What's Love Got to Do With It?

In my opinion, balance needs love, connection and vulnerability to thrive.

In the depths prior to healing, I was the girl who never committed to anything, and was proud of it. People, places, apartments, jobs, and of course, relationships, I kept absolutely everyone and everything at arm’s length. I didn’t even want to commit to a cell phone contract.

By the time I came around, my parents were out of love but “stayed together for the kids.” I never once in my life saw them kiss, say I love you, or sleep in the same bed. There were situations surrounding my youth that resulted in never knowing if friends and some family were going to stick around, so it was easier to just not get attached.

And I stayed pretty much “not attached” for 20 some years. I shut down those feelings of loneliness through my depression and all of its manifestations.

When I started healing, love became an inevitable part of the process. I started to (and continue to) build mini “friend families” everywhere I went—in college, when I worked in France for a year, and in every job and volunteer gig after that. I found my people, my role models, gurus, and I ended up with lots of “moms” along the way.

Their love and unconditional support opened my eyes to the beauty and necessity of connection.

I believe that growth requires connection.

It requires you to push that fear of being let down out of the way, and cracks your heart open to vulnerability. And of course the more healed you become, the better your selection of people tends to fit your life. And before you know it, you’re counting the years of those connections in decades. And you’re falling more in love and forgiveness with those that have been there since day one.

After all that work, I felt ready, finally, for a partner in crime. I tried traditional dating and soon came to find at my age that set up’s weren’t necessarily as thoughtful as my strategy-focused brain would’ve liked. They were oftentimes the one single girl someone knew, paired up with the one single guy they knew. No thanks, time to do what I do best and take the reins.

I signed on to a dating app back when there were only two, I chose the one where you had to pay and be matched before you’d see a profile assuming that would mean people were more serious.

I coupled this with LOTS of yoga nidra. Nidra almost every night in fact, and ending every session asking to find my true love. I’ll never forget one of those last sessions before it happened, in front of my little tree, in my little house, everything felt so right after that I had to snap this very picture. The painting above the tree says “love.”

And about a year later, I found my lobster. Just when I was about to take a break from the exhaustion of dating.

I can’t say for sure that this love is solely responsible for the next phase of up-leveling my life (and my balance). But what I will say is the life I have now is not one I knew was possible for me. And it didn’t happen until I met my Kirk and had someone to fully lean on, and use ALL my words with, as I navigate the highs, lows, and sideways of this life.

Whether it’s romantic, platonic, or just a whole lot of LOVE for yourself, I wish the very same for you today and every day.

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A woman is running with two dogs in a park.

Balancing a Brain that’s Fighting Back

By Katherine Warren • April 6, 2025

Your brain will straight up lie to you. There’s no way to sugar coat that, friends, there just isn’t. But your brain also creates beautiful ideas and inventions, and well, everything you see that surrounds us. It’s the power of the AND. Your brain is the king of the “and.” The first step in finding balance is recognizing this. The second step is discerning the beautiful part of your brain from the beast. The third is not reacting to, judging or negotiating with the beastly part. It’s tough, tough work. It’s lifelong work. And even if your friends start calling you things like the “definition of balance” (a term so kindly bestowed on me by some friends recently). You’re still gonna have to work your a** off on this part for the rest of your life as you sway back and forth, in and out of balance. Does it get easier? Yes and no. The beauty of understanding the feeling of balance is that you don’t have to rely on your brain so much. You know how it feels to be in a place of solid, grounded peace, no matter what your brain is shouting you “should” or “could” be doing. The harder part is that the more you find balance, the more likely it is that you are upleveling your life. Your focus and pure presence have likely brought about more of whatever you define as a successful life--mentally, physically, or materially. That uplevel can mean those brain lies cut a little deeper, make you question every decision you make to protect your peace. If you’ve learned to sit with that pain in your belly, it might fight a little harder to make you pay attention to it. It might put up a bigger fight to try to force you to listen to those untruths. This is when you have to remind yourself, your brain will straight up lie to you. Under no circumstances should you negotiate with these thoughts. That’s where spiraling lives, that’s where lack of balance lies. Sometimes holding hard to your balanced routines will do the trick.