Got grief? Stop freaking out. There’s an app for that. For the first time ever, it is available for FREE! Click the link above to download my grief healing app for free all December long in The App Store. The iHeal because iFeel will track your personal grief cycle, guide you through meditations specific to each of the 5 stages of grief and will help you meaningfully journal right from your phone. Take advantage of this limited time offer and please share this link with your

I’m super excited right now. This weekend I had a dream to build a small garden. Basically it was all feelings feelings feelings with the word FLOWERS on repeat. Every single time I checked in on my feelings/FLOWERS situation, my gut would tell me to go outside and create a garden. Where? Right here where it’s all boring. Yeah but…I’ve never made an outdoor garden. I didn’t care. Nothing could stop me. I told my husband I was going to the store to get soil and flowers to make

Happy Holidays! Yes, I had the holiday blues and yes I still have a reason to smile. HUGE. First of all, I made it. It has now been one full year since my last PTSD-related Emergency Room visit for dehydration due to cyclical vomiting. Let’s take a look at how I did it: HOW I BEAT THE HOLIDAY BLUES: (1) I cried a lot. This is not a new thing. I usually want to cry the whole time and do cry most of the time. The difference this year? When I felt like I wanted to cry, I didn’t

DEEP BREATHING with Penny Elias Of all the healing modalities I experienced on my Sedona Soul Adventure back in January, the one I REALLY must learn to master is deep breathing. Why? Because my body naturally wants to heal itself in exactly this fashion. When I surrender and finally allow my body to do what it already knows how to do, which apparently is deep breathe, all seven of my chakras spun like seven pinwheels with enough energy to light up NYC forever. When that happe

Altruism, or selflessness, is the principle or practice of concern for or devotion to the welfare of others (as opposed to egoism). Remember last winter? I do. So long. So dark. So full of despair. I spent a lot of time sobbing in the bathtub thinking about Whitney and Bobbi Christina last winter. Unable to see the light. Wondering how it could possibly be that I am still fucking here. How am I still alive? On one of these days in early January 2016, I came across a story abo

I went on a hot date a couple weeks ago. I’m still bothered by it. We went to the movies to see a comedy. More lives were lost in the first 20 minutes of previews than anyone could’ve ever imagined. It was unbearable for me to watch. Human life matters. This is what I said to myself every time I gasped and closed my eyes in an attempt to unsee the casual massacre: human life matters. Why are these previews SO violent!? I’m here to see a comedy!!!! So guess what? That “comedy”

If my PTSD were cured, it would look like me not having to go to the Emergency Room anymore for dehydration brought on by adrenaline dump. I used to go to the ER a lot. Even on vacation. I can tell you about Emergency Rooms in Colorado, Washington and California. Mostly I can tell you about Emergency Rooms in New York and Nevada. I went to the ER so many times in 2010, I agreed to have my gall bladder removed exactly 6 weeks before my wedding. I was back in the ER with the sa

Why is my New Year’s Resolution to forgive myself? Great question. I don’t know. I do and I don’t. When I feel sad or lonely, which lately has been often, I start to feel a little bit of anxiety. Take me in that state of being, add anything else to the mix (forgot something, hungry, etc.), and you have a recipe for me turning on me. Fast. I am talking about zero patience for me. Sometimes I feel like I want to bound after my own self on all fours, like I need to attack myself

What is loving yourself all about? Remember this guy? Stuart Smalley. A Saturday Night Live character played by Al Franken circa 1991. “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and, doggone it, people like me.” That’s it. That’s “the joke.” In 1991 I was 10 years old and completely cognizant of how laughable loving yourself was. People like me?! What a joke. Wouldn’t it be smarter (safer) to just believe that I was not good enough, not smart enough and honestly, that everybody hated

We visited Mount Rainier National Park, Washington for our 11 year dating anniversary October 13th. Within the first 24 hours, I had an incredible life epiphany involving the movie Rambo First Blood, which is filmed in Washington (and Canada, let’s be honest). By the time we arrived at our cabin, it was dark and our son was already asleep, so after unpacking the car and tucking him into his bunk bed, my husband and I got to just sit out on the back deck, relax, and enjoy the

In honor of Veteran’s Day, here is a link to a brilliant 20 minute video about how to cure Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). If you or someone you know suffers from this injury, please watch this video to learn how to feel better immediately. I have always considered myself a Veteran, though I have never been in the military, I was in the war at home. Domestic Violence. Abuse and Neglect. I am a survivor. One of the many different things I do to recover from my complex P

Went on a hot date over the weekend to the movies and saw Bill Murray in St. Vincent. I love Bill Murray. I am not done considering my overall opinion of this (very) dark comedy, but I am way overdue in sharing the part that immediately resonated with me… Yes, it has to do with grief. Bill Murray plays a character who (spoiler alert) loses his wife. The conversation he has with the little boy he babysits is very relevant to me. It went something like this: (little boy) I’m so

Relationships never die. This is a major epiphany for me. There have been many relationships in my life that I wished would die; that I believed were already dead. It made sense to me at the time and went right along with my former erroneous belief that relationships die when one of the parties thereto passes away. That’s not true at all. I know this now. I write a lot about grief. It’s kind of my thing. Grieving has actually strengthened my relationships with those that have

Shifting from negative mantras to positive mantras was probably my greatest success of 2014. I pushed myself through every day of my life, all the way to 2014, using hateful, terrorizing, emotionally crushing negative mantras. I was not always aware I was doing it. It was habitual to say the least. The only reason I decided to stop doing that was because of the look on my therapist’s face when I told her that’s how I got myself through high school, college and law school (and

Ever hug yourself? I do. Additionally, I made a YouTube video about it. I’m that girl. Actually, I wrote the script for: Hug Yourself + Love Yourself = Heal Yourself, hours before learning some pretty heinous news. I am increasingly intuitive like that; producing and directing this movie was healthy for my grieving process. Not sure what else I would’ve done with my seconds, minutes or hours. I made the set and shot the footage in record time. I’d say this one was fast tracke

Kelly Rae Roberts, will you be my friend (yes, no or maybe)? Before Disney’s Frozen, there was this: I saw it in a shop window in Boulder City, NV on April 21, 2013 and almost had to sit down because I was so…struck. I was overwhelmed. I felt strong, sad, lonely, inspired, hopeful, angry, joyful and I was not sure whether I was going to scream or cry or scream cry.  So I just looked at my husband and said: she’s coming home with us. She hangs on the wall outside of my bedroom

Hey, wanna know what my greatest parental achievement is to date? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mZbzDOpylA Watch this Sesame Street video. The belly breathe. I promise you I am no parental expert, but this is my story: As I was staring at the computer screen, watching Belly Breathe on YouTube for the millionth time, holding my son, dreaming about how I used to be a lawyer back when people still talked to me and I still left the house regularly, it hit me that I was not bre