Struggling with restless nights and groggy mornings? Quality sleep is essential for your health, yet common disruptors like stress, hormones, and poor habits can interfere. This guide offers practical strategies to overcome sleep challenges, optimize rest, and wake up refreshed. Take control of your sleep and feel your best every day.

Start your journey to greater happiness with small steps by noticing one positive thing each day. This simple daily gratitude practice boosts joy, builds resilience, and shifts your focus toward the good. Embrace moments that matter, from a warm coffee to a quiet morning, and nurture lasting happiness in your life. Read more to see what a year of choosing joy uncovered.

Learn how to make the most of Late Summer by using the Earth Element to help balance digestion, support mental clarity, and strengthen your immune system during this transitional season. Try practical tips for seasonal cooking, self-care, and preparing for the cooler months ahead.

Explore the dynamics of friendships in our latest article, "Friendships - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Delve into the importance of Social Rest, understanding red and green flags in relationships, and learn how to cultivate healthier connections. Perfect for anyone looking to enhance their social circle and personal well-being.

Immerse yourself in the vibrant energy of summer with our latest article, "Vibrant Growth: Ancient Wisdom for Summer." Discover how the Fire Element of Chinese medicine can enhance your season with joy, passion, and connection. Embrace the warmth and learn to live fully in tune with summer's abundant yang energy.

“Why Eat the Rainbow—What Does it Do for Me?" offers a vivid guide to enriching your diet with a spectrum of colourful foods. Each colour provides unique nutrients that boost health, from immune support to liver detoxification. Embrace a diverse palette for better health and vitality.

Discover the vibrant world of "Eat the Rainbow," a guide to enriching your diet with the colors of nature. It's an invitation to transform your meals into a palette of nutrients and flavors, promoting better digestion and health. Embrace variety, simplicity, and creativity in your culinary journey.

"Emerge & Awaken: Ancient Wisdom for Spring" delves into the rebirth and renewal that spring brings. Highlighting the Wood Element of Chinese medicine, it explores creativity, planning, and growth as spring's gifts. Learn to harness this season's energy for setting intentions, cultivating flexibility, and embracing movement. Discover how to align with the upward and outward energy shift, plant beneficial seeds for the future, and navigate life's challenges with grace. Welcome a season of transformation and growth, preparing for a vibrant spring and summer.

"Radical Rest" challenges the norm by advocating for rest as a fundamental aspect of productivity and well-being, drawing inspiration from Chinese medicine's principle of 'wu wei'. Embracing the natural rhythms of each season, it offers practical guidance for deep rejuvenation and self-discovery. Dive into this transformative journey and unlock the power of radical rest.

In a world that glorifies hustle and grind, the essence of true rest often gets lost. But "Rest is a Verb!" invites a paradigm shift, urging readers to prioritize self-care without guilt. Exploring the multifaceted nature of rest, the post delves into the seven types: physical, mental, social, creative, sensory, emotional, and spiritual. Through insightful descriptions and practical tips, it empowers individuals to reclaim their right to rejuvenation. From serene meditation sessions to joyful creative pursuits, each aspect of rest is celebrated. With a gentle nudge toward self-compassion, the post encourages small yet impactful steps towards a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Why is January 1st the magical date that everything changes and we magically start doing all the things we want to do?  This also extends to starting anything on the first of any month, or Mondays, for that matter.  Why do we have to wait for these specific days to change, and are these the best days to start?

For the last month or so, I’ve been getting newsletters and social media posts prompting me to buy my new planner for the new year, to name my “word of the year”, and to set my resolutions, intentions, or feelings for the coming year.  Of course, this also comes with prompts to buy all the things to help me finally achieve all my goals…  

On a cold winter day, there is nothing better than sitting curled up in a cozy chair with a comfy blanket, a warm drink and a good book. There might even be a fireplace or wood-stove nearby.

For many, including myself, this deep rest is something we crave in this season. More so if we’ve been ‘sprinting’ and ‘doing’ most or all of the rest of the year. In this season, the days are shorter and the nights longer; our drive to get things done isn’t as strong and that’s okay! It’s not supposed to be. This is a season of hibernation for a reason. This is also a season when Yin is at its height. The longest night of the year (the Winter Solstice) is also the most Yin night of the year. Quite literally the opposite of the Summer Solstice and the longest day of the year (ultimate Yang).

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, habits are at the heart of everything you do. Making them work for you is where the magic happens. Motivation is often the driving force behind the beginning of change when trying to change a habit.

We can’t stop habits from forming and nor do we want to!  Habits help us!  Habits are great when they work for us and not against us.  Whenever we want to change our routines, we need to change our habits.  This is especially true every time there’s a change in season or a change in routine.  Think back to the end of August and the beginning of September.  There’s a lot of change in a couple short weeks.  Not having habits and routines that support you can make changing things harder than it needs to be.

Changing habits can be as easy as making the new habit easy or making something we want to stop doing more difficult.  As humans, we naturally gravitate towards easy over hard - let that work for you in this case!

My favourite season is finally here!! Okay, almost – it officially starts on Saturday. I LOVE autumn and everything to do with autumn. I love the warm days and cool nights, the amazing food (the farmers markets are full of amazing food), chai, soups, all the cozy sweaters and so much more.

Saturday marks the halfway point between the longest and most Yang day of the year (the Summer Solstice) and the longest and most Yin night of the year (Winter Solstice). Yin and Yang will be exactly equal on Saturday. After Saturday, Yin will begin to grow as Yang begins to wane. This is a season of change, a season of pivoting. It’s an important season because it represents the bringing in of all the work that has been done this year. This might be work on your health, work on your relationships, work on your home, work on your business, work on something else entirely.

We’ve been chatting about how habits are formed, how they affect your daily life and how to start making changes. If you didn’t catch the previous two articles, you can read them here: How Habits Affect Your Life + How to Make them Work for You and How to Change Your Habits and Make it Stick - Part 1.

Simply put, habits are an unconscious response to a specific stimulus. If you get cut off in traffic, what’s your automatic response? If you’re feeling stressed, what’s your go-to solution? If your pet or child comes to see you and wants a hug, what’s your response?

Our lives are run by habit. We wouldn’t be able to do the majority of the things we do in the day without habits. This doesn’t make habits wrong, right, good, bad, healthy, unhealthy… Habits simply are. Habits by nature are subconscious and exist solely to respond to different stimuli (pop over and read How Habits Affect Your Life if you want to understand why habits better).

"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." - Health as defined by the World Health Organization

I've come to believe that if I want to thrive, I must invest in my health. If I want to merely survive, I can treat health as an expense and treat symptoms as they arise.  For years I treated my health as an expense and opted for the cheapest solution.  I struggled with iron deficiency anemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, debilitating periods and more.  Unlike most practitioners, I understand chronic illness and the struggles it creates because I’ve lived with it.

Did you know that hitting the snooze button actually makes it harder to get out of bed in the morning?  

Studies have shown that we get most of our REM sleep (or dream sleep) in the latter part of our sleep cycles (these cycles happen multiple times throughout the night).  We also get more REM sleep overall in the early morning hours.  REM sleep is the most restorative part of the sleep cycle.  When your alarm goes off in the morning, you’re most likely disrupting REM sleep; especially if you wake up from a dream.  By choosing to hit your snooze button instead of getting up, you are starting another sleep cycle and may be reentering another REM cycle within that sleep cycle.  

When I was a child, I used to beg my parents for a pet; sadly, they never gave in.  However, I found a way around that!  I started babysitting our neighbours pets when they were away, this began a lifelong love of cats (and the occasional dog).

Little did I know then what a profound effect having pets would have on me.

My husband and I currently have four cats - Jane, Darcy, Toes and Lizzie.  They each have such unique personalities and quirks.  I truly can’t imagine life without them.