For a few years now I have been hosting a 30 Day Gratitude Challenge on my social media pages. This year has been a bit difficult for me, and I've decided I didn't want to do something if my heart wasn't fully in it. 

A few of you have reached out and expressed your gratitude over the previous year's challenges, so I thought I would share the prompts in case you were looking for some additional ways to look at gratitude in your life this year.

​People have been asking me about how I manage to live with chronic pain recently, so I figured I would compile some ideas and resources that have helped me on my journey. 

First, I need to note that I am not pain-free and don't believe I will ever be pain-free. That was the first obstacle that I had to address. For me and many others with complex chronic conditions, pain can be mitigated to an extent, but we may never reach a state of being completely pain-free. 

I'm not saying that to sound pessimistic, but realistic. It's not helpful to blindly believe that there is some cure-all remedy to make everything miraculously better. Pain cannot be prayed away, medicated away, or exercised away. Unfortunately, the human body is indeed failable, and we live in an imperfect world. These are simply facts.

One of the most important lessons I learned was that meditation looks different for everyone. Unfortunately, via modern media, we have been spoonfed this image of meditation only looking like sitting cross-legged, fingers pinched together, eyes closed, in a pristine and serene setting. While this sounds like a lovely and heartwarming experience, it is not something that most of us can achieve. 

A frequent conversation that I have with my clients is on how to reframe the idea of meditation. Many people think that they cannot meditate, which is simply untrue. We just don't know what to make of this foreign idea if we're not used to calm, quiet, and stillness. 

Below is an unpublished interview that discussing the importance and fallacies of meditation.