03/13/2026
As a small business owner, you want to make a difference in people's lives, in your community, and at an even bigger scale for humanity and most of the people I work with are passionately driven because they love what they do.
I am no different, and honestly, loving what I do makes it even harder to say no, especially when my body is quietly, and then not so quietly, asking me to slow down.
Learning to listen to my body and draw real boundaries is not something I arrived at gracefully, it is literally the foundation of the work I do. I teach meditation, self love practices, nervous system regulation, getting to the root cause of things, because I have spent most of my life learning how to survive my own body.
By the age of 42 I have lived through:
Chronic migraines from 24 to 26, cervical cancer and a full hysterectomy at 27, sepsis and over a week in the hospital at 32, mono and more than a month in bed at 37, and last May a TIA that landed me in the emergency room followed by a diagnosis of Lyme disease and POTS.
I want to pause there for a moment, because that list represents years of my body trying to get my attention in increasingly urgent ways, years of exhaustion and fear and medical procedures and the particular kind of grief that comes from feeling like your own system is working against you.
I have a compromised immune system and I am a Highly Sensitive Person, and I am deeply grateful for both of those things now because my body has become one of the most honest instruments I have ever known, it tells me quickly and clearly when my actions are out of alignment with what is actually true for me.
Nine years ago I began the deep emotional excavation work that changed everything and since then my health and daily life have transformed in ways I could not have imagined when I was surviving sepsis in a hospital bed or lying flat with mono for weeks. I learned to draw boundaries, to say no even when the guilt of saying it felt unbearable, to do so much self care that people around me genuinely did not understand what I was doing or why.
My body left me no other choice and that is exactly how I found my way home to myself.
The body is not an inconvenience, it is a barometer, a precise and patient biofeedback system that is always telling you where you are out of alignment with what is true for you. It took me years to feel that connection in my own body because I was running on autopilot, chasing a version of success that had nothing to do with how I actually felt inside.
Over the past few years my body has felt more and more like mine again and that kind of return takes time, undoing years of neglect is a layered process and there is no shortcut through it.
And then the past couple of weeks happened.
I felt the slow decline coming, I knew the feeling, and I kept going anyway, because my work is growing, my connections in community are deepening, and I love it so much that I let the excitement drown out the whisper.
It only took a day or two of pushing before my body made the decision for me and I have been sick for a week now, canceled classes, personal appointments, collaboration opportunities, everything, and even knowing it is necessary, even trusting the process completely, I do not love it LOL, I want to be there and that part is real.
And I also know what happens when I do not listen, I have lived that version of the story more times than I can count.
So here I am, letting you all in on something vulnerable and honest.
I am not teaching anything I have not had to walk through myself, every tool I offer came from years of trial and error inside my own body, every practice came from a moment where I had no other option but to find a different way through.
And clearly I am still learning this lesson, because even when we know better, even when we teach it, we are not immune to the patterns that once shaped us, and loving what we do can blur that line in ways that are genuinely hard to see until the body steps in and makes it undeniable.
This week my body stepped in.
So I am slowing down, canceling what needs to be canceled, resting when I would rather be showing up, allowing my system to recover so I can actually sustain this work long term, and honestly this is part of the practice too.
The same listening, the same honoring, the same radical self care I encourage in others, sometimes it looks graceful and sometimes it looks like being laid flat for a week humbled by your own body again.
Either way the lesson is the same, our body is always communicating with us and when we learn to listen when it whispers we may not have to wait until it forces us to stop.
And in sharing this out loud I hope it offers something real for whoever needs to hear it today, because your health and your wellbeing are what sustain everything you love, so slow down enough to remember that, honor your own process and trust it, even when it asks you to stop.
Sending love and grace.
