The Challenge - Ride The Butterflies: The Story Contest

"Here’s my challenge –

I want you to share a time where you danced with uncertainty…and won. A story where you felt the butterflies, the anxiety and fear, where you thought about turning back, maybe you even did, but then turned back around and ended up creating or becoming or doing something amazing. It could be about art, business, love, health, life, whatever. It just has to be real, no fables here.

I want you to inspire people not only with what you’ve accomplished, overcome and moved through, but with your willingness to reveal your dreams, struggles and successes. To own the gremlins and the glory." - Jonathan Fields

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Hello Gorgeous, This is your Butterfly Life

A few weeks after Eli, my second baby was born, I would stand in the shower and hear my own voice cry out in my head. It was muffled in the spray of water over my head, and the only place I heard it, always in the shower. It was screaming, stop the car, the baby is coming.

Eli was born in the car. He flew out of me as Patrick caught him while putting his foot on the brake at the same time, pulling up just seconds prior in front of my midwife's cottage. My body had labored that child out in one hour. Never before have I wanted to make time stop as that night in the dark car on the back roads of a New Hampshire town.

What sounds like a movie script that would be funny -- baby born in car, husband still driving as he catches baby in one hand -- was my slide into Post Traumatic Stress with a side of the baby blues.

What went from voices in the shower later would turn into fear of dropping him off of an escalator or lying awake at night imagining the bunk beds falling onto him and crushing him. My mind, which always had a bit of OCD, was now in full swing panic OCD.

Help came in the form of Zoloft and life started to have its brightness back. I could sleep without thought of collapsing beds or Eli running out in the street as a car was coming. My husband and I connecting, two years later, and a sudden fever for discovering myself again.

And then Lucas.

Baby three. The child that would change my life and show me that butterflies come out of the dark when you are willing to dance with them.

Quickly wean off Zoloft which left me with painful zaps in my head and needing to wear sunglasses during the day. In bed for four months, horrible sickness with the pregnancy. Praying for more. Withdrawing and wondering how. Each pregnancy detaching me from my marriage with Patrick.

Before Lucas was born I enrolled at the school, Institute for Integrative Nutrition. We had no money for me to go. I would have three children, one 4 months old and classes in another state when school started. I would have to pump!

In a leap of craziness, of I must change my life now, I threw it on a credit card and felt paralyzed with fear and the uncertainty of joy already soaking into my spirit.

I learned that gluten could cause anxiety and gave it up, cold turkey. I started to write. My love for being a mother had left me off balance. I longed for more, to reconnect with the woman inside, the one who had longed to find her voice.

The butterflies now find me and we dance. They honor the woman who now feels gorgeous and passionate in her own skin. They hang out in my belly when I am about to launch a new program. The day I announced I was gathering 200 women to join me in a program for adding more joy in our lives, the butterflies were multiplying and soaring.

It is my joy and my mission to ask women to live the butterflies fluttering around, gorgeous life.

Those days when I wrestled in the dark with my mind, holding onto the fears that were not real, taught me about moving towards the light. The more butterfly moments we can add to our lives, the shinier, sparklier and increasingly joyful we become.

Finding our voice from the dark which sings out, which illuminates the spaces around us.

Flying with the butterflies, using every moment and gift of our past to allow our souls to discover the work they were meant to be doing.

Starting with overwhelming anxiety, not knowing how to send an attachment to an email, having no prior experience of how to do any of it, I now run a business where I ask women to ride the butterflies. To dance with them. As my tribe slowly gathers around me I watch them discover how to free their butterflies from the nets of their past, their story that no longer serves them. To change lives, starting with their own. To feel the beauty that our lives can hold.

Butterflies ring out the truth of our spirits. They soar when we do.

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Thank you Jonathan, for riding the butterflies. xo