04/23/2026
Six years ago my husband and I left our Baldwinsville home carrying a lot of debt, a renovation we’d poured ourselves into, and a decision that would change everything. We sold. We started over. We bought land. We began building a “tiny” home (800 sq feet) from scratch (no mortgage, no shortcuts) while also building a homestead, paying off property, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I left my nursing career to build a wellness studio on the land we were still developing.
It has been a wild, intentional, exhausting, beautiful ride.
And I have been stuck in striving mode for most of it.
Not because striving is bad. Striving is what got us here. There are seasons of life that genuinely require it—where you put your head down, you do the hard thing, you keep going even when it’s uncomfortable. That was us. That has been us.
But I’ve been doing a lot of somatic inner work lately (I’m taking a 200 hour somatic yoga teacher training). Listening to my body the way I ask my clients to listen to theirs. And what I’m hearing/feeling is pretty clear: it’s time to pull back.
The house isn’t finished. It probably won’t be for another year or two. I’m not sure we’re ever truly finished with anything though. There’s always a next thing waiting. In yoga philosophy there’s a concept around non-striving, the practice of releasing our grip, our attachments. This summer I’m finally going to live it.
Most of my bigger projects are moving to next year. Not because I’ve given up, but because my body is asking for a season of ease. And I’ve learned the hard way what happens when I override that signal — burnout, exhaustion, the kind of depletion that takes a long time to come back from.
Here’s what I know to be true, in the work I do and in my own life: we live between polarities. Striving and ease. Effort and rest. Neither one is wrong. It’s getting stuck at one end that creates the problem; chronic overdrive on one side, avoidance and stagnation on the other. The real work, the integrative work, happens in the middle. Knowing which one you need right now. Choosing it on purpose & honoring it.
For me, right now, it’s ease. It’s doing work that feels calm and grounding and like home. It’s letting the bigger goals sit at a comfortable distance for a few months while I actually enjoy what we’ve built.
Because holy hellll have we have built something. Something real and OURS. And I want to be in it, not living outside of it searching for the next thing.
I am right on time. And I give myself permission to rest inside that.