Welcome to The Pieceful Life

To all of my Soul Diver fans, welcome to my new site: The Pieceful Life!

My first blog was created at a time where I felt completely lost. The title, "Soul Diver", was exactly what I was doing; going down, deep into my inner self, and trying to understand who I really am. (It just happened to fit well with the fact that I love to scuba dive, and being underwater is one of my very happiest, and calmest, places to be!)

Looking back at my very first post, almost 6 years later, I just want to give that girl a big, long hug. When I started blogging, I was recovering from a traumatic surgery, completely burnt-out from my job, suffering from depression, and far away from my family. I was at a turning point in my life. I was so brave. I left the path that I had never questioned, and always thought I would be on, even though I had no idea where the next path would lead.

In that first post, I included a quote:

"Never be afraid to fall apart because it is an opportunity to rebuild yourself the way you wish you had been all along." - Rae Smith

I was so lost, but so wise! Reading this quote filled me with such a sense of pride for allowing myself to fall apart, for learning how to sit in the discomfort of being broken, and for rebuilding myself into the person I am today.

But throughout that journey, I felt scattered. As my life, and my sense of self, evolved, I had the sense of becoming a fragmented person.

I have always been a daughter and sister. When I started my blog, I had also been a wife for a few years. And I had a fast-paced career at Microsoft, for 10 years, after graduating from a competitive business program. So there was me: the Daughter, Sister, Wife and Business Woman. Right before my surgery, we got a puppy (our Mitzi). So there was me: the (slightly obsessed) Dog Owner. When I left my job at Microsoft, one of the first things I did was learn how to mosaic. So there was me: the Artist. Mitzi and I became an animal-assisted therapy team. So there was me: the Volunteer. A few months after moving back home to be closer to our families, I became pregnant with our first son. So there was me: the Mother. Boy, that is a big part of me. That part of me almost swallowed the other parts of me whole. It took some time and effort to find the parts of myself outside of being a mother again, but when I did, I took yoga teacher training certification. So there was me: the Yoga Teacher. And through that whole journey, there was me: the Blogger. Now, I am all of those things. And I felt like I was still keeping them quite separate.

As I said in a comment on a Facebook post recently, I am proud that the steps I've taken in the past year have helped me feel like one whole person again. I felt so fragmented like there were many different versions of myself, and am now starting to feel like they are all weaving together, into exactly the person I want to be.

And in that same spirit, I have been working on bringing all of my different websites (blog, Mozaica, etc...) in one place! Quite honestly, I ran out of space to upload pictures on my other blog. And I thought if I am going to pay for this site, it might as well do exactly what I need it to do. "The Pieceful Life" combines my love of mosaics, yoga and introspection together: peace by piece.

Of course, it has taken a lot of thought and time to move everything over to this site. Did they make it easy to import my existing blog posts to another site? Not even a little bit. I have manually copied over every single post. But I actually had a lot of fun going through all my old posts. Reading those memories and lessons learned and seeing those pictures was nourishing to my soul. And realizing that so many lessons have repeated themselves multiple times was an insight that I'll be diving deeper into in future posts.

I hope you'll join me as I continue through this journey!