful, and regulating for our nervous systems. We make room for the people whose values and hearts are aligned with ours.

11/26/2025

Would you be interested in joining the book club?

If you feel called, I would love for you to comment “I can trust body”

And if we get enough interest, I will reach out to you directly!

This is how we build a new relationship with our bodies, and instead of us all going through it alone, I think it could be such a powerful experience together as a community.