Goals are capable of being stifling; intentions have the power to set us free to be our best selves. A new year is a great opportunity to reflect on your growth of the previous year. It’s a good time to review what you’ve learned and how you’ve grown through the inevitable challenges life presents. Growth can be painful—but it brings with it proof of our resilience. 

The beginning of this New Year is a time for us to truly explore the events of the past year, our lessons and, ultimately, our…

Christmas is coming! Are you excited? Counting down the days? Or are you just a teensy, tiny bit overwhelmed and stressed?

It’s the “most wonderful time of the year,” right? For many of us, it can also feel like the most overwhelming time of the year. Especially as we ride out the second year of the pandemic and unknowns which are still present in our world due to COVID.

There is much to do—gifts to buy, presents to wrap, food to cook, a tree to decorate. There are events…

How to Cope with the Impact of Cancer on Your Mental Health

There are those rare, pivotal moments in life that never leave you, even after other memories from the same period have faded. One of these moments is if you are diagnosed with Cancer

Your world may crumble.   You may not really hear any of it. The word “cancer” was the only thing your brain will digest

The impact of cancer on your mental can be a very negative one at first. Even if your doctor and treatment team…

Cultivating Joy and Savouring the Good

Despite the divisive times we find ourselves in, I believe there is one thing nearly all of us can agree on. Our nervous systems are getting more than their fair share of wear and tear these days.

 With an apparent oversupply of unpleasantness, these times are an easy set-up for negative emotional feedback loops that lead to escalating levels of anxiety and stress. It is a natural human tendency to avoid or resist the…

A Note from Amy

Coping with Loss

As we welcome November along with the colder rainy days, longer nights and the advent into darkness, this is often a time and period of loss and letting go for many of us as we begin to move to inward reflection and allowing more introspection into our daily lives.

How do we each cope with grief and loss in our own lives?

What is grief?

Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is…

A Note from Amy

The Many Blessings of Gratitude

There is much written and researched on the value of being grateful, and no time brings this more to light than Thanksgiving.

As we welcome the beginning of October, and the Libran New Moon we are invited to honour our own resilience, courage and growth and to reap the harvest of what we have sowed.

For each of us this will be different.  In what way(s) does gratitude and thankfulness show up for you in your life?   How do you honour the…

As a counsellor, I am often asked by my clients in my one-on-one sessions, “Does meditation help with stress?” Followed by, “my mind is so busy all the time I cannot possibility learn to meditate”.  

Meditation is a vital practice of mine which has served and sustained me for many years.  I would like to offer you some helpful guidance and tools if you are considering meditation as a daily self care and grounding practice in your own life.

Meditation has the ability to wipe away the day's…

As we approach the ending of summer and beginning of autumn and the fall equinox...

Transitions. Every single one of us is going through them right now. Sometimes we choose them, sometimes they are chosen for us. As human beings, we tend to fear change, and most times resisting it. We try to hold on to ideas, youth, possessions, etc. as if they were never in a state of decay since their inception.

I however like Nikki Giovanni’s perspective of transitioning.  “A lot of people resist…

“It took me a long time to identify what I was feeling as grief, particularly because I was having to work out on my own what was going on with me emotionally. It would have helped so much if someone or something external to me had validated how I was feeling and said, “Well, of course you will feel strong grief for what you have lost, and of course you can’t be who you were. How could you be after all you have gone through?”  Cordelia Galgut, PhD, Cancer Survivor

Cancer changes everything:…