Hey Pioneers, and thanks for checking in for another blog post! This November blog is all centered around the gift of presence for yourself, especially with the upcoming holiday season.  "During our average day, most of us speak around 16,000 words, but our thoughts - our internal, tireless chatterbox minds - produce tens of thousands more, 95% of which are reruns. No wonder it's so hard to get to our basic stillness; it's buried under tens of thousands of thoughts." - Caroline Welch In our every day, there are seemingly a million different things happening at once that can be overwhelming, distracting, upsetting, etc. In these moments, it can be easy to not even notice the lack of presence you are experiencing.  But what does presence actually mean for ourselves? Well, by dictionary definition, it means "being with another or in the immediate vicinity or proximity" which implies that the opposite of presence is in fact absence. According to Caroline Welch,

  Hello fellow Pioneers and thank you for checking out the third blog post of  When Life Feels Messy... (WLFM) I think we can all agree that a part of being human is the inherent desire to build relationships with others and have closeness.  Sometimes we have a natural ability to create healthy relationships but other times, due to multiple factors, such as role models, environmental factors, etc., we find ourselves in unhealthy and toxic relationships. Sometimes a relationship starts to turn sour and both partner's catch it in time to make amends. Sometimes, it is caught too late and the best thing to do is walk away. But sometimes, we might realize the relationship is toxic and not know how to get out of it.  As October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we wanted to devote this blog to discussing the differences between a healthy relationship and one that is toxic. Our monthly podcast episode also features a special guest who has a lot of therapeutic experience in wo