What is LifeCrafting?

LifeCrafting is a term I coined to describe my particular style of intentional living, authenticity, and creation of personal health, inner peace, and FREEDOM. At it's heart, it's about getting in the driver's seat of your life - instead sitting in the back seat and letting life happen to you. To end up at a destination that brings you the health, peace and freedom you desire, you have to be willing to do the work. You have to be willing to do some soul-searching, make some hard choices, and put yourself out there even though it makes your heart race and your palms sweat. Truth? Publishing this site makes me SUPER uncomfortable. But I'm doing it anyway. Because I know too many people just going through the motions and wishing they were somewhere else.

How did I get here? Healthy living and wellness have always been my passion. In residency I took extra training in nutrition and alternative medicine and dreamed of opening my own health and wellness center. When I finished residency and entered clinical practice, I pursued additional training and received my board certification in Integrative Medicine and actually DID open my own private practice.

And then the bottom fell out. Insidious joint pain gave way to the sudden onset of food allergies and ultimately I was diagnosed with Lyme Disease. Despite feeling like death warmed over most days, I managed to keep up my crazy schedule - working 60-70 hours a week between my growing private practice and the multiple moonlighting positions I worked so that I could continue to make my mortgage and student loan payments. Until the day my own doctor told me "You've proven that you can do what no other Lyme patient has done. But if you want to get better, you've got to stop burning the candle at both ends."

I cried the entire two hour drive home. He was right. As a physician myself, I KNEW he was right. And I hated that knowledge. Because it meant doing the unthinkable. It meant throwing away everything I'd spent the last several years creating and then building. It meant giving up my dream. I died a little that day, but I did what I had to do. I closed my doors, cut down to just one job with part-time hours. For the first time in my entire life, I rested. And a year later my blood cultures were negative, my labs normalized, and I was Lyme free. But the cost was immense. Profound fatigue and daytime isolation fueled depression and loss of self-esteem and sense of self. I even pushed away the man I'd spent the last five years loving, the one I thought I'd eventually marry. I was lost, empty, like a shadow of myself.

Over the next few years, I bounced between jobs and houses and relationships. I felt like I was stuck in a teeny tiny boat in the middle of a giant lake as a storm was blowing in, pushed this way and that by the circumstances of life. It took a move across the country for what I thought was my dream job to wake me up. It wasn't that the people at the clinic weren't great, it was that I got there only to realize that it wasn't where I was supposed to be. And it was out of the months of soul-searching that followed that this thing I call "LifeCrafting" was born.

At it's most simplistic, LifeCrafting is following your heart to intentionally design a life that brings you joy. But, like many things that are simple, it's anything but easy. Especially in the beginning. Because to follow your heart, you have to know and understand what you truly value, and what brings your soul joy - what nourishes you. And in my case, sometimes the answers you get aren't always the ones you want to see. Hence why I've owned this web address far longer than this site itself has existed. In order to really find peace, you need to dive deeper and understand what feeds your soul. And then you need to make the choices, day in and day out, to honor yourself.

So if you're tired of marking time, tired of wondering where the day/week/month went, tired of feeling like there's something missing, then jump down the rabbit hole with me...

I'll share my journey (always a work in progress!) and have exercises and questions for you to help you in yours. And along the way, I'll also talk about some of the things I'm passionate about: lifestyle medicine, environmental sustainability, travel, archaeology, family, music, movement and raising kids who are just good humans. Hopefully, you'll feel comfortable enough to share some of your story and your passions and we can build a community of amazing supportive individuals who want more out of life than just going through the motions.

With that in mind, here's the first set of questions: What's the craziest thing you've ever wanted to do with your life? (Career dream at age 6 is totally included). How do those memories make you feel? What was it about that thing that was so appealing to you at the time? What kept you from going after it?