According to the paper from Claire Costello, Managing Director of Philanthropic Solutions at Bank of America and Jackie VanderBrug, Head of Sustainable and Impact Investment Strategy in the Chief Investment Office for Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank, up to 93% of women give to charity or volunteer, compared to 80% of men. This shows that the vast majority of women care about giving back, whether that is with their time or money.  

These numbers honestly don't surprise me.  Even with women making $0.82 to every $1 men are making, we still give more.  The paper from Costello simply reinforces the fact that women are playing a central role in the charitable giving space.

Here are just a few examples of women all over the world who are giving: 

• British author J.K. Rowling reportedly dropped off the Forbes list of billionaires because she gave so much money away through the Volant Charitable Trust. 
• In China, the landscaping entrepreneur He Qiaonu pledged $1.5 billion for bi
...

"I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me."~ from the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

For some of us, our past is the last place we want to visit.  So instead, we run from it.  We run into relationships, jobs, food, excessive exercise, gambling, drinking, promiscuity, excessive dieting, excessive overachieving.  You name it, we try it.  We try everything  and anything to avoid the feelings, experiences, and hurts of our past. 

How do I know this?  I was a marathon runner when it came to dealing with my past.  I was lost, lonely, confused, hurt, and scared when I was a kid.  I hated myself to the point of self mutilation and bulimia.  I just didn't know how to exist in this life. And I used to blame everyone else for my pain.  

My parents truly did the best they could with what they were given through life.  I can now see them as also being hurt and scared as adults navigating ...

Personal and professional expansion is such an amazing, beautiful, and hard process.  It is one filled with ALL of the emotions. While we push past the limiting beliefs that generations of family and society has placed on us, there is fear. 

Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of being alone, fear of losing those you love because they don't understand or agree with you.  I have gone through all of these fears in my head over and over for a decade before making my leap. 

I continue to move through them as I continue to expand and dream. 

As we sell our home to move back to New York from Georgia after almost 20 years, another layer of limiting beliefs show up. 

The tricky part is that these are not my limiting beliefs, but husband's.  

As I dream bigger, he contracts. He wants to build his dream house and I agree with two conditions...it must be on the water and it must be over an acre .  He begins telling me I am dreaming too big.  He tells me that "only rich people live on the ...

"Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.  So if you are feeling uncomfortable right now, know that the change taking place in your life is a beginning, not an ending"~Neale Donald Walsch

For a decade I tiptoed around the edges of my comfort zone.  I wanted amazing things to happen in my life.  I had big dreams of building my own wellness program and retreat center.  I would take "mini" courageous actions, such as starting my own private practice, or joining a group practice.  I ventured out on a business with a friend where we began creating and providing retreat style continuing education credits for licensed therapists.  I would spend endless hours researching how to write a business plan.  Only to turn around and spend endless hours researching nonprofit applications and grants. 

All of it ended in a return to my comfort zone.  I returned to the 'safety' of climbing the corporate ladder, with the steady paycheck and benefits that allowed me to support my family.  I was the br...

If you are anything like me, you look to signs from the Universe that you are heading in the right direction in life.  This is especially true when I finally made the decision to take the leap of faith to leave the corporate world and begin my own business.  One mistake I made for a very long time while looking for signs from the Universe is the belief that all of the signs would lead to this super amazing feeling like I was floating on a cloud.  I thought that all the opportunities would just start flooding into my life like pretty little gifts wrapped in bows and dusted with sparkles.  Don't get me wrong...I totally have those experiences.  For instance, once I made the decision to resign from my corporate job to focus on building my business, opportunities and signs were everywhere, as were the opportunities to lean into my faith and trust in the process.

Since we are human being having a human experience, we are constantly expanding our awareness and transforming our realities.  T...

Did you know that 50% of women say they give up on their dreams and are unsatisfied with their life according to SK II Global Dreams Index Survey.  When I read this, my heart sank.  I know what it is like to be in that space.  I felt it hard several times throughout my professional career.  I would look around at my amazing life and wonder why I felt so lost and sad.  On the outside, it appeared as if I had it all-the job, the marriage, the kids,  the house, the cars, the friends, the vacations with family.  So why was I feeling so depressed, anxious, and so unfulfilled?  

In November 2019, I had my awakening.  I realized that I gave up on myself...I gave up on my dream.  I was meant to be living a different life.  A life that I pushed aside for over a decade.  A life that my soul was quietly urging me to embrace time and time again.  And no matter how many times I heard this voice, I would quickly, and sometimes not so quickly, shush it away and keep going in the unfulfilling directi...

Have you ever had the experience of being at the top of your game, feeling amazing, and on top of the word, only to have it crashing down on you in either a few hours, days, or weeks?

Self sabotage is a sneaky bugger.  It works on such an unconscious level that often, we are not aware of our decline until we are well on our path of destruction.   As an adult, I can reflect on so many forms of self destruction in my early years.  There were so many tactics I had to push people away so I could reassure myself that I wouldn't get hurt.  I had created so many forms of self destruction that reinforced 'my place in the world' and that I would not become 'too sure' and egotistical of myself.  As we move into adulthood, we are able to reflect on our immature forms of self sabotage, but what about the stealthier forms as we mature?  Before we get into the forms of self sabotage (which will be a training on 5/7/21@11am in The Essentially Zenful Facebook Page), let's look at the reasons we sabo...

In a world that is so goal driven, do you ever wonder why so many goals never fully come to fruition? Can you recall a personal or professional goal, or maybe several, that never made it past the first week or month of it coming to your mind?  

Do you attribute that to your lack of wanting or desiring your goal?  Could it be that you weren't meant to have that dream come true? Could it be that external conditions and situations stopped you from moving forward with your goal?

More often than not, it is because the goal maker does not know the most effective and powerful way to create goals.  Did you even know there was a "most powerful way" in goal setting?!  I didn't before I began my research.  While exploring goal setting to build confidence and create massive transformations, I found:

7 Ways to Create Powerful Goals: 

1. Desire Dump. List all of the things you want over the next 20-30 years.  Nothing is too small or too big.  We often limit ourself when we dare to dream big, imm...

We are all striving for abundance-whether it be a fulfilling relationship, a fulfilling career, financial abundance, a fulfilling Spiritual life, or an abundance of time for self care.  We want all dimensions of our life to be full and thriving.  We spend countless hours dreaming of our Ideal Life, and then it usually ends there.  Do you ever wonder why we stop at visualizing or daydreaming about our Ideal Life?  Why many of us get stuck in this dreaming stage.  When we clearly know there is a gap between where we are and where we want to be.  When we come to from our daydreaming and 'snap out of it', we immediately chastise ourself for being so "silly and foolish" thinking we can have all of the things we desire in our life.  We move into an acceptance that "this is as good as it is going to get", even though we know deep down there is more to life.  Studies show we spend almost 50% of waking hours daydreaming, and at least 2 of those hours  are spent thinking about how life could be ...

If I had to pick a song for my life, it would be Crazy Train by Black Sabbath.  It was the song my husband and I walked into our wedding reception with.  It's the song my boys rock out to when they are feeling a bit spunky.  This song describes how I felt for much of my life.  This song is also how I implemented humor into the darkness that I felt for so long.   

I had spent most of my life wondering if I was going crazy and truly broken beyond repair at my core.  My childhood was chaotic.  I created even more chaos in my teenage and young adult years.  I created chaos in the earlier years of my marriage.  Chaos was all I knew.  It is where I felt comfortable.  It's why I 'fell into' my profession at addiction treatment centers-which are always filled with chaos with the patients who are detoxing and learning to live a different life, and the staff who all tend to thrive in chaos themselves.  

Soon, I began to feel exhausted of the emotional turmoil I was living in.  I was tired of b...