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I AM NOT A VICTIM OF MOTHERHOOD

Sometimes inspiration comes when you're on your knees in prayer; sometimes it comes as a whisper to your soul, from scripture, or from the words of a kind friend. Other times it flows from the tip of a pen onto a piece of a paper. That was how it came to me just a couple of weeks ago. As I sat up on a Sunday night planning my personal calendar and my meal plan calendar for the upcoming week, a simple sentence entered my mind and flowed out onto my paper as flowingly as anything could possibly flow: I am not a victim of motherhood. That was it. There was nothing overtly flashy about that piece of inspiration. However, I had been entertaining thoughts lately about how I want to focus more on 'Rachael as a mother'--to develop that part of me- for the benefit of my children and myself.   I have spent the last couple of years fighting to figure out how to just survive and take care of my mental and physical health and well being. I needed to figure out how to heal my bo
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Recent posts

Peace in the Corpse Pose

Happy Hearts Month! It's February! I'm excited- I love Valentine's Day. It might be because I love chocolate...but I also just love love .  A few weeks ago I finished a book called "Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses" . It's the story of one woman's life and how the discovery and practice of yoga (including meditation and breath control) impacted the way she navigated anxiety, marriage, motherhood, a career, and being an adult human. She talks about the balancing act of life as a work-from-home mom; how she endured the early years of motherhood and the struggle with expectations and comparison that women have somehow created. (All of which life coaching deals with head-on! See my friends Hannah , Jody , and Brooke !) I had so many flashes of empathy while listening to this on audio book. SO many of the experiences she talked about were things that I have been through, seen, felt or thought. And yet, many of them were things that I have not had
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New Year. New You??

Happy 2018!  Here I am! Having survived a new years nightmare of sickness in my family, I'm alive and kicking..sort of. I have had so many thoughts lately about newness and starting over and new things, you know, in preparation for the new year. It was especially exciting to me that the new year started on a Monday so I could start a new week with all the new and wonderful things I was going to do in 2018. Since it didn't quite work out that way, I had to let all that go. I have just been doing what I can do and letting everything else be what it is.  After listening to several amazing podcasts by Brooke Castillo I wanted to do my own little 'year in review'. What did I do, endure or accomplish in 2017? What are my goals for 2018? If you listen to Brooke's podcast about her year in review and her new year in review, you'll notice she speaks about the future as if it has already happened. This is a fabulous way to think! I highly recommend you check it out a
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Guess what??!

Did you know that we all have the same 24 hours in each day??? I have really been focusing on this idea when my coaches talk about the idea of "being busy". They repeatedly remind us that "busyness" is a thought, not a circumstance. Aside from that, you can only even do one thing at a time , so even if you are busy it doesn't matter because you can only do what you can do in a single moment. There are tons of people in this great big world that wear their busyness as a badge of honor; sometimes we even use it as an excuse for why we don't want to do something or can't possibly do something. If I'm being honest, I have to admit to doing all of these things at least a few times in my life, especially as an adult. Over the last couple of years though, since I've decided to live my life more intentionally, I've developed more of a sense of doing things because I want to do them, not out of obligation. If it's something that I care about or wa
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Opposition, my Friend

Life is a funny thing some times. For the last month or so I have been all over the place (in a non-literal way). My brain has been in a huge fog of thoughts that I haven't been able to pin down. Sometimes they feel clear and intelligent, but other times they are just messy and irrational. It's a strange feeling and I'm wondering if it's my body's way of giving me heck. It also causes me to wonder if this is something that so-called 'crazy' people go through before they have a major break down. Either way, I'm getting through it, one day at a time. I'm also hoping that writing will help condense the fog into some kind of intelligent clarity rain drops or something.... Here I am! Showing up! In full force.  I want to tell you about a challenge I have joined with a coach named Molly Phair . This is a 6 week challenge ("rock your body-holiday version") and it requires participants to track things like nutrition, exercise, and a variety of
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The Gift of being Present

Our family gets to celebrate birthdays for five months in a row every year, beginning with July and ending in November, just in time for Christmas. I grew up with a lot of birthday celebrating. Being a twin, there were two of us, so most of the time we had big parties with our friends and a separate family party because of our large extended family. It was great! Twice the cake, twice the fun, twice the love! As a parent, I do birthdays a little differently, and by differently, I mean I have no exact way whatsoever. I watch some of my amazing friends do these fantastic decorations and surprises and I love it! But that's where it sort of ends for me. I'm thrilled for my friends and their kids, that they make the time to do that stuff, don't get me wrong, I love it, but it doesn't work out that way for me. Somehow it seems that there is always something happening in our lives to round out the beginning and end of a birthday week or month and it ends up taking priority o
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Endure the Excursion with Gratitude

My life has undergone a few changes in the last few weeks. Our family has relocated and is in the beginning stages of establishing our own business. We are completely readjusting and starting over. It's a wonderful opportunity for all of us and we couldn't be more grateful. In fact, I spent the first several days feeling little else except gratitude and amazement at the innumerable blessings I have been given in my life. I know without a doubt that God prepared the way for my family to come to this new place in our lives and even though it won't be easy, I'm looking forward to the journey.  Gratitude is an incredible thing. There is something about counting your blessings that brings about a tremendous sense of love and humility. Since we moved we have 'graduated' from grad school and student life and come to a place where we need a more spacious home to maintain our business and family (and the minor detail that small towns don't exactly have easy to find
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