The Grace & Grit Podcast challenges conventional narratives about women's health and body image. Host Courtney Townley encourages listeners to replace aggressive demands and unrealistic expectations with love and respect. The show helps women rebuild their relationship with their body and rethink the female health story.
Episodes
Episode 717: The Exhaustion of Being the Reliable One
I know this role well: the capable one. The woman who figures it out. Makes the call. Remembers the details. Handles the logistics. Notices what everyone else missed. The one people trust because, somehow, she always gets it done. Being capable is a wonderful thing—until capability quietly turns into responsibility for everything. In this episode, we're looking at the hidden cost of becoming the p
Episode 716: You Don't Have to Solve Everything Today
Some problems have solutions. And some problems simply don't have solutions yet. That distinction can be incredibly difficult to tolerate when your brain wants certainty, closure, and a plan. So we think harder. Analyze longer. Run through every possible scenario. And sometimes make decisions simply because not knowing feels unbearable. In this episode, we're exploring what it means to let somethi
Episode 715: What Are You Carrying That Isn't Yours?
There's a difference between loving someone and assuming responsibility for their experience. A very big difference. And yet many of us have spent years picking up other people's worry, disappointment, decisions, struggles, and emotions as though caring about someone requires carrying whatever they're carrying too. In this episode, we're looking at the emotional weight that doesn't actually belong
Episode 714: Your Attention Is More Valuable Than You Think
There is an extraordinary number of people, platforms, problems, and algorithms competing for your attention every single day. And most of them are very good at getting it. The question is whether they deserve it. In this episode, we're talking about attention as one of your most valuable personal resources and what can happen when you become more intentional about where you direct it. Because wha
Episode 713: Why You Need More White Space in Your Life
A piece of music without rests isn't richer because every second contains sound. Eventually, it just becomes noise. Life isn't all that different. Yet we've become remarkably skilled at filling every available inch of it. An open weekend gets plans. Twenty free minutes gets email. Standing in line gets scrolling. Even a walk can become another opportunity to consume information. In this episode, w
Episode 712: Are You Living at the Speed of Your Anxiety?
Have you ever caught yourself racing through your day when absolutely nothing is chasing you? Walking faster. Eating faster. Answering messages immediately. Feeling pressure to finish things that don't actually have deadlines. Mentally moving on to the next thing before you've finished the thing you're doing. I know this pattern because I catch myself in it too. In this episode, we're exploring th
Episode 711: Maybe You Don't Need More Motivation
When something important keeps falling off your list, it's easy to assume you have a motivation problem. Maybe you need more discipline. More commitment. A better routine. A stronger why. Or maybe your life is simply too full. In this episode, I'm challenging the assumption that every behavior-change problem needs to be solved by adding more effort. Sometimes the most powerful move isn't figuring
Episode 710: The Invisible Things Draining Your Energy
You can look at your calendar and think, "I shouldn't be this tired." But your calendar only shows what you're doing. It doesn't show everything you're carrying. The decision you haven't made. The conversation you keep postponing. The thing you're trying not to forget. The situation you keep mentally rehearsing. The worry humming quietly in the background. In this episode, we're talking about the
Episode 709: What Gets the Best of You—and What Gets the Scraps?
We say our health matters. Our relationships matter. Creativity matters. Joy matters. Being present for the people we love matters. But do those things actually get the best of us? Or do they get whatever energy happens to be left after work, errands, obligations, messages, problems, and everyone else's requests have taken their share? In this episode, I'm inviting you to look at priorities throug
Episode 708: Your Energy Is Not an Unlimited Resource
We're pretty good at understanding that money is finite. If there's $300 in the account, spending $900 is eventually going to create a problem. And yet, we often refuse to apply the same logic to our energy. We make plans based on the energy we wish we had, judge ourselves for not being able to handle more, and keep making withdrawals long after our internal account is flashing insufficient funds.
Episode 707: When Your Life No Longer Fits Who You're Becoming
There comes a point in midlife when the strategies, expectations, roles, and routines that once worked beautifully start creating more friction than flow. Our instinct is often to assume the problem is us. We need to try harder, get more disciplined, become more organized, or somehow get back to the woman we used to be. But what if the friction is telling you something else? In this episode, I'm e
Episode 706: Finishing Strong vs Finishing Perfect
Strong does not always mean pushing harder. Sometimes it means knowing when to rest, when to ask for help, and when to give yourself permission to release something gracefully. In this episode I challenge the perfectionism that drives so many women to abandon everything in the final stretch of the year, and make the case that finishing strong is a personal definition, not a performance standard. S
Episode 705: The Woman You Want to Be on January 1st Is Built Right Now
Every January, millions of women vow to start fresh. And most of them are starting from a significant deficit. What if the preparation started now instead? In this episode I use the analogy of preparing for a serious hike. You would not sign up for the hardest trail of the year and then spend the months beforehand eating poorly, skipping training, and letting everything slide. Yet that is precisel
Episode 704: The Comparison Trap Gets Worse in the Fourth Quarter
Something specific happens at the end of the year that makes comparison particularly sharp. The natural impulse to take stock collides with the curated highlight reels of everyone around you. And the result is a particular kind of pain that deserves a direct response. In this episode I explore why year-end amplifies comparison and offer the most reliable antidote I know: an honest inventory of you
Episode 703: What Does Your Body Need This Time of Year?
This time of year, a lot of attention goes toward what other people need. What the family needs. What the gatherings require. What the season demands. And quietly, without much fanfare, the woman who is often managing most of it stops appearing on her own list. In this episode I redirect the question inward. What do you need to move through the next eight weeks with your health and your sense of s
Episode 702: Rest Before the Rush Is a Strategy
In endurance sports there is a practice called tapering. In the weeks before a major race, athletes deliberately reduce their training volume. Not because they are giving up. Because they understand that showing up to the biggest demand of the season at full capacity requires strategic rest beforehand. In this episode I make the case for applying that same logic to the most demanding stretch of yo
Episode 701: How to Protect Your Non-Negotiables When Life Gets Full
The season will expand to fill whatever space you give it. You get to decide how much that is. In this episode I distinguish between what is truly non-negotiable and what is simply a preference, and make the case that the former list is usually shorter than most people think. I also name the mechanism by which non-negotiables erode, not through one dramatic decision but through a series of small,
Episode 700: The Difference Between Coping and Recovering
Coping and recovering can look remarkably similar from the outside. Both involve a pause in the difficulty. Both offer some form of relief. But they produce completely different outcomes over time. In this episode I define the distinction clearly: coping is buffering, reaching for something that temporarily alters how you feel without changing what produced the feeling. Recovering is addressing th
Episode 699: Your Relationship With Alcohol Deserves an Honest Look
There is something interesting about the things we have done long enough that we stop questioning them. They become invisible. We cannot imagine life without them. Not because life without them would actually be worse, but because we have never given ourselves enough distance from them to find out. In this episode I address the claim that alcohol does not really affect you, which is one I have hea
Episode 698: Self-Expression Is a Health Practice
There is a particular kind of aliveness that comes from doing something that is completely, authentically yours. Not a template. Not someone else's version of how it should be done. Not a performance calibrated to someone else's expectations. Yours. In this episode I make the case that accessing that aliveness is not a luxury. It is a health practice. I share the contrast between what it has felt
Episode 697: The Art of Saying No Without Explaining Yourself
Most of us were never taught to say no cleanly. We were taught to soften it, justify it, apologize for it, and wrap it in so much explanation that the other person barely registers it as a no at all. In this episode I make the case that the compulsion to over-explain your no is not politeness. It is people-pleasing. And it is costing you more than you realize. I share my own practice of declining
Episode 696: Finding Your Center
Most of us treat feeling centered as something that happens to us when circumstances are favorable. But what if center is not something you feel when things are right? What if it is something you return to regardless of what is happening around you? In this episode I define center not as a mood but as a relationship with yourself, specifically the condition of being grounded in your values, regula
Episode 695: Regulating Your Nervous System Will Make Some People Uncomfortable
When you start doing the work of regulating your nervous system, something interesting happens. You feel better. You make clearer decisions. You stop absorbing other people's chaos quite so readily. And some of the people around you find that deeply unsettling. In this episode I explain why the friction that comes with growing into a more regulated version of yourself is not a sign that you are do
Episode 694: Emotional Hunger vs Physical Hunger
We spend enormous amounts of time and energy managing what we eat. Very few of us have been taught to ask why we are eating. In this episode I explore the critical distinction between physical hunger, which builds gradually, is satisfied by food, and stays satisfied, and emotional hunger, which arrives suddenly, is often specific to a particular food, and is not resolved by eating. I share the emo
Episode 693: Accountability Tools vs Self-Leadership
The wellness market is full of tools designed to hold you accountable. And most of them are genuinely useful. But there is something none of them can do. And understanding that distinction might be the most important thing about using them well. In this episode I make the case that tools are multipliers, not foundations. A food tracking app cannot tell you why you are eating. A recovery monitor ca
Episode 692: Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose
Dolly Parton once said: find out who you are and do it on purpose. In a world that constantly invites us to be something other than ourselves, doing it on purpose is a radical act. In this episode I use Dolly's life as a masterclass in self-leadership. She was told early in her career to change the way she dressed to appeal to a wider audience. She did not. She was pressured repeatedly to use her
Episode 691: What You Practice Now You Will Live in December
Every year, millions of women arrive in January exhausted, depleted, and vowing to start over. And every year, the same pattern produced that outcome: a slow unraveling that began somewhere in October. In this episode I make a direct challenge to the fourth-quarter slide, the quiet permission most women give themselves to let their health practices slip in the name of seasonal busyness. The habits
Episode 690: The Sleep Divorce and Other Brave Sleep Decisions
There is a decision that a growing number of women are making quietly, usually without telling many people, because they are not sure how it will be received. They are choosing to sleep apart from their partners. Not as a statement about their relationship. As a statement about their health. In this episode I make the case for the sleep divorce as a practical, loving, intelligent choice for midlif
Episode 689: Letting Go as a Form of Nutrition
We talk about nutrition almost exclusively in terms of food. But there is another kind of nourishment that rarely gets discussed: the kind that becomes available when you release an identity that no longer fits who you are becoming. In this episode I explore the identities many midlife women carry past their expiration date: the caretaker, the overachiever, the one who never asks for help. These i
Episode 688: Boundaries Are Not a Personality Trait
There is a story we tell about boundaries that sounds like this: some people just have them and some people do not. Today I want to dismantle that story completely. In this episode I make the case that boundaries are a skill, not a fixed character trait, and that the women who appear effortlessly confident at setting them have simply practiced more. I also speak directly to the guilt that arrives
Episode 687: The Portfolio Mindset for Your Body
What if you thought about your body the way a smart investor thinks about a financial portfolio? Some assets are highly liquid and relatively easy to adjust. Others take years, even decades, to build, and are worth protecting above almost everything else. In this episode I use my own recent DEXA scan results to illustrate the portfolio analogy in a way that is concrete and personal. My body fat ca
Episode 686: Defining Enough
If you do not define what enough means for yourself, you will spend your entire life chasing it. And here is the cruelest part: you will never catch it. In this episode I challenge the wellness industry's infinite improvement loop, the idea that there will always be another five pounds, more muscle, better biomarkers, another protocol, and make the case that defining enough is not settling. It is
Episode 685: How to Stay Yourself When Everyone Wants Something From You
The fourth quarter of the year has a particular quality to it. Demands increase. Schedules fill. Other people's needs multiply. And if you have not decided in advance who you want to be through all of it, the season will make that decision for you. In this episode I introduce one of the most powerful self-leadership strategies available for navigating a demanding season: pre-deciding. Before the p
Episode 684: Food Without the Fuss
Before you follow anyone else's food rules, do you even know what your own are? And where did the beliefs you are currently living by actually come from? In this episode I make the case that most women are living by a food philosophy they never consciously chose, assembled from family messages, diet culture, and whatever the wellness trend of the season happens to be. I share my own food philosoph
Episode 683: You Get to Change Your Mind
There is a version of commitment that has nothing to do with integrity. It is the stubborn adherence to a decision you made in a different season of your life, with different information, as a different version of yourself. In this episode I make the case that changing your mind is not weakness. It is wisdom accumulated through experience. I share my own journey with juice fasting, something I was
Episode 682: Intentional Periodization
You would not expect a professional athlete to train at peak intensity fifty-two weeks a year. Their coach would never allow it. In this episode I make the case that your life operates on the same principle as athletic training: periods of high demand require recovery on the other side, and applying expansion-season expectations during a recovery season is one of the most common and costly mistake
Episode 681: The Power of Critical Thinking for Your Health
The wellness world is extraordinarily good at selling certainty. And most of us, somewhere between the compelling testimonial and the limited-time offer, stop asking the most important question available: does this actually make sense for me? In this episode I make the case that critical thinking is one of the most underrated health skills available. Women dive headfirst into extreme programs, exp
Episode 680: How You Show Up Is a Choice
There are two sentences I use in coaching that have the power to completely shift how someone moves through a difficult relationship. They are not complicated. But sitting with them honestly requires a particular kind of courage. In this episode I share those two sentences and the story behind why I started using them: my own experience caring for my father through a complex and sometimes heartbre
Episode 679: The Stories We Tell About Our Bodies in the Mirror
There is a voice that shows up every time you step in front of the mirror. It has opinions. It compares, it critiques, it comments on everything. And most of us have been so immersed in it for so long that we have stopped noticing it is even there. In this episode I make the case that the internal narrative running in your head while you get dressed is not neutral. It is a health variable. The bod
Episode 678: Define Success Before You Chase It
Most people spend their lives chasing success without ever stopping to define what that word means to them. And the cost of that oversight is enormous. In this episode I make the case that if you do not define success, you will never reach it. You will just keep running. I share what success means to me in this season of my life, which has nothing to do with accolades or external validation and ev
Episode 677: Resentment Is a Signal, Not a Sentence
Resentment has a bad reputation. We treat it like something to be ashamed of, pushed through, or managed away as quickly as possible. But resentment is not the problem. It is a message. In this episode I make the case that resentment almost always has the same origin story: you gave something without asking for what you needed in return, or you kept saying yes when you meant no, and the feeling is
Episode 676: Your Power Statement
Most of us make decisions reactively. Something comes up and we respond based on how we feel in that moment, what someone else needs, or what seems like the path of least resistance. A power statement changes that entirely. In this episode I introduce one of the most useful self-leadership tools I know: a personal declaration of who you are when you are operating at your best. I share my own power
Episode 675: Are You Becoming More Alive as You Age?
We have a lot of metrics for health. Steps, sleep scores, bloodwork, body composition, VO2 max. And I am not dismissing any of them. But there is a question underneath all of them that rarely gets asked directly: are you becoming more alive? In this episode I explore aliveness as a measure of health, not just physiological health but the quality of your engagement with your own experience. You can
Episode 674: Stop Gaslighting Your Own Body
Your body is sending you signals constantly. Hunger. Fullness. Fatigue. Tension. Overstimulation. The need to move. The need to stop. And most of us have spent years overriding those signals so consistently that we can no longer reliably read them. In this episode I introduce the concept of interoception, the body's ability to sense its own internal state, and make the case that rebuilding this re
Episode 673: When Did You Make Going Outside Hard?
It is too hot. It is too cold. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood. I do not have the right shoes. I do not have enough time. We have become extraordinarily creative at making one of the most basic and universally available health practices feel inaccessible. In this episode I gently dismantle the excuse taxonomy: weather excuses, infrastructure excuses, and time excuses. I make the case tha
Episode 672: The Case for Eating With Other People
In the Blue Zones, the regions of the world where people consistently live past 100 in good health, researchers kept finding the same things. And one of the most consistent was communal eating. In this episode I draw on Dan Buettner's Blue Zones research to make the case that eating with other people is not just pleasant. It is protective. Shared meals slow us down, almost automatically. They impr
Episode 671: Stop Trying to Get Your Old Body Back
It is not a privilege that our bodies change. It is a privilege that we lived long enough to change. In this episode I challenge the assumption that a past version of your body was the standard against which all future versions should be judged. Bodies change because life happens. Because hormones shift, experiences accumulate, and time passes in a living system that is always responding to its en
Episode 670: Your Environment Is Coaching You
In 2012, Google noticed its employees were eating too much candy. Rather than lecturing them about nutrition or appealing to their willpower, a team of behavioral scientists did something much more interesting. They moved the M&Ms. In this episode I use Google's Project M&M, in which simply placing candy in opaque containers led to 3.1 million fewer calories consumed in seven weeks with nothing fo
Episode 669: The Return on Ordinary Days
Almost no one talks about the Tuesday. The ordinary, unmemorable, nothing-particularly-special Tuesday that is, in fact, the primary unit of a life. In this episode I make the case for investing in ordinary days with the same intentionality we bring to peak experiences. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman's peak-end rule, which describes how our memory weights peak moments and endings far more than the lon
Episode 668: Your Sleep Is a Report Card
Sleep is not a switch. It is a harvest. And what you harvest at night depends almost entirely on what you planted during the day. In this episode I reframe sleep as the report card your daily choices write about themselves. The quality of your night is being shaped all day long: by the light you are exposed to, by whether your brain gets any processing time, by what you eat and when, and by how ac
Episode 667: Are You Lonely or Just Under-Connected?
Loneliness and under-connection are not the same thing. And if you are treating them as the same problem, you may be reaching for the wrong remedy entirely. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between loneliness, a feeling state, and under-connection, a behavioral condition, and explain why the solution to one is emotional and the solution to the other is practical. I use the analogy of thi
Episode 666: You Probably Don't Need a Better Morning Routine
The wellness world has sold us a very elaborate lie about mornings. That the quality of your day depends on a precise sequence of activities completed before most people are awake. Cold plunge. Journaling. Meditation. Gratitude practice. Exercise. Hydration. In this episode I offer something much simpler and honestly much more useful: stop starting your day in reaction mode. When you wake up and i
Episode 665: The Health Benefits of Being Bad at Something
When was the last time you did something you were genuinely not good at? Not working toward being good at it. Just doing it, badly, for the pure experience of doing it? In this episode I make the case for the category of things you do purely for love, with no ambition toward mastery, no monetization, no performance for an audience. This category is worth protecting. Maybe even expanding. Because t
Episode 664: The Art of Doing One Thing at a Time
We pride ourselves on multitasking. But the research on this is unambiguous: what we call multitasking is actually task-switching. And we do everything worse when our attention is divided. In this episode I make the case for the radical, countercultural act of doing one thing at a time. Not as a productivity strategy but as a quality-of-life one. Because when your attention is split, you are never
Episode 663: Simplicity Is a Health Practice
The women who tend to their health most consistently are not always the most informed. They are often the ones who have simplified enough to actually follow through. In this episode I make the case that the answer to most health consistency problems is not more structure. It is less complexity. Because a simpler approach that actually happens is infinitely more valuable than an optimized one that
Episode 662: A Love Letter to Walking
Back in July I made the research case for walking. Today I want to do something different. I want to tell you what walking has actually given me. In this episode I share how my nine-month-old Great Dane Tilly has made me one of the most consistent walkers of my adult life, and what those daily 45-minute morning walks have produced that no step count study can quite capture: a creative brain that c
Episode 661: Your Life Needs More Awe
Rachel Carson wrote that those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. I have been thinking about that sentence a lot lately. In this episode I explore what awe actually is, drawing on Dacher Keltner's definition: the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. And I make the case that
Episode 660: Rest Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing
Lying on the couch scrolling your phone is inactivity. But it is not rest. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between what restores a human being and what merely passes the time. Genuine rest produces something on the other side: more capacity, quieter mind, a body that has had a chance to repair. Most of what we call rest keeps the nervous system engaged, stimulated, and reacting, which m
Episode 659: Where Is Your Third Place?
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent his career studying something most of us have never thought to name. He called it the third place. Not home. Not work. The other place. The one where you belong without obligation, where you show up because you want to, where something in you exhales. In this episode I explore Oldenburg's concept and what gets lost when the third place erodes from modern life: not j
Episode 658: You Are Not What You Consume. You Are What You Absorb.
The more accurate version of "you are what you eat" is this: you are what you absorb. And the same is true of information. In this episode I explore the difference between being smart and being wise, a distinction my husband and I were wrestling with in a recent conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Smart is about intake. Wisdom is what happens when information actually ge
Episode 657: Muscle Is More Than a Metabolic Organ
Somewhere between the bodybuilding world and the wellness world, we lost something important in the conversation about strength. It got reduced to metabolism and body composition. In this episode I make the case that building genuine physical strength does something that calorie math cannot explain: it changes your identity. I share my own experience training with Ido Portal and how that period of
Episode 656: Boredom Is Not an Emergency
We have become so uncomfortable with emptiness that we fill every available moment with something. A podcast, a scroll, a task, a distraction. And in doing so, we have cut ourselves off from something the brain genuinely needs. In this episode I make the case for boredom as a doorway rather than a problem. I share my own experience of extended pausing, seasons of deliberately not forcing the next
Episode 655: When Did Eating Become So Complicated?
We have taken one of the most basic human activities and turned it into an anxiety-producing intellectual exercise. In this episode I hold a nuanced position: I am not dismissing food tracking, macro counting, or structured eating approaches. For many women, especially those who have been eating in ways that have disconnected them from their body's signals for years, some structure genuinely helps
Episode 654: Your Attention Is Part of Your Health
Most of us think carefully about what we put in our bodies. Very few of us think with equal intentionality about what we put in our minds. In this episode I make the case that your attention is a health variable. What it lands on, repeatedly, becomes the environment your nervous system lives in. And that environment is either building your capacity or quietly eroding it. I share the filter I perso
Episode 653: Who Can You Call at 2 A.M.?
You can be in a room of ten thousand people and feel completely alone. If no one there actually knows you, the numbers mean nothing. In this episode I explore the difference between being connected and being truly known, and why that distinction may be the most important relational one of your life. I share my own honest reckoning with the limits of surface connection and my growing craving for re
Episode 652: The Case for Morning Light
This is not a biohacking episode. I am not going to tell you to buy a special lamp or track your lux levels. I just want to make the case for something so simple and so free that we have almost entirely stopped doing it: going outside in the morning and letting daylight reach your eyes. In this episode I share how my nine-month-old Great Dane Tilly accidentally became my most reliable wellness acc
Episode 651: What If Fun Is a Health Metric?
What if we tracked laughter and play and genuine enjoyment with even a fraction of the enthusiasm we bring to our step counts and protein grams? In this episode I make the case that fun is not frivolous. It is a sustainability mechanism. And in a long-term health practice, sustainability is everything. I explore the concept of bringing magic to the mundane: what happens when you approach cooking w
Episode 650: Your Body Loves a Rhythm
Your body is not asking for a perfect schedule. It is asking for predictability. In this episode I explore how the body's circadian rhythm, the internal clock regulating nearly every physiological process, is set and sustained by consistent external cues: light, meal timing, movement, sleep windows. When those cues are reliable, the body can do its work efficiently. When they are scattered, the sy
Episode 649: Do You Have Enough to Look Forward To?
My husband and I were talking recently about how full and heavy midlife feels right now. The parents to care for, the teenager still at home, the business to run, the relationship to tend. And underneath that conversation was something surprising: the weight of it is also what keeps us going. In this episode I make the case that having something to look forward to is not a luxury. It is a health v
Episode 648: The Health Cost of Being in a Hurry
You can eat well, exercise consistently, and sleep seven hours a night. And still spend your entire day physiologically rushing. In this episode I make the case that chronic hurry has a real and measurable health cost that most of us are completely underestimating. When the nervous system is in a constant low-grade state of urgency, it affects digestion, immune function, sleep quality, cognitive p
Episode 647: Your Social Life Might Need Progressive Overload
In strength training, if you never increase the challenge, you stop getting stronger. The body adapts and then plateaus. The same thing happens in your social life. In this episode I take one of the foundational principles of physical training and apply it to relational health, because a lot of us have been lifting the same relational weight for years. Same people, same conversations, same comfort
Episode 646: Boring Works
After thirty years in the wellness industry and hundreds of conversations with extraordinary health experts, I keep arriving at the same conclusion. Not a revolutionary one. A remarkably unsexy one. The basics work. In this episode I share the turning point in my own life that proved this to me beyond any doubt, including my experience with a program called Genesis Transformation, where I watched
Episode 645: The Envy You Are Not Admitting To
There is a feeling most of us were taught to be ashamed of. We call it a sin. We hide it. We dress it up as something more acceptable. But what if envy, honestly examined, is actually one of the most useful signals available to you? In this episode I draw the distinction between jealousy, which makes me feel small and defensive, and envy, which points at something I desire. I share my own experien
Episode 644: Alone but Not Lonely
I have been alone but not lonely. And I have been surrounded by people and felt profoundly alone. Those are two completely different experiences. And understanding the difference between them might change how you relate to both. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between solitude and loneliness, share my own deep craving for solitude and the permission it took to finally pursue it without
Episode 643: The Art of Receiving
I am very good at giving. I spent a long time being terrible at receiving. And I have come to understand that the inability to receive is not humility. It is a wall. And it keeps love out just as effectively as it keeps pain out. In this episode I share the story of my friend Colleen volunteering at my first retreat and what happened when I finally said yes to being supported. What I discovered co
Episode 642: The Inner Critic at Midlife
There is a voice that most of us know intimately. The one that says you are not doing enough, not being enough, not achieving enough. At midlife, that voice often gets louder. In this episode I share my own evolving relationship with my inner critic, including how I have learned to stop trying to silence her and start turning her questions back around. When she asks why I am not doing more, I have
Episode 641: How to Make Your Journaling Practice Richer
Journaling is not about filling pages. It is about going somewhere you have not been before. And the quality of where you end up is almost entirely determined by the quality of the question you start with. In this episode I reframe journaling as a practice of radical self-inquiry rather than a diary or a gratitude list. I share a collection of less obvious questions worth sitting with, including w
Episode 640: Rest or Story? How to Tell the Difference
Do you actually need rest right now? Or is rest the story you are telling yourself to avoid doing the thing? These are two very different situations. And knowing the difference might change everything about how you approach your days. A client of mine recently brought this question to me. She said she always feels like she needs to rest, no matter what, and she was starting to wonder whether that
Episode 639: Woman of Grace & Grit: Lindsey Sills
Lindsey Sills is living proof that consistency isn't about perfection—it's about practice. In this episode, we talk about redefining health beyond weight loss, building non-negotiable habits that anchor you, and navigating "off track" moments with acceptance instead of shame. Lindsey shares the mindset shift that helped her stay steady through multiple seasons of life and the powerful moment she
Episode 638: Learning to Love the Hallway
There is a space between who you have been and who you are becoming. It is not comfortable. It is not certain. And it is not optional. I call it the hallway. In this episode I explore what liminal space actually is, why midlife is by its very nature a liminal season, and how I have had to learn to stop treating the hallway like a crisis and start treating it like a classroom. I used to hate not kn
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