“It’s always an adventure with you Brittany Kay.” -mom
The hardest relationship you will ever encounter is the one you have with yourself.
It’s has taken me years, maybe even several life times to learn to love myself. If I’m being totally and completely honest somedays I still feel unlovable, but throughout this journey I have learned great skills, collected many tools and become a craftsman of relationships.
The biggest lessons of my life have come to me through my connections with others, but after some heavy blows in this department I realized that I had forgotten my connection with myself and my connection with God. I was solely depending on receiving my happiness from aspects I couldn’t control. Often times by endlessly pouring from my own tank into people and jobs who could in no way pour back into me.
I always watched all these people talk about how freaking awesome their lives were. People who were so busy living their own destiny they looked like they were glowing. It left me wondering, how they faked it so well. I just assumed everyone was faking it like I was.
It wasn’t until I allowed my messy parts to show up and took radical accountability for them that I learned, that shit ain’t fake. It’s real! Real life is messy and true happiness lives amongst the mess.
As a Life Transition Coach and Energy Healer I help my clients navigate their connection to themselves, others and God through a mind, body, soul and spirit approach. Meaning as we dig through the messy moments of their lives, I teach then how to implement real changes through shadow work, somatic practices, inner energy work and spiritual alignment. Shifting their, “I’m a hot mess and so is my life” beliefs into “I’m a badass and I love my life, to spite the mess around me!”
You don’t have to fake it to glow. You can get there one tiny piece at a time. All the while seeing you’re surroundings in a whole new light. There is REAL happiness in your life, but you gotta be willing to GET messy to discover it!
The lady behind the name.
Meet Lois… loving others in services!
This is my grandma Smith, my nieces grandma Lois, my dads mom, and my grandpas wife. Which is where on June 30, 1947, Lois Irene Schmelzle, became Mrs. Charles Andrew Smith, and the story of my family began.
This year would have been my grandparents 76th wedding anniversary. You see my grandma just had to be a June bride; even though 76 years later she can’t tell me why that was so important, at the ripe old age of 19 it was her number 2 request of the time; number 1 being that she marry Bud Smith. Just 5 years prior she saw this man of her dreams for the first time; the older brother of her best friend, he was home on leave before his WWII deployment and had come to greet his sister after school. Lois’s journal entry April 21, 1944; “I saw Bud Smith today, and boy he sure looks swell and so different than I expected”, her crush is almost palatable. Two years later to the very day of that encounter he would tell her that he wanted her for his wife. That fall it becomes official as she receives her engagement ring and he begins to build them a home, and come June she tells him whether the house was finished or not she was to be his bride before the months end.
Over the next 43 years they would build a business, raise 3 children and be gifted 7 grand babies. Just settling into retirement and dreaming of all the years they had ahead to travel, love on their family and friends, in 1991 with Buds passing, Lois would find herself in a major life transition. A widow at 63. Grieving the loss of the love of her life, moving into a new home all alone and embracing a new chapter full of challenges and beauty.
My grandma will tell you how her life was easy. She wanted for little and needed for nothing. How my grandpa even in death is the best provider she could have asked for. She will also tell you that looking back she can hardly believe that 19 year old her just got married so easily. “I mean I had barely even lived, what was I thinking” ,she tells me. But I know she wasn’t. God had their most perfect plan designed and while most of it seems to be lived in true rose colored lighting there are shadows of darkness in her life as well. Deep loss, slow aging, lonely sorrows. She never lets those dark edges over shadow the bright joy she has experienced though. Life long friendships, raising babies and grand babies and great grand babies, hours and hours of service to others, craft groups and Y-camps and trips full of exploring.
For me personally though my grandma has always been my safe place. The embracer of messes, and commissioner of joy, she always knows how to see the good in life, especially when things aren’t looking so good. When I decided to start a coaching career, it was because I desired to help people in some of the hardest moments of life embrace the messiness and commission joy. Naturally, it was no surprise that when I sat down and truly digested what and who helped me most along my own personal journey of hard times it was and still is my grandma. Always loving others in ways of service. She has taught me many things along this life journey and while on the surface it may seem we share very few similarities in life and most certainly come from different times there are far more parallels than even I realized.
It is my hope that over time sharing our stories will, inspire, intrigue and ignite joy in your life… especially in the hardest and messiest of times.
Learn to love yourself —
instead of loving the idea of other people loving you.
