How on Earth Did a Facial Turn Into All of This?

A messy, honest reflection on finding myself, shedding expectations, and the story behind Skin & Soul.

Hello, Beautiful Souls!

Blog #2.

This one is going to have a slightly different tone.

My first blog was very let's contemplate eclipses, snakes, shadows, and the nature of growth.

This one is more...

How the hell did a facial turn into all of this?

If you've known me, supported me, or followed along through pre-Lula Mae, Lula Mae, and post-Lula Mae Dani, you probably know pieces of this story.

But that's the thing about people—we only ever know pieces.

We see the business. The marriage. The career. The smiling picture online. The new beginning.

We fill in the blanks and assume we understand the story.

Meanwhile, the person living it may still be trying to understand it herself.

I know I was.

Before Lula Mae

Pre-Lula Mae Dani was deeply insecure.

I struggled with acne and bullying for much of my life. I often felt misunderstood, with this deep desire underneath everything to simply be chosen for who I was.

Years before I enrolled in aesthetics school, I started getting my eyebrows waxed by an aesthetician and asking questions.

I didn't completely understand what this career was yet, but something kept pulling at me.

Maybe I could understand my own skin better.

Maybe what I had experienced could help someone else feel more comfortable in theirs.

Eventually, I listened.

I went to school and turned something I thought might be a part-time job into a career.

Because, naturally, life immediately ignored the plan I had made for myself.

Then Came Lula Mae

My first marriage ended, and aesthetics suddenly needed to support me.

I went back to school for my instructor license. I taught aesthetics. And somehow, eventually, I found myself opening Lula Mae Aesthetic Boutique.

The vision was always bigger than skincare.

I wanted women to have a place to build careers and support themselves. I wanted clients to walk through the door, exhale, receive a service, and feel comfortable being themselves.

If you read the old Lula Mae reviews, I know we accomplished that.

What I didn't understand was what creating it would cost me.

I'm not ready to tell that entire story yet.

But I can tell you this:

Lula Mae made me.
Validated me.
Broke parts of me.
Enlightened me.
And introduced me to parts of myself I had spent years suppressing.

I had this enormous desire to help people.

In many ways, I did.

In other ways, I can look back now and recognize that I wasn't equipped yet to help in all the ways I wanted to.

First, I needed to learn how to help myself.

Minor inconvenience:

I had absolutely no idea how to do that.

When My Soul Got Loud

By this point, I had remarried.

Within the first year of that marriage, my husband lost his job. Then a worldwide pandemic shut down the business I had spent almost three years building.

I was trying to keep a business afloat, a marriage together, a household functioning, and everyone around me okay.

There wasn't much room left in my own psyche for me.

Eventually, my soul got tired of being put on hold.

And she got loud.

There was a period when my inner world became so intense that I genuinely wondered if I was approaching some kind of psychological breaking point.

I'm incredibly grateful that instead of continuing to bulldoze through it, I started listening.

I had already begun studying Vedic astrology, but I became increasingly drawn to it—not because I wanted astrology to tell me what would happen, but because it gave me another language for understanding myself.

Then came dream analysis.

Jungian psychology.

Therapy.

Books.

Podcasts.

Questions.

So. Many. Questions.

I became fascinated by the complicated lines between spiritual breakthrough and psychological distress, intuition and fear, addiction and attachment, coping and healing.

And somewhere in there, someone I trusted recommended a book called Addict America.

That book changed the questions I was asking.

What Are We Using to Escape Ourselves?

I started thinking about addiction differently.

Instead of only asking, What substance is someone using? I became interested in a much more uncomfortable question:

What are we using to escape ourselves?

Suddenly I wasn't just looking at drugs or alcohol.

I was looking at work.

Achievement.

Validation.

Relationships.

Being needed.

Control.

Busyness.

Even the constant desire to fix and improve ourselves.

You can be praised for working yourself into the ground.

You can call over-functioning “being helpful.”

You can call perfectionism “high standards.”

You can even turn healing into another thing you're trying to be good at.

Rude.

I became less interested in asking, What's wrong with me?

And more interested in asking:

What is this doing for me?
What is it protecting me from?
What happens if I actually listen?

No single book, therapy session, dream, or astrology placement explained my life.

Together, though, they helped me see it differently.

I wasn't becoming some shiny new version of myself.

I was aggressively coming home to myself.

And Coming Home Changed Things

The first thing that had to go was Lula Mae.

I had outgrown her.

Not because she was bad.

Not because she was a mistake.

She simply wasn't mine to inhabit anymore.

Eventually, my second marriage ended too.

I'm not ready to tell that entire story either.

What I will say is that my second ex-husband and I failed each other while doing the best we knew how to do at the time.

That's devastating.

And painfully human.

Walking away from my business and my marriage—two enormous pieces of the identity I had built—was one of the most painful and empowering things I've ever done.

I'm still working through parts of that pain.

This isn't the part where I tell you I healed everything, discovered my purpose, bought a linen wardrobe, and now wake up at 5 a.m. to meditate.

Absolutely not.

I'm still figuring shit out.

So... Skin & Soul

Somewhere in all of this, I realized something.

I still love aesthetics.

I still believe deeply in skincare, touch, ritual, rest, and caring for our physical bodies.

But what I want to offer people goes beyond skin.

I'm now back in school working toward the credentials required for substance use disorder counseling.

On paper, an aesthetician becoming a substance use disorder counselor might look like a pretty aggressive career pivot.

To me, increasingly, it doesn't.

Because the worlds keep colliding:

Skin and identity.
Addiction and attachment.
Recovery and relationships.
Ritual and spirituality.
Self-care and self-awareness.
Outside in and inside out.

That's Skin & Soul.

I'm especially interested in supporting women navigating recovery and major life changes, as well as women trying to support a spouse, friend, or family member through recovery.

I respect traditional clinical approaches and want to understand them deeply.

I also have questions.

What if we supported the whole person?

What if recovery could hold accountability and compassion?

Science and spirituality?

Clinical support and ritual?

What if caring for the outside and tending to the inside weren't treated like completely separate worlds?

I don't know exactly what all of this becomes yet.

And for once, I'm trying not to force myself to know.

And Apparently My Inner Work Needed a Mascot

Which brings me to Shedna.

Yes. I named a snake Shedna.

Stay with me. 😂

Recently, I used ChatGPT for a creative exercise: essentially taking this part of myself that sheds, questions, grows, has boundaries, and is learning to trust herself—and giving her a personality.

Somehow, Shedna emerged.

Her motto?

She sheds skin, not standards.

It's funny.

But underneath the joke is something that connects directly back to my first blog.

Shedna isn't some brand-new Dani.

She's the same snake.

Just with a little more room to move.

Maybe that's what Skin & Soul is becoming too.

Not me abandoning everything I've done before to become someone completely different.

It's me integrating it.

The aesthetician.

The instructor.

The business owner.

The student.

The spiritual seeker.

The woman who has screwed things up.

The woman who has survived things.

The woman who is still learning.

All of her gets to come with me.

So, Bear With Me

Skin & Soul is being born while I'm living it.

You're probably going to watch me experiment.

I'll change my mind.

I'll learn something that challenges something I believed six months earlier.

I'll make mistakes.

I'm human.

But I feel a calling.

I see a vision.

And the last time I felt something like this...

Lula Mae was born.

The last day I walked out of Lula Mae, I made her a promise.

I promised to honor everything she taught me by continuing to become a better person, a more aligned soul, and allowing myself to be messy while I did it.

This is me keeping that promise.

If something in this journey resonates with you, there are ways to support Skin & Soul that have nothing to do with booking a facial or buying skincare.

Read the blog. Follow along. Join my newsletter. Share something that makes you think of someone you love.

Grow alongside me.

Because if there is one thing I've learned through all of this, it might be the Dani quote I come back to again and again:

“Awareness isn't half the battle. It is the battle.”

Once we see something, we can't completely unsee it.

That doesn't mean we'll immediately change.

We may repeat the pattern.

We may screw it up spectacularly.

We may apparently need to learn the same lesson seventeen different ways.

But awareness gives us something we didn't have before:

a choice.

A question to sit with:

What have you become aware of in yourself that you can no longer pretend you don't see—and what might you choose differently now that you see it?

Until the next question,
Dani 🧡💚✨

Life Gives Us Experiences. Reflection Gives Those Experiences Meaning. Or Does It?

An intimate reflection of shedding, growth, and embracing every layer.

Sometimes life doesn't take something away from us. Sometimes it simply removes our ability to pretend it still belongs.

I've been sitting with that thought since the Ashlesha New Moon Eclipse.

Whether you follow Vedic astrology or not, I've learned that eclipses have a way of revealing what has been quietly unfolding beneath the surface.

They don't always create change.

Sometimes they simply change the contrast enough for us to finally see it.

And to be clear, I don't use astrology to explain life.

I use life to understand astrology.

The stars don't tell me who I am. They offer a language for experiences that can otherwise feel impossible to name. The energies behind the stories. The archetypes behind the deities. The symbolism.

They don't replace reflection.

They deepen it.

In the days surrounding the eclipse, life handed me one of those moments. Something that had been quietly unfolding suddenly became impossible to ignore.

Not because of what happened.

Because of what it uncovered.

I've caught myself wanting to understand why.

Thank you, ego. We meet again.

I wanted to find the exact moment everything shifted. The conversation. The decision. The turning point.

As humans, we crave a story that makes uncertainty feel logical.

And lately I've been wondering if logic can become its own kind of addiction.

We reach for explanations when uncertainty becomes uncomfortable. We analyze. Rationalize. Replay conversations. Search for the missing piece that will finally make the feeling make sense.

Maybe certainty gives us the illusion of control.

But what if that's not the lesson?

What if the invitation isn't to figure out when something changed, but to notice what the experience revealed inside of us?

What happens if, instead of immediately explaining the discomfort, we simply observe what rises from it?

Because one truth kept returning to me:

I knew something had shifted long before I could explain it.

Intuition.

A quiet moment of coming back to myself.

And if I'm honest, I still can't fully explain it.

But I can feel it.

I've spent a lot of my life believing discernment would feel like certainty.

I'm beginning to wonder if it feels more like a quiet knowing. A subtle awareness that something deserves our attention long before we understand why.

Maybe intuition doesn't always tell us what something means.

Maybe sometimes it simply whispers:

Look here.

And maybe discernment isn't trusting the conclusion.

Maybe it's trusting where our attention is being called while remaining curious about what we'll find there.

Because self-trust doesn't mean every feeling is fact.

Maybe self-trust isn't saying, "I feel this, therefore I must be right."

Maybe it's saying:

"I feel this. I don't completely understand it yet. But I'm not going to abandon myself while I figure it out."

What if the feeling isn't the answer?

What if the feeling is simply where the inquiry begins?

That question has followed me through the space between these eclipses.

And somewhere along the way, my understanding of illusion began to shift too.

Maybe an illusion isn't always something false.

Maybe it's simply an incomplete picture we've mistaken for the whole thing.

The illusion that something was permanent.

That belonging has to be earned.

That trying harder can make something fit again.

That we need to understand why something is ending before we're allowed to release it.

Or even that clarity means finally knowing exactly what something was.

What if clarity is simply being able to see more of it?

For me, astrology has never been about predicting the future. It's a language for self-awareness. A mirror. A way to pause long enough to ask better questions instead of rushing toward better explanations.

And Ashlesha gives us quite the mirror.

The serpent.

Shedding.

Entanglement and release.

The uncomfortable space between the skin we've known and whatever exists underneath it.

As someone born with my Moon in Ashlesha, I've often felt like my life has unfolded in seasons of shedding.

People have told me that I transform often. That I seem to birth new versions of myself quickly.

Dani 2.0.

Then another.

And another.

I've never quite experienced myself that way.

I've taken huge risks. I've made plenty of mistakes. I've learned really hard lessons. I've lost and grieved parts of myself that once served me and eventually didn't.

I've changed.

Of course I have.

But underneath all of it, I don't feel like I've repeatedly become someone new.

I feel like me.

The same me.

Just grown.

And maybe I've misunderstood the serpent because I've misunderstood shedding.

A snake doesn't shed its skin because it needs to become a different animal.

It sheds because the body underneath has already grown.

The snake underneath isn't new. She's grown.

And the old skin wasn't wrong.

It wasn't bad.

It wasn't a mistake.

It protected her.

It contained her.

It belonged to her.

Until it didn't.

What if we offered ourselves that same grace?

What if we didn't have to hate who we were in order to honor who we are?

What if something could have belonged to us, served us, protected us, even been deeply loved by us...

and still not belong anymore?

Maybe shedding doesn't birth a new snake at all.

Maybe shedding reveals another layer of the same one.

Not reinvention.

Integration.

But then another uncomfortable question found me:

What if I've become attached to growth itself?

What if "doing the work" can become another skin?

Reflect.

Find the lesson.

Integrate.

Release.

Grow.

Repeat.

There is something beautiful about finding meaning in our experiences.

But what happens when growth becomes another way of avoiding simply being?

What happens when every painful experience immediately becomes:

What is this teaching me?

What am I supposed to learn?

What am I being asked to release?

Who am I becoming?

Maybe even those questions—beautiful as they are—can become another attempt to escape uncertainty.

Maybe sometimes nothing needs to be transformed yet.

Maybe sometimes something hurts.

Maybe sometimes we don't understand.

Maybe sometimes the snake simply needs to stretch into the space her growth has already created.

And live.

As I moved through the days between these eclipses, something else began happening.

I found myself face-to-face with patterns I thought I had already outgrown.

And that was uncomfortable.

Because my first reaction was something like:

Seriously? We're here again?

I started wondering whether I was slipping backward.

Whether all of this reflection, healing, therapy, learning, shedding, and growing had somehow brought me right back to an old version of myself.

My work and studies in substance use counseling have taught me something important about recovery: progress isn't always linear.

And a conversation with my therapist challenged me to look differently at what I had been calling a return to an old pattern.

Maybe I wasn't unconsciously repeating it.

Maybe I was consciously revisiting it.

I could see the pattern.

I could feel the familiar pull.

I could recognize the ways I once would have responded to protect myself—or protect the connection.

And this time, I had a choice.

That distinction has stayed with me.

Because maybe growth isn't never meeting our old patterns again.

Maybe growth is recognizing them when they return and realizing we no longer have to respond to them the same way.

This week, I found myself standing inside one of those patterns.

I could feel the familiar instinct to defend myself.

To silence parts of myself.

To make room for someone else's experience before I had fully honored my own.

And then something different happened.

I said what was true for me.

Not dramatically.

Not as an ultimatum.

Not because I knew what would happen next.

I simply said it.

And I stayed.

I stayed with the discomfort.

I stayed with the uncertainty.

Most importantly, I stayed with myself.

Maybe that's the skin I'm shedding now.

Not a person.

Not a relationship.

Not another version of myself.

A pattern that once taught me I had to abandon parts of myself in order to stay connected.

And maybe shedding that pattern doesn't mean I'll never feel its pull again.

Maybe I'll recognize that skin many times.

The difference is that I know what it feels like now.

I can notice it.

And noticing doesn't require judgment.

That brings me back to one of the simplest practices I've learned, and one I return to again and again:

Observe without judgment.

Maybe that's also what I've been misunderstanding about eclipses.

We often say eclipses bring hidden things into the light.

But I've found myself asking:

Why do we assume that what was hidden was dark?

What if what was hidden was understanding?

Compassion?

A boundary we hadn't found the language to express?

Vulnerability underneath defensiveness?

Strength we hadn't recognized in ourselves?

A truth we weren't ready to hold yet?

And why do we assume darkness itself is something bad?

The shadow isn't necessarily something to fear or eliminate.

The shadow is simply what becomes visible because there is enough contrast to finally see it.

The brighter the light, the deeper the contrast.

And contrast gives us dimension.

Perhaps an eclipse isn't asking us to expose the darkness so we can replace it with light.

Maybe it's allowing us to see enough of both to understand the shape of what we're looking at.

Because more than one thing can be true.

Someone can be defensive and still be capable of understanding.

We can love someone and still question whether something is working for us.

Something can hurt and still hold something healing.

We can intuitively know something shifted and have absolutely no idea what that shift means.

Something can have served us and no longer belong.

We can release something without making it wrong.

We can revisit an old pattern without becoming the person we were when we first learned it.

We can grow without becoming someone new.

Maybe clarity isn't finally deciding whether something is light or dark.

Maybe clarity is becoming capable of seeing enough of both to hold the whole picture.

And maybe that's where I've landed in the space between these eclipses.

Not with the answer I was looking for.

With a practice I've been learning for years:

Observe without judgment.

Notice the feeling without immediately turning it into fact.

Notice the shadow without deciding it's darkness.

Notice the old pattern without calling it failure.

Notice what no longer fits without making it wrong.

Notice yourself reaching for certainty—and get curious about why you need it.

Maybe reflection doesn't give our experiences meaning after all.

Maybe reflection gives us enough space to observe what's there.

And from that space, we get to choose.

Not who we want to become.

But how we want to show up as the person we've been all along.

So maybe there isn't a Dani 2.0 waiting on the other side of this eclipse.

Maybe there's just Dani.

The same woman.

Still learning.

Still questioning.

Still occasionally meeting an old pattern and thinking, Oh, you again.

But a little more willing to stay with herself when it happens.

A little less interested in forcing certainty.

A little more capable of holding light and shadow at the same time.

And maybe a little more willing to let an experience simply be an experience before deciding what it needs to mean.

Sometimes life doesn't take something away from us.

Sometimes it simply removes our ability to pretend it still belongs.

And sometimes what no longer belongs isn't a person, a place, a relationship, or even an old version of ourselves.

Sometimes it's simply the way we learned to survive.

The snake underneath isn't new.

She's grown.

A question to sit with:
What are you noticing without needing to understand it yet?

Until the next question,
Dani
Skin & Soul