the “why”
“Don’t forget to take care of your three homes: mind, body, & earth…”
I read these words as a naive 20-year-old scrolling through Pinterest trying to procrastinate my schoolwork. Little did I know they would come to shape my entire philosophy on wellbeing and intentional living.
It was the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the world was shutting down and shutting in around me, I was struggling to write the beginnings of a collegiate thesis on one of the most social activities that exists: dance. Back then my biggest aspirations were to figure out how to make it to Broadway and live in New York City. I had just moved back home as my university shut its doors, my then-boyfriend and I were figuring out fully virtual communication just 6 months into our relationship, and I wasn’t vegan yet. What a time.
But as I, along with the rest of the global population, hit one of the lowest and scariest points in my life, the light bulb turned on: dance and mental health. To this day I’m pretty convinced I chose this as my thesis topic to justify going down my self-help rabbit hole and make sense of the mass chaos, but the decision did kickstart a perfect storm of events that made me the tree-hugging, journal-writing, plant-eating yoga teacher I am today.
Over the next year, I finished my thesis to great accolades from my professors, spiraled through every Netflix environmental documentary, became a vegan as a result, graduated college with honors, watched my boyfriend move across the country . . .
. . . and succeeded in thoroughly burning myself out.
Turns out being brilliant, forward-thinking, and accomplished throughout college didn’t change the fact that I was exhausted, unemployed, broke, and car-less. I had been so focused on living up to everyone else’s expectations for me that I hadn’t taken two seconds to sit down and think about my next steps. What was supposed to be one of the most exciting times of my life, the hard launch into adulthood, turned out to be a stressful mess of every adult’s opinion about what my future should be. “What grad school are you going to?” “Did you apply to internships yet?” “Don’t go work there, you have so much more potential!” I wanted to, respectfully, flip off every adult that was offering me an “excellent opportunity for resume-building and experience” without the funding to back it up. EXPERIENCE DOESN’T PAY THE BILLS.
So I found a job at my local gym as a kids’ dance teacher and politely told the world to EFF OFF. Thus began the reinvention of Vero.
I spent the next year separating my self-worth from my academic achievements and selfishly learning to ask: what does Vero want and need to do? And I ~ finally ~ began to unpack a whole thesis AND pandemic’s worth of wellness information that I had acquired and not yet gotten to apply.
I used my gym’s employee discount and got yoga teacher certified, I got super annoying about living an eco-friendly lifestyle, I learned to cook for the joy of it instead of for survival, and so on and so forth. And as I slowly started to take back my autonomy and lean into my own interests, as I felt my shoulders relax and joyful Vero start to peek through, those little words from a few years ago came creeping back into my brain: don’t forget to take care of your three homes: mind, body, & earth.
And I realized how truly intertwined all three of them are. I had researched all three separately at different times in my life, but it was when I applied them all together and put them into broader conversation with each other that I saw the shift from isolated ideas to integrated life philosophy: When we intentionally take care of all three of our homes, they take care of us and each other. And so the cycle goes.
So here we are . . .
Three Homes. A culmination of all the lessons I’ve learned along the way about being ~ well ~.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
M I N D
Everything to do with mental wellness and mindset. From meditations, journaling, and book clubs, to overcoming our own limiting beliefs, goal-setting, and more.
B O D Y
The physical. Yoga flows, sleep habits, run clubs, plant-based recipes, and everything in between.
E A R T H
The glue that holds it all together. Life feels better when we put ourselves in the context of the bigger picture around us. From daily sustainable habits and product swaps to global climate activism efforts, our mental and physical health is bound to the health of our planet.
I hope this community adds as much value and joy to your life as creating it has for me.
