September 19, 2020 This post was originally posted in early 2017. I moved last weekend and rather than skip a publication date, I updated this post that seemed to be a favorite. Hope that you enjoy it. If you want to reduce your suffering, change your relationship to pain. The idea is that by changing …
Seedlings
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How to Stop Letting Fear of Discomfort Keep You Stuck
September 5, 2020 We get unstuck when we meet life on life’s terms. Because impermanence is one of the few things we can count on, discomfort is, to our dismay, part of the human condition. In spite of our spiritual leanings and our beliefs about an afterlife, the idea of impermanence keeps us off-center. We …
If You Want to Make a Difference, Be Purposeful in Where You Put Your Attention
August 9, 2020 We don’t have to be famous, wealthy, or brilliant to make a difference. If enough of us regular people hang together, we can change the world. But before we can do that, we need to make conscious decisions about where we’re going to put our attention, and in what we’ll invest our …
What Do You Want People to Say about You When You’re Not in the Room?
July 26, 2020 Figure out what you long to experience and let that be your guide. In an On Being article, Our Inescapable Selves, blogger Courtney E. Martin asked herself a question. “What are three things you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room?” I loved the idea of this exercise, and since …
In Search of Honorable Relationships
July 12, 2020 Honorable relationships depend on our ability to explore the things we believe we can’t talk about. Emotional intimacy requires that we ask the questions, even when we’re not sure we want to hear the answers. Life is a touchingly brief opportunity to taste just about anything our hearts desire. Love, then, is …
You Are Who You Repeatedly Tell Yourself You Are
June 28, 2020 You’ve heard it before. Change your mindset, and your world will transform. “To become a different kind of person is to experience the world differently. When your mind changes, the world changes. And when we respond differently to the world, the world responds differently to us.” — David Loy, in “Rethinking Karma” We …
Want Your Relationships to Take Off– In a Good Way?
June 14, 2020 Turn the tables and give others what it is that you want to get from them—a sense of safety. The best gift you are ever going to give someone is permission to feel safe in their own skin. To feel worthy. To feel like they are enough. —Hannah Brencher This idea is a …
Make Friends with Your Limitations and Reduce Your Emotional Pain
May 31, 2020 It hurts to be human. When something hurts, it’s natural to want it to go away. Acceptance of pain, whether emotional or physical, doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is to try everything you can think of to feel better. You’ve listened to podcasts, read the blogs, and taken courses about loving yourself. …
Non-Attachment Is Best Understood by Looking at What it Isn’t
May 17, 2020 What it isn’t, for starters, is becoming the emotional equivalent of a stone. Instead of “letting it go,” it’s about “letting it be.” Like mindfulness, I hear the term non-attachment a lot. To many familiar with these terms, mindfulness and non-attachment both imply something we should be after , and suggest desirable states …
If Thinking You Need to Be an Expert Has Kept You Stuck, Read This
May 4, 2020 I spent most of my twenties and thirties feeling uncomfortable and “less than” because it was clear to me that I wasn’t an expert at any one thing. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the belief that being an expert at something was “the goal.” You don’t need to be an …