I'm recording this episode just a few hours after dropping my daughter off in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. And I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to put into words what the last several days of my life have felt like. Because I don't know that I've ever experienced so much love and gratitude and grief and beauty all at once.
I'm running on about four and a half hours of sleep. I'm about to start my period. I've traveled across the country twice in four days. I've celebrated my birthday, attended a funeral, spent time with some of the most extraordinary women I've ever known, spent two incredible days skating with our friend Mitchie Brusco, and just said goodbye to my sixteen-year-old daughter in the middle of the wilderness.
I have experienced so much beautiful, raw life in the last four days. So much going and doing and achieving, supporting and being supported, loving and being loved. And this morning, after all of that, I suddenly found myself alone in the vastness of Yellowstone, with miles and miles of wilderness between myself and home, and what a gift it was to have nowhere else to be but right there with myself.
To understand why that morning meant so much to me, I want to share a little of what life has looked like behind the scenes lately.
I've been in one of the most intense seasons I've ever experienced. And if I'm being completely honest, I've been struggling to find the balance between building something I love and actually being present in the life I love.
We've been rebuilding nearly every part of ōnlē.
An entirely new website. A completely rebuilt ōnlē Method course. New assessments, daily voice notes, customer education, product pages, emails, subscriptions, packaging, and so many little details that most people will probably never notice.
All while doing my best to stay consistent with the parts of my work that don't stop while we're rebuilding: recording these podcast episodes, publishing research-based articles, showing up for our community, and leading my team.
And I love this work. I love it with my whole heart and soul.
But I'm also a wife and a mother of four. We homeschool. Our days are full and beautiful and loud and busy. And sometimes I feel like I'm trying to live two lives at once.
One where I'm completely immersed in helping other families experience the same healing my own family did through rebalancing, and another where I just want to be a mother, a wife, and a woman who has time to enjoy the ordinary things.
And I've been recognizing something about myself that goes much deeper than loving my work or the way my ADHD brain works.
For much of my life, staying busy and being productive made me feel safe. And somewhere along the way, I started believing that if I could just finish everything, get everything right, and accomplish everything I envisioned, then I could finally rest.
Except there's always something else to do.
And I've been realizing that this goes so much deeper than how I spend my time. It's about the ways I've learned to protect myself, the ways I've kept myself busy without even recognizing what I might be avoiding feeling. And through all of the beautiful, incredibly deep work I've been doing on myself over this last year, I've started to understand what it really means to live my life with my heart wide open.
And I didn't even know my heart was closed.
I think we all experience things throughout childhood and throughout our lives that teach our nervous systems how to protect us. And those patterns become so familiar that we don't even recognize them.
But the more I've learned about my nervous system, the more I've become aware of all these ways I've been protecting myself, even from experiencing the fullness of my own life.
And I can trace so much of this transformation back to rebalancing my gut. Because before I could begin recognizing these patterns and changing the way I responded to my emotions, I needed to be able to hear myself. To feel what was happening inside of me.
Once my gut-brain connection became clear I could finally hear myself. I could finally feel the true depths of my feelings and be okay with them. I became deeply attuned to myself.
This is why so many women and children who rebalance experience such profound shifts in their emotional health. We hear it all the time, children who were having tremendous meltdowns several times a day going weeks or months without. Children who were never able to sleep for more than a few restless hours suddenly start sleeping all night long. Women who spent years feeling anxious, irritable, overstimulated, or constantly on edge describe feeling calmer, more patient, and more connected to themselves and their families.
I really want you to think about how significant your gut-brain connection is, and how profoundly it influences your mental and emotional well-being. If this is resonating with you, the 128-Day ōnlē Rebalance Method is linked for you in the show notes.
Because we're talking about changes that transform the way you experience motherhood, childhood, your relationships, and your everyday life. And I've been experiencing that in such a profound way myself.
And I think that's what's been so beautiful about these last few days. I've been able to experience all of it. The excitement, the love, the sadness, the gratitude. I've felt every bit of it.
I spent the beginning of the week in the Catskills in upstate New York with a group of women I've grown incredibly close to over the last year. These are women who lead rapidly growing, high-impact businesses, who are so bravely and unapologetically pursue their life purpose. But what I love most about them has nothing to do with their businesses. It's how pure and raw and vulnerable we can be together. There isn't a single thing anyone is uncomfortable talking about, and I think it's the first time in my adult life, maybe ever, that I've felt completely safe in sisterhood.
We stayed in this magnificent home with enormous windows overlooking the most beautiful fall foliage I have ever seen. We went hiking together beneath the enormous trees with their orange and golden leaves, and at one point we were all lying on the ground, hugging the soft moss, with leaves literally raining down around us. It was pure magic to be in their presence and love and be loved, see and be seen, support and be supported.
I flew home late Saturday and got home at 1:30 in the morning, and then spent Sunday and Monday with our dear friend Mitchie Brusco, who, if you are in the skateboard world, you know Mitchie. He came to spend two days skating with us in the barn we've just built, and it was such a special couple of days together.
After skating on Monday we flew to Salt Lake City for Ty's grandmother's funeral.
She was ninety-seven, and it was such a beautiful celebration of her life. Her funeral happened to land on my 39th birthday, and because of that, my whole family ended up together when we'd originally expected our daughter to be away on her school expedition.
It was all so beautiful. Being loved so deeply by these women, spending such special time with Mitchie and my family, celebrating Ty's grandma's life, and having my entire family together. And what I've realized is that we don't have to separate the joy from the sadness. We can feel both. We can celebrate someone's life and grieve their passing. We can feel incredibly happy watching our children grow and still feel the ache of knowing how quickly it's happening.
Tuesday night, after the funeral and what turned out to be one of my favorite birthdays of my life, my daughter and I hopped on a plane home. And after just four and a half hours of sleep, we woke up and headed into Yellowstone to meet up with her school.
And oh my gosh, it was magical.
There was a light covering of snow on the ground, these enormous dark clouds with brilliant splashes of blue peeking through, and we saw the most beautiful trumpeter swan, a red fox crossing the road right in front of us, so many elk and their sweet babies, bison, a bald eagle. On the drive my daughter shared her favorite songs with me, told me what the lyrics meant to her, and read me the stories and poems she'd written in her creative writing class.
One of her poems talked about how childhood doesn't keep.
And those words just swallowed me. Because childhood doesn't keep. My children are growing up right in front of me, and I want to be fully present for every beautiful bit of it.
We finally found her school, deep in the heart of Yellowstone, I helped her get settled, listened to a little of their lesson about wolves, gave her a hug, and left.
And suddenly, there I was. Completely alone in the vastness of Yellowstone National Park.
I hadn't thought about what would happen after I dropped her off. I'd been so fully immersed in everything I'd been experiencing over the last several days. And suddenly, here I was, surrounded by miles and miles of wilderness, with no service, and all of that gratitude and love and sadness came pouring out of me.
I started crying enormous, heaving tears that overtook my whole body. And I just let myself cry. I let it all come out as I drove toward home, and about thirty minutes later, I felt magnetically pulled toward the Mud Volcano pull out.
I got out of my car and started walking along the boardwalk, breathing in that incredible sulfur smell coming up from the earth, watching the steam rise and the mud bubble and churn beneath the surface.
And suddenly, the tears came pouring out of me again. I sat down on the boardwalk, completely overcome with emotion, and I knew exactly why I'd been drawn to this place. Here was this magnificent earth source energy, this life source energy, literally bubbling up from deep within the earth.
And it was exactly what was happening inside of me.
All of this beautiful, raw life I'd experienced over the last four days was coming to the surface, and I was allowing myself to feel every bit of it.
And I thought about how differently I would have experienced this moment not very long ago. I would have dropped my daughter off and immediately turned on a podcast or an audiobook. I would have completely overridden my body's need to process everything I'd just experienced by learning something new or disappearing into a different world in a book.
But today, I didn't need to do that.
I needed to cry. I needed to walk. I needed to smell the sulfur coming out of the earth and watch that bubbling spring. I needed to feel what needed to be felt.
Because something I've learned through all of this work is that feelings need to be felt. And a lot of times they're uncomfortable. But the more we meet ourselves in those moments, the more we allow those feelings to move through us instead of constantly distracting ourselves from them, the more deeply connected we become to ourselves.
I think one of the most powerful things I've learned this last year is that living with an open heart is a choice we get to make. We all experience pain and hurt, and we develop ways of protecting ourselves. But we also get to take responsibility for our heart space moving forward.
That's a choice I've made this last year that's forever changed my life.
And I want you to think about this in your own life. How often are you so busy getting through your day, taking care of everyone, doing all the things that need to be done, that you don't even recognize what you're feeling? How often do you distract yourself from the uncomfortable things, or put off actually enjoying your life until everything is finally done?
Your children are growing. Your life is happening. There is so much beauty available to you in the ordinary moments, and there is so much to be learned from the uncomfortable ones.
I hope you'll give yourself permission to feel all of it. To notice where you've been protecting yourself, to get curious about what you're afraid to feel, and to begin opening your heart to the life you're already living.
Because childhood doesn't keep. And neither does your beautiful life.
I love you, my friend. Thank you for being here with me today.
