Getting uncomfy for healing
Have you ever faced a secret battle in your healing? As a result of this, did you make yourself feel small in order to accommodate the comfort of others? Healing is uncomfortable, to say the least, but it doesn’t have to isolate you from people who want to support you.
Giving the gift of self-care
Every year my clients comment on how easy it must be for me to come up with gift ideas for family members because I could just restock all of their skincare. But the truth is that buying skincare for someone may seem like a great gift, but not everyone on the receiving end finds it to be as useful or thoughtful as you may think. Buying someone anything that has to do with their self-care, healthcare, or beauty care can be a little tricky. If you’re not careful, the gift can come off a bit offensive regardless of how well thought out you may feel the intent was. There are a few things I’ve learned over the years that may help you navigate giving the gift of self-care this year.
How To Cleanse your Skin!
Imagine a morning without coffee, a night without netflix or starting your car without keys. All of these scenarios have missing parts that just don’t make sense. That’s exactly how I feel about a skincare routine with no cleansing. It simply doesn’t work. Cleansing your skin is something that more often than not is done incorrectly. As the first step to your skincare routine it is often skipped over or done way too quickly. In order to have your skincare routine work effectively you must prepare your skin for success. This post is bringing it back to basics to bring you the proper education on how to cleanse your skin.
Intuitive Self-Care
Last week I was so honored to host an event with Michelle of Holisticism and Nicole Webb, who’s a reiki practitioner who uses muscle testing as a modality for intuitive healing. We were able to partner to discuss the innate wisdom that our body holds. I found myself speaking to a group of incredible women who were all prioritizing themselves by making the time to attend an event that would focus on their self-care. Sometimes I feel like a kettle boiling over and the burnout is real. I know all of you can get the same feeling when our work and personal lives get congested with the non-stop to do lists. This is where self-care comes into play, but only up until the last few years did I really start to determine the difference between self-care and escapism.
Our emotions and their energetically paired organs
Over the last couple of months, I have found myself being able to immediately put into application some newfound knowledge. In the past, I may have learned something from a class or a program and any connection it would have for my life or work just didn't really click right away. I can’t even begin to tell you how my career path has been limited in the type of education that I have been seeking. Most classes were repetitive or sales-driven so my experience with clientele was my preferred form of continuing education. Each individual would have such a special case that I would find myself needing to do extensive research to help them get to the root of their case. From doing this type of custom care I found myself really getting to know the ins and outs of how the body works on a physical level. What recently clicked for me was the connection between emotion and your internal systems. So when you are experiencing a chronic emotion, what physical part of your body is out of balance?
Consistency might be key, but why do we sometimes drop off?
Last week I got my first facial in well over half a year. Mind you I take great care of my skin but a true facial is rare for me. I felt so incredible afterward that I actually said: “wow, this must be why I’m in business!” People ask me all the time, how often do you get a facial? And it’s sort of embarrassing that the answer is almost always never. The reason why comes in two parts;
1 - I don’t work in a spa setting anymore where I am able to get treatments with my coworkers on my downtime.
2 - I’m really not the best when it comes to consistency with services.
My hair seems to always be a few months out from when I should have gotten it cut, I am a little late on follow-ups with my healers, I don’t get massages nearly as often as I need to, my exercise schedule is never consistent and most of the time an appointment gets prompted by someone else who is bugging me to book. I’m truly grateful for those prompts and utilize them just as much in my practice because of my own failure to launch when it comes to active consistency. So why do we get stuck? I want to explore a little bit of that today since I’m right there with you and what to do to navigate it all.
A new kind of resolution
You know that feeling you have when the clock strikes midnight on New Year's Eve and you feel like you can start anew? That feeling can be awfully intimidating and exhilarating at the same time. To feel the pressure to shed old habits overnight can oftentimes set us up for failure which can eventually lead to shame. This year, I set a new intention. One without the shackling feeling that a resolution may previously have had. The intention was inspired by my last client of the year, Cassie of Candid Health, which is to take things one day at a time. We all have different ways of working through patterns and releasing what needs to be let go and in the past when I would find myself backtracking more than anything if I set a strict resolution up for myself. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I march to the beat of my own drum and regardless of my work ethic where I could go about a busy schedule with no problem, it was never fulfilling and I would fall back hard to old patterns and escapism. The intention to take things one day at a time for a workaholic like me is the most freeing and self-loving act I can think of at this point in my life.
I'm about to get real honest here...
If you know me, you know that one of my best and worst qualities is that I’m a workaholic. I get a lot done in a day but it’s often at the expense of having a social life or taking a vacation. Being in a service based industry I rely on my clients to pay my bills and regardless of manifesting major abundance over the last several years, I still think that I can't stop taking the work. It never dawns on me until I realize how little I was able to see my parents when they visited for 3 weeks, how I’m booked in every day my husband has off, and how I am hardly available to attend the events of my community members. It’s really vulnerable for me to admit this to myself because I often get the response of “you’re probably too busy, I’ll just book with you next month” and my answer will always be “I’m never too busy for you”. I’m so honored that people reach out to me for facials and rarely will I ever say no because I genuinely love the work. So when my wonderful mother-in-law offered to assist my husband and me with a trip for our honeymoon last Christmas, I knew this was my opportunity to take an unapologetic vaca. However, as the last few weeks went by and we were slowly approaching the honeymoon of my dreams, I started to panic. That’s when I realized that Mercury was going into retrograde and if I know anything about this weird shift in the universe, it’s that it is an opportunity to test your faith in a higher power and my ability to handle anything with grace. So here it goes...
Traveling Skin Blues
Over the last weekend, I had a lot of new and regular clients ask about the inevitability of stressed skin during travel. I was certain that I addressed this on a blog somewhere but realized that this subject has been skipped almost entirely in the last 2 years of the blog! What a disservice this has been! Traveling is already so frustrating and stressful so the last thing you want to worry about is your skin having a meltdown as a result. Though I’m not the expert on extensive travel (I’ve never been to Europe or across any major ocean), I have traveled for 24 hours plus before and to multiple climates. I also have experienced just about any major setback as in lost luggage, flights canceled, and the sprained ankle while crossing borders (remember that?), so I can speak to the unexpected. Since I have a major trip aka my HONEYMOON coming up soon as well I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about prep for in case of emergency so your skin doesn’t go crazy.
Facing Fears
It’s easy for me to skip over the synchronicities that lead me to pick the topic of my blog post each week but over the last few days, I faced and realized a couple of fears of mine while hearing a lot of the fears from my clients. Sometimes it’s something as small as the fear of a post facial breakout or it can be as serious as feeling like you can’t look in the mirror without shame. Fear, to me, is simply false evidence appearing real however regardless of the times that I say this and the advice I give to others on how to overcome fear - I still face some major fears that can honestly paralyze me. So what can we do when we still have fears we know we have to face?
Love.
What I’ve learned over the last decade of skin therapy work is that I’m one incredibly empathic human. I feel everything. I’ve learned just about everything I can know about marriage, divorce, heartbreak, childbirth, miscarriage and grief from my clients. Little did my clients throughout the years know, they helped me tune into my heart to make some of the most difficult decisions I ever had to when it comes to love and loss. I continuously find myself holding space for people in some of the most tumultuous times. The therapeutic skin coach approach was to help you get to the root of the emotional issue just as much as the physical, so naturally your life events come up in conversation because it's all connected. You can't have glowing skin if you're disconnected from your experience. I wanted to share some of the most valuable lessons in love that I picked up along the way.
Perception.
It’s officially August 1st so this means it is the last official month of my 20s. A lot usually comes up for me right before my birthday because I physically feel a chapter writing itself to a close. I become very reflective about where my life is going as well as what I’ve learned from the previous 11 months. I can safely say that my 20s have been a decade of epic growth that I can wax poetic on it all day. Over the last week I have been incredibly fortunate that the universe has graciously presented me with multiple gifts of self care which has helped me tune into my reflective period. Honing into that voice in my head that is screaming at me to finally shed some of the barriers I’ve held up for as long as I remember. The one that screams itself the loudest is simply to be my most authentic self. So as I continue to write I want to dive a little deeper into the themes that has led me to where I am now, living an authentic life of my choosing with the world as my oyster.
What every city transplant needs for their skin care
Due to the universal pull of abundance I’ve been manifesting I recently had a considerable amount of new clients. One thing that most of them had in common was that they were recent transplants to LA. Without even seeing them I already knew what they would be dealing with. Each individual had a completely different background and circumstance yet they all were experiencing a common Skin Food Talk category of skin imbalance. Since I’m co-founder and lead the skincare side of Skin Food Talk I already knew what would be common symptoms because they were experiencing compromised detoxification organs that led to inflammation and irritations. So why is it that this happens to nearly every city transplant? As someone who has lived in 3 states, 2 countries and countless homes, I can confidently say I’m the expert of this topic. Here are my top 3 skin care tips for new city transplants:
Why makeup is a luxury, not a necessity.
If you’ve ever had a treatment with me you know that in my consultation form my very last question is what is your ultimate skin goal? I wrote a post about year ago about becoming makeup free and since then the most common answer to my skin goal question still remains the same - to be makeup free. I may have done a few of you a disservice by immediately exclaiming how easy that goal is because of my personal relationship with makeup. I grew up obsessed with makeup to the point that if I could translate the equivalent of my obsession to the current time, I would 100% be one of those instagram/snapchat/youtube tutorial gals. I loved creating looks, doing other people’s makeup and I was praised for my natural ability in this department. I booked jobs all the time in the beginning of my career that I can safely say that the spring and summers of 2007 and 2008 were spent with me at my makeup counter dolling gals up for events like prom, graduation and weddings. I loved it but it also taught me a lot about how many people lacked confidence, self awareness and even struggled with a little body/facial dysmorphia. My love of makeup started because of artistry but my relationship to it on an everyday basis changed because of my own evolution of self love and acceptance. So with that, I want to dive back into how being makeup free has nothing to do with skincare, it has everything to do with acceptance.