loy-al-ty (noun): the quality of being loyal to someone
loy-al (adjective): giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person
synonyms: faithful, true, devoted

This past weekend, I was having a conversation with a really close girlfriend who I consider to be a sister. She is such an amazing mother, wife, and women of God. I am super thankful for her placement in my life with her genuine support, love, and friendship. Throughout our conversation she stated “there is an expiration date for loyalty when the person no longer values you.” After conversing on our own personal experiences, I knew I had to share my thoughts on loyalty.

​Often as women, we get caught up in being so loyal we begin to lose ourselves. I personally have found myself compromising my happiness due to loyalty. We know that men at times think we “deserve” a ring after we have accepted and looked passed their dishonesty, infidelity, mistakes, and disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, I am definitely a fan of sticking by your partners side because no one is perfect and everyone comes with faults. However, at some point we have to be loyal to ourselves first.

In the world of community development, the fact that ZIP code often trumps genetic code in determining a person’s overall health has become conventional wisdom. If families live in well-maintained housing, if they’re able to buy fresh food at a nearby supermarket, if their children can walk to school in safety, they are more likely to be healthy — in both body and mind.

​But community developers and their funders are grappling with how exactly to gauge the concrete connection between wide-ranging investments in a neighborhood and improvement in the health of the people who live there. Increasingly, they are seeking out hard data to evaluate the success of their work and to drive decision making about future projects.

Can achievement be broken down into steps? It isn’t always that clean and easy, but those who achieve great things usually go through much of the same process, with many of the items listed below as part of that process. So if you have been struggling with achievement, look through the following. Begin to apply them and you will be on the road to achieving your dream.

Step 1: Dream it.
Everything begins in the heart and mind. Every great achievement began in the mind of one person. They dared to dream, to believe that it was possible. Take some time to allow yourself to ask “What if?” Think big. Don’t let negative thinking discourage you. You want to be a “dreamer.” Dream of the possibilities for yourself, your family and for others. If you had a dream that you let grow cold, re-ignite the dream! Fan the flames. Life is too short to let it go.

​Think about from the time you wake up. Most of us sleep next to our phones and it's the first thing we grab after snoozing our alarms. We wake up to multiple notifications, tweets, Instagram posts, and the Snapchat stories of crazy adventures our friends experienced last night.

There are roughly 3.7 million vegans in the U.S., accounting for just over 1% of the population. Many go vegan to spare animals; the diet doesn't just cut out meat, like a vegetarian one, but nixes all animal sources of food, including eggs, dairy and honey.

​But if you’re wondering whether a vegan diet beats all others when it comes to your health, there’s a lot of room for debate.

​On the pro-vegan side of the ledger: A new study from Italy’s University of Florence linked vegetarian and vegan diets to significantly lower rates of ischemic heart disease and cancer. More research has tied vegan diets to healthier guts, gentler menopause symptomsand even lower levels of stress.

Meditation is an approach to training the mind, similar to the way that fitness is an approach to training the body. But many meditation techniques exist — so how do you learn how to meditate?

“In Buddhist tradition, the word ‘meditation’ is equivalent to a word like ‘sports’ in the U.S. It’s a family of activities, not a single thing,” University of Wisconsin neuroscience lab director Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., told The New York Times. And different meditation practices require different mental skills.

​It’s extremely difficult for a beginner to sit for hours and think of nothing or have an “empty mind.” We have some tools such as a beginner mediation DVD or a brain sensing headband to help you through this process when you are starting out. In general, the easiest way to begin meditating is by focusing on the breath — an example of one of the most common approaches to meditation: concentration.