The Before Days

12 years ago, I was sitting on the couch surrounded by piles of laundry, and feeling like I was falling apart.

I hadn’t showered in 2 days, and my plans for that day included grocery shopping, picking up the dry cleaning, and taking my 3 and 1 year old children to a playdate.

Playdates were a form of torture as far as I was concerned.

As I sat surrounded by the unfolded clothes…a reminder of yet another boring task that was my responsibility, and that still needed to be done… it hit me.

What am I DOING?

What is the point of ME?

Is it just to take care of everyone else?

I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. My children inspire me. I feel utterly blessed to be able to spend the time with them that I do.

They are beautiful, wonderful, amazing…and completely frustrating too, let’s be real.

But it wasn’t about them at all.

This was about Me. The person on the inside. The one who, it seemed, had been forgotten, ignored, minimized.

I felt unimportant and insignificant.

A Life Left Behind

In my previous job, which adhered to a more identifiable, learnable, and predictable work-reward structure, my efforts were acknowledged and re-payed by a steady move up the ladder.

But now that I was a stay at home mom, there was no one to even witness my efforts.

I hadn’t realized how much of my identity was connected to my job. Because once it was gone, I felt like a stranger to myself.

I started wondering…Had I only been interesting because of my job? Now that I didn’t do that anymore, what was I all about?

Was this it?

Chores and duties and being a caregiver?

My old life was gone, and I felt scattered into a hundred pieces.

I just didn’t know how to ‘do’ this new life.

I tried the Womens’ Magazine solutions: I exercised more. I cleaned up my diet. I found a friend that could relate.

And those things helped.

A little.

But I was still missing something.

My Purpose.

The thing that would make me feel important and relevant.

The things that would move my spirit.

The things that would make me feel like I mattered.

As it turns out, falling apart was just what I needed to inspire me to build something even better for myself.

A Blog is Born

As a writer, words are my way of communication, with others, and with myslf.

When something is too messy in my brain, I immediately head for the pencil. Whether its writing in my journal, writing a letter to myself or the person(s) at the center of my issues (I don’t send them, just write them), or even writing an essay about the topic.

This is how my blog was born.

By the time I decided I was going to actually create a space where I could explore all of these issues and struggles I was having surrounding motherhood, my identity, and figuring out my purpose, I had about 15 essays just sitting on my computer.

When I came up with the name for my blog, friends and family weren’t so sure about it.

But I was.

All of the “best practices” for a catchy, memorable, or SEO-friendly title, were irrelevant to me.

MY SOURCE LIFE, explained exactly what my blog was all about. It was my journey through this life to get to the source of the things that made me happy, excited, alive and fulfilled.

Creating a ‘ME’ Map

I decided that I needed a sense of guidance and defined paramaters. Yes, I’m that kind of anal.

So, I started examining things I was interested in. It didn’t have to be big. If it was fun to me, or came easily, I allowed myself to take a longer look.

After all, I had nothing but years ahead of me to figure myself out.

It turned out to be a surprisingly difficult task.

The things I had placed importance on before were no longer factors in my life, so it felt like I was rebuilding myself from scratch.

Really it was rediscovering myself.

But eventually, the things that were truly important to me started to become more and more clear, and they fell into 4 main categories:

Physical Health

This was about making sure my body was working at its best. I started doing things like juicing, and even took up running for a while.

I think your physical self is the first foundation. If you don’t feel good in your body, everything else will be tainted.

Mental Health

I think many of us never really learned how to take care of our mental health.

It has only been within the last decade that I have really explored the idea that if I gave more time to caring for my body and soul, I would be able to do and give more to others.

This is a piece that I think most often gets forgotten, or pushed to the bottom of the list, but was, and continues to be one of the most important parts of evolution.

I talk about mental well-being, and the challenges I face with my own mental health fairly frequently on my blog, because its something I’m always working on in my life.

Podcasts are one of my favorite tools for helping me with this. I truly feel that you need to always be inputting inspiring, positive and self improving content into your world. Because there are always sad, frustrating, and demoralizing elements that sneak their way in and threaten to derail you.

A couple of my current favorites are:

On Purpose with Jay Shetty. He’s also got a great audiobook as well.

The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes

The Tim Ferris Show

Personal Morality

Living a life in alignment with your personal moral and ethical code is a detail you may not have thought much about but for me, this was a big one.

This piece touches the job you choose to work at, the people you choose to surround you, and how these things align with what you believe to be important.

Are you working at a slaughterhouse, but you are Vegan? I can pretty much guarantee that’s a NO, but you get the idea.

Now, this is not about imposing your personal morality on other people. The rules you decide to adhere to in your life, is a choice you make for yourself. Its not for you to impose your beliefs on another person. That is for them to decide.

But it is, about living a life that, at the end of the road, you feel proud of. Not because of your physical accomplishments, but because you putting your energies into the things that are beyond achievement and live in the realm of honoring your morals.

Being A Responsible Steward of the Earth.

This is a perfect example of how everyone will have their own elements that make up their Source Life.

Not everyone is going to care about this as much as I do, and some will care even more.

But for me, it touches many layers of my life. From the food I eat, to the business I’m creating.

What now?

In the simplest terms, I try to do more things that make me feel good!

Wouldn’t life be better if more of the things we did in our everyday lives enriched us rather than depleted us?

Your job, your relationships, your physical health, your mental health?

Everything.

I think we are all living a Source Life. Searching for our personal purpose.

Of course your Source Life is going to look different than mine because it includes what is important to you.

But for everyone, living a Source Life is about shedding the things that are causing you harm, and spending more time and energy on the things that will contribute to your most fulfilling life.

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