Tag Archives: creating fertile ground

Creating Ease with the BlendTec Blender

With deep gratitude, I received a BlendTec WideJar and Twister blender to review. I am always looking for new ways to make healthy eating simple and I have loved all that I’ve created with my BlendTec.

It can feel overwhelming sometimes to walk into the kitchen and feel like you can come up with a healthy meal in a short and stress free time. My BlendTec has helped make that easier than ever, and I’m happy to share some of my favorite food creations with you!

I make smoothies almost every morning, and with the juice button, they have never been smoother before now. I’ve used other high power blenders before but they sometimes left chunks of fruit that would appear in my glass and that hasn’t happened with the BlendTec.

The buttons are so easy to navigate and my 4 year old often helps out with making smoothies. It’s great to get her involved and experimenting. I let her add what she wants to her smoothies because it gives her the chance to learn a lesson I certainly have – sometimes fewer ingredients work better than adding in everything you can think of!

The BlendTec Twister has been our favorite for making ice cream. I’ll put a couple of frozen bananas in there (cut into smaller pieces) along with chia seeds, almond butter, and some raw cacao powder and in under a minute we’ve got a creamy and delicious healthy ice cream. I grew up making banana ice cream in my mom’s Champion Juicer, so it’s wonderful to share this tradition with my daughter now.

I also use the Twister for dips.

I’ve been making a cashew yogurt (inspired by Persephone Brown), which is the perfect accompaniment to fresh fruit and granola. I take a cup of cashews, juice of a lemon, cinnamon and water to reach the right consistency and blend them together. This has been perfect to take along for camping trips as an easy breakfast.

Most recently I made an amazing avocado dip, it was so creamy and smooth and I ended up making tortilla chips to have with it but I honestly could have eaten it right off the spoon! I blended an avocado, lemon juice, paprika and sea salt. It didn’t need it, but a little bit of flax oil would be a great addition for some healthy omega-3s.

A BlendTec can feel like a big investment, and there’s no doubt that it is, but it’s one that you can see in action everyday.

If you want to learn more and start bringing ease to your kitchen follow one of the links in this blog to see what great options BlendTec has to offer!

If you have any questions about the BlendTec or the recipes I shared above, please leave a comment below!

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Note: I received a BlendTec WideJar and Twister blender in exchange for writing a review and a few blog posts for their site and the links in this blog are affiliate links (that means if you’re as excited to try the BlendTec as I was, you’ll be helping support my business while getting to enjoy a BlendTec). All ideas and opinions in this blog are mine.

Holding Peace

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Holding onto trust
In a broken fractured world
Can take so much strength

Strength is hard to find
In the darkest days and hours
Stillness guides the way

Take seat from the core
Turn deeply inward to see
The eternal light

Ever present glow
Home to trust, strength and knowing
Waiting to be found

Shed away layers
Let them burn up in the fire
Revealing your truth

Open the heart and
Receive the gift of being
Authentically you

Trust comes naturally
When you live from your wisdom
Then you can find peace

* A note about this poem: Haiku found me in a big way this summer and held me together and things around me felt like they were falling apart. Here, I created a longer poem made from haiku stanzas.

Reinventing Your Relationship with Women

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“She craves men but women are her most abiding lovers. Her friends are her soul mates, all the love without the consumption of sex and romance, a different kind of intimacy. Women make love by admiring each other, studying and envying each other and mixing it all up in a pot of devotion.”― G.G. Renee Hill, The Beautiful Disruption

I remember wanting to be part of the popular group when I was younger. That shifted one day when I realized that when one of them left the room she became the topic of conversation. I recognized then that they might have plans every weekend but they didn’t have anyone to trust when they really needed a friend. What I realize now is that they also didn’t have anyone who could see them and accept them for who they were.

Over the years, friendships have come and gone (and some have come back around), and I have learned so much about myself, friendship, and what it means to be in relationship with other women. Here are a few things I’ve learned:

Friendships (like ogres and onions for all your Shrek fans) have layers.
Holding expectations of others does not usually work out well.
We grow as individuals, and sometimes that means we grow closer to others, sometimes further apart.
There is ebb and flow in relationships, as with anything else.

When we find our women, the ones with whom we can finally let down our guard and expose our vulnerability to without fear of judgment, we have the chance to give and receive such a beautiful gift.

We have the chance to hear and be heard.
We have the chance to see and be seen.
We have the chance to explore our vulnerability instead of hide from it.
We have the chance to be open to who we were, who we are, and who we are becoming.

As we prepare ourselves for any new becoming, be it preparation for conception and pregnancy, motherhood, or as we step into the new version of ourselves that we are currently calling forth, this type of support can create such a huge different in how we allow ourselves to be seen.

In being seen by others without the cloud of judgement, we start to drop our own self judgment too.

I’ll be honest with you, for a long time I thought this type of intimate friendship was a dream that was not based in reality. I thought that women didn’t have the capacity to hold in this gentleness in the realm of friendship because I had not seen in, felt it, experienced it.

Just because you have not experienced something does not mean it does not exist.

I want to tell you that it’s here and you can find it. As I’ve learned many times before, the finding often comes when you stop searching, striving. Sink in, sink deeply in where you find love and joy, and there will be your circle of women, finding their way to you, holding you up and being held by you in turn. It is pure love, pure magic.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Quieting the Fight Inside of You

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We fight ourselves so hard. We make things more complicated and more difficult than they have to be. We do this with the little things (what to eat, doing dishes and laundry) and with the big things. But it’s the fighting with all of the little things that really gets us stuck because it’s happening all the time. It’s the pattern so many of us run constantly, like music in the background that is always playing. So how do you stop it, or at least practice quieting that fight?

First, you recognize that it’s happening. This alone can create huge shifts, because this type of message from your inner critic is often so ingrained in how you function that you don’t even notice it anymore. Cues that it’s happening include negative self talk like:

“I can’t do anything right”
“I messed up again”
“I don’t deserve…”
“I don’t have enough time”
“I have other people whose needs have to come before my own”

Sometimes the cues come in your behaviors more than the self talk:

Resistance
Procrastination
Distraction

These fights can go on for so long and when they do, they start to influence who we are at sour core. Quieting the fight allows you to grow into your authentic self.

When you recognize that you are fighting yourself, you open the door to learning more about what you really want.

In this place of possibility you can ask yourself a simple question, “What do I want right now?”

The question is certainly easier to ask than answer much of the time, but the next step is asking the question and listening for an honest response.

I’ll share an example of a situation that comes up in my life because it serves as a good reminder that this is all practice and that there is not some simple quick-fix that is going to work 100% of the time.

It gets to be dinner time but I’m rushing around trying to finish things from my day. I begin to notice my hunger so I go into the kitchen to see what I have to eat. I open the fridge, and then close it deciding there’s nothing there that I want. I open the cupboard door. Same thing. I check the counter to see what’s out and none of that really appeals to me either. I’ll do this many times, sometimes taking a break to check my email as if somehow, magically, new food will appear in my kitchen and it will be exactly what I want. Each time that I go back, my hunger (and my frustration) is rising.

Many days, I’ll stop myself at some point and say to myself, “Wait. What do I really want right now?”

Sometimes the answer will be “I don’t know” and the loop of frustration will continue. Most of the time though, when I can step away from what I have and don’t have, what feels easy or difficult, I can tune into my body and discover what it is I want, whether it’s protein, salad, a refreshing smoothie or one of my easy go-to meals.

The recognizing and asking are keys to quieting the fight, but the foundation of it all is in creating ritual.

When you create ritual within your day to day life, all of the little places start to be infused with ease instead of overwhelm.

You create ritual in your closet by filling it only with clothing that you love. Then getting dressed each morning becomes an act of self-love, everyday.

You create ritual in your eating habits by filling your kitchen with nourishing choices, so no matter what you choose to eat, it fills you on many levels.

You create ritual around the seemingly mundane tasks and suddenly the dishes, the laundry, the cleaning up the clutter become ways to care for your environment, and by extension, yourself and your family.

Ritual does not have to mean whatever you have been taught by others that it means. Ritual is yours to create and define.

In the month of October, we will be gathering as a community to explore in the Sacred Ritual Everyday. If you join us for this journey, by the end of October, you will have taken great strides in quieting the fight within you.

Learn more and join us today.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

The Gift of Savasana

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Whether we love the pose or we try to avoid it as much as we can, each pose in yoga has something special and important to offer us. I was recently at a yoga teacher training info session and when this topic came up in conversation, she assured us that it is in leaning into the poses we like least where so much growth happens.

In a recent early morning home practice, I found myself re-discovering a lesson from one of the poses that is most difficult for me – savasana, or final resting pose. I was revisiting a similar lesson that I learned many years ago (that I wrote about here). Savasana brings up a conflict for me between my expectations and my reality. This happens a lot with me, and so it is no surprise that it plays out on my mat.

In savasana, when I want my mind to be still, it starts dancing. My asana practice acts as a great distraction from thoughts as I’m so tuned into what my body is doing in the present moment and how it feels. When given the chance, my mind activates again.

Savasana, I realized on this recent morning, offers a great gift. It allows us to experience something we often forget to give ourselves – it allows us to be held.

Sometimes, amidst all the craziness that comes in and out of our lives, that’s all we really need – just a few minutes to be held.

Embrace that gift when you give it to yourself.

What’s your experience with savasana? Please share with us in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Growing Every Day by Pushing Your Edges

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I held her in my arms and she felt safe. As I slowly lowered her into the water, I could feel her excitement and trepidation build.

“This is funny but I don’t like it,” she said through nervous laughter, and I picked her up again.

“This is funny but I still don’t like it,” she said when we tried again.

“I can do it!” she said with excitement, and by the next day, she was walking around the pool without even holding my hand. “I just learned how to do this yesterday!” she exclaimed with pride.

New things, especially when they involve water up to your chin, feel scary at first. It is the trust and pushing through the fear, which allows you to experience the empowered excitement of accomplishment.

You grow when you push your edges. You stay the same, and sometimes even wither, when you stay in the safety of the arms you have always known. I wrote about this last year and it’s a lesson that I try to teach my clients and myself all the time.

This can be a hard lesson when it feels like the ground is shifting underneath you and everything feels like it is somehow outside of your comfort zone. It can feel easy to run back to the things that give you comfort – old patterns, safety nets that you know are holding you back, and decisions that seem okay in the moment but that you end up regretting.

So what can you do to keep stretching yourself without feeling like you are about to drown? You reach out for someone’s hand, hold on just as long as you need to, and then let go so you can experience your own freedom.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Toxins, Preparing for Conception, and Simplicity

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Do you know what's in your products

It’s really all about simplicity. When I interviewed Dr. Laurel Standley for the Creating Fertile Ground Conference, she shared that even as a scientist, she doesn’t know what all of the ingredients in our products are. After all, there are over 6000!

So what are we supposed to do?

Memorize lists of ever-changing chemicals to be concerned with? I tried that; it’s not so easy.

Ignore the issue and hope for the best? The stakes seem too high for that, as we’re talking about not just our health, but also the health of generations to come.

As I’ve learned more and more over the years, especially when it comes to toxins and the childbearing years, I’ve come to discover a way to do the best you can without getting yourself overwhelmed by tons of information – keep it simple.

I recently had an in person session with a client. She and her husband are planning to start trying to conceive soon, and she is thinking about what’s in her products in an entirely new way now that she’s thinking about her future baby. It was a deep dive into this topic, and after our time together she said, “Thanks again! It was all really helpful and encouraging.” Encouraging. That’s key. You can gather all the information you want online, and you’ll likely find some of it to be helpful and much of it to be scary. That’s not really my idea of helpful, simple, or empowering at all.

Here’s what I taught her about simplicity when it comes to the products we’re using on a daily basis:

Use fewer products. On average, women use a dozen products daily. How many do you use? Often, many of them are ancillary to our needs, and they come at a huge price. One thing that my client realized was that she was seeing the same ingredients again and again as she checked her labels. Not only are we exposing ourselves to these chemicals, but we’re getting exposed multiple times by our products. How can you use fewer products in your routine?

Keep the ingredients list short and readable. One exercise that I have my clients do is you write out all of the ingredients that are in their products. For each one, they make two columns – the ingredients that they recognize and know what purpose they serve and the ingredients that they don’t recognize. The same reaction comes up again and again – so many of the ingredients are difficult to spell, let alone understand. Looking for products that have simple ingredients (ideally 10 or fewer ingredients and that you can recognize) is a great way to release the fear and overwhelm about your products. Check your labels. Do you know what you’re putting in and on your body?

Don’t feel like you need to do all the research on your own. We are surrounded by so much information these days, much of it full of unnecessary fear, much of it contradictory, and it can easily be overwhelming and confusing. Getting lost in a sea of information is not my idea of simplicity. Is it yours? If not, choose simplicity by starting where you can and finding support from those who have a passion for digging for the information and sharing just what you need to make this journey an empowering one. How can you reach out to get support so you can find more simplicity?

I’d love to know what was most helpful and how you plan to bring more simplicity to your daily routine. Join the conversation by sharing in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

Simplicity is Practice

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This week in my love note to my email list I’m talking about simplicity. Here with you, I am going to share what I do on a (mostly) daily basis to invite simplicity into my life, and to try to encourage it to stay.

When you’re first getting started with practicing simplicity, it can feel hard. If you’re anything like me, you can pause now, look back over your life, and realize how unnecessarily complicated you’ve made most things.

Simplicity allows you the space to focus on your desires without getting tangled up in overwhelm, fear, and anxiety. Simplicity is a breath of fresh air. It opens your eyes to what’s most important because your vision becomes less clouded.

When you can infuse your journey towards motherhood with simplicity you create more space for empowerment, ease, and enjoyment.

As with most things, simplicity is a practice, and to keep it going strong, to weave it into the fiber of who you are, it can help to have a few guiding practices. Here are some of mine.

Start small :: Make the bed. Morning pages. Lemon water.

Create space :: No technology for the first and last 2 hours of the day. Clear clutter.

Be grateful :: Remember the good. Release the not so good.

Nourish :: Whole, fresh foods. Uncomplicated and delicious.

Move your body :: Walk. Sun salutations. Dance party.

As you ease into your day, begin with the things that make you feel amazing. Be fully present in the moment. Enjoy the warm water rushing over your body. Hold that hot mug between your hands. Feel the cool breeze on your face.

Simplicity lives in the moments. That means that at any point, you can begin again. You can choose simplicity right now and know that you are giving yourself the gift of a simplicity practice.

How can you choose simplicity today? Share with us in the comments below.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,

When Adventure Leads You to Unexpected Journeys

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Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll

The day starts quite normally::

Waking up, rubbing slumber from my eyes, rolling over, out of bed and into morning pages

Lines follows lines of thoughts and dreams and to-dos and ideas

Breakfast is made (smoothie for me, waffle with just jelly for her)

As she’s off on an as-yet-unknown adventure, I sit down to begin mine

And later there’s the phone call::

“Mama, I fed a HIPPO!!!”

And she did, she fed a hippo apples, thrown right into the mouth big enough to fit her

And she turned to her Za (short for Zabazabadoo, nickname for Zayda, Yiddish for grandfather)

She said to him, “I want to work here when I grow up.”

So I learned::

Adventures are rarely expected as we are rubbing the slumber from our eyes

Each moment opens the path to a new journey waiting for us

We know so much when we are young

We forget so much as we grow

I want to share with you::

Write your morning pages

Take yourself on adventures big and small

Let your heart guide your journey

Be open to the impossible feeling possible
Peace, Love, and Wellness,

P.S. Looking for a new adventure? Join us for the Creating Fertile Ground Circle

Birthing Your Dream through Visioning

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I create vision pages in chunks. When I participate in one of Hannah’s programs, I find myself catching up with 10 prompts in one night, scraps of paper flying, recycling bag filling, as I rip, cut, glue, repeat. Again and again. And then, when I stop to take a breath hours later and look back at what I’ve done, I’m in awe.

Sometimes it’s a few days later, sometimes a few months, that the messages on the pages begin to have meaning for me. During the recent intense full moon energy (did you feel it?), I didn’t know what the messages coming across meant. At one point I did something unusual for me – I pulled off some words that I had glued down. Suddenly, they didn’t feel right.

The next day the energy was still with me, and two more pages came out, in black and white, and they terrified me. I’ve kept them open on my desk. As I shared with friends my fear in these words, they helped me peel back the layers so I could begin to uncover the meaning. I was scared because of what I thought they could mean. Then I opened up and accepted what they did mean.

“Look, it’s hard to let go, take the leap…”

And just like that, I hired an amazing virtual assistant (who I know in real life) to help me with parts of my business that drain me so I could let them go.

“The making of magic, search for excellence…”

And then I had a conversation with an incredible woman who has worked in the infertility field for 30+ years (and probably held me in the NICU when I was born) and we are meeting for lunch to discuss how we can work together to support women during this incredibly intense time.

“Authentic life, designed by you.”

Another women signed up to work with me and I was so aware of how freeing it feels to get to create my own schedule and work with women who are ready to do what it takes to see their dreams fulfilled.

This all came just from the last two pages, black and white, from a couple of days ago.

I’ve been so enthralled with these pages that I have barely begun to comb over the 16 pages that led to this. Well, except for my favorite. Here’s C.C.:

And here’s one that I created a while ago for you but finally glued down the other night:

When we open ourselves up to the process of visioning, we get to imagine and begin to create the life we want to be living. We get to breathe life into our dreams.

The soulwork around visioning is an incredibly powerful place to start your journey (or the next leg of your journey) because you get to throw out all of your preconceived ideas, what you think you should be doing or thinking or feeling, what others think you should be doing or thinking or feeling, and you get to play. You get to step into that place of possibility and say this is what I want. You get to claim it.

When we gather for the Creating Fertile Ground Circle at the beginning of June, our first month will be all about stepping into the vision. From there, we’ll get to explore how to bring that vision to life, bit by bit, as we explore deeper each month.

Visioning will continue throughout the 6 months because there are always new messages, new layers to uncover and explore.

If you are ready to begin to breathe life into your dreams, if you’re curious about what creating a vision for your future can help your manifest, I encourage you to join us for the Circle.

Peace, Love, and Wellness,