It's my motherf*cking 37th Birthday

Its my motherf*cking 37th birthday!

Aging is such a beautiful privilege. It’s truly a gift to have taken another trip around the sun. There are more white hairs on my head, wrinkles on my face, my skin is getting a little drier, and I can literally feel the weight of life on my body. This cake has a few more layers AND it’s all so beautiful and all so amazing.

The wise and wonderful Oprah once said, “Every year should teach you something valuable, whether you get that lesson it’s up to you. Every year gets you closer to expressing your whole and healed self.”

This year was challenging to say the least. I had no idea this year would be the year that would bring me some of the greatest life lessons I would learn and to be on a path of healing some of the deepest parts of my soul.

Lessons I’ve learned this year:

1. Trust my body’s wisdom. She is intelligent when she knows she knows. For years I didn’t trust my own body’s wisdom. Like most women, we’re told to listen to our intuition, but we’re not taught how to tune into the voices.

2. Communicating with radical honesty and transparency is hard, but it’s the only way to create change. I never realized how much I was a people pleaser when it came to communicating my needs. In the past, I would minimize my needs because I was too afraid of the other person’s reactions. The right people honor your needs.

3. When I ask for support, the people who are capable of offering will always be there. I have a deep wound around asking for help that I worked through in 2018 through the help of one of my partner’s. The moment I started to open up and as for support, it came flying in from the people who are able to offer it.

4. I am a really incredible coach/mentor/teacher. I had such a deep imposter syndrome around coaching even though I had been coaching women part-time for 3 years now. This year I decided to put more effort into coaching and pivot towards the direction I want to head towards and it’s been the most fulfilling feeling ever.

5. I am more capable than I give myself credit for. I can do hard things.

6. Honoring my own boundaries especially with loved ones is hard, but necessary. Asking for a divorce because my boundaries were crossed was the hardest thing to do, but it needed to happen.

7. Life is filled with pop quizzes. I always tell my clients that when you’re on a healing journey working on deep inner self, triggers will happen it’s part of life. You’re cruising along and life is like “Pop quiz motherf*cker! You like this trigger?” And it’s just to see how integrated you are with your shadows.

8. My body is so divine and I love every inch of my thickness. The relationship I have with my body has evolved over the years. Thanks to the pandemic I’m feeling more still than ever and also feeling really grounded in my body despite the added pounds. It’s a really good feeling to just allow my body to exist in her divine thickness.

9. I am incredibly compassionate, sometimes too much. I have a lot of compassion for humans and their human experience and sometimes that compassion is given at excess with no end in sight. I’m learning to find my compassion limit so that I don’t get compassion fatigue.

10. You can be in pain or heartbreak and still embody pleasure and joy. In the first 4 months after I told Jon I no longer wanted to be married, I sat deep in my pain pushing aside any sort of pleasure or joy that I would feel because so much of society tells us that divorce is painful, hard, and destructive. All of this is true I won’t deny any of it, but you can still lean into pleasure and joy as you go through the process of it all.

11. If you can radically accept yourself, friends and loved ones can too. As I’ve gotten older I’ve given less f*cks about censoring my life experience for other’s comfort. What I’ve been able to look back and recognize is the number of friends and the crazy support squad I’ve built simply by being me in all of my messy raw beautiful ways.

12. Your anger can be channeled and use for creativity and productivity. When anger speaks allow them to have a voice. My anger wants to be creative and produce and if that’s what she wants to do then I’m going to let her do it.

13. I LOVE helping women become more sexually liberated! I’ve found my purpose in life through all the pain and trauma I’ve experienced and it’s a true honor to be on this path,

14. Investing in your personal and professional growth is a must, but have a cap on it each year! I tend to gather lots of information thinking I need to learn more in order to get past my imposter syndrome, but the reality is I know a lot and it goes back to lesson number 5.

15. My daughters continue to be my greatest teachers in life. They are always there to keep me honest, guide me, and hold me accountable.

16. I am deserving of love that doesn't feel like a struggle because I have the ability to give myself that love. This was a really interesting lesson to learn for me. I grew up believing that all love is a struggle that marriage is hard and that relationships are meant to be a constant push and pull. That's not the case at all. The most loving and secure attachments make you feel safe.

17. You are worthy because you say it is so. Self worth cannot be verified by others. If you depend on others for your worth then its other-worth.

18. Guilt and worry are useless emotions. Guilt means you use your present moments being immobilized as a result of past behavior, while worry is the contrivance that keeps you immobilized in the now.

19. I have the right to change my mind anytime. For as long as I could remember I was always guilted about changing my mind in order to follow my heart and my body. This year I promised myself to no longer abandon my own wisdom.

20. The most beautiful and intimate sexual relationship is the one that I have with myself.