When Is It Time to Stop Trying to Fix Ourselves?
Are you a self-help junkie? Even if you don’t have a stack of books on your bedside table detailing the newest ways to fix yourself, you still might be. And it wouldn’t be your fault if you were. Our conditioning from a very young age is to believe that we need to become better, new and improved versions of ourselves, even […]
What to Do About the People Who Blame You for Everything
My recent post: “When You’re In Relationship With A Blamer,” inspired overwhelming feedback, both from people who feel they receive blame and those who think they’re blamers. (Encouragingly, many blamers expressed the desire to change their blaming habits.) The questions I raised included: How do we proceed when someone that matters to us assigns us negative intentions that […]
When You’re In Relationship With a Blamer
There is no better time for growing than the holiday season. And not just growing in the belly, but in the heart and mind as well. Family interactions, particularly those that go on over a period of consecutive days, offer profound opportunities for self-awareness, learning, and evolution. Our greatest challenges are our greatest teachers, and they often […]
Who’s In Charge, Computers or Humans?
Something remarkable happened yesterday, not remarkable good but remarkable crazy. I was riding in one of the new group taxis that have taken over New York City, and we were traveling from midtown West to midtown East. I was the next to be dropped off and there were umpteen routes that we could take to […]
How to Make Every Day Feel Sacred: Cultivating the Profound Inside the Mundane
I recently returned from a remarkable and different kind of weekend. It was a weekend infused with poetry, ritual, music, beauty and kindness. Three days dedicated to bringing meaning to the surface of life, up from the hidden depths where it normally lives. We listened to the exquisite words of the poet David Whyte, resonated with stories of love, friendship, […]
Are Your Spiritual “Shoulds” Sabotaging Your Spiritual Life?
A person on a spiritual path should not get angry, and certainly not furious. This was high on my list of spiritual “shoulds.” The problem was that I was on what I thought of as a spiritual path (and had been for a long time) and I still got angry and furious and still, sometimes even acted […]
How to Look Out for Yourself
There are times in life when things fall apart, when we lose something deeply important, something that made us feel connected, grounded or safe. Sometimes a lot of things fall apart at the same time. There are times in life, for everyone, when it feels like all our safety nets get cut, and we are […]
Why Our Thoughts Are Not Real
Did you ever realize that everything going on in your mind, every thought, feeling, sensation, everything you are aware of, is in fact happening only in your private internal world? Your thoughts appear only to you, and are not being heard by anyone else whatsoever. There is one physical world here on earth, but billions […]
Prescription for Happiness: Living WithOUT Intention
We are a culture of doers. “What can I do?” “What should I do?” And the double do… “What do I do?” We are conditioned to believe that we need to do something to be happy and really, just to be okay. We need to do something in order to get the something or someone […]
When Old Friends Stop Being Good Friends
Friendships change, and not always for the better. Sometimes we find that a friend with whom we have had a long and important relationship is no longer someone that we particularly like or enjoy being around. Perhaps the friend has changed and become someone different or perhaps we have changed, and what used to work […]