I consider myself a spiritual and loving person. I have experience a few religions in my life Baptist as a young girl, Jehovah Witness as a teenager and I studied Islam and was a practicing Muslim as a adult. I have always been interested in searching for the truth and had many unanswered questions about Christianity.

As I sought out and researched about "holidays" and the significance behind them I became more and more interested. I found out about our Thanksgiving holiday and discovered that the Indigineous People (the Indians) was slaughtered and this is how this holiday came about. I was blown away.

I am continuing my personal quest on improving my health and releasing my weight. After graduation last May, and being off of work for the summer, I have more time to put towards going to the gym on a regular basis. I take the abs class, belly dancing and total body class every week and then I do the cross trainer, tredmill, bicycle and lift light weights. I realized my problem was not exerising and staying active, but it is learning to eat less. As an adult I became addicted to food and would use it whether I felt good or bad. I now know I have to pay close attention to myself because food was a crutch for me.

Greetings My Sistahs!

I discovered Black Love Day, which is celebrated on February 13th. Last year a close friend of mine gave me information about this significant holiday. Black Love Day is an alternative to Valentine's Day and is a day of observance, celebration reconciliation, forgiveness, atonement and demonstration of love for the black community. The concept of Black Love Day was established in the year 1993, by a woman named Ms. Ayo Kendi. She felt the strong need and desire for more expression of "Black Love" among the communities. She had organized the first Black Love Day publicly in Northeast, Washington, D.C. Her ideas were widely accepted by the public and media in an inaugural celebration with success and it became an official day of recognition, observance and celebration by Mayoral Proclamation in D.C.
It is meant to celebrate black relationships, from self love first, to love for family to love for community and our race and love for your Creator. Instead of wearing pink and red people should wear purple for spirituality or black which is a blend of all the colors put together.

I have a 14-year old daughter who is both intelligent and beautiful! She is the only child and is very independent. She is very serious about the arts and was dancing ballet, african and modern dance since she was 4 years old. She is an young actress taking acting lessons and have done several theatre plays. She loves it and is very serious about her future career.
She also draws and loves animals very much. She loves to read and is an excellent student in History and Engilsh. She is very well mannered and people tell me all the time how beautiful she is and well mannered. We do not have a lot of close family or many friends, however, I make sure she gets support to help her figure out her life, however, she is struggling with negative children coming in her direction just being mean to her for no reason not knowing anything about her and just attacking her.

Thank you God! I finally passed my statistics exit exam for college! I am one semester away from graduation! Math was always a challenge for me, but I did it! I am please with myself for continuing to press forward when things became challenging! I will treat myself to a pedicure and lots of fruits and vegetables! I have one more challenge in my life right now which is to release the extra weight I gain within the last two years. I have made many attempts to lose the weight and succeeded a little only to regain it back. I can be a nutritionist and a expert with all the education, information and knowledge that I have at knowing the right foods to eat, eliminate meat from my diet, drink lots of fresh water and to exercise everyday or three times a week, but some how I am not able to apply what I know. There seems to be a spiritual and mental block that I need to negate and nullify even if I don't know what it is! I need help! I graduate in less than 5 months and I desire to give myself the gift of good health and release the extra weight! I have obtained some meatless dishes and soups to prepare and am asking if any one would give me a hand with this!

I went through many life struggles where I lost myself along the way. I have overcome many obstacles and I am living a more fuller life than I did before. I remember when I had to remain in situations, such as jobs, relationships and living arrangements that was against my spiritual make up. I made the conscious decision to pray and really believed that God loves me too, and that I am worthy. I was determined to get myself back! I made a decision to do the footwork and sought out holistic Counseling. Because of my personal healing I discovered I had the ability and attention to listen and counsel others. This is when I decided to become an Counselor. People always told me that I was good at inspiring, motivating and being an active Listener. As a psychology major and volunteer Counselor, I am always reading and looking for new materials to help people get themselves back and live a healthy, full life. I found this website that is about coping with life stressors. I particularly was interested in the personal growth link. I would like for you to share your thoughts about the site: www. coping.org/