I like to post pictures here and share my little dharma message over and over, which is 👉🏽 do the work to figure out who you truly are at the core of your belly, and then do the shit out of that. Live it! Rock it! Be it! And many days that exactly how I live!! ✊🏽💪🏾🙌🏽 But guess what...I’m still human. I’m still doing the work of clearing through my own triggers. And, when you take off on giant life changes and adventures, like we have recently moving to Puerto Rico, you accelerate encountering your demons.

So while I’m here living the good life in PR, embracing all of this fantastic change, I’ve also been having epic melt downs and come aparts each week as I encounter and work thru old triggers and shit that gets dredged up from all the change.

I don’t want to deny this. I don’t want to only show you my good side. I can’t talk about honesty, #nohiding, and authenticity and then only share happy shiny glossy reflections of my life. So, I have to be real and tell you - I can be really unpredictable. One minute I can be having a fun day of furniture shopping for our dream home, and the next minute I encounter another shopper wearing designer clothes who (in my mind) judges me for not wearing comparable designer clothes and then - BOOM - I am triggered into questioning my entire sense of self worth for the rest of the day until I talk it all through and cry it out with my Man.

Things stabilize and happiness restored for a while, but then a few days later I am having a great evening at a restaurant chatting with friends, next we go to a salsa bar after dinner, I get insecure...want to dance but can’t let go of insecurities and then - BOOM - I get triggered into tightness and anxiousness for the rest of the night watching friends having fun while berating myself for being so stiff. I try and see if I can drink this tight feeling away...like, maybe one more beer will help. 😆 🍻 Nope. Doesn’t help. A little alcohol can loosen you up. However, a lot of alcohol, when you are already anxious, only makes you a sloppy anxious drunk who eventually falls into a mental pit of “poor me.” 😩

It’s not always pretty being me. Being sensitive, and (I’ll say it) sometimes down right unstable, is not how I want to be. But it’s the truth and that’s all I can ever share. In fact if I don’t share the full spectrum of myself...from the lovely lady prancing around the streets of old San Juan in the beautiful light of sunset - to the stiff girl against the wall later that night at the salsa bar who got triggered into a fit of insecurity...I’m not being authentic at all. Because you can’t hide parts. If I hide one part I’m hiding the whole of who I am, and all I want to be is real and whole.

Life is often a 2 steps forward, 1 step back process. Hell, and some days it feels more like 1 step forward, and 5 steps back. This plays out in our photo shoots every time. For every lovely shot of me walking down the street, wind in my hair, with great lighting there are many more shots where my face is full of tension, I trip, fall, or blink.

Idk why I beat myself up about my struggles. When I’m down I can hear my ego run down a familiar list of shoulds, like “you’re 47 and should have your shit together by now. How can you go from feeling like an enlightened goddess one day to blubbering with snot running down your face groveling the next? What is wrong with you? Pull it together!” Idk how much of that is genuine self criticism or just ego trying to badger me into living at a higher and happier level with more consistency. Thanks for trying ego. But the truth is I’m doing the very best I know how to do each day. Some days that goes well, and some days shit falls a part. That’s life. That’s being human. That’s me.

(Thank You @sean-king for taking these photos with me and not deleting the out takes this time 🙏🏽😘)