Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Ferris Bueller

I mean… he was right. And the last five or so years of my life has definitely proven that.

Life sure is a domino effect, isn’t it? One thing leads to another, leads to another, and then you look back and it is nothing like you thought it would be. And mine is no exception.

I am a big believer in we manifest what we believe we deserve in life. So everything that happens leading up to the change, and even after the shift was all an act of manifestation.

I also believe that sometimes we have to go through the darkness to walk into the light. And so this is the story of some of the darkness I have walked through in the last few years.

I never intended to take a long sabbatical from blogging, but it happened. Just like I never intended to move from the creek. We spent almost 18 years living there and I thought it would be our forever home.

We spent all those years remodeling to make the house exactly as we wanted it, never once thinking about the resale value of the choices we made. We just did what we loved. Luckily that one worked out pretty well.

For several of those “silent years,” I was a rep in a direct sales company. I did a little here on the blog about it, but it never really felt like it fit, so I eventually stopped posting about it. But I did get sucked into that pyramid scheme life. Financially it was a solid choice, I made a lot of money, made a lot of friends and had all the accolades that went with it.

From the outside looking in, it seemed like I was the poster child of MLM success. I went on trips all over the place, bought the fancy house where the success stories seem to live, and even cut my hair like the rest of the cult. Let’s be clear – it is a cult.

And I had no idea I had gotten in over my head. The truth behind the story is that I already had a very successful and large following on social media, with over a million followers online before I drank the kool-aid. So the “model” was already skewed from the get-go.

I had a very successful blog, working with brand partnerships, and even had a published book. So all the things it looked like the MLM world brought me? I already had them. But the one thing blogging didn’t have (and how the cult sucked me in) was sisterhood. Sisterhood for a group of women that I felt like supported me, encouraged me and even admired me. Because I was lost and miserable on my own.

I will say, though, even with all of the dark parts of the capitalistic cult, I do have reasons why I am glad that I went through it. I have found that almost every bad thing that’s ever happened in my life was a set up for something better. And this was no exception.

Without the cult, I wouldn’t have found an amazing customer who turned into my therapist. Without the cult, I wouldn’t have found a business coach that showed me the real-time results of therapy, and inspired me to take action on hiring that therapist when the universe sent me a sign.

Without the cult, I wouldn’t have fallen into such a deep, dark hole that I had to claw my way out. And in doing that, I also found clarity in the fact that I went through that so I could show other women the way out of the same darkness that I found myself in.

Going through it was incredibly hard – but it was the catalyst for why I leaned into figuring out how I could make life soft.

Because I am nothing if not a rebel. I was made to be the polar opposite of what folks expect me to be.

So I learned to be softer and kinder to myself as a rebellion of the hell that I went through in the darkness.

In finding my way to a softer life, I released so much of what looks like success from the outside:

• I sold my brand new BMW car that I rarely ever drove to buy a vintage VW bug… my dream car.
• I sold a brand new house that was in the “perfect” neighborhood to buy a house no one would buy.
• I cleared out all of the “business casual” outfits that hustle culture sold me and replace them with thrifted dresses that look like they were donated by Stevie Nicks.
• I grew out the “cult cut” – an asymmetrical bob – to let my hair grow long and be wild.
• I let go of the opinions of others and found my own voice.
• I stopped people pleasing, started setting boundaries, and pissed a lot of folks off along the way.
• I quit trying to be the “good girl” and started being authentically me, flaws on full display.
• I lost the mask of trying to keep it “all together” and embraced my unique individuality
• I stopped eating my feelings, started journaling and lost 120 pounds.
• I walked away from religion all together and deconstructed all the trauma it caused me.
• I cast off the weight of other people’s opinions and started focusing on my damn self.

In other words, I let go of all the things that were “SUPPOSED” to make me happy, and just started doing what TRULY makes me happy.

And I can’t believe it took me so long to get to that point!

When the company fired me back in April, I was ecstatic! Everyone around me was shocked, angry or sad.

Me? I was FREE! Free to do what I wanted without a single second lost worrying about who was saying what behind my back. Free to be myself again.

So how did I do all that?

Well first, I went to therapy. Intense therapy. And I worked through a TON of the trauma that I had been through in my life. Poverty trauma, religious trauma, mental, physical and emotional trauma.

I had been to a psychiatrist years before and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Turns out, I didn’t have that after all. I had PTSD and ADHD. That was fun. (note the sarcasm).

When I figured that out, though, lots of research helped me realized that brains with PTSD are literally wired differently. It’s almost like they have a protection mode against happiness. Then I fell down a very long rabbit hole to figuring out how to rewire my body and brain so that I could actually receive and remain in the season of joy and calmness I so desperately wanted, yet always felt alluded me.

And then my world changed. Because I gained understanding, I could change my thoughts, which eventually changed my life.

I could go on and on for days, but essentially I learned this:

Being born into a cycle of trauma created an addiction to adrenaline from infancy. And that addiction created a life that was rife with chaos, all in an effort to keep me in the cycle of chaos and feed the addiction. Essentially, subconsciously I made my life harder so I could keep up with the supply of adrenaline that my body was accustomed to.

What did that look like?

• Losing my keys so I would be late, which fueled created adrenaline.
• Picking fights with my husband because I was a tiny bit irritated over something… which created more adrenaline.
• Overeating to shove down my feelings and avoid them, which created self-loathing… a huge creator of adrenaline.
• Forgetting things constantly, which always created more stress and, yes, adrenaline.
• People pleasing so much that I had created a life that I dreaded each day.
• Taking responsibility for how everyone around me felt, and people pleasing to try and fix it.

When I realized this and looked back over my life, I realize that it was scattered with the fallout of that one simple biological need: Creating chaos to create adrenaline.

So I set out on a quest to change that. And those things have changed my entire life. From one that feels overwhelmed with stress, anxiety, shame and exhaustion, to one where some days I feel overwhelmed from the joy, peace and pure abundance in my life.

I felt like I had broken a curse. Which is why I wrote an ebook all about it, to help you break the curse, too.

Breaking the Curse: the magic of soft living when life feels too hard is my love letter to the women who feel broken in life. It’s the book I wish I had found when I began this journey.

I spent years researching all the science behind why this all works, how use simple, effective techniques without spending a fortune on “supplements” to help you reset your brain and body. How to break the curse and how to step into a life that feels like magic.

Because I have no better way to describe it. My own journey, plus the results of hundreds of my students, reflects the life-changing results.

So if you want to let go of a life that feels hard and fall into a life that feels soft…

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE YOUR COPY