I haven’t forwarded you onto my new site yet. There’s one more post I still want to write for this space before I do. In the meantime, I wrote a new post from my heart this morning. Head on over and check it out.
Categories: Empowerment
It’s time. I’m excited to announce that my website is launching today. This has been a long time in the making, as I’ve grown and honed my business behind the scenes and dreamt up a beautiful space that can hold all of it: my work, my writing, me.
And now it’s time to move all of the amazingness that has existed in this space over to riankerfoot.com. The pig’s still over there. He even has a brand new pic. And there’s so much more of me there. I had a hand in every little detail, from the photographs of objects that fill my home to the colors and new categories and placement of every little thing.
Evolution is an interesting thing. It requires stretch and faith. This has been my home for almost four years. It’s comfy. You’re all here. But I know I’m ready for the next thing. I know I can help people in a bigger way over in this new space and that creation is already feeling brighter and bigger over there. You’ve got to be willing to leap to get to the next stage of your dream. This is me leaping.
I hope you will join me on this next leg of my journey. I have lots to write and say and it’s all happening in a deeper, bolder way over there.
So here’s how it works. If you’re following me through wordpress.com, the lovely folks at wordpress will migrate your subscription over to the new site. HOWEVER, this means my posts will only show up in your reader. You won’t receive notifications to your inbox anymore.
To make sure you’re notified when there’s a new post, simply enter your email address on the new site and you’ll get the new posts to your inbox. Simple.
Whether you just want to read my blog posts, which will be the same heart-filled, real me they’ve always been or you want to check out my empowerment coaching too, there’s space for you. And I think interacting is going to be a little easier over there, so reach out. I’d love to hear from you.
As a special thank you to you guys, who have been here with me as I’ve grown, I’m offering $125 off of a Truth Session for the next week. You can book it for a date in January or February but the booking itself needs to happen by 9 am PST Friday, January 22 to receive the discount. Use the code: CAKE. Wondering what a Truth Session is? Head on over and find out. If it speaks to you, then sign up for a hit of powerful clarity.
There was a time where it was scary for me to talk about what I do, who I am as a coach. But now I feel so integrated. Who I am as a writer is who I am as a coach is who I am as a human being. I show up as me in all spaces and I don’t apologize for any of it. That feels good.
My need to be liked has transformed into a powerful desire to have impact as my whole self.
I want to continue helping other people feel just as good in their skin, owning their brilliance and stepping out into the world to create amazing things.
Thank you, thank you for the crazy inspiring conversations that have occurred here over the years, for being a part of this community and for allowing yourselves to be seen. You mean more to me than you know.
There’s a brand new post waiting over at my new site, so let’s get to it. Onwards. See you over there!
P.S. Please be patient with the new site as it’s caching and adjusting to new traffic, it may take longer than usual to load some images.
Photo credits: Sachin Khona + The Essence Oracle
Categories: Empowerment
A little over two years ago, I lost two people I loved: my husband and my friend of thirteen years. I lost them to each other.
If you think that some things are so bad that there’s no returning from them, I am living proof that heartbreak can make you more loving and hopeful, that loss can ultimately be a gift.
They don’t tell you that you lose more than just love in divorce. You lose friends. You lose family. You lose your appetite. You lose the idea of who you were. At least I did.
They also don’t tell you what you gain.
I remember the early days. I sent a heartfelt message to mutual friends telling them that I wanted to continue to celebrate birthdays and watch TV shows on Sundays. I held my breath and pressed enter. Crickets. Only one friend wrote a response. I never heard from most of them again.
Allowing a vacuum to open in your life is one of the most challenging things you can ever do. To sit in the emptiness, to let go of the familiar and wish people you once loved, who have hurt you deeply, well, is to be brave in a way that fundamentally changes you.
I did not know what would come to fill up the emptiness.
I gave up half of my belongings to my ex-husband and ex-friend and moved into a beautiful one bedroom apartment. I painted the walls the pure clean white I had always craved. A blank canvas. I began adding things slowly: a white tufted bed, a pale aqua wall, girly things that had felt taboo in a shared space. I bought a juicer for myself when I didn’t feel like eating and started cooking simple meals for one when my appetite returned. I went to Meetup brunches with strangers and listened to stories about their lives. I became quiet in a way I had never been. I saw things in ways I had always been moving too fast to see. Life slowed down. I noticed the rushing around me.
I watched my ex-friend Instagram my belongings: an iPod my dad had given me, peacock feathers I chose for the Christmas tree, a painting I’d purchased for its resemblance to myself and my then husband, the couch I had lovingly had custom made. And I let them go. I felt my anger and I let that go too. I decided before I had any proof that there would be more of everything: more paintings, more Christmas tree decorations, more love.
I spent time alone and for the first time in a very long time, I coveted my own company. I travelled around Australia for a month. I went surfing and night diving and for long runs in the rain. I watched movies and stayed up as late as I wanted. I wrote pages of stories just for me.
I started to make new girlfriends. It felt a lot like dating. We’d go for tea and have long talks or go out dancing. There was no history to bind us, we were there only because we enjoyed each other’s company. It was something I’d been craving for years.
A gift.
Sometimes I felt afraid, used, unworthy. Sometimes I played the victim and sometimes I played the hero. But I chose to simply notice that and accept it too.
Mostly, I believed.
I believed that life was fundamentally good and that one day, I would love again. I started to see opportunities to love all around me.
At my lowest, I didn’t want to get out of bed. But I did. I had snowball fights with my mom and singing competitions with new friends and jumped on a giant trampoline with a Belgian girl who was like an instant sister halfway across the world.
Intense moments of pure joy sprinkled throughout moments of intense pain. This is one of the gifts of loss that they don’t tell you about: the ability to become completely and totally awake to your life.
I would spend one day hibernating in a yurt and the next go out and make new friends, diving headfirst into the sea.
It can all exist at once. Remember this, when you think you have to figure it out, when you feel compelled to stuff yourself into the rigid role of griever. You can be happy and sad. Angry and centered. Surrounded by love and alone.
Anyone who looked at my photos from my time in Australia would be surprised to hear my husband had left just two weeks earlier. It wasn’t that I wasn’t feeling it.
I just wasn’t willing to stop seeing the beauty in the world around me. I wasn’t willing to give up on the idea that the world, and the people in it, are fundamentally amazing.
Because they are.
One day, in a documentary filmmaking course that I decided to take on a whim, I met an attractive, confident, creative man. It was just a stirring at first, the glimmer of possibility.
Two months later, we went on our first date.
Six months later, we road tripped down the west coast.
A year later, we moved in together.
Today, we love each other, grow together and talk about how we became the people we are today and who we want to become tomorrow.
We listen. We are kind. We appreciate the journey it took to get here.
Love feels like complete and total acceptance balanced with the desire for growth.
Not just from and for my partner.
From me to me.
Which is the true love story here.
These are the gains they don’t tell you about when you experience loss. Because to truly get them, you have to learn them for yourself.
When I celebrated my birthday two months ago, and again when I hosted a Christmas party with my partner last weekend, I looked around in amazement at the life I had created in two short years.
Where that unknowable vacuum once stood, there is life and laughter and expansiveness like nothing I have ever experienced.
The people around me love me for me. I have stripped away the layers and allowed myself be seen for the first time in my life. I understand that I am the creator, that I’ve been the creator all along. I choose not to be a victim and I am slowly, slowly loosening my grip on needing to be the hero. I mess up sometimes. And that’s okay.
All I need to be is a human being. Heart open. Unattached. Ready to receive.
Here is what I know to be true about times of loss and rebuilding—you must hold two very different realities at once: the ability to accept and fully experience your loss and the unabashed hope for a better future.
You cannot run through the loss to the shiny beacon on the other side. Nor can you allow the pain to dim your heart.
It’s a balancing act. It requires presence.
Can you be with your pain? And can you also lean into your desire?
It is the combination of the two: the stripped down loss and the white hot desire that will lead you to the life you are longing for.
Stretch out your arms in the dark. Be willing to cry and laugh in the same breath. Most importantly, no matter what, keep listening, listening, listening to the drum beat of your cracked open, loving, overly optimistic heart.
That’s how you rebuild a life.
It’s how I rebuilt mine.
Categories: Empowerment
What is your relationship to jealousy?
Do you shut down, reject people, beat yourself up, project your inadequacies onto others, talk smack?
Or do you get curious, poke at it, play with, dive into, even love your jealousy?
For most of my life, I did the former.
I would shut down when someone succeeded at something. I’d take it personally. I’d beat myself up: “You already had that idea. Why didn’t you act on it?”
The sting of jealousy felt too sharp for me to want to lean in any closer. I wasn’t “good enough.” I’d let myself down.
A world where jealousy is bad supposes something false: that there’s only one go round at success, one shot at an idea, only room for one bright, shiny person.
Which, of course, is a lie. (You know that, right?)
When you start poking at jealousy, some very useful information emerges.
Jealousy is a beacon leading you straight to your desires.
Someone wrote something brilliant?
Jealousy is telling you that you want to write something brilliant too.
Your bestie is making loads of money?
Jealousy is whispering to you that you crave abundance.
Or maybe it’s something more nuanced: I want to do that but I would do it this way. I want more money but I would spend it on that.
Cool. That’s beautiful, useful information.
So what now?
Act on it. Show up. Tell jealousy that you hear the call and you’re up to the game.
What’s your way of speaking that thing, of crafting it into existence?
Find it and your jealousy will start to dissolve into the joy of creation. All of those things stuffed down inside of you will breathe into the light. They will be liberated.
More space will be created. More ideas will come. You will forget that you were ever in competition because you will be in motion, moving towards your desires.
We are powerful. We can call in that abundance, that success, those beautiful, impactful words. When we give ourselves permission. When we believe in our own brilliance. When we love our jealousy for the cheeky messenger that it is.
Jealousy is whispering something. Some truth that it wants you to lean in closer and hear.
“You want something?” it’s saying.
Go get it.
Categories: Empowerment
The world is aching and angry and confused right now.
And it’s calling out for more love.
All over my newsfeed are beautiful posts about love and peace. I agree. We need more love. We need more grace. We need to embody the change we want to see in the world.
Here’s the disconnect I’m seeing between the anger out there and the call for peace: we’re making up that love is a passive answer to this kind of tragedy.
It’s not.
Love doesn’t need to be contained in a gentle, quiet box.
Love is not spineless. It’s not all peace and om’s and rising above.
Love has some fire in it.
Love is a messy, beating heart.
Fierce love says, “I love you fellow human being, and I’m willing to go to the mat for the potential I see in you.”
When we are isolated and sick and lonely, we can’t always see the light. We lose sight of our own potential.
When I was at my lowest, in the early days of my divorce, it wasn’t the polite friend who said the “right” things who helped me the most. It was the one who fiercely believed that things would be okay, who saw the good in me when I couldn’t see it myself. Who got on an airplane and packed boxes and used curse words.
That’s love.
There’s a need for more fierce love in our world right now. Not shaming or making people “other” than us. And not simply sending a prayer out and going about our day. But real, I will go the mat for you, love.
Our disconnection is breeding discontent. It is killing people. The idea that what’s happening “over there” isn’t our problem is the problem. The people who are hurting people are hurt. They have lost sight of their own light. They are blowing themselves up to get our attention.
Instead of pouring more shame on them and pretending that they are a different breed of human, what if we looked for the potential in them? What if we started insisting that love become our human currency?
Not passively. Not some day. Now.
Love doesn’t just occur in a vacuum, away from other people. It happens in the streets. In our interactions, online and off. In extending past our comfort zones and asking a friend (or a stranger), “Are you really okay?”
It’s calling people forth into their greatness rather than calling people out.
We need to override our conditioning to be polite and keep our distance and remember that we weren’t built that way. We were designed to be in relationship, to live in communities, to look out for one another.
I (imperfectly) do this in my life constantly. I’m a fighter. It’s not always comfortable to set your eyes on the bigger picture, put your ego aside and then go out swinging in the name of love. But the payoff is huge. The understanding on the other side is worth every bit of fear that you will look stupid or too passionate or (the biggie) be rejected.
Fierce love has allowed me to heal my relationships with my parents, with friends, with myself. It’s what makes me a damn good coach. It’s also a big reason that you come back to read this blog. Because my love has some fire to it. I am willing to go the mat for love.
Don’t be afraid to do the same.
None of us is perfect at this. It’s the mess that seems to delay us, put us off and send us into judgment. If I reach out to you, will you reject me? If I care too much, will I be hurt? This is what leads to weak connections, isolation and watered down love.
We’re playing it safe and people are dying. Not just in Paris or Beirut. Every day, people take their lives because they feel alone. Because we’re afraid that we will love people the wrong way or that they won’t love us back.
Love is always right.
Our world needs our imperfect hearts.
It needs us to have an opinion about all of this and then stay open to the opinions of others. To find the connection points instead of focusing on the separation.
So…
Let’s walk into the mess. Cry ugly tears. Insist that we treat each other better. There’s no precision to this. And that’s okay. Let’s keep trying. Keep reaching out. Constantly forgive ourselves so that we can easily forgive others. Work on imperfectly loving ourselves so that we can imperfectly love others.
Roar a little louder. Open our hearts wider.
Forget what it’s supposed to look like and go to the mat for humanity.
Photo by The Essence Oracle
Categories: Love
Truth and Cake 