JULY 2016 EDA INCLUSIVE!

Hello my Lovelies

I am on a flight leaving Toronto, Canada. I love this city! Quite a few years ago, I had decided to give up overseas touring to a large degree.  I had grown weary of being gone from home for a year at a time. The wear and tear on my body and emotional self was so noticeable that I had decided to stay home more and focus on building a family.  We only have so much energy in our lives, and energy is the food that grows things.  I had used all my energy to grow a career, but it wasn't all I wanted to grow in my life, so I made the choice to take time to grow other things. I have so enjoyed that choice - scaling music back and having a child has been an amazing gift in my life. It has been a privilege to nurture my son and watch him grow from a helpless infant to a confident and creative young boy.  

Now that my son Kase is a bit bigger, I've been able to travel more and tour more easily. I have enjoyed returning to work and creating - while still honoring the fact that I can't travel and tour and promote like I did when I was younger.  

There is still so much music and creativity in me, and I have so much I want to share.  But how I want to share it has begun to shift.  Being a mom is a priority in my life, so finding new ways to open my heart to the world has been my focus this last year.  I have begun public speaking, building on the messages in my book.  I have also begun developing a website, where I will share the exercises I have used to overcome the obstacles in my life.  I began developing these exercises when I was 17 or so, and they have helped me create significant change in my life by helping me to rewire my brain and create new habits that allowed me to create change. I have used these exercises to help myself overcome panic attacks, crippling self-doubt and many destructive behaviors.  I have spent a lifetime not only learning music, but also how to be a balanced happy person who is the architect and driver of a life, rather than a victim or passenger of a life we might have inherited. These are the things I want to begin to share.

I look at life as if it were a body.  Work is one limb of the body, romance is another limb, family another, passions and hobbies another and physical and emotional health yet another. To be happy and satisfied, we need to have equal tone in each limb. But what too often happens is we focus on one limb, giving it all our energy, and so it grows into a very muscular limb, while the others atrophy, creating imbalance. Imbalance causes suffering. I have striven to nourish every aspect of my life, to have equal tone in each limb of my life.  I have spent my lifetime learning about nutrition, emotional fitness, fiscal health and how to keep an identity that is separate of being in a romantic relationship and being a mom.  Eventually I want my website to be a resource for those looking for inspiration, education and tools in every category, so they can better live a life where each aspect of their lives has the chance to be developed equally.  When all aspects of our lives are equally developed, we are no longer a human full of holes, but a whole human. I want to share the amazing doctors and teachers I have discovered in my journey toward whole humanness. I hope to have the first phase of the site launched in mid September, so stay tuned for updates.

There are also some TV shows I have in the works, and will share more about those in the future.  The point is that I have been busy trying to solve things in my own life; I’ve been trying to find a way to be at home more, to be a mom, while still making a living doing something I love.  And fear not, I will always make music as well, but in the changing landscape where it is increasingly harder to make money selling CDs and books, it's imperative that artists find ways to leverage their message into other areas if they are going to survive.  

So, that's my work and passion.  What else am I up to? I'm headed to Alaska! It will be Kase's first time! I waited because I wanted him to be old enough to remember the trip, and man, is he excited to see Opa Atz (Opa is Swiss for grandpa) and where I was raised. I am so excited to share it with him. I will film while up there, so expect an appearance in Alaska The Last Frontier on the Discovery Network in the near future.    

I will send in some photos while I am there as well, so check out my Instagram and Twitter feeds.

Ok, the plane is landing safely back in Nashville, so it's time to go.