ABOUT WELLY & SOUL
A life can look perfectly fine and still not feel like your own.
Welly & Soul grew from a simple realization: I had spent a lot of my life becoming, achieving, managing and getting through. Somewhere along the way, I became more interested in something quieter—what it means to actually feel at home in the life you’re living.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY
I got very good at getting through things.
For a long time, I thought a good life was something you built by doing the right things well. Work hard. Be responsible. Keep moving. Take care of the people you love. Handle what needs handling.
And I did.
But life has a way of making some of our carefully constructed ideas less convincing. Mine certainly did. There were years that asked more of me than I knew how to give, seasons when simply getting through the day counted as an accomplishment, and experiences that changed what I understood about strength, wellbeing and what it means to actually be present for your own life.
Somewhere in all of that, I stopped being quite so interested in having life figured out.
I became much more interested in being here for it.
WHAT I KNOW NOW
Feeling at home in your life is different from having it all together.
I used to think wellbeing lived somewhere on the other side of improvement. A calmer mind. A healthier body. A more organized house. Better habits. More time. Less stress. Perhaps a personality transplant during particularly ambitious weeks.
I don’t anymore.
I think it lives much closer than that.
In the way a room feels when you finally make it yours. In food made with care and eaten without rushing. In noticing what your body has been trying to tell you. In stepping outside long enough to remember that the world is considerably larger than your inbox.
Sometimes it is meditation or yoga or understanding a little more about how our minds and bodies work. Sometimes it is moving the damn lamp.
None of these things creates a perfect life.
But they can make the life you’re already living feel more inhabitable.
WHY WELLY & SOUL
A place for the life you’re already living.
For women who have spent a lot of their lives taking care of things. Building careers. Raising families, Managing homes, Showing up for people. Starting over when necessary. Carrying more than anyone probably realized.
Welly & Soul is a place to explore what makes a life feel good from the inside—not as another project to perfect, but as something to notice, tend to and actually inhabit.
Here, that might mean home and the rooms we create around ourselves. Food and the pleasure of gathering at a table. Time outside. The ways our minds and bodies work. Rituals that steady us. Beauty for no particularly productive reason.
There will be science when science is useful, stories when stories say it better, and probably the occasional opinion about why moving a lamp can improve an unreasonable number of things.
Mostly, Welly & Soul is an invitation to pay attention to the life that is already happening.
Because it turns out, this is it.
A LITTLE ABOUT ME
I’m DeAnn. And apparently I contain multitudes.
Most of my working life has involved people—leading them, teaching them, coaching them, listening to them, and trying to understand why we humans do the things we do.
Along the way, I’ve studied mindfulness, yoga, the brain and nervous system, behavior change and the complicated business of being human. I’m fascinated by what science can teach us—and equally interested in all the things a research paper cannot tell you about what it actually feels like to live a life.
Outside of work, I’m happiest making a house feel like home, rearranging things that were perfectly fine where they were, cooking something worth sitting down for, growing things, being outside, and noticing the small rituals that make ordinary days feel less ordinary.
I don’t have a perfectly optimized morning routine. I sometimes hold my breath while answering email. I have moved furniture that absolutely did not need moving. And despite years of practicing mindfulness, I remain capable of being irritated by astonishingly insignificant things.
So this isn’t a site written from the mountaintop.
It’s written from here.
AN INVITATION
You don’t need a different life to feel differently inside the one you have.
Maybe you came here because something in your life is changing. Maybe nothing is changing at all, and you’ve simply begun to wonder whether the way you’ve been living is still the way you want to live.
Either way, you’re welcome here.
We’ll talk about homes and bodies and minds and meals and meaning. About what helps, what science actually says, what we’re still figuring out, and the ordinary things that somehow matter more than we expect them to.
Not because every part of life needs improving.
But because it’s worth being here for.