As 2025 comes to a close, I’m not rushing to define it or reduce it to highlights and hard moments.
I’m pausing long enough to listen.
I find myself in the quiet dusk of the year—candles lit, the pace slowed, attention turned inward. What’s rising now isn’t a to-do list for what comes next, but a deeper awareness of what this year has already given—and taken.
This is a threshold moment.
The urgency that carried me through the months has softened just enough to allow perspective. From here, I can see what strengthened me, what asked me to grow, and what quietly completed its work. Not everything needs to be carried forward. But some things do.
What follows isn’t a recap of events or accomplishments. It’s a distillation.
Ten truths.
Ten lessons.
Ten ways this year shaped how I now choose to live, love, and lead.
These are the things I’m taking with me as 2025 releases its grip—
not as resolutions, but as anchors.
My Top 10 from 2025:
1. Finding My Hands
For the last seven years, I was building my own relationship coaching practice while also serving in a senior support role for my mentor. In January, I stepped away and chose to fly solo—no buffer, no excuses. What followed was a year of testing: my perseverance, my stick-with-it-ness, my belief that I could do this on my own. There were long stretches where progress felt invisible and doubt spoke louder than evidence. By the end of 2025, I could feel my own hands again—capable, weathered, and still building.
2. Tending the Sacred Third
Working with individuals and couples one-to-one in my home became one of the most meaningful expressions of my work this year. In that intimate setting, we slowed down enough to see the internal and relational patterns quietly shaping their lives. Together, we upgraded internal operating systems, translating insight into lived, sustainable practice. Through conversation, embodiment, and collaborative canvas work, what had been abstract became visible and workable. What emerged was not perfection, but deeper intimacy—with self, with one another, and with the life they were actively choosing to build.
3. Writing What Changed Me
Writing and publishing my first book, Unbreakable Us: Removing the Barriers to Love, became far more than a professional milestone. It was a collective act, held by the steady love of my husband, the discernment of my editor and publisher, eighteen generous endorsers, and thirty-five volunteers who helped carry it into the world. I set out to write about relationships and love. Instead, the work pulled me deeper than expected—into humility, rigor, and a level of honesty I hadn’t planned on offering. The book didn’t just ask me to teach what I knew. It required me to live it.
4. Trusting the Collective
In February, I followed an intuitive knowing to bring my couples work into a group setting for the first time. What emerged was an immersive day that invited couples to slow down, soften, and open in ways that surprised even them. Working with the Sacred Third in a collective field allowed each relationship to be witnessed, honored, and strengthened. The experience was deeply connective—for the couples and for me. It was clear this work wanted to continue, and I will be offering it again on February 14, 2026.
5. Where Sisterhood Deepened
Our second annual gathering at Wiawaka exceeded anything I had imagined. Fifteen courageous women came together on Lake George to explore their unique expression through painting, writing, movement, and shared presence. What unfolded was not performance or breakthrough culture, but real connection—rooted in honesty, creativity, and mutual witnessing. The land, the lake, and the sisterhood held something larger than any one of us. The resonance has already carried forward, with three women committed to returning in 2026.
6. Returning to the Canvas
After so much outward focus on the book, I found my way back to my own painting practice. I re-entered that quiet space where thought can rest and insight arrives without force. I allowed paintings to unfold slowly—sometimes over months—layer by layer, tracking where my life, my mind, and my heart were in real time. This was not productivity; it was presence. After a year of sustained outward action, I’m deeply grateful for a medium that invites me back inward.
7. Choosing Community
This year, I made a deliberate shift out of the solitary labor of writing and into the discipline of community. Joining business, aligned-minded, and creative groups challenged my habit of doing everything alone. Being witnessed, encouraged, and held accountable in real time changed how I moved and how I worked. Community didn’t dilute my focus—it strengthened it. It arrived as both support and initiation, exactly when it was needed.
8. From Product to Practice
After launching the book, I resisted the urge to let it become just another thing to be consumed. I slowed the pace and asked a different question: how does Unbreakable Us become a lived practice, not just an idea? From that inquiry, a six-week masterclass emerged—designed to build mastery, shift mindsets, and support real change in how people relate. The work asked participants to practice differently, not perform better. The response was deeply affirming, and the masterclass will return in March or April of 2026.
9. Speaking What I Live
Most unexpectedly, I gave a talk at my Unity church on the concept of Love as a Living System, drawn from the second chapter of my book. Giving a Sunday sermon was never something I imagined for myself. And yet, there I was—bringing this work into a spiritual community, in real time. The book has carried my voice and my practice into places I couldn’t have planned. (Click image to view the talk.)
10. Choosing Each Other Over and Again
We spent eight delicious days on Cape Cod, where the biggest question was which beach to greet at sunrise and which to return to for sunset. It was a necessary pause in a year that asked a great deal of both of us. Alongside work pressures, we were also holding hope for a dear friend navigating leukemia and a second stem cell transplant. None of it was simple, but we didn’t face it alone. This year reminded me that even when the world gets wonky, our love—and our choice to stand together—remains a source of strength.
As you stand at the edge of this year, I invite you to do something simple and revealing. Scroll through the photos on your phone—not to curate or judge, but to notice what stops you. Let the images show you where you were tested, where you softened, where you stayed, where you grew. From there, name your own top ten—not as accomplishments, but as truths you’re carrying forward. This is how a year completes itself: not by rushing ahead, but by claiming what it already gave you.
As we cross this threshold together, may you carry forward only what is true and sustaining. May what has completed itself be gently released, without regret or rush. May the year ahead meet you with steadiness, courage, and room to breathe. And may love—lived as a practice—continue to shape how you choose, relate, and belong. See you in 2026.