What do you do when you feel like you are doing everything right and nothing is happening? How do you keep going when you feel like you are at your very best, but life just doesn’t seem to be giving you a break? These are hard questions to answer and ones I struggled with for years. In some ways I still do from time to time. 

The years I was raising my young boys were the hardest. I am an introvert by nature and the physical demands of having young kids were difficult for me to navigate. Add to that starting a career and living in a difficult marriage. The days were long and difficult. I know so many women who can relate. We want to be all things to all people. We want to be supermoms, have a happy marriage and build our careers all at the same time. 

Most of us weren’t raised to know how to take care of ourselves first and connect with others and our purpose from a place of overflow. As women, we are culturally and generationally taught that meeting others’ needs before our own is the only acceptable way to be a woman. Depleting ourselves of all our energy and resources so we operate as a shell of the woman we could be. We move into resentment and stay in our survival stress response mode most of the time. 

However, there is a new generation of women who are deciding that living overwhelmed in our stress response mode is NOT the way we want to live. We want to be connected to who we are and live life to our highest potential. Many of us don’t really even know what our greatest potential or capacity is, but we want to challenge ourselves to see how far we can go. How high we can reach, and not from a masculine, overworking and over achieving standpoint. Instead, from a centered and grounded place. We desire to be fully connected to ourselves and express ourselves as fully alive. We understand that when we learn to connect with ourselves and who we are, find peace within, and create our own rules for how we live life, EVERYONE wins. When we are alive and full of hope and joy then we become moms who inspire our kids and offer them the gift of full self-expression as well. We become creative and energized in our jobs. We work in a way that suits us rather than how someone dictates we should. We are discovering that we are more productive than we ever could have been in traditional roles. We have marriages and partnerships with joy and passion. This is because we are ALIVE instead of half asleep just existing in life, living by other people’s rules and standards. 

I don’t think of these shifts as right or wrong. That doing this or that is wrong and this or that is right. I think of it in terms of living your life asleep or awake. Going through the motions of all the shoulds, rather than waking up and deciding to live life the way you intuitively feel is best for you. We were each born with gifts, talents, preferences, and creative resources. One thing that living all over the world has taught me is how much our culture influences what we perceive as right or wrong. How much our culture influences what we perceive God says is good or bad. We are much more free than we think. The Universe/God/Your guiding light wants to partner with you in the creation of a magnificent life. Why would we be put on this earth to struggle and suffer? Why would we be put here to only use our minds and physical reality as our source? We have access to an infinite resource of abundance, joy, adventure, fun… LIFE. 

My challenge today is to consider opening yourself up to the everpresent energy of abundant life that already exists all around you. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and center your focus on your heart center. As you take deep breaths, picture the light within you getting brighter and expanding, to connect with your mind, then your whole body. If thoughts pop in about the grocery list, an email you need to respond to, or an appointment to make for the kids, this is normal. We are used to allowing our minds to override the sense of being that we all have access to. The more minutes we can just sit in being with ourselves and the loving light that is present within us, the more we get to know who we are, and what our purpose is. We can anchor ourselves to peace. Have something beside you to jot down the things that pop into your mind, so you can let them go and return to sitting in peace. Continue to take deep breaths and just be. From this place inspiration comes. From this place peace is present. From this place you can handle the moments when your kid has big feelings. From this place you can handle your stressed out spouse who you are struggling to connect with. From this place you can know what the next steps are at work that will inspire you. From this place and only this place will you be able to curate a life you love to live. 

Following other people’s rules, muscling up and overworking from your head, and continuing to move forward in a way that makes everyone else happy, but leaves you miserable, will only lead to more suffering and disappointment. I know it feels the opposite. I know it is easier to stay quiet. I know it seems scary to speak up and say you aren’t happy. I know. I’ve been there. I’ve also lived the part where I didn’t speak up and it all blew up in my face anyway. It all came crashing down because I wasn’t living in authenticity of who I am, who I am created to be. Staying quiet and keeping your head down will buy you a little more time, but it just makes the undoing harder and messier with time. 

Maybe you can avoid the big crash by taking a few moments each day to connect with your heart center and allow yourself to just be. Maybe it is just small incremental changes that need to happen that will add up over time, and allow you to see your way out of the sadness and disappointment you feel. What I know for sure is that even if the choices you need to make are big and scary, they will feel doable when you are connected with yourself and at peace. I am here to help as many women as I can connect with their heart, understand how incredibly loved they are, and learn to partner with the ever-present energy of love, all to help you live your life fully awake and alive, just as we were each created to do.