Imagine this...

You are born an innocent, adorable little baby entering this world with inherent worthiness of love, without having to do anything to earn or deserve affection. Imagine you grew up feeling loved and safe, yet empowered to test boundaries and explore new realms. When you inevitably got hurt in your exploration, you were met with an encouragement to express your pain, and a comforting reassurance that you will be okay. You were taught that pain is a part of life and getting hurt is not something we have to be afraid of because we are strong and can handle it. 

You were pushed to work hard for what you want, building a work ethic, confidence, and pride in your ability to make things happen. You were encouraged to fail often because it means you are taking risks, putting yourself out there and on the path to succeeding. Your unique talents, passions and interests were championed, encouraged, and celebrated, allowing you to forge a unique path, authentic to who you are and what lights you up. You went on to study things in school that interested you and forged a career path that is meaningful and fun, without a care or concern for what other people think.

Your dedication to embark on purposeful and passionate endeavors, develop your skills fully, take risks, put yourself out there, fail, keep going, ask for help, receive constructive criticism, learn, grow, pivot, innovate, and evolve, leads to incredible financial success and professional fulfillment. You continue to grow and push your boundaries your whole life, leading to perpetual passion, aliveness, and pride. 

Your genuine confidence and happiness allow you to open up and connect with people easily and effortlessly. You foster a vast community woven with genuine and deep relationships with people mutually supporting and caring about one another— feeling a profound sense of belonging and love. Your wellspring of innate security, joy, and abundance allows your cup to spill over onto others, freely sharing support, warm smiles, and random acts of kindness with both strangers and loved ones alike. When people you know hurt you, you talk about it with them openly and honestly, working through your differences, and growing together.

You wake up with excitement for your day and go to sleep with peace and fulfillment, knowing it was a day well spent. When your life is done one day, you smile knowing you left it all on the field and made the most of the time you were given. You lived, you loved, you mattered, and now you are ready for the next great adventure.

It is likely your life experience feels vastly, and maybe even laughably, different than this idyllic picture. In fact, it may feel something more like this…

You are born an innocent, adorable little baby entering this world with inherent worthiness of love. But soon you learn that affection must be earned. Early in your childhood development, you begin to study your parents, learning which behaviors please them, earn their affection, and create peace in your home. And conversely, you learn which behaviors seem to lead to disapproval, abandonment, or volatility. You internalize a deep fear that you aren’t enough and won’t be loved unless you can perform in all the right ways.

You go on to lead a life determined to prove your significance. You study things in school and choose a career path that you think will make your parents proud, earn lots of money, sound impressive to your friends or just feels safe, never considering what you enjoy. Soon you feel the pressure to settle down, get married, buy a house, maybe have a few kids—so that’s what you do. You work hard and achieve some degree of success and feel like you “should” be happy with your life, but deep down you feel a profound sense of unfulfillment, wondering “Is this it? Is this all there is?”

Your seeking of external validation creates patterns of people pleasing, social anxiety, and a life-long performance of who you think you need to be to be liked and loved. All of which leave you feeling some degree of exhausted, insecure, bitter, unworthy, anxious, alone, and uncared for.

You look at other people’s lives on social media and it feels like you are behind. It feels like you should be better, life should be more than what it is. You feel the potential within you for so much more than this. You fantasize about changing careers, changing spouses, changing addresses, changing yourself in some sort of way that just seems better.

You have lots of ideas. You set lots of goals and make lots of plans and do lots of research and think about it all a LOT… but alas nothing ever actually changes. You can never quite seem to take action or put yourself out “there.” At least not long enough to be successful. And so you remain stuck in analysis paralysis, perpetually planning to start, trapped in a purgatory between being fully here and somewhere else, enslaved by the never-ending obligations and responsibilities of your life.

You have lots of stories and excuses about why you can’t and haven’t done anything to change, but deep down you know the truth… you’re afraid. Afraid to make a mistake. Afraid to fail. Afraid to let people down. Afraid to make the wrong choice. Afraid to start over. Afraid of what people will think. Afraid of rejection, abandonment, looking stupid. Afraid you are wasting your life. Afraid you are going to die alone. Afraid of pretty much everything. Ultimately, afraid that you aren’t enough and won’t be loved.

And so you remain stuck in your familiar and comfortable routine, hidden away from the world, choosing the familiar pain of your present circumstances over the uncertain abyss beyond what you’ve known. You beat yourself up for your failure to change and for settling for this mediocre existence, gathering further evidence to support your deep-seated fear that you are not good enough.

The inner screaming of your soul that you are wasting your life manifests as anxiety, trying to wake you up to make a change. But that internal alarm is quieted by a blanket of helplessness and hopelessness called depression. And here you remain, swaddled in apathy, sucking on your chosen pacifier of comfort to get you through each day.

You’ve found enough sources of pleasure to numb, distract and escape from your pain— whether it be endless busyness, food, alcohol, pain pills, weed, shopping, video games, online puzzles, extramarital affairs, social media scrolling or Netflix binging.

These coping mechanisms provide just enough pleasure to dampen the pain of disappointment, loneliness and self-loathing that may otherwise motivate you to make a change and grow beyond your current circumstances and limitations. These low-quality sources of pleasure provide a temporary high, followed by a comedown and feeling even worse about yourself and your life, creating a downward spiral taking you further and further away from the person you might have been and the life you might have had.

Other people trigger you easily and often, causing you to either erupt in anger and meanness, hurting the people you love; or you go cold and pull away— protecting yourself and hurting them silently with your withholding of love. You pass along the pain you feel inside like a contagious pandemic, until eventually it seems that all people suffer from the affliction of being a selfish asshole. Believing that all people suck, you seek further refuge in the cozy isolation of your nest at home.

You put your head down and do what you have to do to get by. The days, months, and years blow by in a monotonous blur that feels like blink, until one day you lift your head up from the hamster wheel you’ve been mindlessly running on and realize you’ve reached the end. You are flooded with regret for all the things you wish you would have done differently. You wasted the precious time you were given just existing and settling for the distraction of entertainment instead of the rapture of aliveness that existed just outside your comfort zone. You didn’t live, you didn’t love, and you didn’t matter— and even though you aren’t ready, now it’s over. You are being forced to exit your life much the same way you lived it—feeling terrified, inadequate, and powerless.

Unless, of course, you decide to take your pen and rewrite the end of your story.

You cannot change the beginning. Your parents and your childhood were what they were and it’s not worth wasting any more energy wishing they could have or should have been different. You cannot change your past, but you sure as hell have the power to change your future. At any moment, you can choose to step up and step out of your comfort zone. You can break free from the fear, insecurity, limitations, and other dysfunctional patterns you inherited. You can start living the life deep down inside you know is possible. A life full of passion and purpose and love. A life where you feel confident and fearless, and worthy. A life that ends with no regrets.

Much love,

The Downward Cycle of Addiction: A Personal Story

I was sitting alone in my car in a Ralph’s grocery store parking lot, busting open a box of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, when suddenly there was a knock on my driver side window. Startled, I looked up to see a man in his 50’s I didn’t recognize peering in at me. I cracked my window an inch, as it appeared he wanted to tell me something. 

He leaned down and said with disgust, “You can’t wait until you get home to gorge yourself with food?”

I was shocked. My face turned hot with a mix of anger and shame. The nerve of this asshole to say something like that to me!? Usually when people are disrespectful, I can’t help but clap back with some bitchy response to put them in their place. But I was so shocked and embarrassed that I just silently rolled up the window and drove home in tears.

The truth is, no—I couldn’t wait to gorge myself; I felt addicted to food. I was inhaling those cookies in the car that day with the same fever as a meth addict tweaking for a fix. And of course, I felt deeply ashamed and trapped in a cycle I didn’t know how to break free from.

Every morning I woke up with a renewed optimism and conviction that TODAY was THE day! I was going to eat totally clean and finally lose the weight so I could start my life. I would spend an hour cutting up all sorts of vegetables and fruit and push them through my juicer, stocking gallons of fresh juice in my fridge—which I planned on being the only thing I consumed for at least a week to jumpstart my weight loss. I called this a “cleanse” to feel better about starving myself.

But every day in the late afternoon, as my work was winding down, my determination waned and my cravings took over. I would feel an overwhelming compulsion to curl up on my couch, watch a movie and fill myself with the comfort of delicious food as a reward for a hard and productive day.

I would reassure myself that I would “start again tomorrow,” as I dialed the number to my favorite Chinese restaurant. I was so ashamed about how much food I ordered, I often pretended there was someone else there to share it with me.  

“Hold on one second…” I would say to the woman on the phone.

“Do you want a brownie?” I pretended to say to my invisible boyfriend. 

“Really!?” I fake-laughed in response to his ridiculous request. 

“OK…” I would tell the woman on the other end of the line, “He wants a brownie AND a cookie!” making fun of his gluttony.

When the delivery man arrived, I would turn on the shower before I opened the door so that he wouldn’t think I was alone, and all this food was just for me. 

This cycle continued every day for months; Months turned into years. Hidden in a cocoon of shame, I made sure that nobody knew what was going on behind the closed doors of my fabulous loft. The world just assumed I was fabulous; Thriving; Loving life. And that’s how I wanted it. 

I needed people to be impressed with me. I wanted people to feel envious of my “sexy, single lifestyle.” I never opened up to people to tell them I was struggling. After all, I’m the life coach; I’m the rock and the fixer; I’m the one to whom people turn for support and inspiration. Why would they listen to me if I too, was a mess?  I didn’t want to burden my loved ones with the uncertainty that the knowledge that their source of certainty was broken would instill. So, I put on makeup to cover the cracks and a happy smile to mask the pain, and all the world saw was a care-free veneer of perfection.

I was trapped in a paradox of my own making: I couldn’t put myself “out there” socially, professionally or romantically until I lost weight.  But I couldn’t lose weight because food was the only source of pleasure in my life. 

And this was the holding pattern I wasted years stuck in, all the while planning and preparing to start living the life I had dreamed of; the life I pinned pretty pictures of on Pinterest and made vision boards galore. The life I visualized, planned, set endless goals to achieve and tried my damndest to manifest, but never could seem to take meaningful, consistent action to create. Starting, but always falling back even further, it felt like there was an invisible forcefield I just couldn’t seem to break though.

The depression of loneliness turned to anxiety as the fear that my life was being wasted blasted its warning siren. I couldn’t sleep. The voice inside of me was screaming at me—at how ridiculous it all was. “Just do something you idiot!”

But I couldn’t. I was impotent, paralyzed in place. I hated myself for my failure to change my life. I was so utterly stuck. . . isolated. And it felt like I was slowly dying. 

As I write about this now, it seems like a different life, and a completely different person than who I am today. 

Now I feel strong and healthy and genuinely happy and free. I have finally become the person I always wanted to be, and I have a life even greater than the one I used to pin from my couch. I travel all over the world and work from anywhere I want. My clients are some of the most impressive and inspiring people to walk the earth— from celebrities and professional athletes to CEO’s of huge brands. I wake up watching the sunrise over the ocean from my bed, next to a gorgeous husband and two adorable dogs. Oh, and I finally got on a scale after forgetting about such silly notions as caring what you weigh—and it turns out I’m at my previous goal weight, without juice cleansing, starving or even dieting at all! 

But the way that I finally broke free and got here was not at all what I thought it would take.

I thought that I would discipline myself and work hard enough to one day achieve the perfect body, and then I would feel confident putting myself out there to achieve fame and fortune, and THEN I would be irresistible to a man and worthy of the love I craved. . .and then I would feel I was enough. 

But I had it completely backwards. All of those things finally and effortlessly came to me when I learned how to love myself— which ironically meant I stopped needing these things to happen. 

Deepak Chopra says: “Fulfillment is the state of needing nothing because you are enough in yourself.”

And that’s what happened. . . Through a series of synchronistic life events, I learned how to feel I was enough and fulfilled within myself, without requiring success, a man to love me or achieving my goal body weight.

And in the greatest irony of life, when I stopped needing these things, they effortlessly happened. I finally manifested everything I wanted and much, much more.

Much Love,