My Journey

People said I was living the dream. But it didn’t feel that way. I was doing everything right. I had followed The Good Life Recipe explicitly. I worked in a creative career I loved, I had a beautiful family, I could afford to travel often, and did. So why did my heart feel empty? Why was my body so numb? Why did every single thing feel like a chore? And where did all this anger and unending disappointment come from?

And then my newborn daughter got very sick and after two week long stays in two different children’s hospitals I came home and looked at the piles of stuff that surrounded me and resented it all. And I asked myself…

And it was then that I realized... All the wanting, all the shopping, all the busy-busy, all the excess of life had kept me numb to life. And so the long process began. For two years I decluttered my life. I removed ¾ of my possessions and worked on developing habits to protect myself from returning to a life of excess. But that wasn’t enough...little did I know there was so much more work to do. My marriage was falling apart. He was unfaithful. I was miserable and exhausted. I was doing everything I could think of to put us all back together, but inside I was bitter, angry and scared. I hid it all. I did everything I could think to make everything look right on the outside. I did everything except work on me. And then one day I got an opportunity to forget about it all for a few weeks. I shipped the kids off to their grandparents, put my cellphone in a sock and handed it over to some tv producers, I had no contact with the outside world, and I went on a trip to participate in a reality tv show that brought me back to my ancestor’s homeland, Norway. It was there that I found myself again. And I learned to listen to the quiet voice inside. I came home and threw away all of the expectations of a life that was driven by society and prior conditioning and I started over.

I walked away from the relationship that wouldn’t let me grow. I turned the tables and opted to keep my young children safe from our wounds for a while. We nested as a family (the kids stayed in our “family home” while the adults changed in and out) for 3 years until we learned to co-parent to the best of our abilities. We learned how to communicate and how to center our decisions around what was best for our children. We learned to be friends again, co-parents.

I found a new partner and slowly introduced him to my children. We held weekly family meetings, and took a yearly family retreat. We created love maps and shared meaning. We began to slowly structure our lives around what mattered most to us all. We do morning meditations as a family, we developed a weekly meal schedule to simplify our shopping habits, we couple each day with a family activity, which has helped us all eliminate our daily screen time. We created a system for making and saving money as individuals and as a family. Together we learned new skills for communicating and emotional intelligence.

All of this has done wonders for our family, but it hasn’t always been easy. We have tried things that haven’t worked. We try often and fail often, but our success was born out of our willingness to keep trying. I don’t consider myself a parenting guru or a parenting expert. I don’t believe in that kind of thing. But what I have found is that I am passionate about helping family’s connect and work together as a team, to find shared meaning and find time to be together, while also honoring what makes each person unique. My client is not the parent or the kids, my client is the family as a whole. My goal is always to help your family find a path that builds a stronger relationship and provides the tools to grow together.

I love what I do, and I hope your family will love what we can do together.

-Kirstin