Travel with Chronic Illness: Learning Gratitude đ & Perspective
How I managed expectations, symptoms, and anxiety while traveling internationally with chronic migraine.
Meditation
Bye, 2017! The Best Books of the Year To Soothe Your Soul
2017 was a crap year for most of us. These top five books to soothe your soul will help wash off the past 12 months so you can greet 2018 refreshed!
On Mindfulness, Dancing, & Healing
Like Audrey Hepburn unfurling her wings in an intellectual jazz bar in Funny Face , I have been reuniting with my body and mind by making them dance. Quite literally in the case of my body, at my boyfriend’s band practice or to BeyoncĂ© in my car.  As for my mind, pirouettes twirl in the form of words and symbols. Reading, writing, creating, listening to music, and observing art all set my soul dancing.
I quit ballet rather suddenly the winter I was 12 years old. I had just graduated to full pointe classes and was at the studio for instruction or rehearsal three days a week. I received new leotards and permission to shave my legs as early Christmas gifts. The whiteblonde leg hair grew through the holes in my black tights and contrasted starkly. Thanks to puberty, my period, braces, circular Harry Potter glasses, and a new resurgence of migraines, my 12th year was crappy enough without the embarrassment of a leg-hair-ballet-tights situation. Luckily my mom was merciful, and I am not as easily embarrassed these days, so you get to hopefully find delight or commiseration in my awkward middle school self.
Dancing these days is much more relaxed – the dancing of a few beers, old friends, and a clear night sky. Or to an afternoon breeze through an open window, no witnesses to my lack of rhythm except the noisy hummingbirds outside. I watch monarch and mourning cloak butterflies in my garden dance, twirling around each other like in water. I twirl myself sometimes, around my nephew, his young friend, and a full shopping cart, trying to wrangle the three irrational beings. The music and din of market conversation is always so loud, the lights so bright, the experience such a dizzying rush that it feels like a dance performance. But we are rewarded at the finish with fruit instead of flowers.