Hi, I’m Nadine. I am new, started 2 1/2 weeks ago and wow has time flown. I feel like I’m writing to strangers but I know our connections will soon start to root down so I feel free to lay it down. Is anybody else struggling to find time and energy to really dive into the training? For me, I’m pretty sure it’s a situational issue. You see, right now my husband and 2 girls and I live in an efficiency apartment in a horse barn that is only 600 sq ft. I know there are families in every city that live in spaces this small but I have always been someone who needs to recharge with myself quietly and letting my mind and body do what it needs to do which, on a normal basis, would be cooking a good meal, doing some yoga, creating music or spending quality time with our little mini horse. But for the last 2 years when I’m alone, it’s been a forced time to catch up on laundry or tackling all of our dishes that have piled up in the sink because we don’t have a dishwasher or cleaning up the toys on the floor so nobody trips or steps on legos in the slender strip of empty space we have to walk from one end of the apartment to the other. Did I mention we also have an English Mastiff and 2 fiercely affectionate cats (used to be 3 but the wilderness took her away from us recently…). No matter what I do, this is always a FULL (of things to do) house. My plate is overflowing just being a mom, wife and home maker! Let’s keep going… I just started a horse boarding business after we moved out of what used to be Nashville and we bought this land that we love in a town that we adore. It came with a dreadfully old farmhouse and a 5-stall barn with the “stable keepers” apartment on the opposite side of the hallway from the horses (and approx 20 chickens, give or take at any day of the week)! We sure know how to be found when someone discovers they aren’t allowed to have chickens within their city limits, or someone finds a kitten, or peacocks (yes we tried that out) or horses that need a safe spot temporarily… We give everything we have to care for all the animals and all of this amazing plot of God’s country. Ok, you get the picture. So this “dreadfully old farmhouse” aforementioned came with it’s own energies that were not so easy to care for. My daughters started to become tormented almost every single night by a former owner of the house and this mamma started having panic attacks for the first time ever! What a nightmare!! Fast forward a bit to finding a good psychiatrist and an “energy healer” who told this invisible man living in our house to pack his bags and go home because his mother was waiting for him. She really did it! My kids and I were finding stillness in the night again. But it wasn’t long after that more trouble arrive - our new-ish dishwasher had been leaking on us. The joys of working with appliance and home owners insurance claims is next to none, let me tell you. We had no crawl space to get under the house to see the real extent of the damage that was starting to show in the original hardwood floors. In fact we discovered that half of the house was an addition on cinderblocks! To replace the kitchen floor, we had to replace it all and it had to start from the top down. So we started ripping up the entire first floor of our 2 story farmhouse only to discover the hot-tub sized crater in the dirt below that undoubtedly was created by water… heavy rain and such. We had a suspicion that the dishwasher was only a kick in the butt to get us started on what we knew we would have to do eventually but was not supposed to happen in the first 6 months! The house always had a smell, like a thick layer of musty stuff was hiding under the house. Once we really got to see the foundation which was hardly holding the house up due to water and extreme termite damage, we also got to see what had been living and was no longer living under there. We moved into the apartment ASAP once we saw that some of the main exterior load-bearing beams were not even touching the earth! Complete tear down came at an exhausting cost, topped with live snakes in the pink insulation between our walls and shedded snake skins upstairs in the knocked-out debris. Obviously we saw mold but that was the least concerning thing to me at that point. The house was 102 yrs old after all and it clearly was no place to raise children in. The kicker here is that my husband and I own another company which forces him to travel Mon-Fri most weeks, all year long. So I did what I could trying to hold everything together and we hired who we could afford to take on this massive project. Our first goal of moving in was last year at Christmas. The setbacks we’ve had are unbelievable. But now, we are thinking maybe this Christmas we’ll be in there. My kiddos sleep on the living room couch which I hate for them, and there was more living space if the master king split bed was actually split on opposite sides of the wall. The one good thing about the space is the pocket door for the bathroom… the bathroom that is also used publicly for my clients. Oh well, we are alive and have recently found this immense happiness together as a family after a long spiral downward. My spiral went pretty dark… my husband, well he got to leave every week and sleep in clean and spacious hotel rooms… or sometimes, his truck. His stress is/was just as hard as it is here back at the farm. He had a lot of money to make - supporting my business, our family, our home remodel and 6 families (employees) and obviously the endless slew of contractors. Now, conducting the contractors is another job I hold. GC-ing a bunch of men who want to rush through so they can move onto the next one…. At least 3 now have screwed us financially with bad installs and then walking away… you wouldn’t believe some of my stories if you heard them. So, as I sit and write this to complete strangers, I guess I need to be heard today. This was supposed to be my BM catch-up day. I missed the first week because we were flying home from a family thing up north and the second week just flew by as my kids have been home on fall break for a long week and a half (seriously?! Yes, that long) and they went back to school yesterday - yay a cleaning day for me! Except I couldn’t clean. My body did not want to do a single thing yesterday but be horizontal. I vowed that tomorrow (today) would be an energizing day of watching my lessons and starting my own journey of healing AND cleaning in between. But not long after the kids took the bus, did I get a call from the school nurse telling me that my eldest was throwing up in class. Dear Lord! Another day shot…. And tomorrow my husband will be back and he always demands quality family time as he should, he works so incredibly hard for us and he doesn’t get to reap any of the benefits of feeling our love and appreciation for him for more than half of a year… and that’s been every year since we’ve been married. I am so grateful for him now but it was exactly 1 year ago when I called a divorce lawyer “just to find out”. I’m so glad I never placed that 2nd call. We are stronger than ever just having passed that 7 year hump. So as I sit here, still on medications that I started years ago which I don’t think are helping as much as they are hurting and still ecstatic that my husband finally agreed to fund me on this journey which instantly wiped thousands from our account the day he said yes (we caught a bit of a deal - thank you SO much to the BM team for your generous nature!) and I was SO pumped for days just waiting for class to begin only to realize our flights interfered with day 1. Ugh. I’m so behind with just everything… losing my energizing steam yet again to dive into the slides. Feeling like a failure already. I want this so bad; we NEED this so bad. Needing the journey for Me and for those I love and also, needing the income so my husband doesn’t have to pull all nighters anymore driving all over the country and installing security systems in Detroit or Chicago or small town Ohio, in corporations during the times when their employees are not in the building. You must know that horse boarding doesn’t make an income. You’re lucky if you break even and we have yet to do that. And for what? To have these majestic lawn ornaments that we can’t ride or fully enjoy because really- the job is just shoveling up sh*t everyday of the year and dumping it in the back of the property, constantly refilling water buckets and administering medications and supplements which are highly sensitive and detailed. Repeat repeat repeat. Oh, and rinse rinse rinse in the shower a couple times a day….wash wash wash the half dozen outfit changes in 1 day (x4). It’s redundant and bland and full of flies, mice, dust and venomous spiders that creep into what we call home for now. We need more vacations no doubt, but vacations aren’t readily available owning a farm and neither is the grocery store which is much too far away. Haven’t had the time to plant a garden yet so our diet is up and down since perishables don’t last long… Anyways, thanks for reading and understanding why I needed to write today. I know each and every one of you are just as overworked and busy and anxious about what is happening in the world as I am. I could use some advice on navigating life around this experience. Was it hard to find the time? What did you do that worked? And am I supposed to have a semi-empty stomach when we are learning the different breath journeys? I’ve heard some journeys can be so intense that throwing up or crying or screaming is possible. And how should I explain this to my kids who are sitting 5 feet away in their little personal zones in this tiny apartment? I wish I had a space for me to learn and expand and not be interrupted because my little people are hungry or thirsty or need an extra hand while using the commode… (LOL, had to throw in something to make you laugh). The sick one is sitting here and asking me if it hurts to type this much, haha. Here we are, sharing laughs (and germs) together. She’s getting all of my time while my kindergartener is still at school. At least it’s Friday!!! Thank you 💕