Ever since we launched Natural Awakenings of Milwaukee in June 2011, people have asked me how I ended up publishing a magazine. Since the story of my journey ties in so well with this month’s feature article on living a passion-driven life, I would like to share it.

For the three years just prior to my career change, I was employed in a corporate job as an information technology (IT) professional with a good salary and benefits. I was grateful for a recent promotion to a leadership position with eight people reporting to me. Yet I was feeling unsatisfied; financial rewards and professional status weren’t enough. Each day I felt like I was wasting precious hours of my life, hours that I would never get back. I didn’t feel that I was doing my best to help humanity or make the world a better place.

I began to ask: “What would I truly love to do with my life?” I felt passionate about many things, including eating healthy organic food, applying principles of natural health and complementary medicine, and supporting clean and renewable energies. Plus I had discovered a love of writing a few years earlier. Many possibilities for a new direction surfaced, but no path stood out as “the one”. I decided to exercise patience and see what would be revealed when the time was right.

Within weeks of deciding to trust that “I’ll know it when I see it,” I came across the Madison edition of Natural Awakenings, and it was love at first sight. It took me some time to gather the needed courage and move forward, all the while overcoming the scary what-ifs voiced by well-meaning family members and concerned friends. Taking on this new endeavor meant leaving a stable, well-paying job in the midst of a shaky economy and venturing into the unknown.

Through it all, I held on to the realization that sharing in this publication’s mission of supporting healthy people living on a healthy planet is what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world. I allowed myself to have faith that work that makes me so happy must be the right path for me. As a result, I have felt energized, excited and full of passion about life like never before.

I am blessed to invest my days in work that inspires readers like you—and more than 3 million others around the country—as together we join in making our world a more beautiful place to be.

Live with passion!

Gabriella Buchnik, Publisher