In 50 days, I'll turn 50 years old. In honor of that, I want to talk with 50 women before my birthday.

I want to talk with you.

This summer I had a therapy session with a new person and gave her a brief overview of things that have happened in the past some-odd years… lost a child, got married, had cancer, moved…

This goes out to anyone who has ever felt like they didn’t belong or fit in. Anyone in the Misfit Club.

It might be that you didn’t fit in with your family of origin.

Everything in nature responds to cycles and seasons.
Plants open and turn and close in response to the light.
Birds find food and migrate and mate according to the season.
The things in your garden - plant or vegetable - sprout and blossom and wilt and die in rhythm with a natural life cycle.

A new season is here! The weather has shifted, the light is changing and the holidays are upon us.

It’s a great time for a reset.

In case you haven't had a chance to listen to the Fire on the Mountain podcast I shared last week, I wanted to offer my favorite part of the story.

In the podcast, Ann Black shares how her family lost their home to the fire in the Santa Cruz mountains last year. Like all of the stories of fire loss and the devastation forest fires bring, it is a heartbreaking story.

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

Think back to the last time you felt the anguish of an undeserved situation. A time when you were dealt a hand that didn't seem fair. Fair -- a word nature does not have in her vocabulary.

My body has been talking to me for a while.
Pains and symptoms that I tried to write off as perimenopause. Changes to my body odor. Autoimmune flare ups. And then there was The Nudge.

Happy New Year!

If you are a resolution-setting person, you’ve probably already created some intentions for the new year. As we know, the failure rate for New Year’s resolutions is reportedly somewhere between 50-70%. Those aren’t very good odds.

Aren’t our brains amazing?

How we tend to notice when a room is messy, but not when it's clean.
How a negative interaction with a loved one can amplify all their flaws.
When one small thing goes wrong in your day and you can't let it go and suddenly it feels like the whole day was terrible.

8 Keys to Healthy Eating

According to the system of Ayurveda, here’s how to keep your digestive fire, or agni, burning bright.

Here's how I've been feeling about the upcoming holiday season:

Anxious about uncomfortable conversations I need to have.
Grief and sadness over so much loss this year, as well as with the holidays.
Wanting to find ways to still connect with people and traditions and stay safe.

Obviously there are many things vying for our attention these days: social media, news sources, opinions of friends and family, unsolicited text and phone messages, mailings and advertisements of all kinds.

You might be thinking… with all the crises happening in the world, what I’m eating is not really the priority right now.

I agree that it might feel strange to sign on for something that seems so off-topic.

It’s the Autumn Equinox, the moment that marks marks the last day of the sun’s domination. While this is a time of abundance, from here out, slowly but surely, the nights will lengthen and the days will (eventually) get cooler.

Autumn is a tricky season for the digestive system, and with the stress of the pandemic along with puffy eyes and irritated sinuses from the smoke, our bodies could really use a re-set.

Grief is a funny thing.

There are many myths and misconceptions around grief and grieving, as well as incongruities in our thinking about it.

Here are a few things to chew on and help you spot any hidden Grief Beliefs:

How are you doing? What's happening in your world? What are you listening to, watching, reading? What's making your day better?

I have some announcements below, but first, a story.

If you are like me, on top of all of the other devastation last week from the California fires, your heart broke even more at the reports of California’s oldest redwood forest being destroyed in the blazes. Big Basin Redwoods State Park was described earlier this week as “gone.”