We all like to be known and be seen. Well, as long as how we’re known is a positive thing. No one likes to be the local pariah. However, there’s a more practical side of being known and seen. Life is going on all around us all the time. We’re not an island in it,…
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people describe their authentic self, their voice, in these lustrous terms. It’s loving and giving, making the world a better place and doing for others. It’s speaking the unvarnished truth about things and seeing the world clearly. It speaks in ringing tones about everything that’s possible and…
We have trust issues. There. I’ve said it. Or maybe I should say that we mistrust. We trust backasswards? However you want to put it, we’re putting out trust in things we shouldn’t and mistrusting what we should. We don’t trust our feelings. On the one hand they are inconvenient, interrupting us at exactly the…
When we think or talk about loving ourselves or needing to love ourselves more, most people are talking about a feeling. We are referring to wanting to feel more compassionate about ourselves, who we are, our identity in the world and in ourselves, and to have better self-esteem. All of which is great and I’m…
We are so very bad at it. It’s amazing. It’s as if we’re seeing our goals reflected in a hall of mirrors in the Fun House at a carnival and we’re setting our expectations and creating our To Do lists based on that reflection. We’re either setting goals way too high so they are completely…
Somehow we learn that strong emotions are like wild animals. We can have them in our world, but in very controlled environments, with lots of training, and tons of escape features so we can get away at a moments notice. You know, because they can turn on us. They never stop being wild, right? That’s…
There is no one key thing that makes a relationship work nor is their one that causes them to fail. I dysfunctional relationship can work for decades because the individuals are dysfunctional in exactly the right ways for each other. As the old rhyme goes “Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat…
“While many people engaged in meditation claimed to find it made them more relaxed, I made a somewhat different discovery. Admittedly anxious to begin with, I stumbled on a rather odd realization: The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is desire. Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are…
We all have things we want. Things we want to be when we grow up, things we want to do on that bucket list, things we want to achieve sooner rather than later…. We have these desires that we label “If Only…” and then we stick them in a box and put them aside. You…
Narrative Challenge: The 1 Page Auto-Biography Telling our personal stories or narratives to others is important. Our lives matter and we each have wisdom to share. However, when we tell someone our stories, we have an agenda (good/bad/meh) which informs how we tell them and what details we include, what we emphasize and what we…