Come a little

Closer...

If you came to my house, you'd probably notice the sage first. Then the essential oils because they're everywhere. There are crystals, plants, books, notebooks and photographs throughout the house. A lot of the faces on my walls belong to people who have crossed over. Their photos remind us where we came from and somehow make them feel a little closer.

MY SUPPLEMENTS,

COOKING WITH WHOLE FOODS AND WALKS KEEP ME HEALTHY

I probably have a supplement for whatever you need. Seriously. Tell me what's going on and there's a decent chance I'll start digging through a cabinet. Health is one of those subjects I can talk about for hours, which probably isn't surprising considering my own history.

I cook every meal. I muscle test things all day long. I talk to Creator and my guides, and my son and I talk about our ancestors like they're still part of the conversation because, to us, they are.

I also work from home, which means I have to make myself get outside every day. Otherwise I'll suddenly realize I haven't left the house in three days and my friends are about to send out search and rescue. At some point during all of this, my son and I will probably argue about who forgot to fill the water filter.

This is pretty much my life, and I fucking love it.

MY FAVORITE HUMAN

LIVES ON THE OTHER SIDE OF MY BEDROOM WALL

My son is starting his senior year. He's autistic, scary smart, somewhere around a 140 IQ, sensitive, funny and my favorite person to hang out with. Autism is part of who he is, but we've never used it as a measuring stick for what he's capable of.

Learning is a big part of our house. He actually has more books than I do, which is saying something. At least once a day I'll wander into his room and just hang out for a while. He might be playing while I'm reading or watching a video. Sometimes we talk and joke around. Sometimes we're just sitting in the same room doing our own thing. I like that we don't always need a reason to spend time together.

MY TIME

BECAME A PRIORITY FOR MY SON

Years ago, my goal was simply to find work I could fit around my kid. I wanted summers with him, holidays, weekends, sick days, test days, milestones and all the ordinary days in between that you don't realize are going to matter until they're gone.

Somewhere along the way, something pretty cool happened.
I found work I genuinely love too. I wake up excited when I know I have clients the next day. Coaching gives me energy, especially after being home alone all day. I love the moment when someone realizes, “Holy shit. THAT'S why I keep doing this,” and suddenly all new doors open up for them. Maybe that's because I've spent most of my own life too focused on the gap and unable to appreciate the gain. Now I can.

MY CHILDHOOD

TURNED INTO AN ADULTING LESSON WAY EARLIER THAN I WOULD HAVE CHOSEN.

I learned the have to's, need to's and shoulds when I was still a kid. When I was 10 years old, my father died by suicide. I found him.

That morning changed everything. The house got quiet, the money disappeared and my mother's pain and anger became something I learned to navigate around. I became a latchkey kid who cooked, cleaned and figured out how to take care of things because things needed to be taken care of.

I also learned a lot of things I didn't know I was learning. I created rules about asking for help, about being strong, about needing people and about what I was responsible for. Those rules made perfect sense to a 10 year old girl trying to understand a world that had changed overnight.

MY INVESTMENT

IN LEARNING HAS CONTINUED OVER THE YEARS

By 1992, my boss Vinny had introduced me to personal development and Dr. Wayne Dyer. I loved Wayne Dyer. I understood what he was saying. I highlighted the shit out of his books, watched every PBS special and genuinely tried to apply what I was learning.

There was just one small problem. Understanding something and knowing how to actually live it turned out to be two very different things.

Apparently understanding Wayne Dyer and highlighting every damn page of his books wasn't enough to "The Secret" a house in Maui so I could swim in the ocean next to him.

I kept learning anyway. Ironic, considering I skipped most of high school.

And for years, that was kind of my relationship with personal development. I could understand the concepts. I could recognize myself in them. I could label what was happening and have plenty of those, “Okay, now what?” moments when knowing something still didn't seem to change it.

MY CHECKLIST LIFE

TURNED UPSIDE DOWN IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

Meanwhile, I built a corporate career, made good money, had a dog, got married, bought a house and became a mom. Yes, I LITERALLY HAD THE WHITE PICKET FENCE!!! From the outside, I had built the fairy-tale life we're told we're supposed to want.

Then life became a real fucking mess.

My mother died. I eventually found my footing again and had my son. Then he was diagnosed with multiple challenges. When things were manageable again, I got sick. Really sick. And just when I was coming to terms with what that might mean for my future, I found out my husband was leaving me for another woman. I was already five years into a ten-year prognosis and had started planning my funeral.

Then my husband denied our son's autism. Something in me changed. Whatever I believed about my own future, I knew my kid needed someone who saw him. Really saw him. I wasn't willing to leave this world without him having that person.
So I decided I wasn't going to die.

MY MINI REBELLION

CHANGED SO MANY THINGS, INCLUDING MY PERCEPTION

That's when I started questioning E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!!!

I started questioning doctors, prognoses, beliefs, my own conclusions and eventually the meaning I'd assigned to experiences that had happened years earlier. I became especially interested in the things I had stopped questioning altogether because somewhere along the way they had simply become true to me.

My health journey took me deeper into food, detoxification, essential oils, emotions, spirituality and the connections between all of them.

It also brought me right back to the question I'd been wrestling with since I first started reading Wayne Dyer.

I could understand something intellectually. I could name the pattern. I could know where it came from. I could even know exactly what I wanted instead.

So why the hell wasn't knowing enough to change it?

MY EVOLUTION

CONTINUES SINCE I'M STILL DOING THE WORK, TOO

I'm still in the trenches.

I wish I could tell you I finally have everything completely figured out. That I am now floating peacefully around my museum-styled house making perfectly aligned decisions while my guides whisper answers in my ear to questions I haven't even asked yet.

But.... I would be lying.

Old crap still comes up. Fear still has opinions. And yes, I still align my mother in every new uplevel. Apparently she has excellent job security.

The difference is that I'm better at noticing the speed bumps now. I recognize what happens inside me sooner, and when I see it, I have something I can do with it.

That's why I think of this work more like brushing your teeth than reaching some magical point where you're finally done. You can skip brushing your teeth. Nobody is going to come arrest you. But life tends to work a hell of a lot better when you do it consistently.

The stuff I'm aligning today is different from what I was aligning seven years ago. I hope seven years from now I've graduated to an entirely different set of speed bumps.

I want to keep learning because I love learning. (Value #2) I want to keep questioning what I think I know and discovering things I couldn't see before because I want to live my life on my terms. I want to see every corner of this world and everything in between, literally and figuratively, just because I can.

And I want my son beside me for as long as he'll tolerate me hanging around.

MY RIPPLE

BECAUSE WHAT I CREATE DOESN'T STOP WITH ME

That's what I'm building.

The world will have plenty of opinions about what an autistic kid can and cannot do, just like it did for a little Latina girl from a Puerto Rican family who spoke Spanish at home and English in school at a time it wasn't cool to be bilingual. I can't control that, and I don't particularly want to spend my life arguing with everyone who has an opinion.

I'd rather show him something different.

I can build work I love and still walk into his room in the middle of the afternoon just to hang out with my kid. I can spend summers with him. I can be there for test days, sick days and completely ordinary Tuesdays. (In case you haven't figured it out yet, value #1!) I can keep learning and teaching and building a life that gets bigger instead of editing it down to whatever feels reasonable.

And I can take him with me.

Travel is one of my three biggest values, after my kid, after learning. One gift my mom gave me was the joy of exploring new countries. And after my divorce, most of the traveling my son and I have done has been here in the States. I appreciate those memories, and I also want more. My ideal story includes seeing the world with him, experiencing places we've only read about and creating memories he'll still be talking about long after I'm one of the faces hanging on his walls.

Maybe that's the thread through all of this. My dad, my mom, my son, my clients and me. We're all making ripples in people and places we'll probably never completely understand.

At the end of my client calls, I usually tell them one thing:

Go make some ripples in the world.

I mean it.

And if something you've read here made you wonder whether the thing you think is keeping you stuck is actually the whole story, come spend five tiny days with me.

You might be surprised by what you see.

Join the 5-Day Tiny Challenge

Not What the Dr Ordered/Alchemizing Success