Recently at a lecture I attended, the speaker relayed the following story from her life: A six year old girl was asked, “Pretend you were in a room full of scary tigers. What would you do?” The little girl paused for a long moment and then responded, “Well … I’d just stop pretending.” 

Ah, the power of the mind. Just as it can conjure the scariest of scenarios, so too can it release them. Hold that thought for just a minute or two while you read on. What I want to chat with you about are the three wicked step sisters, Fear, Doubt and Worry (well, that’s a little dramatic but I think you get the point) and how to change the way you relate to them. 

To set the stage, a little gift from the poet Rumi entitled, “The Guest House:” This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice - meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

The premise: We all deal with fears of one kind or another but most of us haven’t a clue what to do with them or how to be with them. Mostly we employ the strategy of fight or flight. When we feel a worry, a concern, a doubt or a fear, we either go to battle with it or run for the hills (how’s that working out for you?).  BUT alas, there is another way. There is a way to be with the heavier side of our emotional selves; a relationship that redefines what it means to be the glorious feeling being that you are.  Read more…

 We always have a choice; we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us and make us feel increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder.

- Pema Chodron

Pema expresses to me, the perfect description of the grateful heart; the willingness, the bravery, the audacity to see all of life as a gift not just the pretty parts but all of it. When we make the choice to live from this bold place, we become strong and balanced; positioned to see the gift in any circumstance. Wow. Who doesn’t want that?

Some science behind gratitude. From research done at SMU in Dallas Texas: The results of a study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism and energy. Additionally, the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, was more likely to help others, exercised more regularly and made more progress toward personal goals. According to the findings, people who feel grateful are also more likely to feel loved. McCollough and Emmons also noted that gratitude encouraged a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness among people since one act of gratitude encourages another. 

Get Your Gratitude on. When we’re beginning a gratitude practice, we begin with the gifts in our life; the people, love, health shelter of our life. Many folks do keep a gratitude journal to bring awareness and attention to the bright spots in their life. For another approach, check out Gratitude Log 

Gratitude is a muscle. Take it to the gym! Work it out, folks. When you do, you will begin to see yourself, your relationships and your life in a brand new way. Interested in doing some heavy lifting with gratitude? Look for unusual places to get grateful. Experiment. What would happen if you got grateful for a reoccurring challenge or for that place you always get stuck when you try to break an old habit or take a relationship to the next level? What if right there and then you said “even for this I am grateful!” What would that shift in perspective do for you? Try it out sometime and just notice what happens. If you’re like me, you’ll feel a release of tension and you’ll start to access your natural curiosity. Curiosity is like emotional lubricant helping you get unstuck.  Read more…

“Any resolution or decision you make is simply a promise to yourself which isn’t worth a tinker’s damn until you have formed the habit of making it and keeping it. And you won’t form the habit of making it and keeping it unless right at the start you link it with a definite purpose that can be accomplished by keeping it. In other words, any resolution or decision you make today has to be made again tomorrow, and the next, and so on. And it not only has to be made each day, but it has to be kept each day for if you miss one day in the making and keeping of it, you’ve got to go back and begin again. But if you continue the process of making it each morning and keeping it each day, you will finally wake up one morning, a different person in a different world, and you will wonder what has happened to you and the world you used to live in.”   Albert E. Gray (1885-1942)

If you’re headed out to make a change in your life, make sure you pack a bag with a few things because you’ll need them along the way: an understanding of the process of change, an engaging purpose or reason for the change, a healthy supply of desire, and a creative, tenacious and persistent attitude. Read more…

“Feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings” as the song goes. I’m not sure most of us have the slightest clue what to do or how to be with these things that seem to surface within us at the most opportune and inopportune times. Like star crossed lovers, running towards each other across a field of wildflowers, feelings can sweep us up and spinning us around, turn the most bland of moments into a blissful, thrilling wondrous experience. Or perhaps they might pull us in close, hold us sweetly in their embrace cooing us into quietness and tranquility. But that’s on a good day. Because in a moment they can turn. We might go to bed feeling centered, strong and optimistic and awaken only to find that the forgotten dwarfs, Cranky, Disgruntled and Guilty have set up camp at the foot of our bed. (“Who invited them, anyway?”) Indeed this world of feelings can be a perplexing one, one that leaves us scratching our heads and feeling powerless especially if we have drank the Kool-Aid that says we’re supposed to live in an inner world reigned over by feelings of happiness and joy (I for one, drank that particular flavor of Kool-Aid and have been dealing with the results for most of my adult life). Read more…

Of the many astonishing, mind blowing, soul expanding gifts that love, romantic love, provides, these days I am reveling in love’s ability to show me the deepest parts of myself, the parts that were forgotten or ignored – the parts that didn’t really learn how to love, to receive love or to give love … convinced they wouldn’t ever really get love. Oh sure, these are not the pretty parts of myself and true, in the wake of love, I’d rather bask in the glory of my amazing smooth-sailing self (ha!), but in this moment, I am also understanding that unless I tend to these shadowy-er, less developed aspects of my emotional self, then my experience of love will forever be relegated to the fringes of my life, the shallow wading pools of experience and I won’t be able to truly stand in the beauty of what my heart so deeply longs for. And so after my most recent brush with love, I drummed up a little bleary-eyed courage and a whole lot of desire and I faced myself as if for the first time. I did this because I wanted to understand. I did this because I wanted to finally know who I was so that I could become who I am. I did this because I want to know love in the way that I dreamed was possible.

We are all familiar with the joys of love. It’s what has us reach for it time after time. The need for love is in our DNA. We require it to live. Love provides deep connection. It holds promise. We put a lot on love. We fill it up with all sorts of hope and possibility. We do this because the returns can be so wonderful. We do this because we are called back to the table to sit with love until we get it right and we answer that call because we intuitively know that there is something powerful waiting for us. But what are we to do with the pain love seems to sometimes deliver? What are we to make of the devastation we feel when love “goes away?” Recently this happened to me. It was stunning. Literally. Read more…

This morning I awoke grappling with fear.  Ugh.  I could feel it in my chest and in my head.  I wasn’t conscious of it as much as I was simply in it.  In this early morning state of mind; I was all wrapped up in my fear.  It was me, I was it.  My chest was tight, my head occupied with fear’s narrative.  And though this fear was attached to a specific situation in my life, it was functioning as a lens through which I was now seeing the entirety of my day. It weighed me down and made everything seem scary and a bit unhinged.   

Then in a flash, I understood something I’d never understood before.  This fear, the one telling me “Be careful. Don’t get too invested. You’re  gunna get hurt.” was actually trying to protect me.  In an instant upon this recognition, the grip fear had on my morning loosened a smidge.  It’s as if there was the tiniest opening that hadn’t been there only a moment before.  In that moment, as I was making the coffee, some impulse had me listen beyond the suffocating narrative I was caught in and I understood for the first time, that my fear had assigned itself to be my protector.  I think I actually smiled.  I became conscious of my fear; listened, got its intended message and it relaxed a bit.  I was no longer my fear.  My fear was no longer me.  Read more…

The world needs all of you.  All-of-you.  Not just the pretty, polished, just-right parts of you but also, the darker, in the shadows, rougher, gutsier, raw and messier parts of you.  You know why?  Because life is about color.  And in those parts of you is where the color is, where the energy hides out, where the rubber hits the road.  It’s when we exclude parts of ourselves that we get into trouble.  When we push out, reject, shame or otherwise banish them from our lives, they get louder, uglier and destructive.  At the very least they turn into a low-level hum of discomfort or anxiety.  So when they present themselves, bring them into the light.  Greet them with a friendly “hello” and integrate them.  Our job as our friend Rumi suggests, is to be a host to all that arrives (see his poem “The Guest House”).  When this is the place from which we come, when we endeavor to make all parts of ourselves feel welcome and heard, they soften becoming allies instead of villains, they reveal their hidden messages and power to us, they begin to show us where they came from and how they are meant to help, not hinder. Read more…

We do not live out our lives in a vacuum.  In the arc of each lifetime there is a line between everything; a thread that connects each of the paths we’ve taken, the choices we’ve made, the jobs we’ve had, the friendships won and lost.  When you follow this thread back to its source you discover that it connects us to who we are, what we want for ourselves, to what lights us up.  Everything expressed within a lifetime is manifested from the individual, the self, the soul.  I believe our choices are born from our values; the very things that we desire and live to express.  Each choice has at its base a connection to something meaningful to us.  The art is to follow the connections, to see the relationships between our choices, to discover what they reflect about us and then to see where they’ve been pointing us. Read more…