How do we help our kids feel safe when the world feels scary?
In this deeply moving conversation, Wendy welcomes back author Dorena Williamson to talk about her newest children’s book, Every Breath, Every Blessing. Together, they explore how to support kids through big feelings, fear, grief, and uncertainty, while anchoring them in hope, faith, and emotional resilience.
Dorena shares the powerful story behind the book, written in the aftermath of tragedy in her Nashville community, and how it became a tool to help children (and adults) process hard moments with honesty and grace.
You’ll learn how to guide your kids in naming their emotions, using breath as a calming tool, and finding small glimpses of goodness even in the hardest seasons.
This episode is a gentle, grounding reminder that even when life feels overwhelming, we are not alone, and there is always a way back to peace, one breath at a time.
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Episode Highlights:
- Kids need help naming big feelings like fear, sadness, and anger so they don’t feel alone or overwhelmed.
- Breath prayers are a simple, powerful way to calm the nervous system and reconnect to peace.
- You don’t have to fix hard emotions, you can sit with them and guide your child through them.
- Gratitude can be practiced even in difficult seasons, starting with something as simple as breath.
- Looking for helpers and small moments of goodness builds hope and emotional resilience.
- Daily rhythms of connection, breath, and reflection help kids navigate life’s hardest moments with confidence and faith.
Resources Mentioned:
Follow Dorena on Instagram
Books by Dorena: Every Breath, Every Blessing, Brown Baby Jesus, ColorFull, ThoughtFull, and GraceFull
Doren’s website
Dorena’s first episode on The Fresh Start Family Show
Unable to listen, or prefer to read along? Here’s the transcript!
Wendy Snyder: Well, hey there, families, and welcome back to a new episode of the Fresh Start Family Show. I’m your host, Wendy Snyder, powerful parenting educator and family life coach. Today I am here with Dorena Williamson. Welcome to the show.
Dorena Williamson: Wendy, thank you. First of all, lots of people shorten Williamson to Williams, so you would not be the first one, but thank you for catching yourself. I’m so happy to be on with you. Happy New Year to you.
Wendy Snyder: Happy New Year. And how cool, because Dorena is a returning guest. Dorena, you were originally on our podcast about four years ago now, on handing children a legacy of justice and righteousness. That was such a fun episode. Terry, my husband, recorded that with us.
Now you’re back today to talk about your new book, Every Breath, Every Blessing: Finding Hope on Tough Days, the most beautiful children’s book. But really, come on, we know this is for us too. Today we’re going to be talking about big feelings, big faith, and how to help kids find peace when life feels scary.
So tell us a little bit about this book. Where did this idea come from, and what was the inspiration to write this one?
Dorena Williamson: Right off the bat, I’m taking a deep breath as I answer your question because the content I’m going to share is definitely one where people want to pause.
This is an unusual one in that the source of the idea and the writing came in the aftermath of the tragedy at Covenant School here in Nashville. When I read this book in spaces anywhere in the country, but particularly when I’m local to my Middle Tennessee area, that’s all I have to say to parents and they understand the context.
For any of your listeners who don’t know, a few years ago, sadly, our Middle Tennessee community experienced the tragedy of gun violence at Covenant School, a Presbyterian school here in Nashville. Our church and Covenant Church have done some community work in collaboration for years. Once a year, we gather and do some wonderful Blessed Fest opportunities to bless some of the neighbors that we share in common in Middle Tennessee.
Our church and really our whole community felt so deeply the pain of our neighbors walking through such a horrific event and the aftermath. In the days following, for context, my youngest is now 22. So a few years ago, she was in community college, and I literally wanted to go grab her from community college. She’s an adult, but I wanted her home with me.
I understood families who were feeling like, “I don’t want my kids out of my sight. I am terrified for what’s happening in our world, and I am mourning with our neighbors.” I don’t have to know them to mourn that children, adults, humans are walking through this.
In the days ensuing, as I lamented with our community online and in person, I began to pour into my journal, as I’ve often done, thoughts of what I wish our world was like and what I do with my big feelings. I was watching fellow parents of young ones say, “I wish I could just bubble wrap my kids. I don’t know if I want to tell them anything. How do I walk this out?”
I watched wonderful community leaders provide comfort, encouragement, help, and sanity. And in the midst of me writing some of those things in my journal, I began thinking, because I’ve written children’s books, maybe there are other people who are walking through their own big feelings. Maybe some of the things I’m reflecting on and finding hope in might also be an encouragement to others.
Some of that content is what led me to take those journal entries and craft them. It became the content for a book that I’d written because it was scribbled out and edited over time. Then I thought, maybe this is something that could help other people. And to my great surprise and gratitude, it has done that.
So I’m grateful, not for the origin. I wish that had not existed. But it’s certainly an opportunity for us to see God bring some beauty out of the ashes.
Wendy Snyder: Absolutely. How beautiful, Dorena. What a beautiful story and way to really take that divine guidance or blessing in that moment and say, “How can I help in this season of suffering?”
Maybe before we get into our subject matter of the day, how this book can support kids with big feelings and tough moments when life feels scary, you could read a little passage for us. And tell us about the illustrator too. I always like to give the illustrator some props because this book is beautiful.
Dorena Williamson: Yes, different illustrators. Each publisher has different agencies they partner with. The illustration opportunity is such a beautiful way to decide who is going to help interpret the words.
I’ll read this:
“Life is one of His precious blessings. And while we are living, happiness can flow like a peaceful river, or sadness can come in on rolling waves.”
For those who are listening, on the page I just read, we literally have water. It’s peaceful, and you see families, children, and adults playing and enjoying the water. So you’re giving children the big-picture moment of what it looks like for life to flow.
And then the second page joins with that one. It’s a mom and her son, and it says:
“In those hard times, I wish we could snap our fingers and find ourselves in a faraway land full of only goodness and peace.”
Wendy Snyder: I wish so too. I wish we could snap our fingers.
Dorena Williamson: I do. And because of my faith in Christ, I know that is a hope I have to look forward to. That’s a certainty that is to come, but that’s not right now.
I’m a grandma now, Wendy. I’m a Gigi now. Since we last spoke, I have an 18-month-old grandson, and I wish he could grow up in a world where things like this were never a reality. There’s good work that so many of us are doing and can do toward that end, but right here, right now, what do we do?
That leads us to the title, Every Breath, Every Blessing. Every breath we take is a gift from God. So us as adults, I began answering your question by physically taking a deep breath because how do you lead with, “Well, this book was sourced from tragedy”? But we walk through tragedies. We walk through hard times.
I usually start with audiences saying, “Let’s take deep breaths together.” And Wendy, it’s so sweet because kids exaggerate. Kids are like, “Huuuuuh,” and “Wooooo.” But even for the littlest ones, what does it mean to give them the opportunity to inhale and exhale?
They know how to do that when they go to the doctor’s office and the doctor or nurse listens to their breath with a stethoscope. But practicing that with children, inhaling and exhaling, and what that means physiologically for us to slow our bodies down, is powerful.
You can’t be frantic and taking a deep breath. Then also counting every blessing, every day that God gives us, every moment, recognizing that it’s a gift from above. Those two things are right in the title, and they allow us as adults to practice this, put it into our rhythms, and then invite children in as well.
Wendy Snyder: Yeah. Well, let’s start with this concept of bringing kids back to their breath, Dorena, and helping our kids name big feelings.
We’re talking about suffering, sadness, heartbreak, challenge, loss. My little cousin lost her first child. She had a stillborn this past January, her first baby boy, Taron Brooks. No explanation. He was born stillborn on his due date. The heartbreak was just immense.
It can sound like fluff to say, “Everything’s okay.” But no. There is suffering. There is sadness, and that is part of the wholeness of life. I think God blessed us with these emotions. The big ones we teach here are happy, mad, sad, hurt, and scared. Those are the ones we try to get parents fluent in understanding. What are they? How do they feel? They’ll feel different in all of our bodies.
When a parent can do that, they’re able to teach their children how to do that.
Sadness, in our world, the way we teach it, is an emotion that shows how much you care. When we journeyed with our family through that stillborn and the grief that followed, the depth of sadness changed me. It was one of the most beautiful times in my life, and I wish it wasn’t there, but I got to give a eulogy for the first time. Doing that was so powerful.
Sadness is an absolutely beautiful emotion because it really does show how much you care.
So I love how in this book you are teaching kids breath prayers. Speak to me a little bit about both the breath prayer part of it and the emotional part of it, helping kids name big feelings and then bringing them back to their breath.
Dorena Williamson: I love everything you just shared. My mind was rolling back. My oldest is 32, and I’m sitting here thinking, “I wish I had had this equipping.”
I’m so grateful for the ways you and your ministry show up in the world and the ways you are helping parents because so many of us didn’t grow up with this equipping for ourselves. Now we’re charged with helping to bring up these young ones, or not-so-young ones, because the things you’re sharing are for all ages.
I love that my 22-year-old has learned through her therapeutic journey to name and state how she’s feeling and how she’s processing things. I look at her and go, “I just love that for you.”
So I love that we can help even the youngest children who are learning words, going to preschool, going to school, or being homeschooled, learn how to manage and how to choose. That’s a gift God has given us in humanity that’s different than all of the other creation, that capacity to choose. I believe that’s part of us being made in His image.
It’s so important to help children. When they’re very young, it may be that you’re literally helping give them words and helping them understand what those words mean. But as they grow, the beauty is they can sit through a file folder and go, “Okay, is what I’m feeling this, or is it that?”
I saw someone recently say that when their parent passed away, people kept trying to put depression on them and say, “You’re depressed.” The person very maturely said, “Actually, I wasn’t depressed. I was deeply, deeply sad. But depression was not how I identified my emotion.”
Depression is real, and people really do walk through that clinical diagnosis. But in the context of that conversation, I love that the person could say, “People tried to identify how I felt, but I was able to say, no, I own how I feel, and I’m not going to claim depression as the feeling.”
So I love that parents can learn, because again, we have to put it into practice. It’s hard to give our children something that we ourselves are not implementing.
Learning to name how I feel, if it is deep sadness right now over the tragedies happening in our world and our culture, to our neighbors near and far, we can name that in our journals and our prayers.
Today, as you and I are recording this, I had texts from a family member going to get a second mammogram. It’s scary for them because when a woman hears, “We might see something, and we need to check again,” you can feel that.
Wendy Snyder: I can feel that in my body. I can feel that fear in my body.
Dorena Williamson: I can too. I tried to explain to my husband, and he looked at me like, “Okay.” I was like, “You don’t understand.” But when you go through that annual event, you know what it feels like, and you can imagine having to be told, “We need to have you come again.”
Then I had another faith leader at our church who was in surgery. We got the text before I came on that the surgery was complete, but they were in surgery for the possibility of something the doctors believed they saw.
These are things we walk through with our own communities, people we may or may not know, our family. So naming our emotions, being able to name those in our journals and prayers.
I think we see precedence for this in the Psalms, as the Psalmists offer their lament before God. They were able to name their circumstances. David named, “Many are coming against me. Someone I once looked up to is now attacking me. I’m walking through this, God.”
They give us this template to say, “This is what’s happening in my world.” There’s no shying away from it, muting it, pretending like it’s not happening, or unhealthy practices. There is, “This is what’s happening, and it is awful and hard and scary and sad,” and whatever other words we put in there.
For us to do that and then invite our children in gives us the opportunity to allow them to take those deep breaths. It gives them an opportunity to develop a rhythm. It allows them to slow down. It allows us to have these sacred moments together.
These are things we can do while we’re in a car driving. We can do it before they get out to go to school or practice. We can do it after practice when their emotions are full of weariness or discouragement, when the coach was particularly hard that day, when they didn’t meet their goals, when school was hard, or when they’re going through something with a friend.
It allows them to take these rhythms through their life. I’ve even had parents of college students say, “This is good for my new college student,” because they are going through big emotions in that new season of life.
So the idea is to start as young as your children are, practice this together, and then it becomes something they can take with them to help guide them through the things that are going to happen in their lives that they may or may not be able to control.
I talk about that in the book. Scary things happen. At Covenant, something really scary happened. For school children to have agency to know, “I may not be able to control the things around me, but by taking those deep breaths, by having those moments of breath prayer, no matter what spiritual setting I’m in or not in, whether they say moment of silence or whatever, I can practice breath prayers, and people don’t even know I’m doing that.”
I can acknowledge God. I can look to God with my eyes open or closed by taking those deep breaths and reminding myself of the agency that I have to make choices on how I feel, how I show up, and how I react.
Wendy Snyder: So beautiful. Are you friends with Kayla Craig by chance, from Liturgies for Parents?
Dorena Williamson: I am. I love Kayla.
Wendy Snyder: Okay, good. I was like, if not, I have to hook you guys up. She’s kind of who I learned breath prayers through. I was going to grab her book, which is half-chewed by my puppy. It’s so funny.
Dorena Williamson: I love her book, and I gave a copy to my daughter-in-law. I was using it, and she was like, “I love this book.” So I bought her one for her and my son to have in their home with my grandson.
It’s another opportunity for us as parents. What do we do with our big feelings? I’ll confess, Wendy, as rich as my heritage was of faith, there are always things we grow in, lean into, and learn. Breath prayers were not something that was part of my own spiritual rhythms. So it’s newer to me, and I’m glad my kids are grasping it, and my son and his wife can hand that to their son, even at 18 months.
They can start teaching him to take deep breaths. He may be super exaggerated with it, but as he grows and learns, he can learn, “Okay, instead of having a tantrum or going crazy, I can choose that with my own little body. I can choose to take a deep breath.”
I love watching parents teach their children, and children learn, “Before I react, I can slow down. I can take a deep breath.” That gives me an opportunity to make a choice.
And honestly, some of us big people need to learn from toddlers and preschoolers how not to have tantrums.
Wendy Snyder: That’s how it is. Our kids teach us just as much, if not more, than we teach them. Let’s be real.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that lamenting prayers are some of my favorite, just being angry and sad and hurt and scared. Breath prayers have changed things for me because I’ve always struggled with the sit-down-at-5-a.m.-with-the-candle-and-scripture kind of prayer. I’ve struggled my whole life with feeling like I needed to do that in order to pray throughout my day.
Breath prayers have really changed things for me. To be able to do it all day long. It’s simple. Simple is my word of the year for 2026.
We were riffing too about these texts you received today, from friends or church family members going through things. We all know people who are suffering. Kids have stuff happen to them too. They hear about the news. Someone might say something really unkind. Middle school girls come to mind. It starts to get so gnarly in middle school.
I have a client whose little boy has anxiety and depression in his family lineage. At nine years old, he has moments where he says to his mama, “I don’t want you to leave because I feel scared you’re going to die.”
Those are big feelings. To normalize that from a young age and let a kid know through beautiful books like this, “Nothing is wrong with you. These are emotions.” I love that the focus in this book is, “You are not alone.” You’ve got God on your side. And I also layer in, there are so many helpers in the world.
That’s what I love about this generation of parents. We normalize therapy now. If kids are having stuck emotions or they don’t know what to do with fear, we read books like this, teach as best we can, and then also allow the lightworkers of the world, therapists, play therapists, coaches, all the things, to support them.
We gift them with sessions that make them stronger, not weaker. This next generation is learning that therapy is just a way of life. Talking about your emotions and processing them is my dream for the next generation, so they never feel like they have to hide or suppress emotions.
Dorena Williamson: Amen. I say amen as a preacher’s kid who, when I headed to college, was aiming to get a degree in psychology and counseling. Much of the motivation was because I watched my pastor dad in the Black Baptist church setting I grew up in. My dad had a minor in counseling in his master’s program, so he actually was qualified to do counseling, unlike a lot of pastors, I will name that, who are not qualified.
But I watched my dad’s pastoral work continue to become inundated with counseling needs because, almost four decades ago, there was still a stigma about going to a counselor or getting therapy. It was stigmatized, but people felt okay going to their pastor.
I began to understand even as a teenager that people were seeking counseling from him because there was a stigma around going to counseling. I’m so grateful today that folks see therapy as a wonderful tool and helper for us as adults.
All my kids have gone, and I’m grateful that they see and have reached out for therapy as needed to assist with employment changes or their own mental health journeys. I’m grateful that they know. Like you said, kids don’t have to hold it in, and there are helpers they can reach for. I hope parents, whatever their journey has been, will reinforce that for their kiddos.
Wendy Snyder: So good. I remember when Stella was little. Here in California, we have Legoland nearby, so we had passes. I would pick her up from school and say, “Okay, let’s go to Legoland this afternoon. But in order to go, we have to play the feelings game.”
We would play the feelings game where we just had to say what we were feeling throughout the afternoon. We’d go for two hours, and even if it was happy, excited to get on the roller coaster, hungry, scared because the loop might be scary, whatever it was. There’s so much power in practicing and normalizing feelings all the time.
Okay, amazing. So how does this book help kids look for blessings, even on the hard days? You mentioned that breath in our lungs is a blessing every day. But it can feel so tough to see that sometimes, especially if you’re a kid or a parent who is struggling in a season where you’re depressed about America, or sad that there’s one kid on the bus who is always messing with you, or a certain class is really hard.
What do you write about in the book that can help a kid remember that there are blessings? I call them silver linings.
I actually got frauded on Saturday. Someone called me and said they were from the bank. The phone number said it was the bank, the same number on my debit card. I spent 40 minutes on the phone. Thank God they didn’t get my money. But now, everyone listening, no bank or credit card will ever call you. They only text now. It looked so real, and they were so professional. I felt so stupid, but I’ve given myself grace.
I ended up spending seven hours at the bank opening all new bank accounts because my information was compromised. But I spent the entire time looking for the silver linings.
I was like, “Who am I going to meet at this bank?” I met the most amazing woman. Her name’s Lindsay. We joked that we’re best friends now because we spent seven hours together. She was so helpful. I got to tell her about my work, my book, and my podcast and just be in community with her. There were some financial gifts from opening up as a new customer again. I got some cash bonuses. I remembered that my fictitious business name had expired, so I got to do that while I was sitting there.
There were silver linings. So how does this book help kids remember to look for blessings and keep their eyes open to them, even when life feels so hard and scary?
Dorena Williamson: That’s so good. I’m so glad the fraud did not lead to you losing funds. But these are the things we lament that are even part of our world, the brokenness that’s in our world.
There’s a spread in the book, and when I saw it, I immediately thought about 2020. Often when I say that, people think of the pandemic. But before COVID-19 hit, Nashville had a terrible tornado, and it was devastating to so many people in our community.
Natural disasters, you can prepare for them and heed all the things you’re told by meteorologists and weather reports, but you cannot control the path of the storm. If it hits you, it hits you.
In the midst of that horror, we were grateful we did not have more impact than a few things getting blown around. But knowing that neighbors here in Middle Tennessee lost everything, we understood that while folks were waiting for the layers of response that can come, some people said, “Listen, we’re going to help our neighbor. If we have a chainsaw, we’re going to come over and start chopping that tree down so we can move it out of the way. What do we need to do? We’re going to get water in.”
They were not just going to sit back and say, “That’s so sad.” They responded.
There’s a picture in the book of the community coming together. It shows a tree that has come into a house. For a picture book for children, how do you picture a tragedy? You don’t want it to be traumatizing, but you want it to carry enough of a message that they understand something hard happened.
Children had to shelter with their families, and their families had to pray them through, if they’re believers, or do whatever they did to bring comfort to their children.
So on this page, there is a storm, and there’s a tree that has come through a house. Then you see images of older and younger people holding a pet, picking up trash, responding.
One thing we can do, and this is for us big people too, is lean more into gratitude every day. This is something my grandmother, who is now in heaven, gifted to me. She reminded me what it means to be grateful. Her name for God was “the dear Lord.” She would say, “I’m grateful to the dear Lord for all He’s done for me.”
So teaching children to practice gratitude every day and to give God thanks every day, not because the day is good or everything has gone the way we wanted, but because God is good. Every day is a gift.
When we do that throughout the day, it allows us to be grounded in gratitude, so that when hard things come, we already have a grounding we can return back to. I keep using that word, but I feel like it’s appropriate for having a rooted life.
When I think of receiving that message from a woman who lived for 95 years and the things she experienced, she went through a lot of really difficult things that I didn’t understand as a child. But I remember her kneeling by her bed as a daily rhythm and pausing to give thanks at meals. Even in her later years, when our communication was mostly by phone because she lived far away, I would hear her give thanks to the good Lord.
To have that legacy of this wonderful woman who walked through unspeakable hardship but was grounded in gratitude, that’s a gift. I get to pass that legacy on to you all.
Wendy Snyder: What was your grandma’s name?
Dorena Williamson: Her name was Catherine. She truly epitomized being grand. We’ve got this G theme of grand, grounding, and gratitude.
I hope that her legacy helps us remember gratitude is not because things are good. Life is good, so I’m grateful. No. God is good. That is unchanging no matter what life holds.
I’m not saying that lightly to your listeners because I know for some who are listening right now, life is not good. People might say, “I literally don’t know what I can look to be grateful for.”
If that is someone who’s listening, I would say, as you take a deep breath with me, you have breath in your lungs, and that is God’s gift. Literally the fact that we are alive is because God has given us that gift. If there is nothing else you can see right now in front of you to be grateful for, let the gift of God’s breath in your lungs call you back to gratitude.
Then in the quietness of your heart, ask God to show you. Sometimes we do have to ask God, “Would you show me? Because right now it’s foggy, cloudy, stormy, and I’m just not seeing what there is.”
Sometimes our kids are going to feel like that too. Everything is terrible. The whole world. When you’re going through one thing, it feels like it’s everything. So then we take that deep breath and say, “Okay, I’m having a hard moment today, but is the whole day bad?”
As my husband would say, “I’m having a bad moment in the midst of my day, but I don’t have to claim the whole day is a bad day.” Even to help our kids reduce it and say, “Let’s talk about what you’re going through right now, but then let’s also get the context of the whole day, the whole week, or the whole month.”
Wendy Snyder: When you’re in those pits, the darkening can come so fast, and it feels like everything. I have a client right now who is trying to get out of a season of depression and anxiety, and she’s like, “Everything feels so dark when you’re in these periods.”
I love what you’re talking about as far as looking for the blessings, but in a non-bypassing way. Mr. Rogers would always say, “Look for the helpers.” I think his mom would always tell him that when bad stuff happens, look for the helpers.
It’s a way of saying, “This is really gnarly, and there are people.”
My pastor told a story about this bully in school who messed with her and made up a lie that she had kissed a boy in seventh grade. Everyone started calling her fish face. But there was this one new girl who had moved to the school, and she was very popular and dressed really cool. My pastor thought the girl didn’t even know who she was.
One day, the girl walked up to the boy and said, “Don’t you ever say anything to her again.” Because she was the coolest kid, everyone listened, and they stopped calling her fish face.
All it takes is one person, one meaningful helper, to make a difference in someone’s life. Look for that. That’s a way to find a silver lining. Who will you meet? Who might help you in this situation?
I do a lot of study with Sharon McMahon. I’m in her book club, and we just studied with Dr. Jemar Tisby, who does amazing anti-racist and anti-Christian nationalism work. Sharon often tells those of us in her community, especially those who are feeling sad about what’s happening in the world, “Just do the next right thing. Help somebody.”
I love the idea of doing for one as you wish you could do for many. Just do the next right thing.
That’s also how we help parents in our community when they’re feeling hopeless or like nothing they do matters. With inadequacy behavior, if a kid quits or believes he can’t do something, you help them do one small thing. Tomorrow you do another small thing. It’s a way to find that little dose of hope, that little silver lining.
I love this page in your book with the storm and the school bus:
“You can’t always control what others may do, but you can do this. Breathe in, you can control yourself. Breathe out, do the next right thing.”
Dorena Williamson: I love it, Wendy. Some of the folks you quoted, I love Sharon and Jemar. Thank the Lord for the helpers. I would consider them helpers.
That too is a great thing to exemplify to kids. Looking for helpers is not something that ends when you’re no longer a child. We as adults, no matter what age, need helpers. The helpers are in our physical community. I believe helpers are found within our church communities, and I’m saying that because I’m passionate about it as a faith leader.
Then there are helpers online. There are people we may not get to meet physically in person, but through their books and resources.
I will humbly say that I hope this book will be one of those helpers. I hope it won’t just be something people pull out only because they’re going through something hard. I hope they pull it out because they want to enjoy a sweet time of reading together. But maybe the words of it will come back up.
My family has walked through some hard things recently, and I have been humbled and amazed that the words from my own book have come back to my own heart. I’ve had to say to myself, “Together, we’re going to take life one day at a time.” That’s the refrain from my book that I have quoted to myself over and over.
I hope this sweet little book will be one of those helpers for families when they go through a hard time or when they’re having happy times, to give kids context for both. That’s part of life.
Folks have even given it to their children headed to college. Whatever that life season might look like, or whatever that hardship might look like, I hope it’s a gift.
And yes, I appreciate and receive your word about doing for one. Whether it’s sending someone a text because God put them on your heart, instead of just thinking about them, send the text if you have their number. Call them. “I was thinking about you, and I prayed this for you today.”
You may not know the power of those small things. I’ve received those texts, and I’ve been blessed to send them. You just don’t know the power of small ways. There are big things we can do too, but don’t underestimate those small ways.
Wendy Snyder: I got an email the other day from a student in my membership program, the Fresh Start Experience. She’s from Australia. She said, “I’m one of those quiet ones. I sit back.” She doesn’t ask a lot of questions, and she’s not at coaching calls because they’re probably at an upside-down time zone.
But she poured into me with the sweetest, kindest words. “Thank you so much for what you’re doing. You have made such a difference in my life.”
She was visiting San Diego at the time, and she said, “I would try to hook up with you, but my family has been feeling ill and we’re in and out so fast.”
She sent the message and said, “Your work has meant so much to me. It has changed my family. I will keep studying. I’m still in the thick of it. I have a teenager.”
It meant so much to me. I still feel it. You never know what someone is going through. I have so many days of self-doubt and fear as a business owner and financially and all the things. It meant so much.
So yes, I love that takeaway, Dorena. And the idea of using your book to practice breath prayers in the non-triggered or non-catastrophic times, because that is how we build practices.
In my membership this year, we’re practicing a different nervous system regulation tool every day. It’s a lot of breath work. We’re trying to be in and out in 10 minutes. Pop on, do some breath work, do some nervous system drills, and remember that we have choice. As your book says, we have the choice. We were given free will to respond instead of react.
Reading this with your children every night or every morning and practicing means they will remember it. When they’re in line in second grade and tempted to shove, they will remember if you practice it.
But if you just pick it up when they get the red note home or when they’re having a hard time believing they can get good on the basketball team, it won’t work as well. You have to develop a practice so they can remember, just like you’re doing with your own words in your tough season.
Dorena, please let everyone know where they can come find you and your beautiful books, especially this latest one. As always, we’ll make sure we add it to our shop page too.
Dorena Williamson: I would love for folks to check out my website, DorenaWilliamson.com. I do try hard to keep things current there, so the latest book is featured as well as other work. I tease things that are forthcoming too.
On social media, I’m most active on Instagram at DorenaWilliamson. I also hang out on Facebook because my mama and lots of her friends are there. She will call me and say, “I saw it on your Facebook.” So I try to keep that up for Mama and company.
Hopefully soon, I’m also going to be on TikTok for BookTok. I’m going to let my adult daughter walk me through that. I’ll let her be my coach as I try to keep things current for some things that are coming.
Instagram is the main jam. I love, love, love tags with my books and kids. So if you read my book or want to send me a message, those things absolutely fuel my work. Seeing the kiddos fills me with joy. Those are the easy ways folks can stay in touch.
Wendy Snyder: So good. Thank you for being here, Dorena, and for being one of our incredible lightworkers of the world. We are so grateful and thank God for the work that you do in the world.
Dorena Williamson: Same back at you, Wendy. Thank you so much.
