Hi, I’m Tawny McVay, the author and creator behind Since We Woke Up. All I’ve ever wanted from my life is to help people grow in theirs, to make the world around me just a little more beautiful, and I use those platforms to that end.

Once upon a time, I was in nursing school minoring in psychology and planned to spend my life caring for what ailed the people around me. As I started work, however, I noticed a common theme – bandaids. That is to say, by the time many people reached our care, poor life choices had already reached a critical level. There was nothing left to do but patch them up and send them out, knowing they’d be back again with the same issues. I was on the wrong side of health.

So we quit nursing and built a gym in our backyard that housed a funky little crowd as utterly committed to the place as we were. My husband and I had both been trainers while going to school and felt it was the better fit for us, helping people make healthy choices to keep the diseases we’d seen so much of at bay. Before the year was out we’d outgrown our simple operation and had to upgrade to a commercial facility. I will cherish those days forever, when I was a trainer nicknamed Satawny who spent her days lifting weights and coaching.

And then, if you’ve read my book, you know we reached a point of “waking up” and left that life to pursue another, one lived on the road in a bus. Four years later, we still live in a big white bus named Oliver, splitting our time between traveling and parking at our home base in Montana where the dream is to create an off-grid homestead.

I’m currently in the process of writing my second book. In my free time, you can find me in my garden talking to plants or in my kitchen concocting herbal remedies. I also love creating away from social media and spend long hours knitting, weaving, spinning, and throwing pottery, to name a few of my many hobbies. Or better put, I’m a lifelong student and my greatest hobby is learning; I hold certifications in more random topics than I can name here, including multiple wellness coaching disciplines and Usui Reiki. I also head up a book club run through my social accounts and work/volunteer for Rachel’s Challenge, a nonprofit dedicated to ending school violence and youth suicide.

My main desire is to grow into a person I can be progressively more proud of every day, one focused on radiating love to everything and everyone she touches. Or, as Elsie De Wolfe poignantly said, “I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life.”