“Sometimes a single request reshapes the whole room.”
Family gatherings are delicate ecosystems. One person’s discomfort can shift the guest list, the energy, the seating, the invitations, and the invisible lines between who comes and who doesn’t.
This isn’t always cruelty. Often it’s fear, old wounds, unhealed history, or a longing for control. And the host, trying to honor everyone, may not see the quiet heartbreak created at the edges. The intention isn’t to exclude, But the impact is real.
Even gentle rooms have fault lines. Even warm hearts can accidentally cast shadows.
Gentle Practice: Breathe in compassion, for every perspective, including your own.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow, we explore choosing new forms of belonging when old ones shift.
“Protecting your peace is not cruelty, it’s clarity.”
There are times you know someone will bring chaos, criticism, tension, or emotional labor you can’t carry right now. Not inviting them isn’t cruelty. It’s honesty. It’s acknowledging that your home is a sacred container, and not every energy belongs inside it.
But the question to ask is this: Am I keeping them out to punish them… or to protect myself? Only one of those choices leads to peace.
Let your boundaries be clean, not sharp with revenge, but clear with truth.
Gentle Practice: Before making holiday decisions, ask: “Does this choice come from wisdom or woundedness?” Let the answer guide you.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow, we dive into the emotional pressure of “family obligation” and how to untangle from it with grace.
“You don’t heal by pretending, you heal by honoring.”
These two weeks have invited you to walk gently through the holidays: with your truth, your pace, your energy, your finances, your heart, your boundaries, and your lived wisdom.
You’ve learned that you can show up without losing yourself. That you can love without agreeing. That you can grieve without collapsing. That you can celebrate without performing. That you can create connection in small, meaningful ways. And that choosing yourself is not rejection, it is respect.
When you honor your design, peace returns. When you honor your heart, clarity unfolds. When you honor your truth, love becomes real again.
Gentle practice: Tonight, thank yourself for how you move through these weeks. Name the grace you give yourself.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow begins a new December series, one centered on a seasonal rythym, inner warmth, emotional nourishment, and the art of slowing down.
“Some hearts recover in quiet, long after the house grows still.”
The day after a holiday holds its own truth. Not everyone wakes up filled with joy. Some wake with relief. Some with grief. Some with an exhaustion that has no name. The world rarely talks about the emotional hangover, the tender ache of navigating rooms where energy collided, memories stirred, and old stories brushed against new versions of you.
Let today be soft. Let the noise dissolve. Let your breath come back home. There is nothing wrong with needing recovery. Sensitivity is not weakness; it is the gift of noticing what your soul can and cannot hold.
Let the quiet reclaim you. Let the stillness realign your chest. Not all healing is grand, some of it is simply rest.
Gentle practice: Drink warm water with lemon or sea salt. Let your nervous system recalibrate.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow, we’ll explore what to do with the emotions that linger after gatherings, especially the ones you may not have expected.
“Traditions are supportive, they were never meant to break you.“
Many families cling to rituals because “it’s what we’ve always done.” But people evolve. Finances change. Relationships shift. Energy levels rise and fall. A tradition that worked fifteen years ago may not be kind today. Renewal is not disrespect, it’s wisdom.
Reinventing the holidays doesn’t erase the past; it creates room for the present. Affordable games, shared dishes, heartfelt notes, gratitude jars, giving something you have (maybe even a sentimental family heirloom) to another person who loves it too. Share the gift of its presence and memories without its ownership but instead a loved memory, this helps change fear of loss and attachement to honor and appreciation and helps us to learn to release what is external and grow deeper internally. (this also requires you to let go of the expectation of what another does, it is a practice in giving fully.)
These honor everyone’s reality without demanding uniformity. Joy grows best where pressure dissolves.
Let tradition breathe, let the seasons evolve. Make space for new rituals where every heart is solved.
Gentle practice: Introduce one new tradition that feels lighter, simpler, or more inclusive this year.
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the freedom to celebrate differently, without explaining yourself.
“Not all distance is punishment; sometimes it’s the safest place to breathe.”
There are seasons when families fracture into separate rooms, separate holidays, separate traditions. It hurts. It confuses. It questions your worth. You wonder if you did something unforgivable or if love simply misplaced itself along the years. But sometimes distance isn’t rejection, it’s growth unfolding unevenly. Some people aren’t ready to sit together yet, and that truth doesn’t have to harden your heart.
Healing rarely begins in the middle of chaos. Sometimes it happens in quiet kitchens, long walks, RVs parked outside the noise, or in the hands of those who learned to love from afar. You can grieve the closeness you imagined while honoring the peace you’ve found. Both truths can live in the same breath.
Distance can soften edges where closeness once cut deep. Let the space become a kindness, a place for hearts to sleep.
Gentle practice: Take a few minutes today to bless the space, not the separation. Say: “May every heart grow at its own pace.”
-Kerri-Elizabeth- Tomorrow we’ll explore the rooms we cannot share, and why that is sometimes holy. (This piece begins a two-week series on navigating holidays with truth, energy, boundaries, finances, and heart.)
Even the fiercest wave can carry you home if you learn to trust its pull.
Grief comes in waves
not gentle tides,
but deep-water surges
that pull at the roots.
You can stand against it,
or let it take you
both are exhausting,
both leave you changed.
Grief is what we view,
based on what we can’t see anymore.
A tidal wave of loss.
There is also the grief you can see,
touching a different depth,
the kind that
requires another enduring perspective.
One that is received , with
or without permission.
Like waves laying upon a quiet beach,
the weight of water
is the weight of memory,
pressing against the chest
until every breath
is a choice.
When it recedes,
you find the shore altered
lines drawn where none were before,
stones rearranged,
driftwood marking where the tide reached last.
You learn to read those signs,
to know how far the waves can come
before they break you again.
And maybe,
just maybe,
you begin to trust
that even in the pull,
something is carrying you home.
~Kerri-Elizabeth~
Every wave changes the shoreline and every change leaves a map. This series moves with the water and the wind, through the quiet ache and the slow return. The next current rises tomorrow, and its direction is still unknown.
Some stand on the shore, torn between the pull of two tides, afraid to lose sight of either horizon.
There are places where the heart feels pulled in opposite directions , a delicate thread stretched between two shores, never sure which way the wind will blow.
Sometimes it is not the storm itself that wears you down, but the weight of holding both the anchor and the sail. One hand clings to the dock, the other reaches for open water, and you are left wondering which will give first.
To love people who stand on different sides is to live in a constant negotiation with yourself ,how to hold loyalty without losing truth, how to be faithful to more than one compass at a time. Those who live there often believe they are keeping the peace, yet they walk on a bridge that sways over a chasm neither side wishes to see.
But bridges creak under the strain. And when the wind shifts, the boards remind you that you cannot belong to both shores without feeling the splinters.
There are moments when you hope for a stand, not a battle, but a quiet, unwavering refusal to join what is wrong, even if it comes dressed in silk and lace. It is the unseen courage you long for, the voice that says, I see the harm in this, and I will not step into it.
When that voice is silent, you feel it in your bones. You watch the gatherings where absence has been engineered, the empty chairs where history once sat. You stand at the edge of the celebration and feel the chill of being placed in the shadows, while strangers are handed the front row.
It is a strange ache, to grieve what is still alive. To watch laughter carry a song that once belonged to your deepest mourning, and realize it is being danced upon without you.
And yet, even in that ache, you may still plant flowers along the invisible fence , sun-warm petals and soft-leafed roses , as both gift and boundary. A way of saying, I see you, I love you, and here is where the water meets the land. Even if the gesture is misunderstood, even if it is whispered against, you know the truth of your own hands and the soil they tended.
Somewhere inside, you know that the journey back to one another is not entirely yours to navigate. Sometimes you cannot swim against both tides. Sometimes you have to anchor to your own truth, and let the currents choose what washes back to shore.
~Kerri-Elizabeth~
But tides never rest for long. Tomorrow, we enter “After the Eye” , where the stillness is a trick of light, and the storm, patient as a predator, waits just beyond the horizon.
SONSHINE FOR YOU 