THE LIFE BEHIND THE WORK
Some experiences change the questions we ask.
Losing two pregnancies and my mother changed the way I understood grief, uncertainty, and the experiences people carry quietly.
I learned that life can look perfectly ordinary from the outside while something very difficult is happening within it. People continue working, meeting responsibilities, and showing up for others, even when they’re struggling with things few people know about.
These experiences eventually influenced my writing, including my book, Lost but Found: Finding Faith after Recurrent Miscarriages. Writing gave me a way to make sense of some of what I had experienced and share a part of my story that other women might recognize.
Motherhood brought new questions. Raising Santi and Lucia continues to teach me about patience, expectations, emotional development, and the different ways children experience the world.
My children have also influenced my interest in parenting and developmental psychology. Much of what I study becomes more meaningful when I consider the everyday realities of raising two very different individuals.
Along the way, I became increasingly interested in how people cope with difficult experiences, manage stress, understand themselves, and find ways to live well despite life’s uncertainties.
That curiosity led me to explore aromatherapy, mindfulness, and eventually psychology. Each offered a different perspective, and the more I learned, the more I began to see how they could inform one another.
Over time, these three disciplines became the foundation of what I now call MAP™: Mindfulness, Aromatherapy, and Psychology.
