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Category “change & challenges”

Overcoming Tragedy: 3 Ways to Create Your Own Silver Lining

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“In the midst of winter I discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.” ~Albert Camus

These words may ring true for anyone who has been through difficult times, then found themselves stronger as a person, or doing things they would have never thought possible.

In May 2011 my brother was kidnapped from his home while working in Nigeria. After a truly horrific ten months he was murdered during a rescue attempt. It was an experience that has left scars we expect never to fully heal.

What happened next genuinely surprised and moved me. I saw the ordinary people …

How Do You Motivate Yourself: With Love or Fear?

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“The heart is like a garden: it can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?” ~ Jack Kornfield

My whole life has been a story of discipline. I started exercising and eating healthier in eighth grade. I planned out my studies meticulously so I would finish school assignments exactly on time. I always arrived five minutes early for any appointment or meeting. Disciplined.

When I began my yoga studies in earnest at the age of twenty-two, I applied the same disciplined nature to my yoga practice. I had extensive practice plans and had scheduled …

5 Tips to Help You Take Action to Overcome Your Fear

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“Thinking will not overcome fear, but action will.” ~W. Clement Stone

I made it all the way to my thirtieth birthday without learning how to drive. After I turned twenty-one, people often asked me why I hadn’t learned yet. My go-to story was that I lived in a place with abundant public transportation options and never had any intention of buying a car.

The truth is that I wanted to learn, but I was terrified, and the fear grew with each year.

What if I got in an accident? What if people laughed at me for learning so late or …

Keep Moving Toward Success, One Failure at a Time

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“If you get up one more time than you fall, you will make it through.” ~Chinese Proverb

I remember clearly the day in March 2003 when I would receive the kind of news that no aspiring musician wants to hear.

“Sorry, but you aren’t currently at the level needed to enter our school.”

Five years of blood, sweat, and tears for what? To be told that I sucked? I sat there, lost in my own thoughts. Was I having a bad day? Was I simply not as good as my ego led me to believe?

There I was, …

Forgiving and Letting Go When You Feel Resentful

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“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” ~Mahatma Ghandi

My childhood was in many ways a nice childhood. I feel like a complete twit to complain about it.  I know other people have gone through so much worse. I’ve read really difficult childhood stories and my heart literally bleeds for these people.

Growing up I was shy, un-confident, and withdrawn. I treated school mostly like a prison sentence. I put my head down and tried to do my time without falling in with the wrong crowd.

My parents were, and are, good parents. They provided …

Building Confidence to Face a Fear Instead of Hiding from It

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“Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” ~Eckhart Tolle

I was very shy growing up, especially in lower and middle school. I moved from the US to London when I was five. Although I don’t remember a lot of my experience in lower school in London, I do know that when I first started I refused to speak or read aloud.

I was in a completely new environment. I was confused and anxious, and it made me afraid of new situations.

As the year progressed I settled in pretty well. I made friends and would not have …

Dealing with Pain or Abuse: You Can Let It Destroy You, Define You, Or Strengthen You

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“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.” ~Unknown

When I was twenty-four, leaving my ex was my “something bad.” It was about as bad as it could get.

After four years of dating, I was certain marriage was right around the corner. Our lives were completely intertwined. I knew he wasn’t a great guy for me, but that didn’t matter because I truly believed I was ready to take the next step.

One night changed everything.

I found his drugs, confirming …

Dealing with Loss: 3 Uplifting Truths About Death and Grief

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“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever; you just have to live.” ~Natalie Babbitt

I stared at my reflection in the mirror as my face contorted into a painful grimace, tears streaming down my cheeks. My throat constricted to keep the sobbing at bay. My grandmother was dying, and this is how I coped with death: by falling apart.

I was lucky; this is the way death is “supposed” to go. Grammy was 96 and had lived out her old age in comfort.

While I knew I would miss …

When Life Feels Crazy: 6 Questions for Cracking Up & Breaking Through

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“Every really new idea looks crazy at first.” ~Abraham H. Maslow

Once, when I was in a painting workshop, I hit a wall of resistance, totally stumped by what to paint next.

My painting teacher came over to explore some questions that could help unblock me. But my “wall” was concrete, or industrial metal, or super-duper spy-movie-like with some computer-code contraption locking all security systems down.

“What if a crazy woman came into the room?” she asked me. “What if the crazy woman painted for you? What would she do?”

“She would explode everything up!” I answered.

“What would she …

Your Reality Is a Reflection of What You Believe You Deserve

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“You are very powerful, provided you know how powerful you are.” ~Yogi Bhajan

Over the last ten years I have learned time and time again that our reality is a reflection of what we believe we deserve, often on an unconscious level.

I discovered this about a decade ago while living in Belize—a diving vacation hotspot on one end and gang-infested, poverty-ridden land on the other.

Back then I was avoiding the 9-5 life. You may say I was running from something, such as routine and following the status quo, but I was also looking to find my worth by …

The Antidote to Criticism: Turn Others’ Doubt Into a Standing Ovation

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“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” ~Aristotle

Gangly and skinny, I never attracted much attention from the opposite sex during high school. I was the friendly and funny sidekick to the popular girls—fun to hang out with but not to date.

When an older guy approached me during my last year of high school, I thought it would be a normal high school romance.

It turned out that our relationship wouldn’t be anything close to “normal.”

As I began to get to know him, everyone around me started to object to …

How Simple Mini Habits Can Change Your Life

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“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~Alan Watts

It was late 2012, just after Christmas, and like many others I was reflecting on the year.

I realized that I had ample room for improvement in too many areas of my life, but knowing that New Year’s Resolutions have a poor 8% success rate (University of Scranton research), I wanted to explore some other options. I knew I wanted to start before January 1st too, because arbitrary start dates don’t sit well with me.

On December …

We Have the Strength to Move Through Pain and Uncertainty

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“Suffering is not caused by pain but by resisting pain.” ~Unknown

Earlier this year our beloved puppy got sick. Not just a poorly tummy kind of sick, but proper, life-threatening, blood transfusion-requiring sick. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. She was at death’s door.

The vet was talking to us in quiet and kindly tones. Using words like “grave.”

Her illness was apparently unusual in a dog her age. Her prognosis was uncertain. She would require months of treatment that may or may not work. We were to watch her for signs of deterioration. Note changes in her appetite and energy levels.

And then …

4 Tips to Help You Keep Going When You’re Filled with Doubt

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“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake.” ~Francis Bacon Sr.

“Just research, research, research. That’s what grad school is.”

It seemed as though that was all I was hearing from my professors, and it wasn’t helpful.

Since returning to school to get my master’s degree, I had maintained a 4.0 average, but I also hadn’t taken more than two classes at a time. Until now.

When I enrolled for the fall semester, I chose to take twelve …

Create Something Beautiful with Your Disappointment

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“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose finite hope.” ~Martin Luther King Jr.

“You have to get out the whining,” my writing teacher told me, peering over a section of manuscript that dripped with self-loathing and pity. I swear I watched the words “Barren, empty, hollow shell
” fall flat to the floor and make the saddest plopping noise.

Those words haunted me for years; they still do sometimes when I get a baby shower invitation or walk by miniature sneakers at the GAP. Miniature sneakers dwell in the most emotional-scar-tissue-filled regions of my heart.

When I was twelve years …

A Simple but Powerful Way to Kick the Worry Habit

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“Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.” ~Swedish proverb

I’m a worrier by nature, and I come by it honestly.

My mother was afraid to cross bridges and ride in elevators, boats, and airplanes. Her mother died of cancer at the age of forty, and my mother spent many years—including those of my childhood—thinking every sniffle, fever, or headache might be the start of something fatal.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, growing up with a steady dose of anxiety, like an invisible intravenous drip, had its effect on my developing mind.

I was an introverted, …

9 Insights on Dealing with Change, Challenges, and Pain

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“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~Alan Watts

This year has been one of unprecedented change for me. From January to March, I traveled to Mozambique, Africa to do volunteer work. I did not speak the language; I did not understand the culture. I was immersed in a completely strange world for two months.

In April, we put our house up for sale. The prospect of uprooting and moving is destabilizing, and one of life’s biggest stressors.

Then in May my marriage failed, and I …

4 Ways to Embrace Slow Change When You’re Feeling Impatient

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“Change is not a process for the impatient.” ~Barbara Reinhold

I love it when change happens quickly. Sometimes things just click, and everything shifts all at once.

When I met the man who’d become my husband, we were married only thirteen months later, and in those thirteen months we both transformed to our very cores.

The problem is that those thirteen months aren’t the entire story. They cut off the three years of intense personal work I did before I met him, all the while wishing to be in a healthy relationship.

Without those three years of work …

The 3 Pieces of Recovery from Addiction or Depression

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“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” ~BrenĂ© Brown

When I started graduate school, it was safe to say that I was running away from things. I’d recently ended a nine-year relationship and I wasn’t planning on dealing with it.

Upon the birth of my nephew, my father, a long-term addict, had begun rekindling his relationships with his three daughters. I didn’t recognize, though I should have, that this needed dealing with too.

I began school so that I’d have something to pour my …

It’s Not Over: Failure Is Success in the Making

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“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” ~James Joyce

Everyone has a story of failure and disadvantage—those things we wish were done differently, better, or not at all. Take these stories for instance:

A speaker intending to be unifying and encouraging onstage leaves the audience disappointed and bored instead.

A lone manuscript is rejected by publishing houses over twenty-seven times, dismissed as too fanciful, fake, and “never gonna sell.”

A poor eleven-year-old boy, deprived of toys his entire childhood, trudges through sleet and snow on his newspaper route in order to help support his family.

An author struggles to …