Enchanted Healing at Kentucky Lake

11/16/2025

She screamed "I hate you" so loud the neighbors probably heard. Then slammed her bedroom door hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall. And I stood there in the hallway—the same hallway where she used to run to me with open arms—and I couldn't breathe.

This is the girl who used to think I hung the moon. Who cried if I left the room. Who told everyone at preschool that her mommy was a princess. Now she looks at me like I'm the villain in her story, and I don't know what I did to deserve this rage.

I cry in the shower so she won't hear me. I scroll through old photos of her at five, at seven, at nine—back when I was her hero—and I wonder where that little girl went. My husband tries to comfort me but I think he doesn't get it. He doesn't know what it's like to have someone you'd die for look at you with pure contempt. To hear "you're the worst mom ever" and know she means it in that moment.

I've apologized for things I didn't do wrong just to get her to talk to me again. I've second-guessed every parenting decision I've made for the last fourteen years. I lie awake at 2am wondering: Did I break her somehow? Is this my fault? Will she ever love me again the way she used to? The absolute worst part? I still have to pack her lunch tomorrow. Still have to drive her to practice and remind her to do homework and pretend my heart isn't shattered into a thousand pieces every time she rolls her eyes at me. I have to keep showing up for someone who acts like my presence is a punishment.

Dr. Lisa Damour sat across from me (metaphorically, through her book) and said five words that made me sob with relief: "Your daughter is not broken:

1. She's Not Lost—She's Building New Rooms
Your sweet daughter didn't disappear—she's expanding. Damour reveals the seven distinct developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood and Contending with Adult Authority. That stranger in your house is still your daughter; she's just trying on different versions of herself. The moodiness isn't personal; it's architectural—she's renovating her soul and you're watching the construction.

2: Her Cruelty Is Actually a Compliment
The most counterintuitive truth: when your teenage daughter saves her worst behavior for you, it's because you're the person she trusts most not to abandon her. Girls practice emotional regulation with their safest people first. Her cutting words aren't signs of hate—they're signs of ultimate trust that you'll still be there when she figures herself out. You're her safe landing pad, even when she's crashing hard.

3: She Needs Boundaries More Than Friendship
Every fiber wants you to be the cool mom. Damour destroys this fantasy: teenagers don't need another peer—they need a parent brave enough to hold the line. When you enforce curfews despite her fury, when you say no despite her tears, you're being the lighthouse she needs to navigate safely to shore. Love isn't always liked. And that's okay.

4: Your Calm Is Her Anchor
Teenage girls are emotional sponges, absorbing every vibration of parental panic. When you manage your anxiety about her choices, you give her permission to manage hers. Your calm doesn't fix her storms, but it teaches her that storms can be weathered. She's watching how you handle yourself when she's at her worst, learning what emotional regulation actually looks like.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3XuvotD

You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.

11/16/2025

My life didn't explode. It just quietly came undone, thread by thread, until one morning I woke up and didn't recognize anything—not my marriage, not my body, not the person staring back at me in the mirror. The panic attacks started coming in waves. I'd be grocery shopping and suddenly couldn't breathe, couldn't remember why I was there, couldn't understand how everyone else was just buying milk like the world wasn't ending. I tried everything. Therapy. Meditation apps. Self-help books that promised I could think my way out of suffering. I kept waiting to feel like myself again, kept believing that if I just tried hard enough, I could put all the pieces back together the way they used to be.

Then someone handed me this book—Pema Chödrön's "When Things Fall Apart", narrated by Cassandra Campbell with such tenderness it felt like being wrapped in a blanket—and I almost didn't read. Another book about acceptance when what I needed was someone to make the pain stop. But I was desperate enough, broken enough, to press play. And Pema said something that made me pull over and cry: we spend our lives running from the very feelings that could set us free. She wasn't going to teach me how to stop falling apart. She was going to teach me how to fall apart beautifully.

1. The Groundlessness Is the Ground
We're all trying to stand on something solid—a relationship, a job, a version of ourselves that makes sense. But Pema reveals the truth we're terrified of: there is no solid ground. Everything changes. Everything ends. And our suffering comes not from the groundlessness itself but from our desperate, exhausting attempt to find stability in a world that refuses to stay still. What if the falling itself is where we learn to fly? What if we stopped trying to land and just let ourselves free-fall into the truth of this moment?

2. Your Broken Heart Is Your Superpower
This destroyed me: moving toward painful situations and becoming intimate with them can open up our hearts in ways we never imagined. Every instinct screams to armor up, to protect, to never feel this vulnerable again. But Pema shows how those walls don't just keep pain out—they keep love out, keep connection out, keep every beautiful thing out. Our broken-open hearts aren't weakness. They're the crack where the light gets in. She teaches us to stop treating our pain like an enemy and start treating it like a teacher.

3. Breathe In the Suffering You're Running From
She introduces Tonglen—a practice where you breathe in your own suffering and breathe out compassion. It sounds impossible, even cruel. Why would you deliberately inhale pain? But something miraculous happens when you stop fighting your fear and instead breathe it in, feel it fully, let it move through you. The monster you've been running from becomes smaller, softer, almost manageable. You discover you're strong enough to hold your own pain. And then you can hold someone else's too.

4. You Were Never Broken
The most revolutionary thing Pema offers: there is fundamental happiness readily available to each one of us, right now, no matter how shattered we feel. Not happiness we have to earn or fix ourselves enough to deserve—happiness that exists underneath all the chaos, waiting. She's not asking us to be positive or perfect or healed. She's asking us to stop treating ourselves like problems and start treating ourselves with the same tenderness we'd offer anyone else who's suffering this much. What if you're not broken at all? What if you're just finally, beautifully, terrifyingly awake?

I've listened to this audiobook four times now. Each time it finds me differently—meets me in whatever new way I'm breaking and says "yes, this too." Cassandra Campbell's narration makes Pema's wisdom feel like someone sitting beside you in the dark, not rushing you to feel better, just breathing with you while you fall apart. The audiobook has become a companion for my worst days, the voice I return to when I forget that groundlessness isn't death—it's freedom.

This book won't fix you. It will teach you that maybe you never needed fixing. That falling apart isn't failure—it's the beginning of becoming whole in a way you never imagined possible. That your pain has purpose. That your fear is a doorway. That groundlessness can become the most solid thing you've ever stood on.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/3K7k0kl
You can find and listen to the audiobook narration using the link above.

11/14/2025

Get you some air that feels like medicine!
Delightful after an energeticaly challenging week!
Still reading the same two books! Both recommended.
Have a beautiful weekend!

11/14/2025

11/14/2025

Ooh, looks good.

I bought this book thinking it was about grief. It is. But it's also about joy, memory, ritual, and the fierce, impossible love between mothers and daughters. Suzy Hopkins wrote it for her daughter Hallie, who illustrated it, and together they created something so intimate it feels almost intrusive to witness—and yet you can't look away.

This is a love letter disguised as practical advice. It's a mother trying to stay present after she's gone, offering instructions for everything from how to unclog a drain to how to survive the days when the absence feels unbearable. Page after page, you realize: this is what it looks like when someone loves you enough to prepare you for their death while teaching you how to live.

1. The Practical Is Sacred
Suzy teaches Hallie how to do ordinary things—pay bills, make pie crust, fix a running toilet. But these aren't just life skills; they're acts of presence. When your mother teaches you to make her apple pie, she's giving you a way to conjure her in your kitchen years after she's gone. The practical becomes ritual, and ritual becomes remembering. Every instruction is really saying: you'll be okay without me, but you'll never be without me.

2. Grief Doesn't Follow Rules
There's a section on what to do when you're sad, and Suzy doesn't offer platitudes. She gives permission: cry in public if you need to. Stay in bed some days. Call her friends and talk about her. Eat ice cream for dinner. The honesty is staggering—she knows grief will be messy and long and will ambush her daughter at random moments for the rest of her life. So she normalizes it, makes space for it, refuses to pretend it will ever be fully "healed."

3. Joy and Sorrow Live in the Same House
What makes this book extraordinary is how it holds both devastating sadness and wild humor. Suzy includes advice on dating ("Don't settle"), career moves ("Trust your instincts"), and how to throw a party. She's preparing her daughter not just to survive her death but to *thrive* after it. The message: yes, you'll be gutted. And yes, you'll still laugh, fall in love, make mistakes, host friends, live fully. Both things are true.

4. Love Is What Survives
Hallie's illustrations—whimsical, tender, occasionally heartbreaking—show a daughter trying to hold onto her mother through art. Together, the words and drawings create something bigger than either could alone: proof that love doesn't end when bodies do. Every page whispers the same truth: death takes the person but not the relationship. Suzy will be gone, but her voice, her wisdom, her presence will live in Hallie's choices, her cooking, her grief, her joy.

This book is devastating and beautiful in equal measure. It's for daughters who still have their mothers and don't yet know what they'll lose. It's for mothers trying to figure out how to love beyond their own lives. It's for anyone who's ever lost someone and wished they'd asked more questions, learned more recipes, memorized more of the small things that become precious once they're gone.

Keep tissues nearby. You'll need them. Not just for the sadness, but for the overwhelming tenderness of watching someone try to make their love immortal through words and drawings. They succeeded. This book is proof that some things really don't die.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4oIErDo

11/14/2025