A Healthy Bite - ThatOrganicMom
Turning Ashes to Beauty: Life Lessons to Help Find Purpose, Prosperity, and Happiness
Life lessons aren't usually learned easily. Keisha Blair was thirty-one years old. The happy mother of two young children, one just eight-weeks-old when her husband died unexpectedly from a rare disease at only age thirty-four.
Unable to comprehend what had just happened, Keisha walked out of the hospital room with her husbands' personal items in a white plastic bag. One thing she did know at that moment, life is short.
Life is Short
Keisha stumbled through the next few weeks making plans to bury her young husband, losing 40 pounds in only a couple of weeks. Devastation, sadness, overwhelm, coupled with having an infant and toddler to care for took its toll on her. She began to second-guess herself, have regrets and her thoughts went around in circles.
She thought so much about her husband, Garfield, and what legacy he had left behind. After doing so much thinking, she realized that she needed to take drastic action to figure out who she wanted to be and what legacy she wanted to leave behind. So, she put her things in storage and took a sabbatical.
Keisha realized she did not want to take on a victim mentality harboring self-pity. She began journaling as a hobby, a way to organize her thoughts, and plan for her future.
By sheer chance, several months before his death, Blair and her husband had consulted with their financial professional, who urged them to buy life insurance policies, given that they had a toddler and another baby on the way. That prescient moment gave Blair, who recently founded The Modern Widow site, financial security for herself and her two young sons—and a new take on the future. "While you don't know how much time you have, you still have to think about how long your life might be, as well as what the next generation needs." ~NYTimes
Life Lessons
On sabbatical, Keisha learned to really tune in to her intuition. This was part of her grieving process. She "learned the hard way as loss and grief made me [realize] that living life "business as usual" — constantly in survival mode — is no way to live." ~ Thrive Global
She and her two young children ate a predominantly organic, whole-foods diet. Meals she made with her own two hands, savoring the process.
Keisha practiced spiritual self-renewal by praying and meditating and helped others. Along the path to her healing, Keisha realized that her "own healing would come by reaching outward not inward."
With spiritual transformation, the focus of your life has gone through an evolution- its not focussed on the valleys anymore — it's now focused on turning those valleys into mountaintops — through serving humanity and achieving happiness in the now. ~ Thrive Global article
This was just the beginning of what was to be Keisha's viral post, comprised of 40 lessons she had learned from her husband's early death. Later, the book would be expanded and reorganized into Holistic Wealth: 32 Life Lessons to Help You Find Purpose Prosperity, and Happiness.
After receiving an Advanced Reader,