This week’s love fest : 05.17.13

The little duck is enjoying a sunshine nap.

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Four links I love
Why society still needs feminism via Fabeku
I’m diggin’ Danielle’s post on the scent of consciousness
From Pace: There’s always a way forward
Oh, oh, oh. This from Liz: What is real (in toddlerland) – and this 10 day journey – water your toddler mama soul

Four things I’m practicing
Creating ease at work
Running with Beanjamin around the house
Silence in the evening
Making space inside of my home

Four things I’m loving
Opening the windows every chance I get
Amy’s Southwestern burritos
Hangout time with zee madre
Sparkly pink polish on my toes

What have you been loving up on this week? Hmmm?

Peace to you,

Because presence is priceless

The way we interact with social media can be a tender subject, so I want to preface this post with a statement. I’m writing this with care and from my own experiences. I’m not writing this in a judgmental way or a holier-than-thou way. I’m writing this because it’s an important topic and I think we need to establish a dialogue around it. You all know I got nuttin’ but love.

That photo up there? It’s a photo of all of my many profiles on various social media platforms: personal Facebook page, Roots of She fan page, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Vimeo, LinkedIn, and Google+. (I shoved the LinkedIn or Google+ pages to the bottom of the screen, I did that on purpose because I have a serious hate on for those sites, they’re so clunky.)

A story: Around the time my day-job was social media, when I was leaving Kind Over Matter and creating Roots of She, I didn’t have a healthy relationship with anything surrounding the Internet.

I was online all of the time, I was constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, I was accepting every friend request on Facebook, following everyone who followed me on Twitter. I loved the hit of adrenaline I got when I saw new notifications because it made me feel important and also like what I was saying had value.

Then I got caught up in the numbers game of it all, I wanted more and more, like once I hit a certain number of whatever, it meant I was a success or I had arrived or I was validated. And that’s all such bullshit, I see that now, I’ve seen it for a while. But that’s where I was at, that’s what my relationship with it all was like.

I pinned and at-replied and hashtagged until… I was exhausted. It all was just so exhausting. To be online all of the time, to feel like I was missing out on something if I wasn’t online, to keep comparing myself to other people who used XYZ website to do whatever it was they were doing.

I realized I wasn’t using social media with thought and care and intention, I was just desperately trying to keep up with everyone else. I was trying to be the places where everyone was because those were the places I thought I needed to be.

I wasn’t being me when I was online, I was being who I thought everyone wanted me to be, who I thought I should be.

I started to notice that I was online I was really just phoning it in, I had scheduled so many things to post throughout the day, but I wasn’t present there at all. I was faking it, and that really isn’t my style. Everything felt so confused but this:

Presence is priceless, it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give. And I had stopped giving it.

I took a (rather large and necessary) step back and evaluated why I even was using Facebook or Twitter or [insert social media platform here.] I came up with this.

I use social media because:

  1. I crave deep connection with the people I care about.
  2. I’ve found so many kindreds through the randomness that is the Internet and that makes me happy.
  3. I appreciate the ease social media can bring as far as staying in touch with people.
  4. And I use social media because it’s fun.

I wasn’t showing up in a way that felt real and good to me.
Social media wasn’t fun anymore.
So I changed everything.

I needed something smaller, more intimate – something that felt cozy.

Using so many different platforms, having so many people in the feed for each of those platforms – it was overwhelming. I couldn’t connect with anyone because I was trying to connect with everyone. I wanted to build connections with people and I wasn’t able to do it. At all.

So, I unfriended and unfollowed a lot of people. The people I went to grade school or high school with, a lot of the people I went to college with. The old neighbors and most of my old roommates. The people I rarely talked with, the people I had never talked with. The people I just plain old didn’t like but had connected with because I didn’t know how to say no.

Let me tell you, it felt really good – letting go of the pressure of how I thought I should act, letting go of all of those people I hadn’t connected with, letting go of all that pent up stress and need for perfecting the Jenn Gibson brand (whatever that is). I felt so much lighter.

Then, I looked at all of the places I had accounts and if it didn’t make me feel good, I stopped using it.

What I kept: Facebook and Instagram.

No more LinkedIn. No more Google+. No more Pinterest. And less Twitter.

And now it feels right.

So every time I update anything now, I take a deep breath and pause to make sure my intention is really my intention and not what I think it (or I) should be.

So every time I update anything now, I’m offering the gift of presence and attention and an unvarnished me.

So every time I update anything now? Yeah, I’m having fun and showing up and using my own gorgeous voice because it’s enough exactly the way it is.

So every time I update anything now? It just feels good, it’s just fun.

How has the way you use social media changed over time? How does it still tickle your fancy? What makes you want to pull your hair out? How does it make you feel?


I’m participating in a social media conscious blog hop, hosted by the lovely Heather Day.

New stories will run through May 30. Hashtag it up with #socialmediaconsciousness on Twitter and Instagram.

Let’s talk, let’s converse, let’s explore this together.

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Peace cookies

Guest post by Jessica Halepis for Oh, these Wild Women: Stories from the tribe

Peace Cookies: These cookies are gluten-free, dairy-free, and refined sugar-free. Makes 1 ½ dozen (or so) cookies

1 cup peanut butter or almond butter
½ cup real maple syrup
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 egg, lightly beaten
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup hemp seed
¼ cup dairy-free chocolate chips
¼ cup dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the first eight ingredients, and then fold in the hemp seeds, chocolate chips, and dried cranberries. Spoon rounded tablespoons of the dough onto an oiled cookie sheet while thinking peaceful and loving thoughts. Bake for approximately 15 minutes, or until just the slightest bit golden.


Outside my window a rich golden sunlight glitters through the branches of a maple with its leaves half fallen. When I squint slightly, the light looks as if it were being filtered, shot at me through a series of pinhole patterns, intricate and lace-like. I can’t help but wonder if, on this particular day, the light were hitting me unobstructed, would I have the capacity to receive it? Or would I instinctively shield its force, hand to brow, fearful that it would burn my fragile eyes?

I pause, unsure of where I’m going with this. After all, the subject of my writing today is cookies. Flourless ones at that! But it’s the name of these cookies that’s of real significance here.

I allow my mind to wander back in time several months. It had been a particularly difficult afternoon with my kids. Perhaps it was weariness, but something got the better of me (again), and I lashed out at them. No, this time I completely lost it. I stood in my kitchen afterwards, empty and weak, and ran my palms over the cool, earth-toned countertop. I was unsure of how to proceed, or what I should make of myself, but I had to do something with my hands, so I made cookies. And somewhere in the repetitive motion of spooning dough onto sheets, the name came to me succinctly and with promise—Peace Cookies.

The name is reminder of what is, right now, most important to me, my real work so to speak: to create for my children a soft, and yet incredibly sturdy, foundation of love, to cocoon them in a world where they feel cherished, nurtured, completely safe—to give them a home.

Yet, doing this isn’t easy. It, I believe, requires a certain kind of open-hearted parenting, a parenting that is centered on compassion, but most of all, connection, and sometimes it feels like too many stars need aligning for this to occur.

My own childhood was littered with fault lines and uncertainty. I spent a good portion of it being carted back and forth between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys of Southern California, between the 101 the 405 and the 5 freeways, through thick lanes of traffic, under a hazy, sun-drenched sky. Like almost all of my school-aged peers, my parents divorced early on—I have no recollection of them living under the same roof—and each of them soon remarried.

And so, I split my time between them, as a young child, which meant that I lived in two homes, instead of one; I had two very distinct, sometimes opposing, worlds that I was required to negotiate, make sense of. Don’t get me wrong, I was plenty loved.

Like all parents, my mom and dad wanted to see me happily and comfortably make my way in the world. I was given horseback riding, acting, and ice skating lessons. I attended private schools. I was well-clothed and fed strange foods, like Tofutti, from the health food store. But somewhere in the process of stuffing things into my suitcase from week to week, like the permission slip or the lone sneaker that would invariably get left behind and then vanish, something was lost.

Running water as it travels naturally spills into familiar grooves and crevices, earthen patterns that have become over time worn and deep. Similarly, we humans, if given the choice, will retrace our old steps instead of forging new ones. We fall into what we know.

If we desire to carve out a path different from the one that has been engrained in us, stamped on our histories, we are required to start from scratch—which, as any creator knows, is not an easy task.

Likewise, building our “home” is something that hasn’t been without effort. The bones for its design were never put into place, and so I find myself having to construct from the ground up. Most of the time, it’s not the smooth coasting I’d imagined it would be. Not the unlabored flying I discovered while riding my two-wheeler down the shallow suburban hills of Abelia Street, a feeling I so loved, I would seek it out again and again. No, quite often it’s more of a plodding, a choppy fall-down-and-get-back-up way of proceeding. And because sometimes it feels like it would be much easier to simply chuck it all out the window, in order to make headway, I need guideposts (go this way!), as many of them as I can get my hands on.

These cookies have become just that, another one of my growing collection of guideposts. While the memory of that day in my kitchen has, over time, grown filmy and dreamlike, what these cookies have come to symbolize for me is clear as day: they are a reminder for me to check myself. To ask whether, in this moment, I’m living out of habit or out of intention.

Whether I’m allowing the world’s definition of success—a success that often I feel compelled to pursue but that, nonetheless, feels suffocating and hollow—to interfere with my priorities. I’m not after perfection by any stretch of the imagination; my life, as I see it, is very much a practice.

But I do know that there is always a choice. A choice to slow down and settle in. A choice to spend more time watching my four year-old getting a kick out of the giving the cat a mohawk and less time worrying about how I’m fitting in, measuring up, and if my life will amount to anything in the end.

Baking these cookies, even writing about them, helps me return once more to that place of deep knowingness, to that silent agreement between heart and mind, where I can look to the expanse of sky, close my weary eyes, and fall into the soft, outstretched currents of the wind.


Jessica Halepis is a mom of three, a writer, and a health coach.

You can find her at Nourished Mom, where she blogs about holistic nutrition, living mindfully, and her quest to savor life’s small, ordinary moments.

Connect: Facebook | Twitter: @nourished_mom
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This week’s love fest : 05.10.13

An early afternoon yoga break underneath some pretty sunshine? Don't mind if I do. (Thank you, oh thank you.) #latergram
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Four links I love
This from Carla.​
For all the Baptiste and Bikram yogis and yoginis out there : this yoga mat is for sale.
I can’t wait for Viv’s new Be Your Own Beloved course – creating self-care policies. Yes!
Eeee! Anna’s got a book coming out!

Four things I’m practicing
Midday yoga breaks (outside in the sunshine!)
Drinking more water
Presence
Leaving it at the door

Four things I’m loving
Wild Berry India Moon incense
doTERRA patchouli essential oil
My little sage plants
Udi’s Gluten-free cheese pizza
Bonus: My super white feet, holla!

Whatchoo up to this weekend, hmm? What gorgeousness do you have going on?

I hope you are having the best of days,

Divine knowing meets sacred action

Guest post by Bri Saussy

Is there any tool out there that is as mysterious, potent, and enchanting as a Tarot deck? The pictures and archetypal themes on the cards can open our eyes to possibilities we had not yet considered for ourselves, often creating a doorway through which we might enter and discover our deepest soul truths.

More and more women are turning to the Tarot to get answers about life’s pesky questions and to meditate on major themes that are playing out in our day-to-day experience.

As a professional intuitive who learned tarot at her mother’s knee, I know firsthand the power and eloquence that the cards possess. But I also know that often when we sit down with the cards-whether to simply play with them or to perform a serious reading-we can walk away even more confused about what our next step should be. This is why combining tarot with meaningful daily rituals is a time-honored tradition.

Ritual is a way of asking the universe for aid and assistance – it is a devotional act that can be used to honor yourself and whatever it is that you are working on. When we combine the knowledge of Tarot with practical ritual know-how we have two powerful tools to connect us to ourselves and to Spirit.

A core part of my work is empowering others to embrace techniques like divination and ritual that can lead to happier and healthier lives. In this spirit I offer Diagnostic Tarot – a 10 week course in learning to work with Tarot cards and create meaningful rituals-for every circumstance, for every day. See the syllabus here and sign up for the course here.

Love, love,

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