For the Parts of You That Are Still Chasing the Sun

Introducing my first book of poetry and some thoughts on healing our way toward the sunshine.

I believe all of us who choose to heal are chasing the sun in some way, don’t you think?

We know what it’s like to live in the dark.

And yet, we’ve seen light shine through the cracks of ourselves we’ve tried to put back together.

And even better, we’ve had moments of bathing in the rays of that beautiful sunshine.

As we heal, we move through this arc over and over, dark to light, dark to light.

My healing journey started by chasing the sun in a near-literal sense. I sought coaching for the first time, which is what jump-started my healing journey, because I felt like a dark cloud was following me around.

When I talk about this feeling, I give one specific example: I was sitting on a beach in San Diego on a sunny Saturday with my husband. Not a thing to do, not a cloud in the sky. On paper, life was as good as it could get. And it was amazing. I was generally happy, successful at work, surrounded by friends, and having once-in-a-lifetime experiences while living in paradise (San Diego).

And yet, even on those blissful, seemingly perfect days, that cloud hung above my head.

It took a lot of excavating, crying on the floor (literally), and a willingness to look at my life in a way I never had before to start seeing glimpses of the brightness I was craving. And for a while, it was HARD. Below is a photo from December 7, 2018, after a particularly challenging coaching session. I was just lying on the floor crying.

Through all of that, I wrote. I used poetry to process the depths of my healing. To understand the realities of my childhood that I’d never realized before. To feel the anger and the grief and the sadness, but also to start catching glimpses of the light.

Now, eight years later, I’m so excited (and honestly, kind of scared) to share my first-ever book of poetry, Chasing the Sun: Stories of Healing.

These poems speak to my journey of navigating from dark to light. Check it out in the video below.

What The Poems Are About

Themes in this book cover a wide range of topics from body image dissatisfaction and body anxiety to changing friendships, growing up, relationships with parents and family, and reconnecting with your inner child.

While my experiences drove the writing of these poems, my hope is that your experience is what comes through when you read them.

The book is split up into three parts that represent the arc of going from dark to light:

• Part 1: The Whispers of Dawn

• Part 2: The First Glow

• Part 3: The Pure Golden Light

What I Hope You’ll Get Out of Chasing the Sun

• Words and thoughts that inspire a shift in your perspective.

• A sense of belonging. I hope that as you read, you think, “That was my experience, too,” and feel less alone because of it.

• The reminder that a disordered relationship with your body is both incredibly unique and also not at the same time, and then experience the feeling of liberation that comes with that recognition.

• Words and mantras that help you through hard days.

• Hope and inspiration to keep doing the hard work, even when it feels impossible.

Fun facts about Chasing the Sun

1. The cover is a photo of me on top of Mt. Batur, a volcano in Bali. We slept on top of the volcano so we could wake up and see the first light of day from the top. We were literally chasing the sun.

2. I wrote 95% of this book while traveling the world for 9 months in 2019! This was when the cover photo was taken.

3. I wrote the last 5% just a few months ago, filling in the blanks and adding some new prose based on the perspective I now bring to this healing journey so many years later.

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