Maybe it was those cozy mornings that ultimately inspired my current love of the cozy, slow lifestyle. After all, I wanted life to be like that all the time.

​And all these years later, I'm wondering...

What was it about those moments that made them feel so good?

Was it having nowhere to go?
Being taken care of?
Everybody being home?
Not having to get dressed?
Feeling connected?
Having hours stretching ahead of you with nothing required?

Let's bring all of that back!

Quiet and warm, cozy moments like that give us somewhere soft to land.

And I've since realized that it was me who added some of that warmth, and I'm with me wherever I go. Some of what I need from cozy moments is more of my own warmth.

​So when you think about your own cozy childhood memories, don't just think about what happened.

What was it about those moments that made them feel so good?

​Because once you know what you were really responding to, you can begin creating more of that now.

And I've come to believe we don't have to save any of those feelings or experiences for weekends.

Not that we can't have our cozy weekends, too. Here's how to create your own...

(1) Lose yourself in a really good book. Not a book you think you should read someday but one you already know you’ll enjoy. Or grab a stack of books, or fill your Kindle so you can have a teapot and book marathon.

(2) Have a movie marathon or watch all your favorites back to back. Stay comfy in your pjs and order pizza so you don’t have to pause for grocery shopping.

If you’re planning this weekend in advance, though, make a list of everything you’ll need and get it on Thursday or Friday so it’s already there.

(3) Invite someone you genuinely enjoy spending time with for tea, movies, games, dinner, whatever. And if you've had quite enough humanity for one week, 😂 have your cozy weekend alone.

(4) Grab your journal and a cup of tea and dream about the week ahead. What would make it truly special?

After you have imagined the entire week, go through what you’ve written a pick a few ways to get as close to the ideal as possible. One each day if you can. Extra points if you do this exercise with others.

​
​(5) Treat yourself to a catch-up video call or long phone call with a long-distance best friend.

Make a pot of tea and give yourselves all the time in the world to catch up on each other’s lives. And for me, I'd add - talk over everything you've been wondering about spiritually (my best friend is so good for that)
​

To create a cozy weekend lifestyle, bring as many of the elements of what you love about cozy weekends into your weekdays. But don't feel pressured to make every day feel like the weekend.

Maybe just notice what weekends, or those wonderful childhood mornings, would represent in your current life, and stop making yourself wait to experience it. What do you wish there were more of in your everyday life?

Rest? Comfort? Play? Stillness? Connection? Time alone? Something to look forward to?

Pick one. Then find a place for it this week.

Because the life you want isn't only made of the big things you hope will happen someday. It's also made of Tuesday night and Thursday morning.
​
Wishing you more cozy moments!

Love, Jeanine
​

It felt like time had slowed to a crawl. Every time I looked at the clock, I recalculated how much sleep I would get if I fell asleep at exactly that moment, and then I worried about how I would feel tomorrow if I stayed awake even one more minute.

When I heard the alarm, it seemed like only minutes had gone by, but I realized I must have slept for two or three hours. And I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I was going to be late for work - again.

That was a common experience during my young adult years. I didn't get enough sleep and then, I couldn't  get to work on time the next morning.

Have you ever had a problem morning and known
clearly that it was connected to a difficult night the night before?

Though it’s easy to focus on fixing the struggle with
mornings , the first thing to resolve is whatever is
going on during the nights before.
​

Make tea. Stop answering people. Put tomorrow's unfinished business somewhere it can wait for you.

The evening becomes a gradual letting go process rather than a crash landing.

​For years, I thought about evenings mostly in terms of what they did to the next morning.

Did I get enough sleep? Would I wake up on time? Would I be exhausted tomorrow?

But here's something I've come to understand since then - the evening doesn't only exist to get you successfully to tomorrow. It's part of the life you're living today.

You deserve to have evenings you actually enjoy.

And if you're sensitive or easily overwhelmed, you may need those slower evening hours for another reason.

You may still be carrying pieces of the day with you—something someone said, a problem you haven't resolved, too much noise or ​stimulation, feelings you haven't had time to understand yet.

​And if you're spiritually sensitive, you may also want time to clear the energy of the day — to let go of what you've picked up, reconnect with your own energy, and come back to yourself before you sleep.
​
A slow evening gives you somewhere to put all of that. Not necessarily to solve it. Just enough room to notice what followed you home, process what needs processing, clear what you're ready to release, and begin letting the day loosen its grip.
​

I'm hoping these will help you plan the kind of evenings that will help you get enough sleep and enjoy your mornings...

(1) What are you usually still carrying with you when evening comes?

(2) What helps you feel like the day is actually over?

(3) If your evening didn't have to accomplish anything except being a part of your life you enjoyed, what would you want more of?

(4) What would make the transition from daytime to bedtime feel less like a crash landing and more like a gradual letting go?

​Maybe that's what slow living has been about all along.
Not making everything take longer. Not moving through life in slow motion (although that would be fun to watch).

Maybe what matters most is to make enough room in your life to actually experience it.

​Even the endings.

Wishing you slow evenings and softer landings.

See you in October!

Love, Jeanine
​

It’s finally here. 🍂

The season of cooler mornings, changing leaves, apple cinnamon everything, candles lit before dinner, fuzzy blankets, good books and cups of tea that somehow taste better when there’s a chill in the air.

I wait for fall every year. And every year, it seems to come with an invitation.

Not just to buy a pumpkin candle or make a list of all the things I want to do before the last leaf falls.

​But to pay attention to the life I’m actually living.

Because I can say I love autumn.

I can save pictures of cozy rooms and imagine slow mornings with tea. I can make lists of books I want to read, movies I want to watch, recipes I want to try and places I want to go.

But none of that means I actually lived fall.

And lately, I've been thinking that the same thing might be true about the rest of our lives.
​

I know. But think about it. We know so much about the lives we want.

We want more peace. More time to ourselves. More connection with who we are. More everyday moments that feel good.

We want to read the books. Drink the tea. Sit outside.
​Journal.

Light the candle for no particular reason. Watch the sunset instead of realizing later that we missed it.

Wear the fuzzy orange socks. :)

We want lives with enough room in them to notice that we're alive.

And yet so many of those things somehow become part of the life we're going to live later.

​After we get everything done.
After things calm down.
After we heal this.
After we fix that.
After we become better at managing our lives.
After we finally become the person who knows how to live the way we keep imagining.

​I know that last one particularly well.

For a long time, so much of my life was about healing, changing, fixing, becoming.

Even the things I loved could turn into tools for getting somewhere else.

Self-care could help me heal. Journaling could help me change. A ritual could help me become a better version of myself.

​And eventually I started wondering what if some of these things don't have to get me anywhere?

And what if I don't have to finish becoming the woman I want to be before I'm allowed to start living some of her life?
​

That's one of the things I love about fall.

It gives us somewhere small to practice.

We don't have to figure out how to change the rest of our lives on September 22. We have today. And tomorrow.

And a season stretching out in front of us.

​So maybe this fall, you practice having the slower morning you've been saying you want. Maybe you drink your tea without doing anything else at the same time.

Maybe you stop saving the good book for when everything is done. (did someone call my name?)

Maybe you notice what the trees are doing. Maybe you make the soup.

Light the candle, just because. (me again)

​Watch the movie. Take the walk. Sit outside for ten minutes and do absolutely nothing useful.

Maybe you check in with yourself in the middle of an normal day and ask Am I here?

Not - Am I healed yet? 
Not - Am I doing enough?
Not - Am I becoming the person I'm supposed to be?

But we should ask - Am I here for the life I'm living today?

Because creating a life that feels like you doesn't begin with having to change your whole life.

Maybe it can begin with practicing the life you want.

One morning. One evening. One cup of tea. One autumn day at a time.
​

​I'm glad you're here. And this year, I don't just want to love you. I want to live you.

I want to get to the end of the season and know that I was here for it. And that's what I want for the rest of my life, too.

So here's the question you can take with you into this new season... 

Are you actually living the life you keep saying you want?

And if the answer is not quite yet, what's a small piece of that life that you could practice today?

​And if you're not sure what would make your autumn feel more like the life you want, I made a free 8-question quiz to help you find out what your days may need more of this season. And maybe what the rest of your life needs more of, too.

Take the Autumn Quiz 🍂 ​

See you next time!

​One of the things I love most about a slow morning is that it gives me time to come to life before I have to dive into whatever's next.

And if you're an awakening lightworker, too, that quiet can give you room to connect in whatever way feels natural to you, with God, your higher self, your intuition or your own inner knowing.

Sometimes what we need isn't another practice to squeeze into the morning. We just need enough stillness to notice what's already there.
​

Do you love tea? My own morning tea has often been the best part of my morning. 

And if mornings are a challenge for you, pausing for a big cup of tea may help you shift from still sleepy to willing to be awake. It also gives you a calming, soothing moment that keeps stress at bay before you move forward into whatever the day holds.

If your days often move fast, having morning tea can be one way to ease into it more slowly.

And if you're sensitive or easily overwhelmed, that little pocket of quiet may matter even more. Instead of going straight from sleep into information, conversations, decisions and demands, you get a little time to arrive first.​

Here's a brief idea for a morning tea ritual...
​

(1) Light a Tealight Candle: light it before you make your tea so you can see it's glow as you go through the tea-making ritual and then have it nearby as you sip.

(2) Meditation Moment: Once your tea is made, take your first few sips without doing anything else. Let yourself become fully awake and present. Notice the warmth of the cup, the taste of your tea and the quiet around you.

Then, if you want, think about the day ahead. How would you like to experience it? You can spend a few moments imagining the day unfolding that way.

(3) Journal: Jot down any thoughts or insights that come to you. You might even ask a question before making your tea and just leave it there as you sip, to see what pops into your mind in the form of inspiration, ideas or intuitive guidance.

(4) Reading: Add something meaningful to your quiet time—a few pages from a spiritual book, the Bible or a devotional, something inspiring, or even your latest novel if what you need most that morning is the pleasure of getting lost in a story.

(5) Blow Out the Candle: once you have finished your tea and journaling or reading, blow out your candle as an end to the ritual.

​Your morning tea doesn't have to become one more thing you have to do correctly. Some mornings it may be tea, candle, journaling and meditation. Other mornings, it may just be you holding a warm cup in both hands and staring at the trees.

The point is to make a little room for yourself before the day gets going — a moment of peace, a chance to reconnect, and to hear whatever might be harder to hear once the world gets louder.

Sometimes a slower morning doesn't just give you more time. It gives you more access to yourself.

See you next time!

Love, Jeanine
​

Do you struggle with mornings? Have ever felt like you hate them and would rather start the day in the afternoon?

If you're answering yes to those questions (even occasionally), the first question to consider in this post is what do you wish your mornings were like, instead? Take a moment to answer that for yourself.

How would an ideal morning feel?

Because before we start talking about what to do differently, and what and how to change, the first thing we're after is the feeling you want. What feeling would make you glad you got up when you did?

My answer to that question is peace. That's the foundation of what I want. On top of that, I might add things like an unhurried experience, moments of simple pleasures (like my morning tea) and the quiet alone time that makes it easy to accomplish the priorities I have chosen for the day.

But the underlying feeling I am after each morning is peace.

What is it for you?
​

Give your mornings a makeover, by identifying what's not working, what might work better and what is non-negotiable in order to for you to create a morning you want to wake up to each day.

Grab your journal and first, write down how you want your mornings to feel.

Then, ask and answer these questions...

(1) What do I most want to change about my experience each morning?

(2) What would perfect look like?

(3) Have I ever had a great morning? What did that look like?

(4) What do I already know how to do (self-care practices, troubleshooting in other areas, etc.) that I could use to shift the way mornings feel? How might moving more slowly through morning help?

(5) What can I try tomorrow morning that might make a difference?

See you next time!

​Love, Jeanine
​

In the last post I shared that when I began asking myself how I wanted autumn to feel, the obvious answer was cozy, and that's true. But as I mentioned, it turns out I want more than that. 

​I wanted to feel more connected to myself and to the divine.

That led me to think about stillness, nature, tea + meditation, journaling and prayer. And I came up with this idea for myself that I'm calling coziness with stillness.

It felt important enough to make sure I didn't lose that thought that I stopped what I was doing, made myself a copy of the Planning for Autumn worksheet, and started writing my own answers on it.

So I am even more convinced that we shortchange ourselves when we only think of the typical comforts of autumn. If you take some time to think about how you want to feel, you may discover things that matter even more than the pumpkin latte you love.

(Not that there's anything wrong with those cozy fall drinks - like my apple cinnamon tea.)

Anyway, here are a couple of questions to ask yourself...

(1) How do I want to feel during the fall season this year?

(2) What moments in my life or things I usually do lead to feeling that way?

​Cozy might be your first answer. And there's nothing wrong with that. But stay with the question for a little while.

What else would you love to feel this autumn?

Maybe you want more joy. More peace. More connection. Maybe you want to feel playful again. Or inspired. Or grounded. Or more present in your own life.

And once you find a feeling that matters to you, don't immediately turn it into another thing you have to accomplish.

​Instead, think about the times when that feeling already happens naturally.

When do I feel peaceful?
When do I feel connected?
When do I feel most like myself?
What makes me laugh?
What makes an ordinary day feel good to me?

​Those answers can tell you much more about the autumn you want than somebody else's list of 50 Things You Absolutely Must Do Before November!

The final step is to ask yourself ...What tends to create these feelings in me?
​
And then make a little more room for that this autumn.

​You may even find that the autumn you want lives somewhere between two feelings.

That's what happened to me. Coziness with stillness feels much more like the autumn I want than either word does by itself.

So try putting two of your words together. What would a peaceful + playful autumn look like? A cozy + connected one? A joyful + spacious one?

cozy + playful
peaceful + connected
joyful + nostalgic
spiritual + spacious
restful + creative

You don't have to come up with a clever name for it. You're just trying to get a clearer picture of what would feel good to you.

​We spend so much time thinking about what we want to do during a season.

But maybe there's another question worth asking first:
How do I want it to feel to be me this autumn?

Once you know that, you can begin choosing the little moments that make that version of autumn more likely to happen.

Not a perfect autumn. Not an autumn in which you successfully completed the Official Fall Activities Checklist. :)

Just one that, when you look back, turns into several memories you'll cherish.

See you next time!

Love, Jeanine
​
​

If you're like me, you love to celebrate holidays and special occasions. And you love fall!

So you look forward to the seasonal transition that shifts us into fall and your intention is to enjoy all things fall. But you don't typically plan how you want to enjoy it.

I never did until the last couple of years or so. But one reason I began to do so is that I kept getting to the end of the season, wondering where the time went and wishing I'd been able to celebrate it more than I had.

So if that resonates with you, let's talk about how I plan an autumn that will feel perfect for you.

​When we think about planning for fall, it's easy to start with the activities.

Maybe you want to bake something with apples, go somewhere to see the leaves, decorate the house, have a pumpkin drink at Starbucks, spend an afternoon wandering through a bookstore, watch your favorite fall movies, or sit outside with a cup of tea when it's finally cool enough to need a sweater.

And I absolutely think you should make that list.

But before you do, think about how you want autumn to feel.

Do you want it to feel cozy? Peaceful? Playful? Nostalgic? Spacious? Like a ​celebration?

Do you want more time outside? More quiet mornings at home? More time with people you love? More ordinary nights that somehow feel like fall?

Because once you know how you want the season to feel, it's much easier to choose the things that will actually give you the autumn you're hoping for.

For example, as I have asked myself what I want to feel this fall, it hasn't just been coziness. I also want to feel more connected to myself and to the divine. And then what comes to my mind is nature and moments of stillness. 

I'm still mulling it over, but it puts me in mind of combining coziness with stillness. Tea and moments of meditation or being in nature (or seeing it from the window, as I usually do, because of allergies) - and writing in a journal. Or praying. 

What are the feelings you want to experience this fall?

​​Once you have a sense of how you'd like autumn to feel, think about what might help create more of that feeling in your everyday life.

And this is where you can start thinking about specific autumn activities and experiences.

If you want more coziness, maybe that's an afternoon spent reading under a blanket, making soup for dinner, lighting a candle when the sun goes down, or having your first pumpkin drink of the season.

​This is why I made the Planning for Autumn page below. It gives you a place to think about what you love about autumn, what you want more of this year, how you want your days to feel—and then bring all of that down to earth by considering what tends to get in the way and what you actually have the time, energy and money for.
​

It was just a couple of days ago that I created this worksheet. And as I was writing this post, I was thinking about my desire for connection to myself and to the divine. The thought felt important enough that I stopped writing, made myself a copy of the planning page I'd created for this post, and started jotting down ideas.

Hope this post has inspired you too. What are you eager to write down?

See you next time!

Love, Jeanine
​

Before reading this post, take a deep breath, drop your shoulders and let yourself relax. Which of these two questions is easiest to answer in this moment? ...

(1) Who are you today?

(2) What do you still need to do today?

For me, it's the first one, but don't think that means I don't have the other answer at the ready, too!

If you answered the latter, I totally get it, because the answer to that question is easier to measure, easier to focus on and seemingly more important in the day-to-day moments of our lives.

​Slow living will give you time to pay closer attention to the grander question, which I believe is sometimes the more important of the two.
​

Are you an awakening lightworker? I have found that shifting from the 3d tyranny of the to-do list to the peaceful way of the slow living lifestyle is the best way both to keep my eyes and heart open, and to process what I see and learn about how things really work around here.

As a healer and lightworker, I've always believed that I was here for a reason, but I used to leave myself out of that purpose, as if my own lifestyle didn't matter. I've come to understand, in the last decade or so, that the way I live is the most important thing. It's what empowers the frequency of the healing I transmit to others and as I mentioned before - my ability to stay awake.

Let's talk about slow living - what it means, and what it offers.
​

Take this quiz and see what you think...
​

That quiz is from my free slow living ebook, which you can download with no opt-in. I apologize for the blurriness of the page - apparently, it works better as a page than a picture. :)

So how did you do? Would you like to learn more about how slow living might be a good idea for you? We'll be talking about it a lot this month.
​

Slow living is about separating who you are from your to-do list. It's about letting go of the idea that more is better, and that faster is the way to go.

It's about doing one thing at a time and devoting yourself to it, being fully present and engaged. So you don't miss anything.

Which means that with slow living, you let go of
multi-tasking whenever possible. It's letting yourself take the time to enjoy simple pleasures, and to savor moments you love.

Slow living is about the pause between each moment of engagement and the next one. It devalues the rush from one moment to the next.

It's the pauses, I'm telling you! But what do you think?

See you next time!