Tell us a little bit about who you are.
I am a solopreneur and owner of Love Your Life, LLC. I’m the author of the book The Self-Care Survival Guide for Employees and the upcoming book The Self-Care Survival Guide for Caregivers. I’m a speaker, a self-care specialist and a pleasure seeker. I live life and show people how to use self-care to come back into connection with themselves and the world around them so they can truly live in the moment and love life instead of just trying to survive it. The big idea? I want to help you create more space in your life for fun, joy and play. I think pleasure is the magic elixir of life. Everything I teach about has come by way of my own personal experiences through helping my body heal through autoimmune diseases, corporate burnout, caregiving burnout, death of a parent, divorce and so much more.
What is your story?
This is such a loaded question, but I think the simplest answer is that my story is learning how to live life in a way that invites a deeper connection with yourself so you can create a life you actually desire to live. It’s an invitation to keep creating and recreating, all the time – death and rebirth, every day. We aren’t taught these things on the playground and unless we’re born into families who are already modeling how to do these things in a healthy and effective way, we can get caught up super easily into the superficiality of the world we live in with quick fixes, stressful lifestyles, fad diets, materialism, comparison, etc. and ultimately watch our lives, that we aren’t even sure how we got into most times, start to crumble around us without having an idea what to do. My story is ever evolving as I’m constantly growing, expanding, changing in some way – every day it seems – and at this point in my life I can look back and see just how much I’ve overcome and how my life looks vastly different than what it use to, even just a year ago. Even so, the journey is never over and I’m still taking baby steps and sometimes giant leaps forward towards even more of what I desire in this lifetime and my hope is that it sparks the same in others.
You embarked on a journey of lifestyle changes and a life detox, what was that journey like?
It was like a rollercoaster haha =) This journey has been about 7 or so years in the making. Your body doesn’t heal overnight and it takes time, a long long time in most cases. I was born to an incredible mother, but someone who worked all the time, didn’t take care of her body, put everyone’s needs ahead of her own and ultimately suffered the consequences for it with tons of health issues. I believe we fall into family patterns without realizing it. Right at the beginning of all of my lifestyle changes, I had noticed that my life was starting to look like hers and it scared the crap out of me because I knew I did not want to end up living the life she had, and I was headed right for it – my body was already giving me very clear signals. Sometimes the fear of what could be has to scare you enough to right your own ship for the long haul.
Were you faced with any obstacles along the way? How did you overcome them?
My biggest obstacle and challenge has always been my lifestyle. From a very young age I’ve always been busy – going from one thing to the next – and I took that lifestyle into adulthood, into my business, into everything. I was always so busy “doing” that I didn’t really know how to just be, yet I always craved more blank space in my life. My favorite days were the ones when all my plans somehow got cancelled and I had the entire day free to do whatever I wanted. I come from a family where my dad is a traditional entrepreneur, so he has a very masculine energy behind the way he conducts business and growing up in that environment and in that energy, it kind of leached onto me. Often times when I feel like I’m not “doing” anything, I have the feeling I’m not going anywhere. Like I’m staying stagnant, I’m not progressing and it triggers anxiety. Truthfully, magic happens when I’m in my feminine flowy energy, so it’s a tough internal dance. Truthfully, I believe that historically conducting my business in a very masculine way along with bad food choices contributed in a big way to developing the autoimmune issues I’ve dealt with. It was a huge goal of mine to get off of any prescription medications I was on by helping my body heal itself through lifestyle changes, food changes, removing the toxicities in my life, etc. and in January of 2019 I was able to do that. I had been on some kind of prescription medication since I was 5 years old, so we’re talking 30 years of utilizing some kind of drug to get my body to function correctly. I’ve been off all prescription medication for a year and a half, which for me has been an incredible journey with lots of hardship and setbacks, but ultimately a signpost along my journey that I’m headed in the right direction.
Did you ever have moments of overwhelm as you were navigating these lifestyle changes?
Yes, absolutely. The thing about health and wellness is that there are SO many resources out there, so many amazing humans doing so many amazing things. So many dietary theories (eat the meat, don’t eat the meat, eat dairy, avoid dairy, grains are good, grains are bad, etc.) it could literally drive you mad. Because of technology, we have access to so much information right at our fingertips – both information we seek out and information we don’t (hello social media!). Every single time I found myself getting stressed out and overwhelmed I did one simple thing. I disconnected from it all. I stopped engaging in groups, mentoring, sometimes technology as a whole, social media, etc. and I came back to my intuition. My intuition has always been my best guide, and I believe that to be true for most (if not all) humans. We know our bodies best and if we take steps to quiet the outside world – even for a little while – we can start to hear our intuitive guidance telling us what’s best for us to do.
What are the biggest lessons you have learned throughout your journey that you would like to share with others?
I think to really start course-correcting in any area takes a lot of determination and expectation that things are going to get messy and that you’re going to fail a lot, so that would definitely be the biggest lesson. Getting clear on what it is you actually want is always key, you can’t go towards something if you don’t really know what you’re going towards. For me, I have plenty of trouble in this area just like everyone else. Sometimes what I want seems to change by the day. I pray a lot, I spend a lot of time in my solitude, I use my intuition a lot – all things I’ve learned to do from bringing self-care practices like a morning routine into my life. That space that I give myself every single morning is where I bring everything I’m feeling and I hash it out with God. I ask for signs, I ask for guidance, I cry it out almost daily. Somehow someway it gives me strength, especially when I feel so lost – which happens a lot. Luckily there have been so many resources – humans, programs, mentors, books, etc. – out there for me to learn from to keep me on my path that I’ve found as if by divine guidance. I think just like anything, the thing to do is just start. Start somewhere and keep taking steps forward. There are so many methodolgies out there, but as I’ve come to learn that I’m a highly sensitive person, keeping things as simple as possible is the best way for me to make progress forward. Becoming aware of what isn’t working is always the first step in my book – and for this, we just have to pay attention to our lives. What feels icky? What gives us anxiety? What triggers us? Once we acknowledge that something isn’t working, we can then take some time and think about what we want instead. Then what’s the gap in between the two? What needs to happen or not happen? Therein lies your goal that you can break down into tiny action steps to take babysteps towards changing this area of your life that is in need of your love and attention. The magic lies in those babysteps.
What inspired you to start your own company, Love Your Life With Misty? Could you tell readers more about it?
I feel a little silly admitting this, but to be honest it really happened just as a logistical thing. At the time I created the business legally, I was only teaching about essential oils and with where I was wanting to go in the future, it just made sense to create an LLC. I remember talking with my accountant and (as ignorant to the whole process as I was) he told me I needed to have a business name (duh lol) and I didn’t have one. I remember sitting in my truck going well, I want to help people love their life, so let’s just go with that and Love Your Life, LLC was born. Looking back on it now I have to laugh at the whole process, moreso because the name is just so perfect for everything I and the business have morphed into now and how everything just keeps transforming and expanding on its own.
How has making your health and self-care a priority impacted your life? What advice do you have for those who may be struggling with this?
I think sometimes life forces you to make something a priority, you get to a point where you really can’t ignore it any longer or it becomes far too painful (physically or emotionally) to ignore it. I think part of health and self-care that scares a lot of people is that it isn’t easy, it’s far easier to be unhealthy. It can also get very real for people when they start changing the way they treat their minds and bodies that their emotions follow suit – we end up doing a lot of shadow work, even though we hadn’t planned on it. Doing a life detox means whole life – so those buried traumas and the grief and the sadness often times find their way out for healing. It’s such a beautiful thing that happens on the other side though. What I’ve learned is that we spend a lot of time and energy fighting to keep emotions stuffed down, to keep ourselves so distracted that we don’t have the time or space to feel our feelings. When you know something is coming up for you emotionally, the first thing we tend to do is get scared of what might happen – like if we allow ourselves to feel what we’re feeling, it will never end. I’ve learned that it does though, most times far sooner than we ever expected. So my advice would be to have great people around you – whether that’s a therapist, spouse, healers, good friends, whomever – to call on in case you need them, but to allow yourself the blank space to let any feelings or past stories that no longer serve you to come up so they can come out. Really sit with them, “see” them and give them gratitude for showing themselves, because you know these are the things that don’t serve you anymore. And then as if by magic, at some point those feelings will just leave – like a wave – and you’ll be left with space for new, better things and ways of being to come into your life. I’ve come to realize it’s all about the desire to create space. To create space in our beings for better things to come in, we have to first get rid of the old stuff that doesn’t serve us anymore – and it requires our full participation in the release.
What are your future hopes, ambitions and dreams?
Honestly my life is ever expanding in ways I most of the time don’t plan, so I hesitate to get attached to ideal outcomes BUT I always intend to have amazing experiences – whether traveling or local – where I can see new and old landscapes with new eyes, meet incredible people, have amazing food, be seen for who I am. I dream of building an amazing conscious community all committed to their own personal growth in creating their lives with their desires as their compass. At the end of the day I just always desire more pleasure at all costs – more play, more fun, living an incredibly radiant life – whatever that might mean or look like at the time.
What does being Simply Unstoppable mean to you?
It means getting really great at failing, but having the resilience and grit to keep throwing the spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. It means being open to sharing vulnerable pieces about yourself and your life so others know that they aren’t alone in how they feel and that there are resources available to them they wouldn’t have ever imagined. It means expecting to grow, transform and expand even under less than ideal circumstances. It means knowing that little by little your purpose in life is always being revealed to you, even if it’s only one flower petal at a time.
How can readers get in contact with you to continue this conversation?
You can also follow me on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn @loveyourlifewithmisty, as well as visit my website www.loveyourlifewithmisty.com where you can sign up for my email list and get more details on my books, speaking events, self-care in the workplace series, etc.
