Tiny Buddha

Category: change & challenges

  • Overcoming the Power of Suggestion: Make Your Own Choices

    Overcoming the Power of Suggestion: Make Your Own Choices

    “People who urge you to be realistic generally want you to accept their version of reality.” ~Unknown

    I’m often open to suggestion. I like to gather opinions and feedback about my writing so that I can use it to improve the impact and make it a better read.

    The thing I’ve learned about listening to other people’s thoughts on my writing is that sometimes what seems like good advice is little more than personal preference; changing an image or an entire scene to suit one person isn’t always the right path, especially if my gut is saying, “You know you don’t want to do that.”

    Now that I am working on a novel, I realize how easy it’s been to sway me, not just in my decisions but also in my thoughts.

    Have you ever taken a different route to a party or family event because the person in the passenger seat told you to? How about putting those comfy, though slightly old trainers in the bottom of the closet because your partner thinks they look shabby?

    It’s a given that we’ve all spent money on something we don’t need because we’ve been lured by the suggestion of T.V. and big companies that appeal to our desire to happy. I bet some people have even given up on dreams because someone else has said they’d be better off aiming a bit lower.

    There’s a difference between valid advice and suggestions based on self-interest.

    There are times when my view of reality gets distorted, when I’m stressed or upset. Once I’ve calmed down, I often acknowledge that my perception was overblown, although a grain of truth often remains.

    It’s frustrating when someone else negates my experiences—essentially saying there is no grain of truth. (more…)

  • 5 Immediate and Easy Ways to Silence Your Inner Critic

    5 Immediate and Easy Ways to Silence Your Inner Critic

    “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” ~William Shakespeare

    I love to paint. I’m not a professional artist. I have no technique, and I am not trained. But I love how the brush feels as it dips into color and moves across a white page.

    Painting allows me to be free, to have fun and play. It also does something else: It shows me how I judge myself and how I can get in my own way. It reveals what I believe about myself that stops me from creating whatever I want.

    Even as I take joy in the process of painting I still hear the inner-critic in my head:

    “This flower is not pretty enough. It should be purple, not red.”

    “Make this face look good so others can recognize what a good painter you are.”

    “You can’t paint just for the sheer joy of it—you need to be doing more productive things with your time.”

    “It’s ugly, and when people see it, they’re going to think you’re weird.”

    The judge inside me likes to tell me how bad I am. He mocks me, teases me, and pushes me around. He’s mean, insensitive, and determined to hold me back.

    When we engage in a project, whether it is the beginning, the middle, or the end, the judge loves to get involved. Although the judge is very unoriginal and speaks to each of us very much the same, his judgments take on hundreds of forms.

    The judge is most definitely a thief, robbing us of our innate goodness, worth, talent, values, and ability. He makes us believe in illusions, wreaks havoc on our spirit, and causes chaos in our mind.

    He likes to break our ego and tell us we are not enough and bad. He likes to tell us we are not loved and not cared about—that we don’t matter.

    He even likes to stroke our ego and puff us up, telling us how good we are, how special and how unique. “Look how beautiful that purple flower is. Look how very talented you are. When people see this, they’re going to find you very special.”

    He loves to break us and stroke us. He loves to seduce us and tempt us. He loves to make us doubt ourselves.

    So how do we silence this inner critic and put him in his place? (more…)

  • The Relief and Power of Accepting Your Struggles (and Finding Hidden Gifts)

    The Relief and Power of Accepting Your Struggles (and Finding Hidden Gifts)

    “It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.” ~Pema Chodron

    I love acceptance. Acts of surrender create forward momentum.

    If we all pause for a moment and observe what we are fighting, right here and right now—maybe depression, anxiety, weight gain, low self-image, or financial stress—we’ll have an opportunity to accept then.

    But that’s just the start.

    Recently I accepted something I never thought I would. Reframing the way I thought about it changed my life.

    I have moderate to severe OCD. Having OCD is basically like believing everything that goes through your mind. Scary, right?

    Obsessive-compulsive people have intrusive and extremely terrifying thoughts—for example, that he or she may have been contaminated by something, which might lead him or her to spend hours washing. I have a base underlying all of my obsessions: that I will hurt people. It was and can be my greatest fear.

    For example, I used to worry that I left the oven or iron on and that, in doing so, I may have burned the house down, which would ruin my husband’s life and also kill our cat. So I’d return home multiple times per day to check these appliances and also send my husband home to check. I also had massive rituals around shutting appliances off.

    OCD is a time-sucker. Obsessive compulsives create rituals to lower the anxiety. I’d check to make sure I didn’t leave the iron on, do everything evenly on both sides of my body so I felt “balanced,” retrace events that happened in my life to make absolutely certain I hadn’t harmed anyone accidentally, and search the internet excessively for answers.

    These rituals literally took up hours my day.

    I discovered that I had OCD one afternoon when I was trying to figure out how you know something for certain.

    Try googling that.

    The first thing that popped up for my search query was about obsessive-compulsive disorder. I felt immediate relief. (more…)

  • Renovate Your Life: 5 Key Truths About Creating Change

    Renovate Your Life: 5 Key Truths About Creating Change

    “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” ~Pema Chodron

    We are currently in the midst of home improvement—what we thought would be a small “touch-up.”  Nothing seemed too threatening on the surface, just a scratch here, a nick there. It would be a simple fix.

    But when we began the project and uncovered the areas we were going to address, we saw there was much more than met the eye, as often happens in life. We could no longer ignore what we had sealed over and painted, covered with lovely flowers, and ignored for many years.

    Isn’t it funny how often plumbing is a perfect analogy for life? Opening what seemed to be a simple clog revealed 45-year-old crumbling pipes, made from materials long obsolete. All of the unseen clogging and rusting seemed symbolic of the hidden parts deep inside myself.

    When I acknowledged a simple issue—my fear of change—it revealed old beliefs that no longer serve me. Beliefs that were behaving just like our pipes by creating major blocks. Beliefs that I had covered so well with personal landscaping that no one (including me) saw them.

    The most amazing thing was sharing this with a plumber who really got it and shared my insights.

    Who knew—enlightenment through our sewer drains!

    So as the project moves on, I want to share five of the truths about home and self improvement that I have discovered thus far: (more…)

  • 3 Things That Limit Your Potential and How to Overcome Them

    3 Things That Limit Your Potential and How to Overcome Them

    “Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.” ~George Sheehan

    Here’s the routine: wake up, do my work, watch TV, and go to bed.

    This was a regular day in my life not long ago. It was not too eventful and not overly challenging, and to be the honest, the less challenging it was, the less stress there was for me—at least that’s what I thought.

    I had been working online for a few years, and my income was not up to where I wanted it to be. In fact, it was pretty far away from the numbers I had floating around in my head! But still, I went through the same motions everyday, hoping that one day I’d reach those numbers through hard work and perseverance.

    I am a big believer in taking action to create the life you want, and at that point I thought I was taking action.

    I would work hard during my day writing articles, perfecting my website’s SEO, and posting in forums. I did this daily because my schedule on the wall told me to do this to be successful. It even told me what time to stop doing one thing and start doing another.

    Occasionally, I would read articles from other online marketers and bloggers about link building and networking. Even my husband, who is involved in real estate, would talk about that relationships he was building and how it helped him with his business.

    But I kept brushing those ideas off because they were outside of my comfort zone. (more…)

  • How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Using Affirmations

    How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Using Affirmations

    “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.” ~Buddha

    I used to teach Adult Upgrading. My students were people who had never completed grade school and/or high school. For a variety of reasons, they were now ready to try it again.

    New students would say, “I wasn’t ever any good at school.” “I can’t do math.” “I hate fractions.”

    It’s my belief that our self-talk is programming ourselves for our statements to be true.

    Those students thought they’d been stating the facts, not revealing programmed beliefs.

    My work was less about teaching math than it was about coaching them toward a change in their beliefs about themselves.

    “I never again want to hear you say you’re not good at math,” I’d say. I’d ask them to switch to “I’m learning math” or “I’m getting better at math” or “I’m working on fractions.”

    I’d help them start to notice their own negative self-talk and then transform it into positive statements. “Sure it sounds weird. So humor me,” I’d have to say. “Yes, I know it doesn’t feel like it’s true. Not yet, anyway.” They’d roll their eyes at me.

    I’ve read that schools teach fractions before many of our brains are developmentally ready to cope at that conceptual level. I believe this, because I’ve met so many people whose problems in school began around the time fractions were introduced.

    Children’s developing self-images are vulnerable. Once children begin to feel stupid about a school subject, the negative self-talk begins. It soon defeats their egos along with their will to learn. (more…)

  • 6 ways to Deal with “I Should Be Better” Syndrome

    6 ways to Deal with “I Should Be Better” Syndrome

    “When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” ~Lao Tzu

    Pretty much everyone I know thinks they should be doing better in some way, at least sometimes.

    Are you totally and completely satisfied with what you’ve done so far in life? No little part of you thinks, maybe I should have more money in the bank? Or maybe I should have a more professional wardrobe, or a book contract, or a dog that’s housebroken?

    The word “should” isn’t exactly enlightened or peaceful, nor is the practice of judging yourself or believing that you’re not exactly where you’re meant to be. But we’re human, so our thoughts inevitably go there from time to time.

    We judge ourselves. We hold ourselves to standards that someone else made up—standards that may not even make sense for our current life.

    I often hear people say things like:

    • “I can’t believe I’m in my forties and still don’t have matching luggage.”
    • “Shouldn’t my child be reading by now?”
    • “I always assumed I’d exercise regularly after I finished college.”
    • “I can’t believe I don’t have better health insurance at this stage in my career.”

    I have to wonder, whose beliefs are those? Whose standards are they, really? It’s not like we wake up at forty and suddenly crave matching luggage. Someone fed us that expectation somewhere along the way, and we forgot it wasn’t our own.

    Would the mother feel genuine concern for her child’s reading skills if they lived on a deserted island? Or is the pressure external, based on what others say, think, and read, and she simply doesn’t realize those thoughts aren’t hers?

    And I, too, have thoughts like these all the time. Not those exactly, but ones like them.

    Like how I should be famous by now. Really. The ship has sailed for being on Oprah, but isn’t someone going to beg me to come on their show?  And how I always thought that by age thirty-four I’d own a home with a yard, not a small condo in the city. Or how I still buy all my clothes on sale and I don’t have a decent wardrobe. And how I still say “like” and “awesome” way too much for an adult.

    So it’s starting to look like we’re all in the same boat with this I-should-be-doing -better stuff.

    Since it’s such a universal human issue, maybe we can make a collective pact to just stop with the shoulds? Can we collectively agree to be just a little kinder to ourselves? Can we set aside the judgments and be proud of ourselves, right this minute, not when we achieve something we haven’t yet achieved? (more…)

  • 7 Ways to Benefit from Not Getting What You Want

    7 Ways to Benefit from Not Getting What You Want

    “Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.” ~Dalai Lama

    A year ago, I hit rock bottom. Until that point, I had put all my energy into my dream of becoming a physician. Last year my life slammed into a brick wall, and my plans seemed to be torn into pieces.

    After high school, I took every opportunity to immerse myself in the medical profession while maintaining my grades in college.

    During the summer of my freshman year, I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician and practiced being a first responder during medical emergencies. Over the next three years, I woke up at 6:00 AM on the weekends and drove an hour to work as a Patient Care Assistant on the Trauma floor at Parkland Hospital.

    However, none of my hard work, experiences, or ambitions seemed significant last year when I didn’t gain acceptance to medical school.

    All the work I had put into achieving my dream meant nothing. The energy that I had expelled to become a physician felt meaningless. I was a senior graduating from college, but I no longer had a life plan.

    After a challenging year, I finally let go—and then I got into medical school. (more…)

  • 20 Things to Do When You’re Feeling Angry with Someone

    20 Things to Do When You’re Feeling Angry with Someone

    “If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” ~Chinese proverb

    As Tiny Buddha grows larger, I find there are a lot more people emailing me with requests. The people-pleaser in me wants to say yes to everyone, but the reality is that there is only so much time in the day—and we all have a right to allocate our time as best supports our intentions, needs, and goals.

    Recently someone contacted me with a request that I was unable to honor. After I communicated that, he made a sweeping judgment about my intentions and character, ending his email with “Buddha would be appalled.”

    As ironic as this may sound given the context of this site, I felt angry.

    I felt angry because I have always struggled with saying no, and this was exactly the type of uncomfortable encounter I generally aim to avoid.

    I felt angry because I felt misunderstood and judged, and I wanted him to realize that he was wrong about me.

    I felt angry because I assumed he intended to be hurtful, and I didn’t feel like I deserved that.

    I ended up responding to his email fairly quickly with a little bit of defensiveness, albeit with restraint. After I pressed send, I felt a little angry with myself for letting this bother me. Then I realized that this was a wonderful exercise in learning to deal with anger.

    It’s inevitable that I’ll feel that way again—and many times, with people I know well and love. We all will. We’ll all have lots of misunderstandings and annoyances, and lots of opportunities to practice responding to anger calmly and productively.

    If we’re mindful, we can use these situations to better ourselves and our relationships. (more…)

  • 4 Ideas to Live Simply and Cheaply When Times Are Tough

    4 Ideas to Live Simply and Cheaply When Times Are Tough

    “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” ~Basho

    When I was a little girl growing up in the big woods of Maine, my mother used to say that gifts do not always come in the packages we expect. In many ways I’ve tried to live by her words, knowing that even during the rough times there are diamonds I can find if I look for them.

    Lately I’ve been thinking about the fact that, exactly three years ago, my husband Dan and I packed up our small car and journeyed west to Los Angeles with our dog, Hopper and cat, Ellison.

    It was the very beginning of the recession. I think I speak for many of us when I say that we had no idea how devastating this “downturn” would be. Dan’s job in Portland, Maine had been put to part time. So we decided to try our luck in the land of milk and honey.

    When we arrived in L.A., we had driven across the country from Maine—traversing mountains, deserts, and forests. And we were starting over.

    That week I became pregnant with our first child. After that, things got harder. I was sick in bed for much of my pregnancy with an unusual condition, and Dan was the only one who could work.

    But I made the best of it, because I remembered what my mom had told me. (more…)

  • How to Get Past a Setback Today to Create a Better Tomorrow

    How to Get Past a Setback Today to Create a Better Tomorrow

    “What does not kill me, makes me stronger” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

    If you knew me, you’d think that I float through life without a care, that nothing fazes me, and that I don’t get stressed.  For the most part this is true, but every now and then something happens that really gets to me.

    We have been trying to sell our house so that we can emigrate to Australia. The house has been on the market for about two years, and we’ve had three sales fall through already. So a few weeks ago, when we had agreed on a sale price with a buyer, I felt mixed emotions.

    I was excited and optimistic but I also felt stressed, hoping that this time the sale would go through but fearing that it wouldn’t.

    I tried not to build my hopes up, but I also spent the week looking on the internet for jobs in Australia and checking out house rentals.

    The buyers were so enthusiastic. They had worked out where their furniture would go and who would have which bedroom. The father had grown up in the village and wanted to move to be close to his mother. It was all looking good.

    A week or so later, my wife texted me letting me know we received “bad news about the house.” Another sale had fallen through.

    I felt low and fed up. I had absolutely no motivation. But after a few days, I decided to pull myself together and get over it.

    Lately I’ve been learning to become aware of my emotions and how they can affect my actions.  Knowing how I am feeling helps me to be measured in my decision making.  I’ve been developing this self-awareness by reflecting on past experiences and examining my emotions and choices.

    As I sit here now, looking at the “For sale” sign outside my house, I can honestly say that I am glad that another sale fell through.

    It was unpleasant and it inspired all kinds of negative emotions. But it also enabled me to examine my own behavior, to become more aware of how I act when I’m stressed or feeling low, to practice being strong in tough situations, and to grow as a person. (more…)

  • How to Grow from Mistakes and Stop Beating Yourself Up

    How to Grow from Mistakes and Stop Beating Yourself Up

    “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” ~Unknown

    The spiral staircase has always intrigued the yogi-designer in me. The visual draw, similarity to DNA, and cosmic patterns, as well as its mathematical genius, could be enough, but the structure can also mean more.

    Picture yourself tripping up in work, life, or love. You’ve made a mistake, said the wrong thing, or didn’t come through with your end of the bargain.

    You think, how did I let that happen? What a (fill in the blank) I am. I can’t believe I did that, again. If only I could rewind.

    These aren’t the greatest feelings, it’s true. However, we live our lives in irony. Though we dislike how we feel having just tripped up, we continue to beat ourselves up way after the fact.

    We cause our own suffering. Furthermore, we seem to forget that when we make mistakes, we grow. An atmosphere of growth is integral to happiness. So create happiness by seeing mistakes as true growth opportunities.

    Although yoga, psychology, and conventional wisdom scream at us to live in the moment, I say we are not just the present moment.

    We are very much our past in the most rich and helpful way. We can use past mistakes to yield a shiny new perspective and, in turn, create a new outcome.

    If we allow them, our mistakes can fuel our awareness. In helping us decide how to act and react in a fresh and fruitful way, they can bring us closer to happiness and further away from causing our own suffering. (more…)

  • How the Word No Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

    How the Word No Can Help You Achieve Your Goals

    “If you lose today, win tomorrow.” ~Daisaku Ikeda

    From the moment we learn to walk and touch things, we hear the word no far more than we will ever hear the word yes.

    “No, don’t touch that.” “No, that’s not for you.” “No, you shouldn’t eat paint chips.” OK, maybe that last one was just me, but you get the picture.

    We are told no so much more than we are ever told yes during the course of growing up, so why is it as adults that hearing the word no can be so devastating? Shouldn’t we be used to it by now?

    As a rookie salesmen every time I heard the word no I got discouraged and thought I must be doing something wrong. I would constantly beat myself up.

    “What am I doing wrong?” “What can I do different?”

    These were great questions to ask myself; however, it’s the answers I supplied myself that turned out to be misleading.

    I figured that if people were saying no, it was because the process was failing me. How wrong I was.

    With sales, as in many aspects of life, there is a process—a start and a finish. Whether it’s setting and achieving goals, getting dressed, or cooking dinner, everything has a process, whether we consciously think about it or not.

    Like a naïve cocky rookie, I decided to abandon the process and started to do things my own way. Much to my surprise, I now heard no twice as many times.

    I just could not understand what was going on, so I got even harder on myself. (more…)

  • 3 Steps to Make a Bad Day Good

    3 Steps to Make a Bad Day Good

    “To a mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.” ~Chuang-Tzu

    The beauty of life is that we constantly have the opportunity to change it.

    We always have the power to recreate it. We can change our thoughts, remember how to live instead of planning each moment, forgive the past, be present for the now, slow down the speed, and push the reset button on a day that has escaped us.

    I recently had one of those days.

    This past Saturday was wonderful, or so I thought it would be when I woke up.

    I’d been invited to a traditional Cambodian, Vietnamese Wedding, and was excited to attend. Although I didn’t know the bride or the groom, I would be the guest of a good friend.

    I had a couple of mishaps that morning that caused me to be late. First, I spent thirty minutes with my younger sister, peeling a wad of gum off the heels she’d borrowed from me the night before—the ones I planned to wear to the wedding in the next hour.

    I half-sprinted without make-up to my car, holding a coffee that later spilled all over the front seat.

    I arrived to the ceremony fifteen minutes late. I quickly made my way toward the front door of the home. A room full of women in vibrant, traditional Asian clothing greeted me inside.

    I introduced myself to a couple as a guest of Sophya, a good friend of mine. They just looked at me blankly, perhaps unsure who she was, and didn’t really respond.

    I made my way to the nearby couch where a small group of kids were playing to wait for Sophya there. After getting lost in Legos for twenty minutes, I heard Sophya calling me from another room. (more…)

  • 5 Ways for Parents to Manage Anxiety

    5 Ways for Parents to Manage Anxiety

    “I vow to let go of all worries and anxiety in order to be light and free.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    I thought I had relinquished anxiety after a few years of mindfulness and meditation. Then I had a baby. It is incredibly easy for us mothers to slide into permanent guilt and anxiety.

    After a few minutes of watching my thoughts, I noticed they ran something like this:

    “My baby is sleeping too much. Should I wake her? Oh no, she hasn’t slept enough and I woke her. I shouldn’t have woken her, I’ve ruined the day. How am I going to fix this? I can’t fix it. I have no idea. I’m a bad mother. She has no routine. I need to put her into a routine. But it’s too late! How will I do this? I should have done it earlier!”

    And so on. Endlessly. Hourly. Daily. It got to the point where I didn’t feel like a caring mother unless I was worrying about something. Then I realized that my anxiety was the only thing that would damage my daughter.

    Babies pick up on all of our emotions. That’s why having a child is a great opportunity to grow as a person. We care so much about our children that we don’t want to lumber them with our old habits and negative emotions. We must move past our pointless worries, but how?

    I have been trying out a few mindfulness techniques and found them to be extremely helpful.

    Prior to this, I was compulsively flicking through endless books by “experts” on sleep, routines, feeding, and general parenting.

    None seemed to be right for the individual needs of my child, so I figured it was time to go within and discover the answers for myself. (more…)

  • The Gift of Anxiety: 7 Ways to Get the Message and Find Peace

    The Gift of Anxiety: 7 Ways to Get the Message and Find Peace

    “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” ~Pema Chodron

    If there’s one thing that has led me the greatest amount of re-invention, it’s anxiety. By anxiety I don’t mean worry or concern. Anxiety is a different animal that grabs a hold of you and halts you in your tracks.

    We tend to reject its milder forms and are really terrified by its intense moments, like with panic attacks. It’s difficult to see when we’re fighting with anxiety that it can have any benefit, but it does.

    Anxiety comes with some great treasures hidden inside, and they can be yours if you know how to get to them. First, you have to stop fighting and listen to the anxiety for clues.

    Getting the Message

    The greatest truth about anxiety is that it is a message. Anxiety is not the real issue. It’s the voice of something else lying beneath that’s calling out to you.

    Most people who experience anxiety try to go after the symptoms more than its cause and try to fight it off as if it were the only thing to deal with.

    That’s not how to go about it if you ever want to know how it happened, why it’s there, and how you can gain long-term freedom from it. (more…)

  • 20 Ways to Overcome Doubts

    20 Ways to Overcome Doubts

    “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chodron

    Nine out of ten times when I feel paralyzed, it’s because I doubt myself.

    Sometimes I doubt my knowledge—whether I truly know enough to move forward. Sometimes I doubt the choices I’ve already made, as if I can somehow find a sense of control in rehashing what I’ve done and deciding how to do it better in the future.

    Other times I doubt my instincts. I think I know what’s right for me, but my mind decides to split and take sides, creating a nagging sense of internal conflict over what I actually want to do.

    I’ve mostly dealt with this as it pertains to my dreams, and it’s partially because I’m terrified of doing the wrong thing and somehow ruining everything I’ve been working toward. I don’t want to say the wrong thing, or make the wrong decision and then have to take responsibility for the outcome of my choice.

    It feels easier not to choose at all.

    But what I’m learning is that there is no such thing as “wrong.” The only wrong choice is not making one. That’s not to say we’ll always create the outcomes we visualize. But maybe that isn’t the point.

    Maybe the point is to learn to be less afraid of leaping, knowing that the net may not always appear, but the fall will never be far enough to do any lasting damage.

    This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as I stretch outside my comfort zone with public speaking. As a former loner, I don’t deal well with crowds in general, let alone crowds staring at me while I talk vulnerably and passionately about something I love.

    The space between the stage and the ground always feels like a massive distance, both in the ascent and the decline. I can’t say for certain I will ever feel fully confident in the spotlight. I may always feel at least some self-doubt, but I can choose not to doubt the choice to stretch and grow.

    Doubts are just an inevitable part of life. The important thing is that we act in spite of them. (more…)

  • 4 Steps to Deal with Disappointment

    4 Steps to Deal with Disappointment

    “Don’t let today’s disappointments cast a shadow on tomorrow’s dreams.” ~Unknown

    For me, disappointment is one of life’s most uncomfortable feelings. It’s complex, containing a subset of other emotions like anger, hurt, sadness, and probably many others too subtle to identify.

    Sometimes, those emotions by themselves are easier to deal with, but disappointment can leave me at a loose end.

    I might not be sure whether I should feel angry, or just impatiently wish that I would hurry up and get over it. Disappointment can hover at the front of your mind and niggle at the back, bringing you a grey perspective on life, even if you’re trying to forget about it. (more…)

  • How to Stop Gossiping and Creating Drama

    How to Stop Gossiping and Creating Drama

    “If you propose to speak, always ask yourself, is it true, is it necessary, is it kind” –Buddha

    Last week my twenty-year-old friend, Dustin, called me out when I was talking negatively about someone to a group of people.

    We were sitting around a dinner table at what should have been a really good planning meeting for an upcoming yoga workshop our group was holding.

    While we were excited about the out-of-town teachers who were coming to share their incredible knowledge with us for a week, we were stuck on a topic that was both irrelevant and unproductive. That topic even had a name.

    For the purpose of this piece I will call her “Jessica.” She practiced with us from time to time, and in spite of the fact that she wasn’t a regular, when she did come her practice brought drama and disruption to the harmony we were trying to create.

    When she didn’t show up for a class, no one seemed to mind all that much or try to get her back in the fold.

    Yet somehow on this night when we had so much coming up in less than two weeks, there was Jessica, invading our conversation. I can’t remember who first brought her up, but I have to admit, I think I was the one belly-aching the most about her and what she may or may not have done.

    Finally Dustin quietly piped up. “Can I say something?” he asked the group.

    All eyes turned to Dustin with shock because he so rarely spoke and was never, ever, ever confrontational. (more…)

  • We Are All Imperfect: How to Own it & Keep Growing

    We Are All Imperfect: How to Own it & Keep Growing

    Imperfection

    “Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.” ~Julius Charles Hare

    A few weeks ago, I made a mistake.

    I wrote a newsletter about my relationship with money, explaining that I used to get worried about money, but I feel differently now. I wrote that I’d realized that doing what I love is the most important thing.

    As long as I am doing what I loved, I don’t have to feel anxious. I trust that the money will appear, without me having to chase it.

    After I sent the newsletter out to the 500 people on my subscription list, I had a funny feeling in my stomach.

    The next day, I asked a friend what she’d thought about what I’d written.

    She said, “It sounds like you’re still worried about money.”

    She was right. That explained the funny feeling in my stomach.

    The things I said weren’t quite true. I wanted them to be true because I wanted to be the kind of person who doesn’t worry about material things.

    It was true that I’ve made some progress in my relationship with money. But I’m certainly not as serene and trusting as I portrayed myself in my newsletter. I still have mornings when I feel panicky about finances. (more…)