In my early twenties, I found myself in an extremely difficult period of life. Like so many people navigating something hard, I turned to journaling. The research on journaling for well-being is genuinely compelling, so I trusted the process. Every day I sat down, committed to it, set aside my time, and wrote to my heart's content. Then I'd check in with myself to see if I felt better. At some point, I didn't. I remember one particular day with unusual clarity, partly because

A bird migration, a lunar eclipse, and a solar flare in one night. On restlessness, fatigue, and the ways of knowing we have stopped listening for.

The Moon Steps Back There is so much going on in the sky today that I have had a hard time sitting down to write about it, so let me just tell you what is up there and we will find our way in from there. Before sunrise this morning, six planets were strung out along the ecliptic, that invisible line the sun and moon and planets all travel. Jupiter and Mercury sat low in the dawn glow, Mars and Saturn were easier to find, and Uranus and Neptune were out past what your eyes can

The other morning I stepped outside and felt the wheel of the year click over. It registered across all of my systems at once, physical, mental, emotional, soul, and cosmic bridge, turning the same half degree in the same instant. The closest word I have for it is a click, though it arrived the way a radio finds its station, a frequency sliding into place without anyone touching the dial. The wheel is always ticking. Most days it ticks quietly enough that you can go a whole s

I was standing in the supplement aisle at our local health food store last week doing the thing I imagine you've done too. Reading labels. Comparing proteins. Whey or pea or hemp or collagen, grass-fed or wild-caught, this salmon or that one, and somewhere behind all of it the bigger questions humming away: paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, none of the above? I have spent over 25 years in this field and even now, these types of choices hold the danger of making my head spin. Here'

The other day I had one of those days that starts off really great but then for no apparent reason, seemed to settle into a vague dissatisfied malaise. I don't know if you've ever experienced that but to me, those kinds of days tend to be weirdly uncomfortable. I started out with good energy. I had a solid grasp on my to-do list, felt like I was going to just rock right through it, and for a while it seemed like I was. I was in and out of email, on and off the phone, in and o

This morning, I was in my office creating an audio assignment for the Nature-Based Therapeutics program at NESBEM. The assignment is called The First Greeting Protocol. The intention for this assignment is to provide guidance to a student on how to enter relationship with a living being that they are just coming to know, whether it is a a particular tree, a particular animal, a particular patch of ground. The protocol moves through six gestures in a deliberate order, arrival,

The quiet power of standing still and holding polarity Summer Solstice is almost here. In just a day or two. I can feel it slowly rising, even though it doesn’t quite feel like summer from a weather perspective. I love the solstices. Sometimes I have time to mark them with a big celebration. Sometimes they sneak up on me and I quickly drink in the turn like a marathoner running to the next station. Last June, on the evening of the solstice, I stood outside to catch the last g

When we other something… we cease to feel its pain, its connection, its relationship to ourselves. The other morning when I came down the stairs, there in the middle of the floor was a little mouse struggling to get across the room. A foot or two away from it was my very satisfied looking cat, lazily waiting for it to move quickly enough to be interesting again. I assessed the situation and just like that, I was in the middle of a very old decision process. I could let nature

The Afterglow Effect I expected to wake up wrecked. Instead, I woke up glowing.

Long before the level teaspoon, recipes asked you to feel your way into the food. A reflection on what "a suspicion of nutmeg" remembers about sensory knowing, and how to find it again in your own kitchen.

The other day someone asked me a simple question, and for a brief moment I could feel my whole system recoil.

Practices for when life feels like a game of Tetris (or Jenga) The other day I stepped onto the treadmill with one intention. I needed to gather myself. The week had been heavy, the kind of heavy where a great many things press in at once and the body can feel it before the mind has caught up. I was looking for a few moments to gather my heart, my energy, my strength. I thought a quiet walk would do it. A little movement, a little stillness, no one asking me anything for thir

Over the past few weeks, I have been creating the content for our Kitchen Remedies class. Because I wanted to include a personal excerpt at the opening of each week, a small note or story about my own relationship with that week’s remedy, I found myself leaning into the content, the practice, the ways of being, in ways I did not expect. So, I thought I would share. It occurs to me, reflecting in this way, that there is a way of being I that have been leaning into for many yea

With a vata-heavy dosha and a highly sensitive nervous system, spring can be a challenging season for me. The wind picks up. The light shifts. The ground thaws and everything underfoot becomes uncertain. Throw in a few major life changes and the upheaval can feel downright unnavigable. When I feel that familiar cascade beginning, the tightening in my chest, the lurching in my stomach, the breath becoming shallow and rising into my throat, the 3am sleep that fragments, the way

How Your Soul Finds Itself Through the Systems That Carry You • • • Yesterday, driving back from Wales through the kind of rolling primeval landscape that makes you forget time zones, and even time, exist, my partner pointed to a hill and told a little story about it. This was not an unusual occurrence. He is filled with stories, and it is also not unusual to hear them more than once. But this time it landed on me differently, not the story itself, but the frissance that it

Why the most powerful thing your body does happens in the spaces you have been taught to rush through I remember once, as a bored teenager, complaining that I wanted time to hurry up and get past. On to the next thing. There was an elder in the room, a friend of my grandfather’s. He said in his slow, methodical drawl, “You know, every time you wish something on, you wish away part of your life.” It landed. And frequently, decades later, I think about that interaction when I c

I am in the middle of making some big decisions, right now. The kind that rearrange the shape of a life. And every cell in me wants to rush toward resolution, because the unknown is uncomfortable, and clarity feels like relief. But here is a little something I've learned, slowly and sometimes reluctantly: the best decisions I've ever made were the ones I let breathe for a full moon cycle before acting. To be honest, the first time someone suggested I wait 29 days before makin

I’ve been craving bitter greens for a couple of weeks. Sharp, astringent, alive things. And, if I’m paying attention, I realize my body has been asking for vinegar and fermented vegetables and the kind of food that cuts through heaviness. Something in me wants lighter broths, sprouts, green and growing things. I want to chew on something that tastes like the earth waking up. Mmmm…. And then I look out my window where it is still under the pall of winter. The ground is frozen.

The other day I was speaking with an acquaintance, and she said, sort of to me but not really to me, that she had to stop reading the news because it made her feel even more fully like she was not part of this world. Potentially not even from this planet, she said. She laughed when she said it, the way women laugh when they are telling the truth and need it to land softly. I, of course, responded with a pithy, "tell me about it." And we moved on. But, you know, I could feel t