Health and wellness professionals, including myself, often urge their clients and patients to sleep more, because sleep is integral to our mental and physical well-being, yet we seldom get enough. It also supports our emotional and intellectual wellness by putting our minds and bodies into a state in which we…

Remembering my younger self in the pool — I started swimming this February because I wanted to do something different. Sometimes, even I get bored lifting heavy things. When that happens, I dial back strength training and bring in something new. I wanted to engage in an activity that would be hard enough to demand focus, but not…

How to find what will support you — While I often talk about exercise as a form of stress management, it’s not usually the focus of my work, but lately it has been taking center stage. In April, I did five speaking engagements for a variety of audiences. I spoke to high school students, fitness professionals, folks who…

Cultivating mindful movement can help you know yourself — Aside from being a speaker, writer, personal trainer, wife, and daughter, I am also a mother of a teenager and I really like it. I spend a lot of time before school, after school, and on the weekends doing mom kinds of things like answering questions about homework, listening to…

Tips from a trauma practitioner and writer on how to turn your writing practice into a healing practice. — Your past can feel like a big tangle of cords and wires, each memory wound around another. In slowing down to write about them you can unwind them, and loosen tight couplings that don’t actually belong together. It is from that place of thoughtful introspection and new understanding that you…

A Trauma-Informed Personal Trainer’s Approach To Sharing Your Story Thoughtfully — I spend a lot of time reading and writing about trauma because I am a trauma practitioner, educator, and writer. My book, Lifting Heavy Things: Healing Trauma One Rep at a Time, is a guide to turning any movement practice into a healing practice. It combines personal narrative, research, and…

A Lisa Frank Sticker, Writerly Advice From Sloane Crosley, and Everything Else I Received in Return — I have written three fan letters in my life and I have zero regrets about sending them. One was to New Kids on the Block in 1988. They never wrote back. I survived. A year before I wrote to NKOTB professing my love for both Joey and Donnie I wrote…

The hot coffee that you make, smooth and rich and bittersweet too, gently helps me wake. You scoop grounds with a steady hand (but oh! mine quake), each night to say good morning and to gently help me wake. You press a well worn auto-brew button for my sake, an asynchronous…

Here’s how it’s going… — While I waited for the subway for the second time this week I smiled because when I stopped looking at my phone and fidgeting with multiple masks, I noticed that there was some decent live jazz being played by a trio of buskers on the Uptown F & M subway…