I’m so excited to be writing this inaugural Resilient Pen Blog post! Arriving at this point has been a long time coming. The truth is that the only place I have really arrived is to this moment. Nothing coming after it is guaranteed. But I’m here. I’m grateful. And I want to tell you a little bit about how I got here and why.

In April 2021, nearly a year after first realizing that my teenage son was struggling in ways that I didn’t fully understand, I reached a breaking point on my bike one morning. (I can still picture exactly where I was.) It was a pivotal moment when I decided that the only way to help him was to pause my personal goals and projects and try to manage the stress, pressure and fear that I felt, in order to find solutions to the things that tormented him. That didn’t solve the problems, though, and the train continued barreling downhill at a dizzying speed, so, in March 2022, with life in chaos, I officially folded my small coaching practice, permanently shut down my blog and gave up on finishing the book I had been writing for a year and a half. My mental and physical health and well-being suffered, but I was consumed with fear and the demands of trying to help my son.

Besides the fear and overwhelm inherent in our situation, I felt like disappointment had become the theme of my life. All my hopes, dreams and aspirations had been crushed.

My complete focus became gathering resources and making connections in an effort to help my son and dig our family out of our deep, dark hole. As I educated myself about this strange, new world we had entered, I gradually learned new strategies and saw glimmers of hope in the stories of others that I met along the way.

I connected with a wonderful online community of moms and a terrific parent coach, and cycling and yoga were saving graces in preserving my sanity.

Gradually, I found my way to a decision.

I realized that there are always going to be plenty of things that I can’t control or change, and, that my child's future might not look anything like the one I had envisioned for him, no matter what I did. I could let that steal my hopes and dreams, too, or I could make a different choice.

I decided that it was time to take my life off pause and create meaning from the pain. I made a promise to myself to grow through the struggle and use that growth to put good out into the world.

Making that decision changed my life. And I believe that it can change yours.

That’s why I do what I do.

My mission is to help you create a truly vibrant life, full of meaning and purpose, even if there are things that you wish you could control and change, but can't.

Before life took this unexpected turn with my child, I had earned health coaching and life coaching certifications, and I had a vision for my future, although it felt a bit blurry. In the earlier stages of the chaos, I earned an academic life coaching certification.

As time went on, and my personal yoga practice became increasingly important to me, as one of my survival tools, I decided to earn my yoga teacher certification, although I wasn't sure what I would do with it.

I slowly began to get stronger, and a new vision started to come into view.

I decided to adopt resilience, rather than disappointment, as the theme of my life.

Over the next several months, my vision grew clearer and became a beacon of hope that would allow me to fulfill my promise to keep moving forward toward greater meaning and purpose and create something beautiful from the pain.

I decided to take my experience, my coaching and yoga certifications and my degrees in sociology and exercise science and establish a resilience coaching and yoga practice that would allow me to help others like me feel seen, heard and understood.

I founded PenPedalPose Resilience Coaching & Yoga to help parents whose hopes, dreams and plans have been upended by child’s mental health and substance use struggles take their lives off pause to start living with meaning and purpose now, even if there are things they wish they could control and change, but can’t.

That's my definition of resilience.

PenPedalPose is named after three of the tools that have helped me the most—shared story, in many forms, including community with other parents like me, journaling and the promise of blogging; cycling, which stands in for all types of purposeful movement, especially things like walking, running and swimming, which can provide great opportunities for clearing our heads; and yoga, which has made a huge difference in how I sleep and has so much to teach us. These are some of the strategies that I will bring to my coaching and to the content I share. I hope they will be as helpful to you as they have been to me.

As I launch my coaching and yoga practice, I hope you will subscribe to my newsletter by clicking the Subscribe button above. I will be sharing weekly content, on a three-week rotation among The Resilient Pen Blog, inspiration for your movement practice and yoga videos.

I am committed to providing services to anyone who can benefit, regardless of ability to pay, so please share my website and any content that you think will help someone who needs it. Parenting kids of any age is hard, and parenting kids who struggle with mental health and substance use is exhausting and terrifying and not something to suffer through alone. I’ve been on the roller coaster, and I want to use what I have learned to help others who find themselves there, too.

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