I learned the secret to not quitting from a very wise Marine Corps officer several years ago when I worked on a US Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan. 

I was working out with Marines as I did every day on the base and I was on the 4th round of doing pushups on 2 gymnastic rings in the middle of a very high-intensity fitness workout. (That’s hanging onto 2 rings that are suspended & you’re supposed to do pushups while you’re hoisting yourself on them & maintaining balance at the same time)…you know, crazy stuff like that. 

It was hard, to put it mildly.  I’d already been rowing, then before that pushups, then squats.  I was exhausted. 

My head said, "what are you doing out here?  You’re too old to be working out this hard, just quit. You don’t have to do this.  This is insane. We’re all crazy. Quit."

I looked to my left and decided to ask Mike who was working out next to me why he...

Today I had this imaginary conversation with a friend or (maybe it was myself.) It went like this: 

Hey Amelia,

Did you know that that blah mood you're in is normal?

And that you're not the only one?

Did you know that you've been feeling tired because your brain is tired?

Yes ma’am it is.

It's worn out from trying to cope with covid, with fires out of control, smoke, political upheaval, along with all the day-to-day stressors you have and it's been going on now for over a year.  

You didn't notice anything at first because you were too busy adjusting, putting on your mask, avoiding crowds, staying inside.

You didn't realize that your brain was on overdrive trying to keep you and your family alive.

The mental and emotional impacts of COVID

Yep. It was over a year without going anywhere except maybe to the grocery store. And you woke up most days thinking...it's another day of the same. The same. The boring old same freakin' thing.

You didn't know how long...

In 2014, my husband and I climbed Mt. Fuji, the highest volcano in Japan at 12,388 thousand feet. Little did I know that this experience would help me be able to deal with the current troubling times.

This was an epic trip for me. In the telling of this story about our adventure, it’s important to give you some background on what it’s like to climb Fuji-San (Mr. Fuji).

The Mt Fuji Challenge

Mt Fuji is a dormant volcano that last erupted in 1708. It was a Buddhist monk in 700 A.D. who first climbed Mt. Fuji. A temple was built at the summit 400 years later. It became a pilgrimage site for Japanese.

In 1860, the first foreigner climbed Mt. Fuji. In 1868, Lady Parkes, an Englishwoman, defied a ban on women climbers and ascended the peak. The ban was lifted afterward. What a badass woman she was!

It was my husband’s idea. Thom had dreamed about this climb even before we moved to Okinawa in 2013. He’d always said, “I’m gonna climb Mt. Fuji."

I really...

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

Barack Obama

Today is about not putting your life on hold and waiting to do the things you love.

If we don't live the life we want now or we're waiting to be happy, then we die full of regrets.  I am a woman living in my 70s so I ask myself every day, what am I waiting for?

When is the best time to do what you want?

Is it when the bills are paid off, you have enough money, the kids leave home when you have more time?...you fill in the blanks.

We wait for the "right" time. For the best job, for the next raise, the perfect house, the best time to do what we want. 

My 13-year-old grand-nephew was diagnosed 4 months ago with a brain tumor. It was malignant. The day before he was diagnosed he was a normal kid playing baseball.

Life can turn you completely upside down. And inside out.

One minute you could be sitting on your...

We're living in funky, unpredictable times.

It’s wearing down even the most grounded and balanced people.

But for some of us, we blame ourselves for things that happen.  We may not even be aware that we’re in this self-destructive behavior. 

You don't have to blame yourself.

In fact, it won’t help you in any way.   

For sure, it’s easy to get stuck listening to the blaming and shaming voices inside of you that tell you that you did something wrong…spiraling you down into negativity, into funky land.

Those are the times when nothing seems right. You feel off but you don't even know what's wrong.

It might be that you woke up feeling happy and everything was going great and then, BAM.

Some small thing happens.

Your phone goes off in the middle of a yoga class, with a voice message from your friend saying your name, "hi, Jo," and the whole class hears the voice recording and glares at you. 

(true story that just happened to...

“The greatest gift our parents ever gave us was each other”  

It’s National Sister Day this week and if you have a sister or someone like a sister, it’s a great time to think about your relationship with her and what it means. 

I can’t imagine going through life without my two amazing sisters.

But it wasn’t always that way.

A tale of three sisters

I remember when my younger sister arrived on the scene.

I didn’t much like her at first. I was 2 ½ and immediately threatened by the fact that I wasn’t the little darling of the family anymore.

Maie, my sister, bit me once.

She was 2. There was a conflict over something like wanting the same toy and Maie used the only tactic she had…biting.

My mother told me to bite her back. (Parents had little training back then in how to parent…it was called I'm the boss and you do whatever I say).

I remember thinking, “but I don’t want to hurt her”...

My mother told me something a little startling when I asked for a pair of red panties. 

I was 9 years old.

She said, “only bad women wear red panties.”

I  was puzzled by what she meant by "bad women" but whatever it was I figured, I didn’t want to be a bad woman.

Where did we get this label...bad women?

I remember my aunt told me that her parents said "no" when she wanted to be a nurse. They wouldn’t allow it and explained that “respectable” women weren't nurses.

I wondered about that, too.  

Instead, my Aunt Billie stood, at the age of 16, right beside my grandfather who was a pharmacist at Hatcher's Drugstore in a tiny little town in South Georgia. 

Aunt Billie worked alongside my grandfather, filling prescriptions as a compounding pharmacist. There were far less regulations then and so she was allowed to do this. 

She had learned from her father how to fill prescriptions. So, even more, confusing...

Let’s get real. We all live in an over-scheduled world with endless to-do lists, and an overload of technology.

Our brains have had it with trying to deal witheverything in the world and adapt over and over again.

If you find yourself like most people, you’re wired and tired. And you may even feel like what’s the point?

That’s when you know that it’s time to take a personal retreat.

What the heck is a personal retreat?

It’s the time you take to step away from your ordinary life and just be with yourself so that you can reset and come back refreshed and be a better version of yourself.

The benefits of a personal retreat

The outcomes of being on a solo getaway personal retreat are numerous.

Even though you think, I don’t have time to stop, this is the very moment to get away.

"The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it. " Sydney J. Harris

Learn more about the benefits of going on a personal retreat and my story...

 "When our souls are tired, we don't need sleep, we need to get away and just be.”

It happens to all of us. We push and push and grind, and the truth is, we don't always take the best care of ourselves. Soul exhaustion creeps up, and then it's time to address our self care in a big way.

How Do I Know If My Soul Is Tired?

Have you ever felt a weariness that seems to seep into your very bones?

It's a kind of exhaustion that sleep alone can't cure because it's a profound sense of fatigue that envelopes your entire being.

Even a full night's sleep can leave you feeling drained of energy and lacking motivation. Excitement for life feels far from grasp.

It's a scenario many of us are all too familiar with. Some call it "soul tired."

When we're exhausted, our body is working hard to just keep up with the daily tasks. When our brains are tired, we can't put anything else in.

This is where I was. Totally blah. Tired and wired. Sick of everything. No pizazz. Dull.

Soul Exhaustion...

The tent that ran away 

Here’s a story about how easily things can change, unexpectedly, and without warning. 

I believe life is easier if we know that we might have to change course when things happen out of our control.  

I think it’s a matter of three things: staying calm, allowing yourself to feel disappointment, and feeling grateful. 

Here’s what happened.

It was going to be a test run. We had just purchased a rooftop tent. This tent camper sits on a rack on top of the truck and with the push of a button and in less than a minute, the tent is fully upright and ready to sleep in.  There’s a ladder that attaches to the truck to get you up there and voila! Instant camping. 

A Trip To Death Valley

We decided that Death Valley would be a great destination as the weather was going to be idyllic for the desert...highs of only 80 and cool nights.  

We were on the road by 6 am as we knew it would be long 8-hour drive....