The art of living consciously

On grief, journaling, and the long way home to yourself—on your own terms, in your own time.

By Author: Welltress ·  8 Mins Read ·  Spring 2026

I know it happened. I know I got up each morning and did the things a life asks of you—the school run, the meals, the work, the endless saying yes. But if you asked me to tell you about that year, I couldn't. It's a blur, a held breath, a long corridor I walked through without ever quite arriving.

She went suddenly. I don't remember much of the year after my mother died. I felt the shift, that something in me left with her, and I spent a very long time pretending it hadn't.

I've since learned there's a name for what I was doing. Staying busy so I didn't have to be still. Saying yes to everything, filling every hour, because the moment I stopped—the moment there was a quiet minute with nothing in it—the grief would rise, and I couldn't bear it. So I made sure there were no quiet minutes. For years.

I had lost people before, and I would lose more. Cancer took several of the people I loved most, one after another, until the world felt suddenly thin. Grief that comes like that, in waves and in people, doesn't leave you as it found you. It asks something of you. And for a long time my only answer was to keep moving, to look the other way, to be useful to everyone so that I never had to sit down with myself.

But grief is patient. It waits. It sends you signs—small ones first, then less small ones—until you can no longer pretend not to see them. Mine came as a tiredness no amount of doing could touch and a sense that I was living my whole life at a slight distance from it, the way I'd lived that first year. Later than I'd like to admit, I understood that the only way out was through. That I would have to do the very thing I'd spent years avoiding. I would have to be still and let it come.

Learning to be still

I didn't know how. That sounds absurd to say as a grown woman, but it's the truth—I had lost the ability somewhere, if I ever had it at all. Sitting quietly made me anxious. It let everything in.

I think, in the end, I was reaching for something I'd known as a girl. My father ran a market garden, and I grew up beside him among the rows—planting, weeding, and harvesting, my hands in the soil. I couldn't have told you so at the time, but I understood even as a child that tending a growing thing does something to the one doing the tending. That the care runs both ways. When my own life finally needed tending, it was that I remembered.

What taught me, in the end, was the body. I came to somatic work almost by accident and to meditation not long after, and between them they gave me something I'd never had: a way to let grief move through me instead of around me. Somatic practice showed me that feeling is physical—that sorrow lives in the shoulders and the chest and the held-tight stomach and that the body, given safety and permission, knows how to release what the mind cannot. Meditation taught me to stay. Simply to stay and breathe and not run while a feeling rose and crested and—this was the revelation—passed. It always passed. I had been so frightened of feelings that would drown me, and it turned out they were more like weather. They moved on if I let them.

And in that stillness, slowly, I found peace. Not all at once, and not perfectly. But truly.

What the page could hold

There was one more practice, and it may be the one that saved me most. I began to write.

Not beautifully, and not for anyone. Just the truth of a day, whatever it was, set down on a page at night. And I found something there I hadn't expected: that a feeling, once written, loosens its grip. The thoughts I was most afraid of — the dark ones I'd been carrying around like stones — weighed less the moment they were out of me and onto the paper. It's a strange, simple alchemy. What stays locked inside you festers.

What you're brave enough to write down, you can finally look at. And once you can look at a thing, you can begin to set it down.

I learned to steady myself that way, one page at a time. Not by hiding from what I felt, but by facing it in ink, in private, where it couldn't hurt me. Some nights the page held gratitude. Some nights it held grief so raw I could barely shape the words. It never mattered which. It was always better out than in.

When I started asking what was in everything

Something else shifted then, and it surprised me. Having watched illness take people I loved, I found I wanted to care for my own body with a tenderness I'd never shown it. Not out of fear — I don't want to live in fear — but out of a kind of respect. I began reading labels. I began asking what was actually in the things I put on my skin, in my food, and around my home. So much of it, once you look, is a list of things you can't pronounce and would never knowingly choose.

That is what "conscious" really means to me. Not a trend or a hashtag. Just paying attention—and choosing, where I can, the gentler thing, the cleaner thing, the thing made with care, as an ordinary daily act of love for a life I no longer take for granted.

Conscious living began, for me, as grief. It then became gratitude.

I'll be honest with you, because honesty is the only thing that makes any of this worth reading. I haven't arrived anywhere. I still have hard days. I still catch myself reaching for busyness when a feeling comes too close. Healing has never meant being fixed. It has meant noticing when I've drifted and choosing, gently and without punishment, to come back to myself.

Why I built this

I made Welltress because I went looking for it—a place, a practice, a way of living that took healing seriously and still made it beautiful—and I couldn't find it. Everywhere I looked, wellness was being sold as one more thing to achieve, one more way to fall short. That was never what I needed. What I needed was permission. To slow down. To grieve. To tend myself. To live, at last, in my own way and in my own time.

I wanted to build a company women could trust. A place where you don't have to be impressive, or fully healed, or holding it all together—where you can simply arrive as you are, wishing yourself well, and wishing the same for the women beside you. That's why this space is called The Wishing Well. It's the whole idea, held in a name.

And here is what took me the longest to learn, so I'll say it plainly in case it saves you some time. When you begin to treat yourself with real compassion—the kind you'd offer a dear friend—something shifts. Your life softens. And then, quietly, remarkable people begin to find their way to you, because compassion has a way of calling its own kind home. What began as the loneliest thing I have known has brought me, in time, a whole community of women I love. That is not a small thing. It may be the whole of it.

Coming home

If you take one thing from me, take this. You don't have to change your whole life. You only have to come back into it, one ordinary moment at a time. A cup of warm water before the phone comes out. A window opened to the morning. A few honest lines on a page at night. One breath, taken on purpose in the middle of something ordinary—just to notice that you are here.

That's where it starts. It's where I started.

For a long time, I wasn't sure I could heal at all—whether I would ever feel whole again. One by one, the women who had mothered me were taken from me, carried on to another world, until it seemed there was no one left to hold me the way they once had. I won't tell you that life goes back to how it was. It doesn't. But I'll tell you the truest thing I know: it gets better. You can find peace. Not overnight and not all at once, but one day, quietly, you'll notice it has come.

That is my wish for you. For every one of you carrying any weight of doubt tonight—may you find your way, in your own time, back to peace, back to yourself, back to a life full of love and grace.

Whether you're finding your way after a season of loss or coming home to yourself for the very first time, there is a place for you here. On your own terms. In your own time.

With love and intention,

Tara