This episode started as a check-in.

A reflection on where I've been spending my energy. Why the podcast slowed down a little. What’s been shifting behind the scenes.

But very quickly it became something else.

Underneath everything I’m building right now, the podcast, my new publication on Substack, and the work I’m doing with my clients. There is one question that continues to sit at the center of it all.

Do you love yourself?

I'm not asking about the surface-level, “treat yourself” kind of way. My inquiry concerns the deeper, more confronting, more transformational.

What does it actually mean to be in relationship with yourself?

This episode is about.

• The evolution of my visibility and why it no longer feels the same
• Why I’m expanding my work onto Substack and what’s calling me there
• What “intimacy-based living” really means (and why it’s becoming the umbrella for everything I do)
• The moment that changed everything for me. When I realized I had never truly asked if I loved myself
• Why self-love is not a feeling, but a practice, a devotion, a way of relating
• How self-love shapes our relationships with others, our communities, and even how we show up in the world politically
• The difference between surface-level self-care and deep, intimate self-relationship
• The real, ongoing work of examining the stories we tell ourselves
• And, the question I am actively sitting with right now: where am I still giving my permission away?

This is not a polished teaching.

It’s a real-time exploration.

A living, breathing look at what it means to build a relationship with yourself… while you’re still in the process of becoming.

If you take anything from this episode, let it be this:

What does it mean to actually be in relationship with myself?

Because everything changes from there.

Find me on Substack: Intimacy-Based Living

Woo hoo! Episode 50.

Be the Fly-on-the-Wall while my friend and fellow coach, Janellea Macbeth, talk about coaching, growth, and support

Fifty marks something quietly significant for me. Less waiting for perfection. Less negotiating with myself over the place of my voice in the world.

More willingness to let what IS alive, be heard

So for this milestone, I chose something different. A real conversation.

Together we explore:

• what coaching actually is
• why coaching and therapy are not the same thing
• support, growth, nervous systems, and personal responsibility
• the beauty and complexity of an industry that is still evolving
• why growth often asks more of us than comfort wants to give

This is not a interview. It is thought unfolding in real time.

Gift from Janellea:

Go grab your copy of Get Out of Your Head and Into the Creative Life

The emotion wheel is a useful tool.

It expands emotional vocabulary. Helps people move beyond broad labels like anger, sadness, fear, or happiness into greater nuance.

But emotional language is only part of the story because emotions don't begin with language.

They begin as sensation in the body.

Before applying language, there is a physical experience.

Tightness, heat, heaviness, fluttering, pressure, a lump in the throat, a sinking in the stomach.

In this Hot Flash, I explore why the emotion wheel is helpful, but also why it's only a starting point on which to build.

Building connection with one's feelings is somatic work. It's embodiment. and it means learning to stay curious about sensation before rushing to label.

Not every sensation needs immediate interpretation. Sometimes sensations simply need witnessing.

Witnessing, curiosity, and learning to use the language of the emotion wheel from the body up is exactly what builds self-trust and deeper connection to your lived experience.

Pleasing often looks beautiful from the outside.

Attentive. Devoted.

Which is exactly why so many women mistake it for love.

It's often painfully to come to the realization that what was once believed to be love was also shaped by something else... Fear.

Fear of conflict. Fear of disappointing others. Fear of losing connection. Fear of being experienced as difficult.

In this episode, I explore why people pleasing can look deeply loving from the outside, and why it often develops as a brilliant nervous system adaptation designed to protect belonging and attachment.

But protecting connection and nurturing love are not the same thing.

In this conversation, I explore:

• why pleasing becomes identity
• why it is reinforced by family, culture, and systemic messaging
• why love requires presence instead of disappearance
• why midlife often makes the cost of pleasing impossible to ignore

Because pleasing may keep things calm…

But love creates the conditions where expansive growth becomes possible.

Why do so many of us struggle to simply receive a good moment?

In this Hot Flash, I explore a subtle pattern I’ve noticed recently:

Someone does something supportive of themselves
Something healthy.
Something they’ve been meaning to do.

And almost immediately… instead of staying with the goodness… they say:

“I should have done this sooner.”

It sounds harmless.

But underneath that sentence is often a quiet form of self-shaming that interrupts growth.

In this episode I talk about:

• Why “shoulding” is a red flag
• Why the moment after growth matters
• How celebration supports nervous system change
• Why self-love includes allowing the win to feel good

Because sometimes growth is not just doing the thing.

Sometimes growth is letting yourself receive the goodness of having done it.

What happens when outward attention comes from love… instead of fear?

In this episode, I respond to a recent social media trend:

Mom...What were you like in the 90s?

With reflects on a video, from that period, with sitting on the floor with my three young children.

What the video reveals to me about presence, motherhood, and the difference between attunement and self-abandonment.

Because not all outward attention is people-pleasing.

Sometimes presence is love in action.

Sometimes presence is what builds trust, worth, intimacy, and growth.

Sometimes what looks similar from the outside is internally organized by something completely different.

In this episode, I explore:

• Why presence and pleasing can look similar but feel profoundly different
• How presence builds intimacy
• Why pleasing is often fear organized
• Why midlife self-reclamation is not selfishness
• How outward love does not require self-erasure

A subtle but important distinction in intimacy-based living.

In this week’s Hot Flash, I wanted to pause on one word, because it sits at the center of how I think, how I strive to live, how I show up in coaching containers, and how I understand the dynamics of relationships:

Love.

Because most of us were taught to think of love primarily as a feeling. As closeness, warmth, attraction, emotional connection.

What if love is something more than feeling?

Drawing from a definition that deeply influences my understanding of love. The work of M. Scott Peck and echoed, powerfully, by bell hooks, in this episode I explore love as:

The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing growth in one's self and in others

In other words:

• Love requires action.
• Love requires effort
• Love has purpose.

That purpose is growth. Our own, and the growth of others.

This is a short reflection on why I believe:

Love is a verb.

What happens when the world feels unstable, frightening, and increasingly difficult to trust?

When headlines pull at your nervous system. Fear can quietly become the organizing principle of life, shaping attention, narrowing possibility, and pulling us away from what is deeply ours to tend.

In this episode, I explore the tension so many of us are living inside right now.

How to remain awake to suffering in the world without abandoning your own life, your desires, your work, your beauty, and your BEcoming.

This conversation is about fear, devotion, nervous system sovereignty, and why choosing what is deeply yours to build is not denial. It is one of the most grounded things you can do.

We talk about:

• why fear is so persuasive
• what happens when fear colonizes attention
• why power-over systems thrive on frightened nervous systems
• symbolic refusal and choosing your own meanings
• why devotion is not betrayal
• what it means to choose love-based action when the world feels uncertain

Because the world may be burning…

And you still get to decide what kind of human you will be inside it.