Tiny Buddha

Category: Blog

  • When People Want to Help but Just Make Things Worse

    When People Want to Help but Just Make Things Worse

    When I was fourteen years old, my family spent a week of vacation in the northwoods of Minnesota. We rode horses, sailed on the lake, sang songs around a campfire, and all the other things most teenagers tell their parents is lame. Even if they are having fun.

    After this week of boring, according to me, my family loaded up into our van and began what should have been a five-hour drive home.

    Except it wasn’t five hours.

    Thirty minutes into the drive we were in a head-on car collision. Triaged and transported to different hospitals around the area, it wasn’t until a few hours later—when my question, “What happened to my dad?” was met with silence from nurses, physicians, and my extended family who found me in the ER—that I knew he didn’t make it out. Not alive, at least.

    Two weeks later, I started high school.

    While I would have liked everything that had suddenly made my life “not normal” to fly under the radar, that was easier said than done. I was walking with crutches. I had crunching, paper bandages around my neck from the seat belt, and the whole story had been on the front page of the newspaper.

    What I was going through was my business, and yet I became surrounded by people offering this and bringing me that and giving me hugs when I just wanted to get back to normal.

    A few weeks later, my uncle showed up at our house and wanted to take us apple picking, something my dad had taken us to do at the local orchard every year.

    This time, when my uncle said apple orchard, he meant the Mecca of all apple orchards near Pepin, Wisconsin.

    As instructed by my mom, I pulled open the door to the garage and loaded into the car, suddenly finding myself sitting behind the driver’s seat. The exact same spot I was sitting during our crash. And not only was I sitting in the driver’s seat for the first time since the crash, I was sitting behind someone who, from behind, looked just like my dad, and who was trying to help by taking me to the apple orchard just like my dad.

    My heart was pounding. I focused on the seat back pocket in front of me, tried my best to breathe and sit facing forward while not looking any longer at the driver and his seat in front of me.

    The longer we drove, the angrier I became.

    My uncle was trying to help, but this, this was not helpful.

    I was tense the entire ride, wrought with worry the car might explode in front of me again, and when we returned home a few hours later, I shot out of the car, slammed the door behind me, muttered, “Thank you,” ran to my room, closed the door, and burst into tears.

    Going to the apple orchard with Dad was our business. Not my uncle’s. Driving that car was Dad’s job, not his.

    While he thought he was doing something so helpful to keep my dad’s memory alive, his one time trip to the Mecca of apple orchards, for me, was the opposite of helpful.

    That’s the thing about any business that’s important to you.

    Whether it’s someone you’ve lost or something you’ve loved and now lost, when things are special to you and other people see those things causing you hardship, they want to help.

    It’s a natural human reaction to want to help. But when you’re the one who’s receiving the help, there are so many times when something that was meant to be helpful turns out the be… the opposite of helpful.

    The truth is just because someone meant well with their actions that does not mean you have to feel good about their actions.

    In fact, most of the time, if someone does something that does make you feel good, it’s because they’ve taken the time to know you really, really well (like asking you if you prefer a compliment during a team meeting or a thank you card in your mailbox), or it’s just luck.

    And all the times when someone means well but it doesn’t feel well are so very normal.

    That’s okay.

    Instead of feeling bitter and angry about what someone did, whatever their intentions, and instead of becoming disillusioned about whether you can do anything to help someone else, it’s important to know the one thing you can know for certain in any interaction: you. Your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and expectations.

    So the next time someone is trying to help with something that is your business. Try this:

    1. Take a time out.

    We tend to use this as a tool for disciplining kids, but honestly, it works just as well, if not better, on ourselves as adults. And it’s not about giving yourself a time out from something you want to be part of. What you do is notice when you are feeling a growing sense of anger, frustration, overwhelm, and use your words to say something like, “I’m going to need some time to think this through. Let’s pick up this conversation at another time.”

    And then take the time away from the situation.

    2. Remind yourself of the intentions in the room.

    Why are you doing what you are doing?

    Why do you think they are doing what they are doing?

    Most of the time, people are doing something because they think it is a good thing or a helpful thing or something that will make the situation better. So, know that the people who are wanting to help are doing so because they care. There is something in it for them to help you and they want to help you.

    Even if the way they are helping now is the opposite of helpful, you can use this reminder about their intention as a key to making the situation helpful for you again.

    3. Speak out. Ask. Use your words.

    You have a person that wants to help you. So use your words. Tell them what would be helpful (or if you don’t know, tell them what is not helpful, and why).

    Say something like, “When you came to take me to the apple orchard, I felt like you were replacing my dad. I already feel worried that I am going to forget him, and I felt even more scared when we did something that made it feel like we were trying to replace him.”

    Notice the “When _______ happened, I felt ________.”

    This is intentional language.

    When you speak this way, you keep the focus on the goal: helping you to feel better, because you have identified a specific situation when that did not happen.

    Then say, “To make this feel better to me, I would need ________.” And say what you would need.

    Is it any apology? Is it that you want them to talk about things more? Do you not want to talk about it more? Do you want to do something you’ve never done before instead?

    It’s your business. So make it your call. And help them help you by showing why unhelpful things are unhelpful and suggesting what would have made the unhelpful things… well, helpful. Because at the root of every relationship is love.

    So, even during times when things aren’t as good, it’s important to separate the actions other people do to help with the intention that’s behind it all: love for you.

  • Meaningful Connection: The Gift And Challenge Of Being An HSP In Love

    Meaningful Connection: The Gift And Challenge Of Being An HSP In Love

    “You don’t need strength to let go of something. What you really need is understanding.” ~Guy Finley

    I used to be married to a very kind man with similar values and goals in life. So why did we end up divorced?

    In one word? Communication.

    Like so many other highly sensitive people (HSPs) I thrived on meaningful, deep communication. I lived for it. I sought it out. And, when at ease, I was good at it.

    Unless he wasn’t. Which was often. When he was shut down, couldn’t articulate what was going on for him, or had nothing to say in response to my openhearted sharing, then I’d get weird in my communications.

    Unfortunately, as time went on in our marriage—and we invited more and more stress into our lives with kids and the building of a house—he became even more shut down emotionally and verbally.

    And when he did, I’d start complaining. Giving him the cold shoulder. Criticizing. I remember sitting on the couch with him after the kids were asleep trying to connect with him. He’d be so quiet, offering no satisfying answers to my questions about how he was feeling or what was going on for him. So I’d start saying things like, “Talking to you is like talking to a stone wall!”

    I know now this was all an unconscious attempt to get him to open up and be more of the champion connector and conversationalist I wanted him to be.

    But of course it always backfired, pushing us further apart. He’d get defensive or silent. So I’d try harder to get through to him with my tactics.

    Sometimes during such conversations, his eyes would begin to droop shut, as they do when he was starting to fall asleep. Then I’d say something like, “You can’t even stay awake to talk to me! You don’t even care about me or our relationship!!” Or, I’d huff and say, “Fine. Let’s just live here like roommates then!” and walk away.

    I felt chronically unfulfilled. He felt chronically unappreciated and rejected. Over time we just felt worn down, with no clear path back to feeling close again.

    If any of this sounds familiar, it may have something to do with the paradoxical nature of the trait of sensitivity.

    We sensitives deeply value connection and meaningful conversation. This is beautiful thing, and because of it we have the potential to gift the people we love—and ourselves—with a depth of love they’ve never before experienced! We are truly built for having deeply connected relationships. Please really hear that.

    Yet our trait can also sometimes contribute to trouble communicating and connecting with those we love. Once we recognize and understand the challenges we face, we can then go on to work on them so that we can create the connection we love.

    Here are six ways HSPs may have difficulty creating closeness and understanding in our relationships:

    1. When we HSPs are overwhelmed by strong emotions—which can be a common occurrence—we may have trouble expressing ourselves effectively, or listening well.

    Instead, we may freeze up and close down, which leads to keeping our feelings bottled up, and missing out on important or even good things being communicated by our partner. Or, we’ll let it all out in a verbal storm that stings our partner. Both eat away at the trust and understanding needed for love to thrive.

    2. When our communications go poorly or turn unpleasant, we feel it for hours.

    We may analyze and brood over what was said, or what wasn’t said, for days in our heads, even imagining problems that aren’t there for the other person. And then, we can’t help but interact and communicate from that hurt, resentment, frustration, or worry. This feeds more tension, distance, and ineffective, painful interactions. This cycle can go on and on, causing suffering for both partners.

    3. We pick up on subtle cues, tones, and body language from our partner—we read him or her—and often weave a whole story about what’s going on for them and what it means.

    We then may take it personally, and react strongly to it—before our partner even knows they’re feeling anything themselves! They can be totally mystified by why we are even upset, which triggers us even more.

    Adding to the complexity of this, what we perceive is going on for them may be true, or may not be.

    This can be a tricky thing about being an empathic creature. Sometimes we jump to conclusions, since we’re used to sensing what’s going on inside others. But most of us aren’t truly psychic, and believing we know more about someone else than they do may cause misunderstanding and hurt.

    4. We unconsciously may believe our partner should have the same level of empathy and ability to understand and care for others as we naturally do.

    This leads to feeling disappointed in our partner, and resentful of them not providing what we expect and want. Once again, we carry that into our interactions by either clamming up and withdrawing, complaining, and criticizing, or by being sarcastic.

    No partner enjoys this, so they’ll tend to react in ways that lead us to believe further that they should be more empathetic, more caring, and more understanding. Which only reinforces our disappointment!

    5. Since we are so sensitive and attuned to our environment, we may notice many subtle “wrong” things our partner does or says.

    Then we feel bothered, frustrated, and exasperated. And of course, this comes out in one shape or form. Even if we say nothing, it affects our partner, as communication is made up of not just our words, but also our tone of voice and body language. They may feel quite unappreciated, like my husband did.

    6. Since all too often in our lives it may have been brought to our attention that we are “different” from the “norm,” we may have underlying low self-worth.

    We may feel less than others and bad about ourselves. This leads to communication challenges across the board:

    • Reactivity and touchiness when our partner does anything that “proves” to us we aren’t lovable
    • Not asking for what we want because of fear of rejection, then resenting our partner for not providing what we want
    • Caring for others at the expense of ourselves because they are more “important” than us, or because we think we need their approval to feel better about ourselves

    Now, it’s in large part due to our strong love of genuine meaningful connection that we HSPs even have these struggles. For us, when something matters so much, it can take on a seriousness that creates so much pressure it actually makes that connection more elusive.

    Because when we feel it isn’t going well or meeting our standards, we may focus on how wrong it is. Which never makes things better in a love relationship. Take it from me. I had to learn this in the hardest of ways.

    But learn I did, and now I love helping others avoid making the same mistakes I did.

    So, if you see yourself in any of the above, please know you’re not stuck with these challenges. We sensitives are actually gifted with the ability to have the most connected, meaningful relationships possible, once we develop the skills to communicate powerfully. 

    Part of what got me there was really reflecting on what went wrong in my marriage the first time around. I got really honest with myself and investigated deeply.

    Then I owned up to my role in my pain and suffering in our marriage.

    I saw I had blamed my unhappiness on him. On his lack of ability to “connect” the way I liked. Since I thought my happiness depended on him doing what I wanted, I was helpless to be happy unless he did it. I essentially gave him all the power over my feelings and behavior. I gave up my own ability to create the loving interactions I deeply desired.

    I saw that I was only good at communication and connection when I felt comfortable and valuable. And relying on him to give me that sense of comfort and worth all the time didn’t work, since he didn’t have it in him every moment to give it.

    Once I saw that I decided to not allow anyone but myself to have that kind of power in my life. I committed to learning how to feel more valuable and at ease in my skin. I committed to learning everything I needed to in order to have the experiences I wanted and valued.

    Now, in my second marriage, I get it. If I want meaningful connection, I don’t need to badger my husband for it, or leave him. Instead, I get curious about how I can create more of what I want. I find ways to communicate and connect that actually work with my man.

    I ask him thought-provoking questions, find activities we can do, and explore new interests together (men tend to bond through activity, and I like to take advantage of this!). I treat him how I’d love to be treated, with consideration of his differences, appreciation for who he is, and openness about my desires (and also some caring restraint, so I’m not sharing every critical thought I have with him).

    Although it’s not my job to make him feel a certain way—and I don’t shy away from speaking an uncomfortable truth so he can understand what I’m going through—I know my actions do affect him. So I aim to communicate in ways that help him feel safe enough, valued enough, and loved enough to be more fully open, more fully himself.

    When I work to understand where’s he’s coming from, who he is, and how he interprets my tone of voice, the words I speak, and the actions I take, that’s leading by example. By doing so, I help create an environment of generosity and understanding, and a sense of being supportive allies in life together. Which is all I really want, anyway.

    Not only does this kind of self-awareness, self-ownership, and commitment to growth allow for the most loving, honest, and sweet connection with my man, it’s also proven to inspire him to grow, too. To become more self-aware, to take ownership of his less-than-ideal contributions to our relationship, and to work to be the best partner he can. Needless to say, we have a deeply loving marriage.

    And you can, too. By being brave enough to look compassionately at where you are contributing to disconnection in your relationship. By being willing to own up to your own shortcomings, and the places you need to grow. And by committing to doing what it takes to grow into the person your sensitive heart knows you can be, with a bit of learning and a sprinkle of effort.

    That’s one of the most empowering and rewarding things you can do for yourself. And for your loved ones, too.

  • How to Move Forward When You’re Out of Work and Feeling Lost

    How to Move Forward When You’re Out of Work and Feeling Lost

    “My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.” ~Richard Branson

    Let’s face it, losing a job sucks! Over the last couple of months, I have been chatting with friends who have recently been affected by organizational changes resulting in being out of work involuntarily. This is a situation all too familiar to millions of people, frequently through no fault of their own. Often it’s a result of an economic downturn, restructuring, acquisitions, and cost savings.

    A couple of years ago, while I was on a business trip, I found out my role would be coming to an end. It wasn’t completely unexpected, and I was actually relieved. However, as an expat it was overwhelming.

    Would I have to move back to my home country? Would I have to leave the place where I’d started to build a life? What about my volunteer commitments? This and so much more spun around my head.

    Thank goodness for re-runs of How I Met Your Mother. Upon finding out the news, I spent hours obsessed with the saga of Ted and Robin while indulging in cookies and ice cream. After a few days, (and before my jeans got too tight), I picked myself up and started moving forward. I was reminded of some valuable lessons along the way.

    Feel the feels.

    Likely you will experience a range of feelings. Allow yourself to sit in it. You may find yourself grieving. This is natural; after all, something that was a significant part of your life has come to an end.

    Elisabeth Kubler-Ross made famous the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Recognizing these stages can help with the coping process.

    Breathe. Do yoga. Meditate. Write in a journal. Create a vision board. This will help ground and center you and soon enough, you will start having clarity about how to move forward.

    Your tribe will always be your tribe.

    Connect with friends and family. Let people know what’s going on. Your tribe will rally and embrace you no matter where in the world they are—or you are. They will love you, encourage you, help you, and still think you’re great, even when you don’t. They will drag you out of the house, drink a cup of tea with you over a video call, and make sure you get to that yoga class. As tough as it is, talking about it helps.

    Ask for help.

    As a fairly independent person, I find asking for help uncomfortable. In the spirit of “be comfortable with being uncomfortable,” I reached out to my network and asked for help.

    One particular situation will always stick with me: I called someone I’d met at an event and told him the news. He asked me to call him back the following week so he could think about suitable connections. Sure enough, the next week, he was ready with a list of ten people that would be valuable to connect with. This blew my mind. He spent time in the following weeks crafting up personalized emails and making introductions. This was a reminder of the human spirit. People want to help—ask!

    Create a routine.

     Not having to wake up and be somewhere messed with my routine. Having a routine can help anchor us, while providing structure, building good habits, and creating efficiency.

    I found it helpful to design a new routine.

    I woke up at the same time every morning, did an hour of physical activity, meditated, and created a to-do list for the day.

    I found a neighborhood coffee shop that became my “office.” When I was not out meeting someone, I would go to the coffee shop and work on applications, networking requests, learning modules, goals, and volunteer projects.

    I ended my “work day” around the same time daily and would have an evening activity lined up. This helped me have structure, kept my mind engaged, and ensured I was making connections.

    Set goals.

    When a job loss hits, it is easy to feel as though your purpose has been lost too. A way to counter this is to set goals and reflect.

    Setting goals helps provide clarity and gives focus, motivation, and accountabilities. Examples of goals could be setting up a meeting or two per week, fixing up your CV, applying to two jobs weekly, or getting involved in volunteer work.

    Goals give you something to work toward, and at the end of the week you can take stock of what you’ve completed and feel a sense of accomplishment. Taking the time to reflect allows you to see your progress and be grateful for the support you have received, and it also gives you something to build on.

    Create a personal board of directors (PBOD). 

    This was a concept introduced to me a few years ago by one of the members of my own PBOD. They’re a trusted group of people who you can turn to for advice, who will share helpful resources and offer different viewpoints.

    As Lisa Barrington explains in her article, Everyone Needs A Personal Board Of Directors, “Your PBOD exists to act as a sounding board, to advise you and to provide you with feedback on your life decisions, opportunities, and challenges. They provide you with unfiltered feedback that you can’t necessarily get from colleagues or friends.”

    Companies are careful to select their board of directors, and you should be too. Some roles you may want to consider are: an accountability partner, someone who will ask the tough questions, one of your biggest fans, a connector, and a mentor.

    Your PBOD does not have to meet all together. You just have to stay connected to all of them regularly. I speak with at least one member of my PBOD weekly. It helps keep me on track and provides pushes me to think differently.

    Play.

    This can be a time filled with high highs and low lows. Take time to play. Laughter and play release endorphins in the brain. As stated on NPR’s podcast All Things Considered, adults play for many important reasons: building community, keeping the mind sharp, and keeping close the ones you love.

    Explore the city you’re in—check out all of the free things you can do. Spend time outside. Go on a vacation for a few days. It can help you gain perspective and reconnect you to what’s important.

    According to Dr. Stuart Brown, Founder of National Institute for Play, “What you begin to see when there’s major play deprivation in an otherwise competent adult is that they’re not much fun to be around.” Put yourself out there. Talk to strangers. Say yes. Have adventures.

    Celebrate.

    Yes, this sounds counterintuitive. You’re walking into the unknown, what’s there to celebrate?

    It’s not every day you get to put life on pause and recalibrate. Be grateful for the downtime. Think of this time as a gift. Be thankful for the experiences the job gave you. Celebrate the success and the struggles. Embrace the lessons—you will take these with you as you move forward. Be thankful for the relationships you formed and the people who helped you and will help you.

    While this period in life may sting, remember, it’s temporary.

    Take this opportunity to hit the pause button, reflect on what’s important, renew and build your network, and set new goals.

    Trust the process—this journey will add a richness to your life, give you empathy, and will build your resilience. The turbulence might shake you, but space is being created for new opportunities, and chances are it will work out better than you thought. Keep moving forward and enjoy all that this time will bring.

  • How I Found Hope and Inspiration After Years of Quiet Desperation

    How I Found Hope and Inspiration After Years of Quiet Desperation

    “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ~Henry David Thoreau

    How many years do we live with a sense of quiet desperation, faking the connection we have with ourselves? Why do we deny ourselves authentic living and exchange our time for mindless living?

    Over the years, life silently and slowly eroded my identity away. By the time my son was twelve years old, I’d completely lost touch with reality. I was always busy trying to be everyone’s hero and creating this perfect little world around me. While juggling the responsibilities of being a wife and mother, I’d lost my individuality.

    Life had brought me to unchartered territory, a place I had never been before. I could no longer silence the cries of my quiet desperation, the yearning to break free from what everyone wanted me to be.

    The weight of being a perfect mother—having laundry done and feeding my family home cooked meals daily—seemed more than impossible. The goal of being an amazing wife was like climbing Mount Everest; I had no energy left when it came to my husband. Because I’d excelled in my career, they thought I could handle more, so they’d doubled my workload.

    I was suffering. The despair was a disease I learned to live with every day, but this day was different. The pain of my confusion and mental starvation was agonizing.

    I found myself on my knees having a mental breakdown.

    I can still feel the tenderness of my hands after I spent almost two hours pounding my kitchen floor, screaming at the top of my lungs, “I can’t do this anymore!” I was shaking uncontrollably from the anger I could no longer suppress. It was a long and painful journey down to the bottom of my soul.

    My tears seemed never-ending. I could barely breathe as my emotions began smothering the little air I could take in. I felt like I was drowning, being suffocated at my own will..

    My mind wandered to thoughts of suicide. My brain fantasized about not having to make decisions, meet deadlines, or deal with the uncertainty of life. I pondered if I could really take my life as an answer to my silent depression.

    I could not calm myself down. I could barely even open my eyes enough to see my hands beginning to swell from the pain of hitting the floor. I felt my husband physically lift my body off the floor, but my soul remained lying there.

    The decades of living in quiet desperation had surfaced.

    I was a shell of a woman whose soul had left her years ago. I had abandoned all my internal needs—time alone, boundaries at work, and space to reconnect with my writing.

    My exhaustion had left me paralyzed. My eyes were dark and my heart was empty of any spirit or ambition. The beautiful glow I once possessed seemed non-existent. The only things visible were fatigue and hopelessness.

    My husband cradled me in his arms, gently stroking my hair while telling me, “It’s going to be okay.” I didn’t believe him. Instead, I worried about the time I was wasting crying when I could have been checking things off my to-do list.

    In that moment, as I wept like a child in my husband’s arms, I realized the root of my suffering.

    There was no major catastrophe in our home or tragic event. I was simply tired of holding it all together and figuring it all out, every day. I was living life in constant “ready” mode, like a soldier in war.

    I had to be ready for tomorrow, prepare for next week, and be on guard for next month. As a responsible mother and wife, I was always trying to get ahead of the schedule by meal prepping, doing laundry for the following week, paying bills early, and preparing for any hiccup that might come up.

    I was serious all the time. I remember my boss describing me as intense, which bothered me at the time, but now I understand. I saw every action as proof of my success or failure; each gauged whether I was excelling or being lazy.

    I never took the time to feel the present moment because I was so worried about the next one. I never truly connected to what was going on within me because the future always mattered more than the present.

    I spent decades “preparing.” To-do-lists, goals, and deadlines spun a web around me until I was fully cocooned, unable to breathe.

    On this particular day, the air had run out and I was gasping for a few more breaths. I had two choices: ask for help or die trying. Either way, something had to give.

    I could no longer live this way, in a hamster wheel of predictability and repetition. I was a robot on autopilot doing the mundane tasks that filled up time slots on a weekly planner. There was no connection within me, just a hodgepodge of work, errands, a few holidays, and parenting.

    After this breakdown, I spent life in a fog, unable to answer my own questions. I was sick inside and had been silently bleeding for years. I needed to heal. I made the decision to take the time I needed for my own recovery. The first step in returning to my soul was to put myself first.

    As I plunged into the depth of my inner self, many things became clear. The carefully spun web of my former life began to shed, and I began exploring new ways of living.

    These five things saved me, healed me, and put me back on a path to authentic and balanced living.

    Just stop.

    Stop everything. The running, rushing, hustling, and moving. Just stop it all. Time will not stand still until you make a choice to break the routine.

    I never took the time to be in the moment because I was always rushing to the next destination and looking to check off the next box on my to-do list. I was running in an eternal mental marathon with no real winner. I was trading the beauty of life for mundane tasks without ever stopping to smell the roses.

    I had to stop the mindless living at all cost. This was the first step in reclaiming my power. It was the first call to action that I demanded of myself. If I did not practice controlling what I did with my time, I would never be able to rescue my soul.

    Cultivate passion.

    My soul constantly yearns to be in harmony with my mind and heart. These three facets of my identity are vital, crucial to my well-being. When they are uncoordinated, exhaustion easily seeps in along with negative thinking and fear. I become an easy target, not anchored or stable.

    My weapon against uncertainty is my passion for writing. When I don’t cultivate that which makes my soul sing, I die a little each day.

    We all have something we do that causes us to lose all sense of time. You cannot ignore this innate ability or talent. It’s simply part of you. Take the time to find it, reconnect with it, and cultivate a relationship with it. It’s your eternal escape. It’s your ace in your back pocket, the answer to most of your confusion. You will find many of your answers when you connect and unite your soul, mind, and heart together.

    Rest your soul.

    Let’s face it, there will be very demanding days where you are juggling many things. The flow of life can get complicated at times, but in order to regain your center, you must take time for your soul to rest and recharge, without any guilt. You wouldn’t run your car twenty-four hours a day thinking it can do more by staying powered on. Everything and everyone needs downtime.

    I used to wrestle with the idea of downtime and often confused it with laziness. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Resting is the most efficient way to keep your spirit aligned. Don’t try to be a hero and neglect your own needs as a human being. Oddly enough, the better care you take care of yourself, the better you are to others.

    Seek connection, not perfection.

    My need for perfection was insatiable. I used to label it as my Type A personality, my overachiever tendency, or the fact that I simply wanted the best of everything.

    This way of thinking often led me to isolation, anxiety, and a heighted sense of depression. However, in my vulnerable state of lying on my kitchen floor having a breakdown, I didn’t have the strength to hold the wall up anymore. The wall that separated me from having true friendships and connections had to come down. It just wasn’t worth the effort of trying to make everything look perfect when it really wasn’t.

    I didn’t need perfection to gain happiness; I needed the connection and the closeness that only real relationships bring. So I exchanged the pursuit of perfectness for the ability to be vulnerable with others. It was finally okay for me to say, “I am a hot mess, and I don’t have a clue how to put myself back together.”

    Allow inspiration to emerge.

    Denying the fact that I was living under a cloak of desperation led me to a higher realization about life. Sometimes in the lowest points of our lives, when all seems to be falling apart, life is actually falling into place.

    When the walls are caving in, the air is getting scarce, and you can feel the weight of suffocation, something happens. Your pain transforms, your agony evolves into something bigger, and you realize that a new you is about to emerge.

    My desperation was the pathway for me to rediscover my inspiration. The dark valley I found myself in led me to higher grounds. I don’t push away the struggles or hide from hard times. Instead, I remain patient, allowing the pain to bring forth a new chapter in my life. Sometimes you need to take a few steps back in order to take giant leaps forward.

    Today, I live from a connected heart space, one that is fully aware and conscious of the energy I hold within me.

    Today, I seek to stay centered. It is here I feel most alive and the happiest.

    Today, I can thank the years of desperation I lived, for I am now on the path to living the best version of myself.

  • How I Started Enjoying My Alone Time Instead of Feeling Lonely

    How I Started Enjoying My Alone Time Instead of Feeling Lonely

    “The only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.” ~Bessel A. van der Kolk

    Learning to be alone as an adult has been a struggle for me. It’s taken quite a while for me to adjust to spending periods of time by myself. It may sound strange to those who know me because I am most definitely an introvert and need my quiet time. However, my time alone was never quite as satisfying as I’d hoped it would be.

    Often my solitude dissolved into sadness, and I didn’t have a particular reason why. My alone time wasn’t productive, and it just made me feel out of sorts. It was frustrating because I knew I needed time to myself, but I couldn’t stand to be alone.

    Once I began to get curious about the sadness and apathy I’d feel when I was alone, things started to shift.

    One day, I noticed that a particular script would begin to play in my mind over and over again. No matter what time of day or the length of alone time, I could begin to hear it play. It said, “You are alone. You are always going to be alone. No one could truly love you. You are unworthy of love.” This tape has played for so long I am unsure if it will ever fully go away.

    In the past too much alone time would leave me depressed or even suicidal, and it’s no wonder why. Hearing such awful things on a loop for an extended period of time would wear on anyone.

    I spent long periods where I was afraid to spend time alone because I knew I’d end up in a rough spot. I did all I could to avoid it. I’d go to bed early, keep my schedule full, spend all my time with my roommate, and more.

    Spend enough time trying, and you’ll soon learn that avoiding solitude is very difficult as a single adult. I knew that, at some point, I had to stop avoiding and figure out what was going on.

    At first, all I did was notice these thoughts happening. I found that this script was common in my life. This same tape would play when I made silly mistakes at work or a friend didn’t get back to me right away. Maybe it wasn’t just about being alone after all. Maybe this was something deeper.

    So I stayed curious about this dialogue in my head. I kept thinking through it when I could. I talked to my therapist and my mentor about it too. Eventually I had a realization that this script and my time alone were a reflection of all the down time I had as a child.

    Growing up, I didn’t see my friends outside of school very often, and I didn’t spend a lot of time with my family. Instead, I spent a lot of time alone.

    When I first thought it through, I just figured I was a normal kid who got bored a lot. Thinking further, however, I realized those moments alone went well beyond typical boredom. What I wanted most during those times alone was attention and love. I wanted to feel valued and appreciated, but I didn’t.

    I didn’t have the connections with others that I truly wanted or needed at the time. I spent long periods of time being pretty sad and feeling deeply lonely. I felt unloved and unworthy of being loved. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s exactly how I feel when I am alone as an adult. It’s that damn script again telling me I’m alone in the world.

    This realization was huge for me because, though my life as an adult is drastically different than my life as a child, I recognize that I’m still healing from past trauma and neglect. Something in me still connected being alone with being lonely. My inner child was still suffering, and it made itself known through this terrible dialogue playing on loop.

    I am in a different place as an adult. I have made choices to surround myself with a community of loving people who support and care for me. I’m not actually alone anymore. Somehow making this connection felt empowering.

    That was then, I thought. This is now. I decided it was time to take my power back and resist the script. Next time I had the chance for some alone time, I was determined to move through it differently. I wanted to teach my inner child that not all solitude is lonely.

    So the time came again where I was alone and the familiar sadness began to well up, but I was prepared. I knew it was coming and I had a plan.

    I had calming music playing in the background and some of my favorite activities ready for me. My journal was out for writing, my canvas was out for painting, my machine was set up for sewing, and I had a book out too. And you know what? The tape in my head didn’t seem so loud. I could still hear it, but it didn’t paralyze me or send me to bed early. I enjoyed being alone.

    I share this all in hopes of encouraging anyone else who might struggle too. There were a few key things that helped me move through this experience.

    First, I stopped avoiding and fighting my feelings. Avoidance keeps us stuck in the same patterns. It’s important to get curious about our thought patterns and our feelings.

    Asking questions like, “I wonder what perpetuates that thought?” and “Does this emotion happen at certain times?” can help things begin to shift. If it may help, I encourage you to sit down with a mentor or a therapist and talk it out.

    Getting really honest about the answers to those questions requires that we sit with the discomfort for a bit and connect in to our inner selves. It’s uncomfortable, but so very worth it. Ultimately, this can help us nurture ourselves. Once we know what we need, we can begin to nourish the parts of ourselves that desperately need it.

  • It’s a Myth That We Can Just “Get Over” Pain and Loss

    It’s a Myth That We Can Just “Get Over” Pain and Loss

    “There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human—in not having to be just happy or just sad—in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.” ~C. JoyBell C.

    “I just feel like it’s never ending… like I should be more over it by now,” my friend says, her eyes looking down at her mug of tea. She lost a loved one three years ago in tragic circumstances.

    Her words make me sad, and there are layers to my sadness: I’m sad for her loss, her grief, for the difficulty she faces daily as she continues her life without this person. Also, I’m saddened by her belief about her suffering; that it’s somehow not okay or normal to still be so sad.

    This is not a woman in ruins. She has a good life. A job she loves, a beautiful home, and family. She’s a wonderful mother to her children. But she is deeply sad. She carries this sadness around with her everywhere she goes—on the train to work, on the sofa while she watches Netflix, out to dinner.

    Her sadness is heavy, yet she carries it with a grace that belies its weight. It’s not ruining her. Yet it’s there, like a psychological shadow, even in her happier moments.

    This conversation made me think more broadly about our societal beliefs about loss, our attitudes toward sadness, and the inherent problems these give birth to.

    My grandmother died over six years ago now. She died horribly and quickly from a brain tumor. From the time of her diagnosis to her death, there were only three weeks.

    Her death didn’t feel real for a long time, and initially I didn’t grieve as I expected I would.

    Months afterward, it started to sink in. As it did, the sadness came. It didn’t consume my every waking thought and feeling, but it was there beside me, wanting me to turn toward it. For a long time, I found this very hard to do.

    My cultural conditioning that sadness was ‘bad’ added a toxic layer on top of the raw experience of sadness and made me feel somehow ‘wrong’ each time I felt sad.

    A Kind of Healing-Perfectionism

    “Get over it.”

    These words suffuse the space around us, deeply ingrained in the cultural lexicon of healing. “I’m over it,” we say to ourselves. We assure others that they will do the same. Worst of all, we hold the belief that we should be over it by a certain time.

    We believe that this is the hallmark of a perfectly recovered loss/trauma/sadness—the gold standard of “I am perfectly okay now.”

    Is anyone ever perfectly okay? Is this really what we’re aiming for?

    Is there anyone who doesn’t walk around with the roots of sadness grounded in their being, even as their happiness exists above these depths? I don’t know of these people.

    What I do know is that the greatest lie we’ve been sold about success and happiness is that these things exist in our lack of sadness or pain.

    The notion of “getting over” a loss speaks more to an ideal than a reality. Like many ideals, it’s alluring, but the closer you move to it, the more you see the danger. It gets in the way of our understanding about loss and grief, and it congests the fullness of our hearts.

    It disconnects us from our emotional truth and gives credence to an expectation about the course of grief that we cannot live up to. When this happens, there is one predictable outcome: We add judgment to our suffering and turn a natural process into a pathological problem, something to be ‘fixed.’

    Certainly, when it comes to dealing with loss, there are times when a normal emotional response can turn into a condition in need of intervention—if our initial sadness fails to abate with the passage of time, and we continue to be obsessed with our grief and unable to function in our everyday lives.

    In such cases, therapy and possibly medication are required. Yet, within the boundaries of what can be considered a healthy reaction to loss, there is a great range.

    What does a normal, healthy response to loss look like? How should it feel? How long is it okay to still experience sadness? When should we get over it? Should we ever? Says who? Why? What does “getting over it” even mean?

    When we think about the need to get over a loss, what we’re referring to is arriving at a psychological destination of being untouchable, unshakable. Reaching a point where we are largely unaffected, even by the fondest memory, or the most difficult one, of that which we have lost.

    It’s a kind of healing-perfectionism that needs to be named for what it is. Such ideals around suffering cause further and unnecessary pain and obstruct the very heart of what it means to be human. When we use the language of “getting over” loss, we are reinforcing the belief that sadness is something that must be overcome.

    Co-existing with Our Sadness

    We are conditioned to move toward things that feel good and to retract from those that feel bad. Primally speaking, it’s about survival. Sadness is one such ‘bad’ feeling; we recoil from it. Yet this retraction isn’t so much based on the inherent quality of the emotion as much as our insidious belief that sadness is, per se, bad.

    Of course, sadness isn’t a pleasurable experience—psychologically speaking, it’s classed as a “negative” emotion. However, we are not simple beings, and the primal drives we have are not so simple either; as such, it is often necessary to go against our basic instincts—to move away from pleasure (as in the case of addiction) and to move toward pain (as in healing).

    In healing from loss, ignoring and resisting our sadness will only send it deeper into our psyche and our bodies. One thing we know for certain is that when we fail to acknowledge our feelings, they continue to affect us anyway—influencing our thoughts, our emotions, and our decision-making beneath the level of our conscious awareness.

    One of the biggest problems with the idea of getting over loss is the implication, and subsequent expectation, that there is a life span to our sadness. A progressively tapering timeline where, after a certain point, the volume of our grief has reached a finite baseline—zero.

    Depending on our unique losses and our personality, the acceptable lifespan might be one year, two years, three years, four. But at some point, as time marches on, we’ll turn to our sadness and ask it why it’s still sitting with us.

    We’ll start to tell ourselves that it’s “been too long.” Yet, try as we might, we cannot force or sadness to leave, so we’ll do the only thing we can: turn our minds away from the sadness that lingers on in our bodies. We’ll disconnect.

    We Can’t ‘Fix’ Our Sadness, and We Don’t Have To

    Whilst Elizabeth Kubler-Ross may have delineated the stages of dealing with death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), these were originally meant for those who were themselves dying, not for those who were dealing with the death or loss of another.

    An unfortunate consequence of applying the concept of linear stages of grief to our human experience of loss is, again, the expectation of a finite ending; we go through the stages and we reach The End.

    The less convenient truth is that grief is non-linear; there is no one pattern it’s obliged to follow.

    Yet this concept of a finite resolution speaks to our society in a broader sense. Humans are exceptionally good at finding solutions. If there’s a problem, we solve it. If something’s broken, we fix it.

    This way of thinking is part of what makes us great; without it, we wouldn’t have the technological advances we have. But the problem arises when we apply this mode of thinking to our human suffering.

    Our bodies can be fixed; we can give someone a leg when they’ve lost one, sew a deep cut, stop an infection with antibiotics. But what of our sadness in the face of loss? How are we to ‘fix’ that?

    When we’re sad, we are not broken. We are suffering, and this is different. Sadness is a normal response to the experience of loss. Yet in a culture obsessed with fixing what’s broken, the idea of “getting over it” starts to infiltrate the rawness of our experience and dilutes the edifying, tragic beauty of living with loss.

    Making Space for Our Sadness

    It also speaks to our discomfort with ambiguity and paradox, especially in the realm of our emotions. We cling to our separate boxes; we seek the clear delineation of “I’m over it” versus “I’m still suffering.” Such thresholds don’t exist in life, nor in love.

    But rather, two opposing, seemingly contradictory emotions coexist; I am both okay and I am suffering. We must give ourselves permission to be the complex and contradictory beings that we are if we want to be fully human.

    Healing is not a line, but a wave. It’s organic, meandering. It doesn’t always move in one direction with one energy. But the most important thing is that it moves—if we allow it to.

    When we have lost, we must learn to live side by side with our sadness. Attempting to shut it out will shut everything out. There is only one highway where emotions in the body make their way into the awareness of the mind; joy, sadness, frustration, peace—they all travel along this same road.

    There are no alternate routes. Which is why when we judge our sadness and push it away, we inevitably push away our joy also. Rather than wasting our energy on the hopeless eradication of sadness, we must make a home for it. A place where it is welcome to live.

    We, in the West, are not so hot at embodying the truth that our sadness has a right of its own; we can’t really control it, any more than we control our joy. Certainly, we can’t structure our life around it, but we can make a space in our life for it to coexist.

    Its resting place is in the same sweet spot as our deep joy and gratitude. Sometimes I say to myself, “My sadness is a person too.” This is how I think of it. And in this thought, a respect for it arises.

    Side by Side, Sadness and Love

    Our belief in the notion of getting over our sadness also robs us of one of the most beautiful opportunities of healing—experiencing love by the act of remembrance.

    The thing that keeps our sadness close is remembering the love we hold but cannot give to someone we’ve lost. Memories are how we relive a person. They’re a way that we honor the existence of another. They’re also how we re-live a part of ourselves and bring meaning to our life.

    In our remembrance, we suffer. We feel sadness. And there is such poignant beauty in this; it’s an edifying kind of pain because it’s born from the depths of our love. To never feel sad, then, would be a kind of forgetting.

    The last thing we want to do when we’ve lost someone we love is to forget them. And yet, when we buy into the belief that healing means a lack of sadness or pain, we avoid the memories of the people we’ve lost, and in our avoidance, we disconnect from our love. Because to feel this love is also to feel the pain of it.

    Where does the love we hold for someone who is no longer with us go? It lives in us. But to breathe life into it, we have to let it live in our hearts right next to the pain that love and remembrance bring.

    When we do this, we soften. There is a release. We expand. We connect, both to ourselves and also to others.

    Compassion can only exist between equals; when I know my suffering and let it speak to me, I can see and speak to yours.

    You don’t need to overcome your sadness. That is not the measure of your healing.

    The measure of healing lies in the relationship between you and your sadness. You don’t have to make friends with it, but you do have to learn how to allow it to live in you, to respect its right to be there even as you respect your wish that it wasn’t.

    This is no small feat. It is the most courageous and bold thing you will ever do, to live in that dichotomy. To inhabit that space.

    Let this be the measure of your healing.

  • Collective Trauma Online Summit—A Transformative Free Event

    Collective Trauma Online Summit—A Transformative Free Event

    Do you ever feel overwhelmed by everything that’s going on in the world and powerless to help? Even if you avoid the news—which to be honest, I generally do—you’ll still be bombarded with the latest conflicts and tragedies when you log on to social media. We may look to our smartphones for a little break from the chaos, but really, there’s no escape from it.

    It’s not that we don’t care—that’s not why we often try to zone out and tune it all out. It’s just all so heavy and scary and disheartening, not to mention never-ending. Still, we can’t just avoid reality, not if we want things to change. And we can’t simply disconnect from it. Whether we face it head on or not, it all takes a toll.

    We are all affected, in some way, by collective trauma.

    We all bear psychological scars from the many disasters and catastrophes we’ve faced as a society.

    We’re all carrying the weight of traumas passed down from generation to generation, possibly without conscious awareness.

    And many of us are working through our own personal traumas while contending with all the tragedies we see in the world around us.

    The good news is, we can heal our collective wounds, find new ways to address the critical challenges we’re facing as a society, and create a world with far less pain and suffering—if, that is, we’re willing to work together.

    If, like me, you’re committed to healing and helping others do the same, I invite you to join meditation teacher, mystic and systems-thinker, Thomas Hübl for a free global online summit to explore one of the most important issues of our time: collective trauma.

    “When we address and heal collective trauma, we go to the root of problems and conflict that can divide people and nations, while preventing future generations from unnecessary anguish and residual problems that get passed through generations.”  ~Thomas Hübl

    Thomas Hübl created this free nine-day summit, which starts on October 12th, to bring awareness to how trauma is not just an individual issue but also a collective phenomenon. Our traumas stay alive (repeating in our life and our world) precisely because they are unrecognized.

    During the summit, Thomas and other speakers will discuss not only the social symptoms we’re all experiencing, but also the steps we need to take to address our challenges through global collaboration and creativity. The summit will explore the following areas:

    • How each of us is affected by collective trauma
    • How community can be a resource in the healing process and pathways to bringing different groups together for large-scale healings
    • How the current structures hold us back from group healing and what we can do to create new supportive structures
    • How our global immune system operates and what can be done to strengthen it as we move through greater stress on the planet
    • How we can invite humanity into a new future where we have the tools and teachers that can work to heal collective trauma

    When you attend this online summit, you’ll learn new insights from leading experts including:

    • Dr. Gabor Maté – Bestselling author and speaker
    • Dr. Claus Otto Scharmer – Senior Lecturer in the MIT Management Sloan School and founder of the Presencing Institute
    • Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams – Zen teacher, author, social justice activist
    • Daniel J. Siegel, MD –  Best-selling Author, Founder of the Mindsight Institute
    • Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe) Diné (Navajo) activist and international speaker
    • Ken Wilber – Founder of Integral Theory
    • Monica Sharma – Best-selling author of Radical Transformational Leadership
    • Richard Schwartz Ph.D. – Developer of the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy
    • Terry Real – Best-selling author and founder of The Relational Life Institute

    You can register for the Collective Trauma Summit for free here.

    This is the first even of its kind, and it’s going to be powerful and transformative, accelerating our understanding of health, collective healing, conflict resolution, global governance, and the nature of our climate crisis.

    I hope you emerge on the other side of this summit feeling more aware of our shared wounds, more empowered to proactively heal them, and more hopeful about our collective future!

  • How to Re-wire Your Brain for Better Relationships

    How to Re-wire Your Brain for Better Relationships

    “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

    I was eight years old when my father and I somehow ended up in a heated, verbal struggle. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but I remember that he was yelling at me.

    I already knew by then that my father didn’t deal well with anger. It wasn’t uncommon for him to explode into fits of rage. I don’t know what I had done this time that had gotten him so upset, but I must have felt that he was being unfair. As he turned his back on me to walk away, I blurted out, “I hate you!”

    It’s not an uncommon thing for a kid to say in the heat of anger, because kids haven’t yet learned how to cope with strong emotions. If you’re a parent, you know what I’m talking about.

    My father didn’t respond. In fact, he didn’t say anything to me at all for several days. He gave me the silent treatment. He ignored all of my attempts to get his attention or to try to reconnect with him. He acted as if I didn’t exist.

    I felt alone, sad, guilty, and scared. As you can imagine, for a child of eight, it was excruciating to be shut off from him. And that wasn’t the only time my dad punished me with silence.

    Obviously, my father wasn’t a good role model for helping me to deal with anger constructively. If he had been, he might have asked me what was upsetting me and would have helped me figure out my feelings. At the very least, he might have apologized for getting so angry.

    Instead, he responded in a way that was anxiety-provoking, guilt-inducing, and painful. His tendency to act in this way made an indelible impression on me and my nervous system that I have struggled with for much of my life. The message I got was clear: Anger is bad and dangerous to a relationship; it brings disdain, loss of approval, and abandonment.

    It’s not that my father didn’t love me. I know now that he loved me very much. But he had a really hard time managing his emotions. This came from his own early experiences in his family where he learned the very same thing that he ended up teaching me.

    During our volatile exchange, I’m sure something deep in his brain had gotten triggered and had gotten the best of him. Some old unprocessed feelings came up, and caused him to withdraw and shut down.

    At the time, he didn’t understand what kind of damage his reaction was causing. He was actually doing the best he knew how. Fortunately, he’s grown and changed a lot since then and so have I.

    But that kind of treatment affected the way my brain got wired. I grew up feeling anxious about feelings of anger. If I felt angry with someone important to me, I worried that if I spoke up or asserted myself, they would abandon me.

    In my adult relationships, any sign of conflict with a partner, friend, or authority figure made me scared that something bad would happen, that I’d be punished in some way, rejected, or abandoned. In romantic relationships, I worried that I would lose our relationship if anything challenging came up.

    As soon as anger arose in some way, my nervous system would respond as though I was in danger. I’d feel anxious and panicky. I’d question my feelings and inevitably I’d rationalizing away whatever was bothering me. I avoided the discomfort of honoring my emotions and talking to the other person about how I felt.

    My adult relationships followed a typical pattern: They would start out with a lot of happiness and excitement, but as they continued, I’d start to feel anxious, worried, unsure, especially whenever there was any sign of conflict. I felt conflicted about my feelings and had a hard time working with them.

    Every relationship has times when partners get angry or upset, and in healthy relationships, the partners can find a way to constructively deal with their emotions and talk it out with one another. But that was not a part of my software. I’d avoid having uncomfortable conversations, I’d repress my feelings, and I’d hide how I really felt.

    As a result, I would often wonder why I felt so disconnected to other people. I would keep busy with my work, school, going to the gym and other activities just so I wouldn’t have to slow down and feel my real feelings.

    Of course, none of this was apparent to me at the time. It was just how I’d been wired. It took many years before I understood what was going on.

    Eventually a skilled and compassionate therapist helped me see how much anxiety was affecting my experience, that I was shutting myself off from my certain feelings because they felt threatening. I had been taught that strong emotions–particularly anger—were dangerous and would result in abandonment and rejection.

    Now, many years later, I have a happy twenty-two-year marriage to my husband, Tim, and I’m a therapist, writer, coach, and speaker. Though I still sometimes feel that old wiring trying to take control, I’ve developed some skills to manage the anxiety or fear that can get stirred up when something is off between us or when conflict arises.

    I see many clients who struggle with similar issues in their relationships. They feel excited to start out with their new romance, but as the relationship goes on, they start to struggle, they feel disconnected, shut down, or they and their partners fight a lot, or respond in ways that don’t support the health of their relationship.

    They often ask me: why is this so hard?

    I’ve learned that, while our specific relationship problems may be different, the underlying issue for most of us is the same.

    At the core of our struggles, underneath many layers of conflict and complaints, is a fear of being emotionally present and authentic in our relationships. We’re afraid of truly expressing our feelings in a vulnerable way. We worry that the other person won’t like us or want to be with us if we tell them what’s really going on for us.

    But why are we afraid of being emotionally present in our relationships?

    The short answer is that—as you saw in the story about my dad and me—our adult brains are still operating on wiring that was created in the first few years of our lives. Depending on what our caretakers taught us about how to function in close relationships, we may have learned some unhealthy coping mechanisms.

    If you struggle with painful romantic relationships (or even troubled relationships in general) as I have, you may be experiencing the effects of “faulty wiring.” You may have learned ways to cope with your emotions that don’t serve you anymore.

    Luckily, there are ways to “re-wire” your brain for better relationships.

    The first step is to understand what you learned about expressing your emotions when you were a child. Take some time to respond to these questions (separately for each parent or caregiver):

    • How did your parent(s) respond to your feelings?
    • Were they generally open, attentive, and responsive to your feelings?
    • Did they get uncomfortable or anxious when you expressed your feelings or certain feelings in particular (e.g., anger, sadness, fear, joy, and the like)?
    • Did they get distracted or seem to ignore certain feelings?
    • Were some feelings okay and others not? If so, which feelings were welcomed, and which weren’t?
    • Did they get irritated, frustrated, or angry at times when you expressed certain feelings?
    • Did they apologize when they hurt your feelings or reacted in an unhelpful way?
    • How did they respond when you were afraid or feeling vulnerable?
    • How did they respond when you were angry and asserted yourself?
    • How did they respond when you were affectionate and loving?
    • Could you rely on them to be there for you emotionally when you needed them?
    • Overall, how did it feel for you to share your vulnerable feelings with them?

    Now think about whether your answers to these questions reminds you of your romantic relationships in any way. Do you ever see yourself acting in similar ways to one of your parents or caregivers when particular feelings arise in your relationship? Does your partner ever act in similar ways? If you’re in a relationship now and your partner is willing, ask them to answer these questions about their parents as well.

    See if you can identify any patterns in how you both share and react to different emotions in one another.

    If you’re not currently in a relationship, think about past relationships, especially particularly difficult ones.

    After you get a sense of what lessons you may have learned about how to express emotions (or not) with people close to you, you’ll be in a better place to learn new ways of reacting.

    Here are some tips for growing your capacity to be emotionally mindful and present when you get triggered by your feelings. .

    1. Recognize and name.

    When you feel a strong emotion, you may have been triggered by old wiring. You may feel out of control in your response, which is why some people say, “I don’t know what came over me!” when they get really upset.

    The first step in regaining control of your emotions is to learn to identify the ones that most often trigger you. Practice observing yourself when you feel those challenging emotions. Name them as they come up. You might even want to write down the emotions that are difficult for you to cope with. This step takes a lot of practice, but it gets easier the more you do it.

    2. Stop, drop, and stay.

    When we feel triggered, upset, and uncomfortable, we often want to escape that emotion. We may get irritable, yell or criticize, walk away, shut ourselves in our room, or numb ourselves out.

    But in order to practice being mindful of your emotions, you’ll need to learn how to stay with them and ride them out. Rather than doing what you normally do when you have those feelings, stop. Pay attention to how the emotion feels in your body. Describe it. Ask it what it’s there to teach you. You may even want to write or draw it so you can become familiar and comfortable with it.

    The point is to look at it, stay with, and learn about it.

    3. Pause and reflect.

    When we’re in a conflict, we often feel like there’s no choice between the time we feel the strong emotion (such as anger, rage, hatred, or fear) and our response to it (yelling, becoming violent, shutting down, or running away).

    But in reality, by stretching the space between the feelings arising and responding, we can create some room in which we can chose how best to respond.

    So, practice feeling the challenging emotion and not responding right away. If you normally lash out with an angry statement when your partner says or does something you dislike, practice doing something else. Tell your partner you need a moment. Breathe deeply and slowly which will help to calm your nervous system. Go for a walk. Whatever you need to do to calm your distress and choose a more helpful response.

    The more often you do this, the easier it will get to make better choices.

    In this space that you create, reflect on what you’re feeling underneath the reactivity. If you’re feeling like lashing out, what’s underneath that? If you’re angry that your partner forgot to call you on your birthday, is there more to it? Are you feeling hurt, disappointed, or afraid of losing a sense of connection with them? Does it feel familiar? Might it be linked to feelings you had when you were a child?

    Explore the emotion. Give yourself time to figure out what you’re really feeling, what you want, what you desire, and what you’d like to happen in that situation.

    4. Mindfully relate your feelings.

    Once you know what it is you’re really feeling and what you’d like to happen, try relating that in a calm and open way to your partner. If your partner forgot to call you, rather than yell that she doesn’t really care about you at all, maybe you can say, “I’m realizing that I feel hurt that you didn’t call me. I worry that you don’t really care about me. I would like to understand what happened.”

    This will help you and your partner connect with one another, open yourselves up to one another in a more authentic way, and share your true feelings and experiences. This way, you are less likely to fall into old patterns where you may trigger one another and cause each other pain.

    By being vulnerable, open, and unafraid to express your true self, you’ll connect better to your romantic partner and you can develop a better understanding of what you want in your relationship.

    I speak from experience. Once I learned how to better express my emotions and what they were saying to me, I decided that I wanted a partner who would be willing to do that as well. I made the painful decision to end a 5-year relationship I’d been in which was full of conflict and, on a deep level, I knew wasn’t all that I longed for.

    But in doing so, in listening to and trusting my feelings, I was able to move forward and eventually meet my husband, with whom I’ve found the space disentangle myself from my old wiring and have a healthier, satisfying relationship. To love and be loved like I mean it.

  • What Helped Me Reclaim the Creativity I Loved as a Kid

    What Helped Me Reclaim the Creativity I Loved as a Kid

    “Absolute attention is an act of generosity.” ~Simone Weil

    When I was a child, I used to write poems as presents for my parents on birthdays and holidays.

    I’d sit quietly and think of what I wanted to say. Then I’d try to turn that into musical language. I’d write those words on the page, and then I’d draw a picture to go with it.

    It didn’t occur to me to even ask whether my parents would like my poem or not; I just assumed they would.

    Then I got older. I stopped giving my parents poems for presents. I stopped writing poems.

    I didn’t write poetry again until I was in college, and then I began to wonder whether my poetry was “good.” Were my poems “good enough” to get me into the advanced poetry workshop? Would they dazzle the teacher? Would the other students like them?

    I paid more attention to the way the words sounded on the page than to what I actually was saying. The depth was covered up by surface. And after all, I wasn’t sure I wanted to really bring my depth to the surface for other people to see.

    I didn’t write poetry very much again until I was pregnant with my first child. Then what was inside me—literally—was calling my attention. I started to put it on the page.

    But there was still this concern about whether what I was creating was “good enough.”

    I’ve been dancing with that “good enough” question for many years. I see now that that question is not just about my writing, but about myself, about my own interior life, and about the relationship between that interior life and my external life: Can my depth come out on the surface? Is my surface appropriate for my depth? Will I be seen, appreciated, understood? And how can I develop myself to the best of my potential, showing up and not shying away from who I am and want to be?

    Now, many years later, I’m a creative writer and a creative writing teacher, and I see my students similarly worry about whether their work is “good enough.”

    I often tell them that their concern, that comes out in relation to their writing, is really a deeper question of how they approach themselves.

    I tell them that, yes, the writing for so many of us brings out these insecurities, uncertainties, and learned patterns of thinking about ourselves that otherwise would lie buried. But that the writing doesn’t create those insecurities, uncertainties, or learned patterns. They’re there within us—and all around us.

    From the time we’re little, we’re given messages about what it means to be a worthwhile person: people are expected to act a certain way, to look a certain way, to speak a certain way.

    For women, our bodies often bear the brunt of these expectations about our physical selves: are our bodies “good” enough, thin enough, pretty enough, light enough, curvy enough, straight enough…

    And for women and men, our writing often comes to be the place where our intellect is valued: our writing is judged in schools; our expression is given grades. We measure ourselves against others.

    But if we’re always being judged—in body and mind—there is no space to be and to become.

    The question of whether we are “good enough” comes from feeling judged, and this restricts us. We experience ourselves as lacking, and a sense of lack leads in turn to our not being able to inhabit our full selves, to our making poor decisions and to living in constricted ways.

    So what happens when we put aside our judgment and allow ourselves to be with ourselves and with our creative voices?

    What helped me overcome my worry about being “good enough” (or mostly overcome it) is being a mother and seeing what it’s like to love my children unconditionally.

    When I am with my children, it never occurs to me to ask whether they are “good” or “good enough.” Those questions seem absurd and meaningless.

    I know that my children were born—as I believe all children are born—as wonderful light beings, miracles with unimaginable potential and unique personalities and gifts. They are, like all people, uniquely themselves.

    I also know that my children were born with the capacity to grow in countless ways. And this potential to grow and learn never stops.

    My children are “good” but that does not mean that they were born good at walking. They needed to learn, as we all do, how to walk. They needed to crawl and then learn how to pull themselves up, needed to learn how to take one step and fall down and then another. At times, also, my children, like all of us, learned how to be more self-aware, how to say they were sorry, how to think about how their actions impacted others.

    We all have room for growth—throughout our lives. We all have room for greater awareness and more skill. But as we mature and grow as people, our essential “goodness” does not change.

    I try to take the same attitude towards our creative acts: of course, we can learn how to be more skillful writers. But each of us is also born a creative being with a unique creative voice, and more skills will enhance the voice, but won’t essentially change what it has to express. Furthermore, our work is an expression of that voice that is appropriate for who and where we are at the moment that we create.

    As a poet, I needed to learn the skills to take my inner world and put it more effectively on paper. I learned from reading others and from having others read and comment on my poems.

    As I wrote more poems, my poems got more understandable, more moving, more skillful. But I don’t think I was ever asking the right question when I was asking whether my poems were “good” or “good enough.” Because that question was like cutting the life force off that was full of life and growing

    Similarly, as a teacher, I can help my students have more skills. I can show them writing that inspires them and that they can learn from; I can give them tools to use in their pieces. But it’s never my job to judge them or to suggest that their creative expression isn’t worthy.

    We are all creative beings. Not everyone is given legs to walk, but everyone is given a unique story and a unique perspective and a unique voice. And who are we, any of us, to say that one story is “good enough” and another is not? Would we ever say that one birdsong is worthy and another is not?

    Perhaps some people will like my poems. I know some will.

    Perhaps some people will not like my poems. I know many won’t.

    But I don’t set myself up waiting breathlessly to be “liked” or not. I set myself up to do my best work and to accompany myself, whether I fall down or walk across the room.

    When my children were little, I delighted in the freedom with which they played, danced, drew, sang. I want them to be able to be themselves as fully as adults, and to love themselves in the process.

    And I want that for all of us, even for myself. For I know that if I want something for my children, then I need to be able to at least try to model it, otherwise what message am I really sending?

    I tell my students: you might not write your most captivating poem this time around, but if you cut off your breath, then you will never will write at your full potential. So take a risk: go for it, and keep trying. Read, write, learn from what you love and engage fully, and keep listening inside and allowing the process to move from the inner to the outer without judgment.

    I started writing as a gift to my parents, but now I write as a gift to myself—and to the world.

    For me, poetry is an act of love, attention, and presence. When I show up fully and listen, then I can create a passage from what is larger than me through my interior self and then out onto the page.

    “Absolute attention is an act of generosity,” the philosopher Simone Weil wrote. When I pay attention to the world around and within me and to the language that I use that is an act of generosity and grace—to myself and to the world and perhaps, also, I can hope, to some of my readers.

  • The Negative Impact of Not Feeling Your Feelings

    The Negative Impact of Not Feeling Your Feelings

    “If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” ~Sidney Banks

    I spent most of my life scared of my feelings. Having feelings and expressing them made me mentally ill—or so I was led to believe by a large number of mental health professionals. When I felt sad, they labeled me as depressed. When I showed any signs of anxiety, they gave me another list of mental health disorders I needed medication for. And if I was angry? Oh well, that was the absolute worst. That clearly proved how insane and utterly out of control I was!

    I didn’t understand how they couldn’t see what was really going on for me. I couldn’t understand how everyone saw me as the problem when what was happening to me was the actual problem. But that’s a story for another time.

    I was brought up to be a good girl, which meant that any angry expressions were forbidden, shamed, and punished.

    I wasn’t allowed to express disappointment because that made me ungrateful.

    I couldn’t ask for what I wanted because that made me greedy.

    I wasn’t allowed to disagree with anyone because that made me difficult.

    I couldn’t express frustration because that meant I was out of control and needed to be left alone to think about my shameful behavior.

    I didn’t ask for help because good girls don’t inconvenience other people.

    I couldn’t be happy either because that made me attention-seeking and annoying.

    I felt all the feelings, but I was taught that they were wrong, forbidden, and shameful, so it didn’t feel safe to feel them. And so I tried to suppress them. I inhibited them, pushed them away, avoided them, shamed them, and feared them.

    Every time I felt something, I saw it as more evidence for how bad I was. Later on, I saw it as evidence for how broken and mentally insane I was. It drove me crazy. But it was thinking that having feelings made me insane that actually drove me insane.

    I believed that what I was experiencing was wrong. I saw my feelings as problems, so I tried to hide them and not feel them. So much so that I don’t even recall feeling very happy or excited about anything. All I remember is feeling tired, lethargic, and bored. I wasn’t even fifteen years old at that time …

    I continued like this for a very long time. My life felt lifeless and bleak. I don’t recall having any fun, adventures, or exciting experiences. Everything just seemed so hard. Life was something to endure, not enjoy. Enjoyment seemed to be reserved for a lucky few, and I most certainly wasn’t one of them.

    It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I learned that my feelings weren’t problems, and that they didn’t make me insane. My feelings only made me one thing—human.

    Feelings Lesson 1: Feelings aren’t evidence that we are broken or insane. They are evidence that we are human.

    I know now that I had always been perfectly healthy, but others taught me to believe that being a little human with feelings was somehow wrong and shameful.

    My feelings were a problem for others. They were inconvenient to them. And as a result of them not dealing with their own feelings—their own irritation, intolerance, and impatience—they tried to control and eliminate mine.

    But what happens when we try to control or eliminate our feelings is that we deprive ourselves from experiencing the richness of life. We numb them all because we cannot selectively numb. We feel it all or nothing at all.

    So if I am unwilling to feel my anger, I will eradicate other feelings with it—apart from maybe one or two that will be expressed more strongly than they would if we only let ourselves feel whatever it is that we actually need to feel.

    Feelings Lesson 2: We are meant to feel all our feelings and can’t selectively numb them.

    In my professional work, I have noticed that sad people usually suppress their anger and angry people usually suppress their sadness. It’s a simplistic generalization, but it is largely true. The problem is that the displaced feeling will be way more powerful and destructive than it would be if we didn’t try to control or avoid it. We avoid a feeling when it is shame-bound, when every time it arises we feel shame for feeling it.

    If we feel something excessively and intensely, it’s a sign that we have shame-bound another feeling, which means that this feeling was not tolerated in our childhood, and every time it arises, our anxiety level rises. We then try to push it down to stop ourselves from feeling it, but then the energy of that feeling gets displaced and added to a feeling we believe to be more acceptable to feel and express.

    The ‘more acceptable’ feeling then takes on a bigger form, and we end up having panic attacks instead of expressing our frustrations about someone. Or we get depressed instead of setting boundaries with people who treat us in disrespectful ways. Or we explode in a rage because we don’t allow ourselves to admit to feeling hurt, alone, and unsupported.

    There are thousands of examples like the above. Sadly, we always believe that our misdirected expression like rage or depression is the problem we need to fix, and so we focus on the result of the problem and not on its actual cause, which means that we cannot solve it.

    If we want to work through our issues, we need to identify which of our feelings are shame-bound and then reconnect with them in healthy and compassionate ways. This is a process. We are going against a lifetime of conditioning, so we need to be gentle with ourselves while persevering and getting honest with ourselves.

    But it is possible. We can remove the shame-binding from all of our feelings by reminding ourselves that our feelings aren’t problems, and that feeling our feelings is what makes our human experience special.

    Feelings Lesson 3: Shame-bound feelings express themselves in different and destructive ways, meaning we simply can’t not feel.

    When we inhibit what we are meant to express to protect others from our feelings, because we perceive that they’re a problem for them, we reinforce the message that our feelings are problems and that we are wrong to feel them. Believing this will negatively impact our mental health and enjoyment of other people and life in general, because feelings exist for our benefit.

    Our feelings exist to guide us through life. They show us what we want and what we don’t want so we can create more of the former and move away from the latter. When someone shames our feelings and encourages us to disconnect from them, they encourage us to disconnect from our emotional guidance system, which serves to help us create a great life for ourselves in which we can grow and thrive. This inevitably leads to creating an inauthentic, unfulfilling life, and stunted development.

    Our feelings also show us when we believe something harmful that isn’t true: a lie of the mind.

    If I believe that my anger is a sign that I am an inherently flawed human being, I feel distressed because this isn’t true. My guidance system is trying to tell me that I’m on the wrong track.

    Because just like the physical pain we experience when touching something painfully hot, emotional pain tells us to move away and let go of a harmful thought. And so, our emotions highlight our state of mind. They encourage us to let go, drop, and move away from anything that doesn’t serve us or promote our personal growth.

    Feelings Lesson 4: Our feelings tell us when we engage in harmful thinking.

    Once we understand the purpose of our feelings, we begin to see the beauty in them. We are made to have feelings—all the feelings! We are meant to feel our feelings. Our feelings aren’t problems. They are just here to give us the full human experience. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! We have the potential to experience it all. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!

    But we cannot make the most of this opportunity if we go in blind. Being cut off from our feelings is just that. It’s like trying to sail the oceans without a compass, hoping to find paradise to live in. It’s navigating life without any sense of what we want or what is good and healthy for us. As a consequence, we make many wrong choices and keep believing all the wrong things.

    Our attention then goes into fixing our mistakes instead of creating a life that is most suited to who we really are. Because we simply don’t know what’s good for us and what isn’t because we don’t know what we are feeling. We are emotionally disconnected.

    We have feelings that try to move us toward what’s good for us, but because we don’t like how some of them feel, we disregard them all. We try to create a successful life without any sense of what successful actually looks like for us.

    Let me outline this with an example:

    What was my anger during my childhood trying to tell me?

    It definitely wasn’t that I was a bad and ungrateful child who was inherently flawed and devoid of any tender human qualities. My anger didn’t mean that I was disrespectful or manipulative and deserved to be hit, shouted at, shamed, and punished. My anger was trying to get me to act, to stand up for myself, to protect myself. Only I was too little.

    Then.

    Not now.

    But I lived by those shame-bound rules for most of my life. I hated my anger. I avoided conflict. I didn’t stand up for myself when it mattered and then got myself into situations that were abusive, full of conflict, draining, and traumatic—but also unnecessary.

    If I had been attuned to my anger, if I had responded to it immediately, nothing would have ever needed to escalate. I would have stood up for myself and moved away from whoever and whatever wasn’t healthy for me and didn’t contribute positively toward my growth.

    I would have made very different choices and I would have lived a very different life.

    Being cut off from my feelings and disconnected from my internal guidance system deprived me of the experience of life I wish I’d had.

    I was doing it the hard way. I was trying to succeed going in blind. It doesn’t work. I know you know that too.

    Feelings Lesson 5: Our feelings ask us to act in ways that are good for us.

    So why am I going on about feeling our feelings? Because it’s the solution to many of our problems.

    Instead of putting all our energy into avoiding, controlling, and eliminating our feelings, we have to become attuned to them. We have to reconnect with them so we can make better and healthier choices for ourselves. We need them. We are meant to have them. And the more we let ourselves feel them, the more easily we learn to respond to them in healthy and life-enhancing ways.

    Because our feelings aren’t problems. They are not inconvenient. They are trying to move us into the direction of health and well-being on a physical, emotional, and mental level.

    And in that way, they help us create a life we can actually enjoy. But only if we allow ourselves to feel them.

  • The Art of Slow Living: How to Reclaim Your Peace and Joy

    The Art of Slow Living: How to Reclaim Your Peace and Joy

    “In today’s rush, we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just being.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    We’re going to start with a visualization exercise. Set a timer for one minute, close your eyes, and reflect on your happiest childhood memories…

    I was born into a family of wanderers, individuals who held a deeply rooted love of travel, and an even deeper sense of adventure. My happiest childhood memories are the times when we packed up our suitcases and hit the road (or the sky or the sea).

    In the quiet stillness of my mind, I float away to a Hawaiian beach. Suddenly, I am once again a young adolescent lying in the sand with the ones I love as we watch the leaves of a large palm tree sway overhead, moving in front of the sun and casting long, warm shadows on the seemingly endless stretches of beach on either side of us. The crash of the waves reverberates through our ears, and a sense of peaceful stillness permeates our entire beings.

    Here, we have no responsibilities, and our attention is simply focused on being present with one another.

    Maybe for you, the happiest childhood memories that come to mind revolve around a favorite holiday when friends or loved ones laughed together without distractions, or spending time with brothers and sisters talking about everything and nothing, growing closer to one another.

    No matter the memories that come to mind, they undoubtedly had one thing in common—in those moments we (and those around us) were free.

    That’s the secret to intentional, or slow, living; when we practice patience with ourselves and others, and allow the busyness of our lives to fall away, we can feel the emotion that exists in every moment, and truly connect to the people and things around us.

    Childhood is, by its very definition, an opportunity to practice slow living. When we are children we do not have the stress of our jobs, our social status, or providing for others weighing on our shoulders. Not only are our days free from responsibility, they are also free from anxiety and worry.

    As we age, we have a tendency to forget the purpose of intentional living, and instead allow our days to be managed and monitored by the incessant beeping or text and email alerts and the allure of amassing social media likes.

    We allow our souls to be turned away from spiritual clarity and light, believing instead that the more “stuff” we allow to fill our days, the happier we will be.

    But the truth, friends, is that the happiness we so desperately seek on our busiest days is not found in the countless distractions of the world around us, but in the innocence of our hearts—the stillness and presence that has dwelled within us since we were children.

    Of course, I’m not recommending that you quit your job tomorrow, forgo all of your responsibilities, and craft some sort of bubble-like lifestyle for your days.

    I am suggesting that you evaluate where your priorities lie, and if you find your life has become too fast-paced to truly connect with yourself and others, that you take small action steps toward decluttering your spiritual core—the part of you that knows the answers to life’s greatest mysteries do not lie in the rush, but rather, in the moments of connection.

    Living intentionally is an art, and is not something that we can master overnight, but by committing to a practice of cultivation, we can encourage relaxation of our nervous systems, begin to avoid the people and things that take our time and energy without giving us anything in return, and create a life we love—a life that is full of peace and genuine joy. Here’s how to get started:

    Evaluate your life.

    What do you truly want out of your life? If there were no barriers like money or power, what would you want to do and with whom would you want to do it? Consider the answers to these questions to be your sense of inner wisdom and trust the messages you receive.

    Identify the people and activities that you desire to willingly surround yourself with, as well as those to whom you feel obligated, and notice how you feel when you think about these people and tasks, responding to your thoughts without judgment. Then, work on increasing the amount of time you spend doing what you love with those you love.

    Little by little, you will find that you are able to take control of your life and live in a way that fulfills you, allowing you to practice intentional presence in all areas.

    Understand that busyness does not equal importance.

    Answering all the emails in our inboxes while we sit at the dinner table is not going to mean anything to the people who mean the most to us. While many responsibilities are unavoidable, there is something to be said for committing to presence of mind, no matter how much we may struggle with feeling like we’re missing out on something that only our devices can tell us about.

    Generations ago, when professionals did not have electronic tools like cell phones or tablets, they somehow managed to complete all of their tasks and were considered by others as having contributed to society.

    Somewhere along the way, that understanding became skewed, and now, we have lofty expectations for how quickly we can respond to a summons and the number of commitments we can successfully juggle at one time.

    Understand that being busy does not make us successful or important; in fact, often, being too busy serves no purpose other than to detract from our connection with the people that are nearest to us.

    Choose a place in your home where you will stow your cell phone and other electronics upon entering the house. When our phones are out of reach, they will almost automatically leave our minds, and we can focus on being present with the people who are physically with us.

    If you find that spending all your time at home without your phone is too difficult or not reasonable for your lifestyle, establish small blocks of time (five to ten minutes maximum) that you are allowed to check your phone before re-stowing and returning your attention to the present. Over time, you will find that your need to have these phone breaks becomes less and less frequent.

    Find silence.

    Our world is noisy—there is no other way to describe it. Yet, we’ve become so accustomed to the din of our environment that we have seemingly become immune to noticing how this constant chaos negatively impacts us physically and spiritually.

    When was the last time you spent a moment in silence? It’s probably been quite some time, if you can even remember a moment free from noise at all. Our culture perpetuates trepidation around quiet, wanting to fill every pause with some sort of sound effect or reverie, so it’s important for us, as we pursue a slower lifestyle, to create a space in our lives that is free from distractions.

    Find a way to bring calm and quiet into your life whether it comes through a daily practice of meditation, a walk through the silence of nature, or a peaceful moment spent in bed before you close your eyes to rest. Pursuing peace will lead to a regular commitment to quiet and allow you to grow in your understanding of what it means to be truly present.

    —

    I’m not the little girl on the Hawaiian beach anymore. I have real responsibilities and accountabilities just like you do. But, by committing to a practice of slow living, of practicing intention and presence in my days, I am helping her to continue to grow and thrive.

    No matter your age or where you are on your journey, you can reclaim a piece of your innocent joy as well—the childhood version of yourself is still inside you, waiting for you to commit to their well-being.

  • If You Don’t Like the Cards You Were Dealt…

    If You Don’t Like the Cards You Were Dealt…

    “People are so caught up in their own negativity and losses that they give up on creating the future they want.” ~Grant Cardone

    I have a friend. Let’s call him Ram. Ram is always angry because of the cards that he was dealt in life. He comes from a middle-class family that has no money or inheritance. He got a decent education but couldn’t go to a better college because his parents didn’t have the money to fund it.

    He’s disappointed that his education has limited his opportunities. He’s frustrated that he has to spend money on public transport while others drive in their swanky cars. To him, it feels like the entire world has conspired against him to ensure he doesn’t succeed.

    What Ram doesn’t realize is that most of us have been dealt less-than-ideal cards, and it’s up to us to make the most of what we have.

    For Ram, everything that he’s suffering through, or has a problem with, is not under his control. He’s angry, frustrated, disappointed, and sad because, according to him, he is not responsible for any of his problems!

    Ram has what you would call a victim mentality. For a victim, everything is someone else’s fault and nothing is under their control. Every obstacle is a problem instead of an opportunity.

    Every time we suffer a setback, we think:

    Why me?
    What did I do to deserve this?
    Everybody is out to get me.
    I cannot do anything right.

    But every time we suffer a setback, we have a choice to reframe our thoughts to:

    I was not up for the task.
    I was lacking somewhere.
    This is a good opportunity for…
    I will be better prepared next time because of this.
    Now I know what not to do.

    Can I be completely honest with you?

    Ram is a pseudonym I created. Ram is me. I am Ram.

    I get into the victim mentality very easily, because that’s easier than taking responsibility for my life. For four long years, I rejected the cards that were dealt to me because I felt that I didn’t choose them, so I could just ignore them.

    I tried to distance myself from my parents and avoided going home for as long as I could because I blamed them for everything that was lacking in my life.

    I’ve read a lot on self-help and personal development, so I don’t know exactly when the switch happened or why, but sometime in the beginning of 2015, I realized that running away was not going to get rid of the cards I was dealt, so I needed a different strategy.

    So I decided to listen to Marcus Aurelius, who said, “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears,” and pack my bags to relocate back to the motherland—back to where it all started.

    It’s easy to look over the white picket fence and think that the grass is greener on the other side. We’re quick to assume things, to create this image about others, thinking their life is perfect when that’s far from the truth! We all have things we wish we could change, but like it or not, much is beyond our control.

    We don’t have control over where we are born, who we are born to, if we are born with a disability or we are born into a poor family. We also don’t have control over the stock market, natural disasters, the decisions our parents make for us when we are kids, which school we go to, or where we live. Most of us have to accept things we wouldn’t choose ourselves—but most of us still have a lot to appreciate.

    When we measure ourselves on someone else’s yardstick, the yardstick tends to be very short because we are only looking at what we lack and wishing we had it. We completely ignore all the things that might be going our way.

    In my case, I was overlooking the fact that I had a college degree, a roof over my head, parents who loved me, a job that was satisfying to varying degrees and helped me pay the bills, and colleagues who were friends at this point, who cared for my well-being. More than anything else, I had mental peace—when I wasn’t dwelling on everything I lacked.

    When we spend our time wishing for something we don’t have, we waste time that could be used for either accomplishing something or getting us closer to actually having that something we want. You can complain and cry about how things are unfair and how other people have it easier, or you can get to work.

    I am going to share a secret with you: You don’t have to do the craziest thing in the world. You don’t need to be the most spectacular. You don’t need to be the most famous. You just need to do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

    Benjamin Hardy hit the nail on the spot when he wrote, “Most people wish that their circumstances would magically change for them. They don’t have a desire to become better themselves so they can proactively improve their circumstances.”

    I had tried avoiding and running away from the cards dealt to me, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I was actually missing out by shunning my family, my friends, and my culture. So this time, I decided to embrace my cards and work with them.

    And boy did that make a difference!

    I’d missed celebrating the festivals, wearing Indian outfits, getting my elders’ blessings, smelling all the street food, and playing on the streets. I was slowly losing my ability to read and write in my mother tongue, which scared me. So, for starters, I decided to reconnect with my roots.

    The festivals reminded me of the fun I’d missed out on, while the street food brought back a lot of great childhood memories. Attending religious ceremonies and weddings reminded me of the importance of having a close-knit family. Reconnecting with my cousins and old friends made me realize that we all have our own flaws and we are all trying our best to live with them.

    The biggest change, however, was that I began to recognize the sacrifices my parents had made to ensure I got a good education and the right values growing up—moving to USA in their forties so that my brother and I could have a better life, working late hours to provide for us, giving up on their wants to fund our education.

    Yes, they were lacking in many departments, but realizing that they didn’t have much help and were figuring things out themselves was the shift in perspective I needed.

    As I started to work with what I have, I was able to leverage that instead of always wishing that I had a completely different deck. 

    I started to lean more on my family. Instead of thinking of them as the weak link, I began to leverage their connections, their experiences, and their advice. I began learning how to navigate the complex web of human relationships.

    It was the beginning of a different relationship with my parents, because by seeking to understand where they come from and why they do what they do, I had begun to respect them and earned their respect  in me.

    I started reconnecting with old friends, who exposed me to interesting people and experiences, and in doing so, strengthened my relationship with them. For the first time, I was able to give back by being present and helping instead of being away and wishing I was present. Overall, this gave me immense satisfaction and mental peace.

    I slowly began to return to myself—to remember who I was before I decided the world had wronged me.

    Moral of the story, as Arthur Ashe wrote:

    “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

    My favorite indian word is Jugaad. Translated to English, the shorter version means “resourceful,” while the longer one would read, “Doing the best with what you have.”

    If you are stuck and unhappy, maybe it’s time to accept the cards you were dealt, because acceptance is the first step toward happiness.

    There would have been no Helen Keller if all she did was rue that she was deaf and dumb. Instead, she decided to accept it, and years later, at a time when very few women were even attending college, she graduated. Not only that, she authored six books while co-founding the American Civil Liberties Union.

    Helen Keller is may be a famous example, but she is not the only one. Every day I see people accepting and playing their hand instead of wishing they’d been dealt other cards. They might not have everything, but they’re doing everything they can to make the most of what they have.

    If they can do it, so can you! I promise you won’t regret it.

  • 3 Practices That Help Ease the Pain of Being Highly Empathetic

    3 Practices That Help Ease the Pain of Being Highly Empathetic

    “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~Walt Whitman

    Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s experience and understand with depth the gravity of their situation. In general, I believe the world needs more empathy.

    But I’ve learned over the course of my twenty-nine years that sometimes being a highly empathetic person is incredibly painful. And sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

    Hearing stories of the pain that people experience can be extra painful when your mind tries to carry their pain around with you. Empathy is healthy when it’s useful and helps a wounded person feel understood and validated and release their pain. But it’s unhealthy when you carry it with you as if it is your own.

    Feeling sorrow for someone who is suffering is part of our humanity and connection to each other. Carrying the sorrow as if it belongs to you ends up feeling traumatizing and can cause you to disconnect from others.

    I’ve always struggled with holding on to the pain of others. From the stories of suffering I hear on the news to the people I run across in my everyday life, I’ve found it difficult not to get lost in their pain and end up holding on to it. When that problem hit even closer to home, I reached a breaking point that ended up teaching me how to stop it.

    My sister is a nurse who was working on a trauma unit floor the day she was assaulted by a patient. Seeing the bruises covering her face and her eyes swollen shut was a gut wrenching experience. For months after that my mind turned over and over again how she must have felt.

    I’d see the surprise and fear on her face in my mind’s eye. I’d feel the terror and the pain. And the overwhelming relief when he was finally off of her. Followed by the sense of humiliation and vulnerability at being alone on the floor.

    She was wounded. My overly empathetic brain created me as the second wounded one.

    I am a highly sensitive woman who struggles with both ADHD and Anxiety. These three challenges come together into the perfect storm to torture me with too much empathy sometimes.

    High sensitivity makes me more attuned to others. ADHD makes it extra difficult to control my runaway thoughts. Anxiety creates a sense of ongoing vulnerability that keeps the wound open. This perfect storm has required a strong internal set of resources to combat it. In the traumatic aftermath of my sister’s assault, I finally found the recipe for that resource.

    These three things have helped me reduce the internal wounding of being too empathetic.

    Mindful Attention to Words without Pictures

    I was on the phone with my mom as she was processing what happened to my sister, and I noticed that the most painful part of it all was the movie reel playing in my head as my mind interpreted her story in pictures.

    I couldn’t bear the emotional onslaught that I could feel coming and somewhat intuitively picked up on a mindfulness tool that I now swear by. As she continued, I made a conscious effort to hear only her words. To only focus on her words.

    When my mind started to create the overwhelming pictures, I would return my focus to the sound of the words themselves. I tried to hear the words and only understand them to the extent of their definition—devoid of the extra meaning and emotional context I had been attaching to them.

    Even though this practice was difficult to do, I was able to leave that conversation without feeling re-wounded. And that was a first.

    A Mindful Mantra

    It wasn’t just the conversations and specific triggers that created the wounded feeling. My anxious ADHD brain would recreate the story on its own. It would play that movie of what my sister experienced start to finish. In those moments, there were no words to attend to. There was only me and my sometimes-torturous brain.

    It was out of that experience that I developed what I’ll call my mindful mantra. It starts with the recognition that my thoughts have run away from me. When I see that, I imagine that it was all playing out on a picture book that I can see myself firmly shut. I even imagine the sound of a book being forcefully shut.

    Then the mantra. Every time I catch myself in this place I use the same mantra, and over time it has become helpful in its own right. This could be anything, but for me, my mantra goes like this:

    “Nothing good goes down this path.”

    It serves as a reminder that there is nothing useful to me or to the wounded person (in this case my sister) in fixating on their painful (now past) experience. It’s also a subtle reminder that choosing to stop the internal battle isn’t hurtful to the person who’s been wounded.

    With that, I find that I can practice the next skill before re-engaging myself in something else.

    A New Visual for Letting Go

    Sometimes the mind tries to hold on as if it’s not quite ready to let go. My ADHD mind has extra trouble with this. It’s in those moments that I practice this mindful visual exercise. I sometimes need to practice it several times before my brain is ready to transition on to something more helpful.

    But like any mindfulness practice, I find that the more I bring my mind back to the exercise, the better it gets at using the exercise for letting go.

    I see my thoughts (or sometimes the book in which I closed them up) floating down a river. I grew up in an area with a ton of amazing waterfalls that debut in this visual exercise. I visualize a powerful, tall waterfall like the ones I grew up with and I see my thoughts fall over the edge.

    Then I stand and watch them flow on the river beneath until they are completely out of my sight.

    After this, I’ve found that it can be helpful to engage myself in another activity to help my brain transition. Sometimes that looks like a good movie or a walk with my husband. Other times, it’s a hobby or project I’m interested in that helps grab my attention.

    If the movie reel starts to play again, I send it back over the waterfall.

    With these strategies, I’ve been able to finally find some peace with my mind. Even though they are challenging strategies that sometimes take practice, I’ve found them to be well worth the effort.

  • Pain, Suffering, Joy, Love—Meditation Helps Me Experience It All

    Pain, Suffering, Joy, Love—Meditation Helps Me Experience It All

    “I know, things are getting tougher when I can’t get the top off the bottom of the barrel.” ~Jesse Michaels

    No one thought I was going to live to see twenty. Including me. In fact, I vividly remember telling my father that it would be miraculous if I saw twenty-five. It wasn’t emotional. It was simply a statement of fact. And yet here I am—mid-thirties, wife, daughter, one on the way, house, job, sense of purpose. What happened?

    I was one of those kids with questions. Big questions. “What does it all mean?” questions. I used to wonder what the point of all of this was. As young as seven and eight I remember lying in bed at night trying to understand the nature of the world. I would examine my family, my friends, my fears, my aspirations, looking for the thread that would unravel the existential knot.

    I loved to learn, and I was frequently drawn to the sciences in a way that I now see as continuing to look for answers to the big questions. When my friends were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they gave the common answers—policeman, fireman, professional athlete, etc. I think someone said “Batman” (it might have been me…).

    When it came to me, I would usually say, “paleontologist or astronomer.” (I later amended this to astrophysicist, but I hadn’t heard of it yet, and further, didn’t have the math skills.) It was clear to me that this world had a rhyme and a reason, and I wanted desperately to understand it. And then, at twelve, I discovered the answer.

    I became a drug addict and an alcoholic. It was beautiful. It did not give me any answers; it simply took away the questions. It shrunk my life to the “one-pointed mind” that I would rediscover later in another context.

    Addiction is an all-consuming activity. I compounded this problem by developing a number of co-occurring mental health problems—rage, depression, anxiety. A continuous cocktail of hopelessness and loss.

    This spiral was only arrested at the nick of time by the intervention of a loving family and a supportive community dedicated to service to those struggling with addiction.

    In the decade and a half since, I’ve watched many friends die, go to jail, disappear, and I have often wondered what the difference between them and me is.

    I have heard the “some have to die so others can live” theory and the “they just weren’t ready” platitude. I have heard the “at least they’re not struggling anymore” and the “God must have needed them” explanations. I reject these utterly.

    While these statements offer some degree of emotional and psychological comfort, I can’t imagine the reality of what they seem to imply: Some of us are “chosen” and some of us are not.

    I think about a friend of ours who died Christmas Eve morning from an overdose. I couldn’t conceive of going to his grief-stricken family and saying, “Bummer about your son, guess he wasn’t chosen.” I’m sure that would’ve helped lift their Christmas spirits every year.

    I have been to seventeen funerals in the past few years, all for people under thirty and most under twenty-five. Each time I have asked myself the same question: Why them and not me?

    I don’t pretend to have an answer. Furthermore, I don’t think there is an ANSWER (capital letters intentional). When I discovered my spiritual and meditative practice I was strongly drawn to the fact that these practices openly admitted they had no answers, only a means to investigate the questions.

    Meditation doesn’t give me any answers. It doesn’t allow me to sidestep grief or pain or rage. It doesn’t make good times better or bad times suck less. It doesn’t offer me a way to disassociate from my very real human experience. Although, for the record, I have tried to use meditation to do all of these things.

    So what difference does it make to me?

    The meditation practices that I employ bring me face to face with the pain and hurt and fear and rage. The pain of losing my friends; the hurt that no one could help them, not even me; the fear that I very well could fall victim to the same delusions; the rage at the utter injustice of why beautiful, talented men and women at the beginning of their lives are lost to us.

    In not trying to avoid the pain, I get to experience it and learn from it.

    I have repeated the negative and destructive patterns of my life not because of lack of will or lack of desire to change, but merely because I didn’t see them. I’ve looked away from my pain and my trauma, and so it’s had no choice but to reemerge over and over again.

    Sitting “on the cushion” has given me a stable and safe place from which to step into the sea of suffering, find the part of me that needs comfort and compassion, and try to bring it into the light.

    My practice has shown me that the answers we look for are whatever we want them to be. Meaning is not an inherent quality. Things happen, and we, as human beings, assign them meaning. Sometimes the meaning is that we “live for them” (the people who have past). Sometimes we “make it matter.”

    I once asked out a girl in one of my graduate school classes because I had just helped bury a seventeen-year-old kid who I realized would never get to ask a girl out again. So what the hell? I asked her, thinking maybe Danny would give me an assist from wherever he was. She still said no. I swear I could hear him laughing at me.

    Sometimes we use things to reinforce the negative story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world we live in. We create our own victimization and tell ourselves it’s not our fault. The world is terrible. I did this forever, reinforcing the story of my own victimhood until it almost killed me.

    Meditation helps me examine all of these storylines. It helps me embrace the things that make my life better and discard (almost always with assistance) the things that are detrimental to myself, that cause pain to those around me.

    It offers me the opportunity to “turn the volume down” on the rage and anxiety and depression. It brings me back within the bounds of experiencing these without them becoming the monsters they used to be.

    It also helps me accept reality as it is. Nothing is supposed to be happening. It’s just what is happening. Embrace it or fight it, it makes no difference. It will, has, and does happen exactly as it’s happening. I only need to adjust to conditions as they are, not how I would wish them to be, to be truly content. Meditation helps me see things closer to how they really are.

    I write this having attended a funeral last week for a twenty-three-year-old man who was my student and my friend. I am selfishly grateful in a strange way that his death was accidental and not related to any substance abuse. I’m not sure if that matters, but it feels different.

    I loved and will continue to love Josh. He was amazingly talented. I met him when he was fifteen and couldn’t play a note. By the end of our time together (I was a music teacher then) he could play four instruments well and a few poorly (harmonica is tough). He had interned at a local music festival during high school and eventually parlayed that into a full-time gig at one of our local venues. I am so proud of him.

    His service was packed. Friends, family—he touched so many lives. The greatest gift that my practice afforded me is that I was there. Really there. I cried. I laughed. I hugged people. I snuck one of my medallions into his casket when no one was looking. I thought he’d like that, both the medallion and the sneaking. (We share a bit of an anti-authority streak.)

    I didn’t run—from his death, from my feelings, or from the people around me. I hugged his dad and told him how much I adored his son and how grateful I was to have helped him along his journey. I stood with my friends and offered a shoulder when they needed it and received one when I did.

    I am so deeply moved to have been able to be there, without a buffer, to help send off my friend. I can be uncomfortable and be okay with being uncomfortable. Pain and sorrow are my teachers. So are joy and love. Meditation brings me to the place where I can experience all of it. I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.

  • Understanding Is Love (and the World Needs More Love)

    Understanding Is Love (and the World Needs More Love)

    “Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand you can’t love.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    I recently attended a weekend workshop, and there was a man in the group who always had a strange look on his face whenever we had to look for a partner to work with. I noticed that some people avoided him, like they didn’t want to work with him. Perhaps it was the vibe he gave off because of the way he looked at people.

    At some point later in the weekend I sat with him. It was hard to put my finger on it, but there was something about him that did feel a little strange, and I could see that other people were put off by him.

    After the weekend had finished, we happened to be sitting next to each other and started talking, which somehow led to him telling me that he is almost completely blind. With his contact lenses in he can see okay, but the low light of the room made it very hard for him to make out faces.

    In that moment I understood. That was why he gave off a weird vibe—because he was having trouble seeing. The “look” he gave was simply a result of him trying to see and ultimately connect with someone.

    The internal label I’d given him of “strange” dissolved in an instant, and in that same moment I felt an opening in my heart. It was an unconditional level of understanding that brought with it a sense of peace and connection.

    Understanding and Letting Go

    We often get frustrated or angry with the people around us, projecting our emotions and frustrations onto them when we don’t understand them. The moment we understand, it can change our whole attitude, creating a space of opening.

    Imagine you’re driving your car, and the car in front of you starts slowing down. You don’t know why they’re slowing down, so you get frustrated and possibly impatient. Maybe you start verbalizing your frustration, or perhaps you even honk your horn in an effort to release some of your tension.

    Then you see an elderly woman crossing the road, moving very slowly.

    In that moment your frustration softens, because you now understand why the driver in front of you was slowing down. They saw something you didn’t.

    We can take understanding in this example even further. You also understand the woman moving slowly. Perhaps you have a mother or grandmother who moves slowly, or you realize that one day, as you age, this could be you, and you’d appreciate drivers slowing down for you. Or maybe you’re young but injured.

    Understanding creates a mental shift enabling us to replace reactive emotions and disconnection with compassion and connection.

    Understanding Is a State of Mind

    Understanding is more than something we do, as in trying to understand someone else’s perspective or how they feel. Yes, this is part of it, but understanding is also a state of mind that we can cultivate. Just like joy, enthusiasm, sadness, or frustration are states of mind that govern the way we experience life.

    When we feel joyous, we think, act, and respond to life in a certain way—joyfully. When we feel frustrated, we think, act, and react to life in a different way—finding reasons to justify our frustration everywhere.

    Understanding is a state of mind that makes us feel more peaceful, compassionate, and connected, creating an attitude of “us” as opposed to a “me vs. you” mentality.

    When we proactively nurture an understanding mindset, we approach people with openness—even if they’re difficult—because we’re committed to always looking beneath the surface instead of making judgments and assumptions.

    We may not always know why someone acts the way they do. But an attitude of understanding does not actually require us to know the exact details of other people’s story.

    Understanding at its deepest level is just like love—an unconditional understanding of another’s humanness. We don’t have to know their story, but we can appreciate they’re going through the human experience, just like us.

    Cultivating an Attitude of Understanding

    There are various ways to cultivate understanding in your life, but I’d love to share a reflective exercise here to help you understand and connect more deeply to yourself and humanity.

    Think of a time when you lost it. A situation when you got angry or frustrated. Maybe a family member did something that really upset you, or maybe someone undermined you at work. The reason why does not matter here; you’re not trying to justify it, and you’re definitely not judging it as right or wrong.

    When you have that memory in mind, just feel it. Feel the sensations in your body—the intensity, the heat, or the thoughts and emotions that come with it. If it’s uncomfortable, that’s okay.

    Don’t try and change it. Just feel it.

    As you feel it, notice that in that moment you were unable to maintain peace inside yourself.

    We can’t be at peace inside while reacting with anger.

    I’m not suggesting there should be a suppression of anger in any way. This is about recognizing the truth of what’s happening inside us when we react with anger. When it happens unconsciously there’s nothing we can do about it—the result being we act mindlessly. But when we consciously pay attention, we deepen our self-awareness, and this gives us the opportunity to choose how we act.

    I had an experience at a coffee shop where I was returning my drink because they’d made the wrong one. When I told the woman at the cashier they’d made the wrong order she was quite rude, and told me bluntly, “That’s what you ordered!”

    It caught me by surprise. Her attitude made me feel like I was being accused of something I didn’t do. I could feel myself getting angry and ready to defend myself.

    I felt a wave of intensity come up inside me.

    As I was about to react and get into an argument with her, there was a moment where instead of feeling my anger, I could feel she was stressed. Something was bothering her, even before our interaction. I don’t know what it was, but it was enough for me to pause, reflect, and understand that we often don’t know what’s causing someone to act the way they do. We can never know what’s happened in their lives just before we began interacting with them.

    There are so many different reasons why someone might be stressed or upset—an argument or breakup, chronic back pain, the death of a loved one, or inability to pay their mortgage to name a few possible explanations.

    That moment of understanding her human nature allowed me to let go of my reaction. I’d taken her reaction personally, and it put me in a state of “you vs. me” where I was ready to fight to defend myself. And I would have felt quite justified in doing so because I felt falsely accused. But if I had, it would’ve just been me reacting to her reaction, and we likely would have ended up in an argument.

    Reaction versus reaction = conflict.

    The world is already so full of conflict. If we want to create more peace in the world, we have to choose not to take things personally and instead respond with understanding, compassion, connection, and peace.

    I’m not suggesting it’s easy, but I believe moments like these offer an opportunity to live from our heart when a natural reaction is conflict.

    For me, in this case, the shift to understanding opened my heart and created a sense of peace and connection to the woman.

    She must have felt it on some level, because without me pushing back at her with my own reaction, she also softened. Something dropped, and she simply asked the barista to make me a new beverage.

    Whatever was bothering her before was still there, but I could feel she wasn’t projecting it outward onto me.

    A moment of understanding can change everything.

    The World Needs More Love (Understanding)

    We often judge or complain about other people’s actions, but if we can pause and be honest with ourselves, we’ll realize we often do something of a similar nature ourselves.

    Everyone has different life stories and traumas that condition their unique personality, but we all experience moments when we’re unable to maintain peace inside, so even though we may not know someone’s exact story, we’re still capable of understanding.

    Instead of wasting our energy judging or complaining about others, we can put ourselves in their shoes and understand that we struggle with similar emotional challenges. This allows us to be more present and compassionate, cultivate deeper self-awareness, and connect on a human level.

    Imagine a world where more people chose understanding and truth rather than reaction and conflict.

    But ultimately imagining it is not enough; it’s a good start, but we need to act. We need to live and engage life from our heart.

    “Understanding is love’s other name…”

    “Understanding is an avenue into love. It’s also an expression of love in action. When we enter into understanding we are entering into love… and “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ~Jimi Hendrix

    What kind of a world do you want to live in?

    Will you choose understanding instead of reaction today?

  • Our Odd Culture of Over-Sharing and the Quest to Be Relevant

    Our Odd Culture of Over-Sharing and the Quest to Be Relevant

    “Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

    We show off our best moments—another sunshine shot from the beach, big smiles, cocktails and all. We try to be controversial. We ride the wave of the latest trend, showing we’re ‘on point’ and ‘in the know.’ We follow in the slipstream of something clever or enlightened someone else has said, rewording a little as if it’s now ours to own.

    We hit send. We repeat.

    As social creatures we all have a desire to be social, it’s literally built into our DNA. However, this modern-day version of social is a strange beast. We’ve developed an odd culture of over-sharing. For many of us, this version of social has also become something of a strange quest to be relevant.

    The ‘social’ tools that allow us to do this are increasing—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram… the list goes on. They’re getting easier to use. Easier to update. Easier to navigate. Easier to integrate into our day. So much so, they’re becoming a constant part of our days rather than something we use infrequently. They’re no longer seen as something we could be using, but rather something we must be seen to use.

    The pull is strong, and getting ever stronger.

    The transition has been swift and shows no sign of slowing. If anything, it’s likely to accelerate as the tooling becomes ever more addictive. And make no mistake, it is built to be exactly that.

    This culture shift is leading to some peculiar behavior. The young, and not so young, can be found obsessively ‘checking in’ to the online world, while checking out of the place they’re in right now.

    What’s This Really All About?

    Can we no longer just savor the wonderful meal that’s in front of us without taking multiple pictures, sharing, and hashtagging to oblivion?

    Can we not be present in beautiful surroundings without feeling the need to ‘check in’ and let our ‘friends’ know exactly what we’re up to?

    I do it, I’m pretty sure you do it too. The question is, why do we do it?

    Is it a sense of being relevant we seek? If so, can we not find our sense of self and relevance in other, dare I say, more meaningful ways?

    Wouldn’t spending our time and energy invested in meaningful work, trying to solve interesting challenges, give us more of a feeling of relevance than the fleeting endorphin rush of a picture shared on Facebook?

    What about being of service to others? Surely this is an area that offers us many opportunities to feel relevant and like we are making a real difference in some small but meaningful way.

    Is part of the reason we seek the mini-dopamine hit we get when we receive a ‘like’ on our latest picture shared online because we struggle to stay present in what we are doing right now offline? Perhaps that’s an indication we should try to find something else (offline) that does hold our attention, rather than seeking escape in the digital world reflexively. Would this not give us more back?

    Balancing the Tension (A Personal Example)

    In no way do I wish to delude you into thinking I’m immune to the pull of this behavior.

    I have, and continue to, leverage social tools—mainly to publicize my writing and books. I will often share an inspiring quote (from someone else most often) and the odd peak into what I’m up to as well.

    Over the years, I’ve gone through times when I’ve picked up my phone a little too much to share and/or check in. As a direct result, I’ve missed out on the magic of the moment in front of me, and have even been negligent of the people that mean most to me by not giving them my full attention when they needed it.

    I’ve become much more aware of this, and try to fight it, but the pull is still strong.

    Some useful habits that have helped me personally include applying constraints to what I use and how often I allow myself to use it.

    For example, while I have tried pretty much all the social platforms at some point in time, I have now settled on using Twitter almost exclusively for my writing-related updates and Facebook for less frequent social sharing.

    I also use both tools, and Instagram (although I have no account as of writing), to follow some people I admire and appreciate. Not all of these are people I know directly, but all add something to my life through their work and words. They are inspirations. I am very selective in the feeds I do choose to follow.

    I also apply constraints to when I check in. I try to give myself a few small pockets of time through the course of the day or week where I can share a tweet, or check what my feed (of people I follow) is up to. Otherwise, I try to stay out.

    I try to objectively look at what I am sharing and ask myself an important question: Why am I sharing this?

    If it’s to bolster my ego or show off even, maybe I’d be better off not sharing.

    If it’s to be of service in some small way, maybe that’s a good reason to share.

    If it’s to share something I’m excited about, maybe that’s okay as well.

    Maybe it’s even okay to publicize some of my work, as long as that does not slip into heavy-handed sales pitches (we all hate those).

    I find it helps to ask myself if, subconsciously, there’s something deeper I’m seeking by sharing—for example, an emotional connection, the feeling of being seen and valued, the desire to feel special. Sometimes I just feel the very human need to be appreciated.

    What all of this comes down to is trying to be mindful. Thinking intrinsically, and also extrinsically, about why we do what we do and the impact our behavior may have. This of course, is easily said but not so easy to do. It’s how we should be living our lives, with mindfulness.

    Strange Times

    There is a malfunction. Over-sharing is not the best kind of sharing. Sometimes when we try hard to connect with other people we lose our connection to ourselves. And even worse, when we chase an audience (and their ‘likes’), we inevitably end up performing instead of simply being ourselves.

    And then there’s the impact on the people we’re sharing with: Bombarding our friends with our opinions might not be all that friendly when you think about it, especially when it leads to heated debate.

    These are strange times. We have truly wonderful technology at our fingertips that we are choosing to use in some not-so-wonderful ways. We should be more connected than ever, but there is actually a real disconnect brewing.

    Our lazy and misinformed online habits can even slip into our real-world encounters. We talk in text-speak, we look for our platform of relevance, we tell anyone that cares how busy (and, by proxy, important) we are.

    Isn’t this all sliding a little toward the ridiculous?

    Is this any way to live our precious lives?

    A Call to Action

    This isn’t an anti-technology, or even an anti-social media, piece. We can use and enjoy both if we choose to. This is a prod at our obsessive need to be heard, in a world that is only going to get louder and more crowded. A poke at what can only become a race to the bottom.

    We can choose to walk a different path.

    We can be more selective in what we share, how we share it, and whom we share it with. We can think longer and harder before we hit send or ‘check in.’ We can get back in touch with the beauty and purity of being present in this moment, with what and who is actually in front of us.

    Let’s reconnect the dots on what it means to be relevant.

    Does the number of likes online really count for anything meaningful in the grand scheme of things, or are there better measures of a life well lived?

    What about committing to being a better lover, a better friend, a better neighbor? What about trying to leave positive footprints in this world with acts of kindness? What about trying to find our point of highest contribution through our work and the way we act?

    Let’s think and act bigger. Let’s live bigger. Let’s leverage the wonderful technology around us in new, interesting, and useful ways.

    Let us function optimally by sharing appropriately and being happy with our place in the world. Let us be happy and content that we are already relevant enough.

  • My Favorite Tip to Ease the Pain of Grief

    My Favorite Tip to Ease the Pain of Grief

    “It’s also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that’s sitting right here right now…with its aches and its pleasures…is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.” ~Pema Chodron

    Many people like to think of grief as an emotional experience. It’s something that dominates your internal, emotional space, and that’s it.

    But it doesn’t take long when you’re in the thick of grief to experience grief that isn’t emotional at all.

    You feel heavy. Like there’s a giant weight on your shoulders.

    You feel like your legs are weak and shaking from trying to stand after the ground has been pulled out from underneath you.

    It’s hard to breathe because it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you.

    You feel heartbroken. Like there is literally a hole punched in your chest. Your grief is as much physical as it is emotional.

    Each of the times you experience intense emotional grief you have also been a human being, in your body, experiencing what’s going on.

    When I started to recognize my own body as part of my grieving, I discovered my favorite way to ease the pain from grief for myself and for people around me.

    You see, when I was fourteen I started high school two weeks after my dad died.

    As I walked into that school building, everyone knew what happened, but at the same time I felt like I had no allies. No one that understood. That knew my dad, or that knew where I was coming from.

    The first couple months I just tried to get by.

    I did the motions.

    Didn’t ask too many questions.

    Nodded and shook my head at the appropriate times, making sure each day I came back with the worksheets filled out and ready to turn in.

    I was like a machine.

    My school counselor checked in with me each week to see how things were going. I saw her in homeroom every Tuesday.

    “How’s it going, Kirsten?” she’d ask.

    “It’s so hard,” I repeated again and again.

    So when she sat me down in her office after the first term, she braced herself for the worst. She’d gathered all the paperwork and people she needed to begin a full blown intervention. And then she looked at my grades.

    “Kirsten! What are you talking about?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “You have excellent grades. What do you mean ‘school is hard’?”

    “That’s just it. It’s one thing to fill out a worksheet everyday (this is what I now call “showing signs of life”), it’s another thing to actually do this school thing. I barely feel like I get settled in one class before the bell rings for the next one. I can’t switch my mind from thinking about geometry to immediately conjugate Spanish verbs. My world runs in slow motion, and this place doesn’t slow down.”

    “What can I do to help you?” she asked.

    “I don’t know.”

    Because I didn’t know.

    That’s totally normal not to know.

    Later that week, I found out from my mom that all my teachers had met about how they could help me, and they offered me an extra set of textbooks to keep at home so I didn’t have to carry around heavy books all day.

    “Why would I want that?” I told Mom. I didn’t want any special treatment.

    “Just try it, Kirsten,” my mom encouraged.

    So because she’s my mom, I listened.

    And it was the BEST. THING. EVER.

    On the physical level, it literally lightened the weight on my shoulders. It reinforced the true reality that just showing up to class was more than enough.

    It meant that just being there was all I needed to do, and the rest of the stuff—the logistics—were already taken care of.

    So when you know you’re going to have an emotionally intense day, what’s one thing you could do to lighten your load?

    Maybe it’s setting a timer when you’re cooking so you don’t have to remember how many minutes the pasta has been on the stove. Lighten your mental load so you have space to be with your thoughts.

    Maybe it’s resetting expectations your family has of you, being honest with them about what you are not available to do so you can use that open space for yourself.

    Whatever it is, think about the little things that cause you stress and use those as a source of inspiration for what actions will help.

    The other key part of the textbooks gesture is that it was a gesture that recreated trust.

    You see, in that one small gesture of giving me an extra set of textbooks, my teachers showed me they trusted me.

    They trusted me with these expensive things and they trusted that I would take their gift with respect.

    All the while, I didn’t know if I could trust myself.

    What was even left of me?

    It felt like I was all grief and no me.

    When someone, a whole group of someones who I respected, said with their action, “We trust you,” it was the first time in a long time I was extended a gentle invitation to trust my community again.

    I didn’t have to feel up for every social event or trust the whole world yet, but I could trust my teachers.

    Suddenly, I had a whole group of undercover allies.

    None of the other students knew I had been given “special treatment.” And each day I walked from class to class to class, I knew there was at least one person in the room I could trust.

    That one action was more powerful than any amount of words my teachers said to me over the entire year.

    Here’s what I want you to take away, even if you can’t resolve the pain from a feeling: Try to alleviate some of the physical burden. By doing so, you are creating space for you to heal that would never have occurred if you focus only on words, wondering “What do I say? How can I talk about grief?”

    Pay attention, listen to your body.

    Even if you can’t take away the emotions right now, what can you do to relieve the physical burden?

    How can you relax the gripping around your heart?

    What can you do to release the physical tension in your muscles?

    It might not take away everything, but just a little something can make a world of difference.

  • What I Did When I Felt Lost and Purposeless

    What I Did When I Felt Lost and Purposeless

    “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”  ~Lao Tzu

    About a year ago, I came across an e-course titled “Find Your Purpose in 15 Minutes.” I found this course during a time when purpose was something I was actively looking for. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure what to do next, and without anything to work toward I was looking for a new motivation to pull me forward.

    The e-course I stumbled upon represents a society increasingly concerned with fulfilling its destiny. There is an unsettling pressure, particularly from the self-help community, to live a life of purpose. And when I couldn’t find my destiny, let alone fulfill it, a sense of failure washed over me.

    Now, I cannot tell you whether it is possible to find your purpose in 15 minutes, because I never purchased the e-course. But I can say it is entirely possible to find meaning in a purposeless life.

    The Appeal of Purpose

    Purpose can provide an answer to the question “Why am I here?” It can give you a sense of direction and drive forward in life.

    Some people might find purpose in meaningful work, using their skills and talent to serve the needs of the world. Others find purpose in raising a family, caring for loved ones, or being an active member of their community.

    Having a purpose will make you feel like you are doing what you’re supposed to do. Like you are living out your life’s mission and making a contribution.

    In a world where most of our basic human needs are met, I suppose it’s no wonder that we are now looking to become more deeply fulfilled. When you no longer have to struggle for mere survival, it’s only natural that you pause and ask yourself what it’s all for.

    The Problem with Purpose

    Living a purposeful life sounds wonderful, and I’m not here to devalue anyone’s purposeful existence. Rather, I would like to remind those that haven’t found purpose yet that life can be meaningful and fulfilling without it.

    The problem with purpose is not at all the actual purpose, but rather our intense attachment to finding it. Doing work we love, contributing to the world in a meaningful way, and leaving our mark has become such a prized endeavor that I can often sense a deep existential worry creep into conversations with my peers.

    For example, I’ve noticed that many of my friends feel angsty when they don’t know what to do next in life or when they aren’t sure if their current endeavors are what they’re meant to do. I too have felt uncomfortable with the fact that I am not serving the world in big and meaningful ways.

    We seem to collectively feel that if we don’t have some grand end-goal to fulfill we are somehow failing at life. And with this, we are passing on the opportunity to create a meaningful life without having a purpose.

    The Alternative to Purpose

    This is where I would like to offer an alternative. Not to purpose itself, but to the glorification of purpose and the frantic gold-rush that we have embarked on to find that one thing in life that will bring us meaning and fulfillment.

    I do believe that living a meaningful life is important. Having no sense of why you are even on this planet can feel restless at best and nihilist at worst. But instead of anchoring yourself in finding purpose, I suggest you anchor yourself in values instead.

    Personal values are guides that can help you navigate the road map of life, even if you don’t know where you’re heading. More importantly, they’re a lot easier to find than purpose.

    Think of a few people you admire. What values do they exemplify? Courage, empathy, ambition? If you look up to anyone, it’s most likely not because of their achievements, but rather their character, which has helped them reach those achievements. What in their character would you like to improve in yours?

    Personal values allow you to live anchored in what is meaningful to you, whether that’s serving others, being brave, or taking radical responsibility for your life. Values, unlike purpose, allow you to infuse meaning into every present moment rather than only finding meaning in one noble cause.

    If you value kindness, for example, then living from a place of kindness can transform mundane daily activities into opportunities to be kind. A boring job can become a playground where you practice your kindness. And an annoying family member becomes your opportunity to show up with compassion and consideration.

    My Journey with Purposelessness

    I used to navigate life with a sense of urgency, always moving forward in an attempt to fulfill my mission in life. I would set goal after goal, convinced that once I had achieved them a sense of meaning would arise.

    But as I worked through the common milestones in life, the meaningfulness never came. So I would continue to set new goals, certain that I just hadn’t found the one thing yet that would make me feel whole.

    When I was stuck at a major crossroads last year, I slowly shifted my focus from finding my purpose to adding meaning to the everyday. A year later, I still don’t know what I am meant to do in life, but I am content to live in the question for now. To sit with purposelessness.

    In the meantime, I find meaning in cultivating my character by living out my values. Personally, I value courage, tenderness, and depth at the moment, so I use everyday activities and challenges to put these values to practice.

    The value of tenderness, for example, encourages me to soften my inner self and stay open to life in the face of hardships. I try to cultivate this part of my character by always being compassionate with others, particularly those who challenge me. I also practice tenderness through self-compassion, allowing myself to be weak and vulnerable at times when staying strong is not the compassionate option.

    I live a life of courage not only by doing things that scare me, but also by truly listening to what my heart wants and speaking my truth. Nurturing courage has faced me with some nerve-racking situations, such as quitting a job that no longer fulfilled me, but rising to those situations has given me the strength to forge a life that feels true to who I am.

    Lastly, I try to cultivate a sense of depth in my life. Rather than scrolling through Instagram, I often spend hours getting my teeth stuck in an interesting book. And rather than traveling the world, I have made it my mission to revisit old favorites over and over again. To get into the nooks and crannies of a city I know well, sucking out the last little marrow from its foundations, offers me a deeper way of traveling not found in weekend getaways or exotic backpacking trips.

    Nurturing these values has given me the chance to see each and every moment as an opportunity to grow and develop my character. While I’m figuring out the why for my life, values keep me on track with the how. And, unlike purpose, I can swap out and play with my set of values as much as I’d like.

    Perhaps one day I will stumble upon my purpose. Or perhaps I will look back on my life in old age and finally recognize that I had been living my purpose all along, and finally understand what it was all for. But for now I am simply curious to experience life as it unfolds, finding meaning along the way by anchoring myself in values.

    If you’re currently feeling a little lost in life, then know that it is okay to sit with that feeling. Know that it is okay to not fix away this feeling in 15 minutes. And know that if you simply show up every day with an open mind and unfold your soul into the tapestry of possibilities, your path will be full of meaning and wonderment, even without that illusive thing called purpose.

  • When Things Go Wrong, I Remember This Day

    When Things Go Wrong, I Remember This Day

    “There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.” ~Richard Bach

    I’d wanted to visit Alaska nearly my entire life. I’d always wanted to see the vast landscape, majestic scenery, and awesome wildlife. So as a single, middle-aged mom with two boys aged fourteen and twelve, we went.

    It was going to be an epic trip—travel from our home in the Midwest to Anchorage, a few days to Denali and back, then down to the coast and a cruise all the way to Vancouver. So much to see, and I was finally there! I was thrilled to experience it all with my boys.

    The first few days of the trip exceeded my expectations. The train ride to Talkeetna was amazing, the lodge we stayed in was perfect, and one clear morning, we got to see Denali! I could practically hear the angels singing when the clouds parted and the mountain was visible.

    After the Denali leg of the trip, we returned to Anchorage to catch a bus to Seward, where we were going to board our cruise ship and head down the coast for the wonders ahead. We had eaten breakfast and were supposed to have lunch at a wildlife rescue center, and then board our ship. It was a lovely sunny day.

    But only an hour or so outside Anchorage, all the traffic on the two-lane highway came to a dead stop. Right there in the middle of nowhere, with the Cook Inlet on our right and the mountains on our left, we were stopped along with all the other traffic in both directions on the highway.

    The bus driver learned there had been a terrible accident up ahead that had involved seven vehicles. Some people were transported by helicopter back to Anchorage with serious injuries; some died. It was truly horrible.

    After the first hour of being stopped, passengers on our bus started getting anxious about how long we’d be stuck and if the cruise boat would leave without us, ruining our vacations.

    The driver told us the traffic jam was many miles long. My kids were hungry for lunch and starting to get stressed about missing the boat. I knew they were trying to figure out my reaction, and they’d probably catch my mood. If I was upset, angry, or anxious, they would be too.

    I realized at that moment that the universe had sent me a test! I think I actually chuckled to myself.

    I’d been interested in spirituality since my youth, reading and studying and pondering a lot. But I hadn’t expected to be tested in front of my kids on my long-awaited dream vacation. I decided in that moment to make some choices in accordance with all that I’d learned, and here’s how they played out.

    1. Acceptance of what is

    I told my kids that I didn’t know for sure if we’d miss our cruise, but that even if we did, we’d find a way to salvage the vacation. They were hungry and bored—their cell phones didn’t work out here. What should we do, Mom? How are we going to pass the time?

    I told them I was going to talk to people, and they should, too. They resisted at first. What will we talk about? We don’t know these people. But we were allowed to get out of the bus and stand beside it with the others, so we did. Wow was it beautiful there—water glimmering with sunlight, green fields in front of gorgeous mountains. And miles of vehicles standing still!

    2. Gratitude

    After a few hours, the wreckers started coming by on the opposite side of the road carrying the crushed vehicles back to Anchorage. One was flattened; another had its roof missing. Awful. My boys and I said a silent prayer for all the people who had been in the cars, and gave thanks that we weren’t among them. None of those people expected their day would end this way.

    3. Calm

    As the hours passed, people were getting hungry and thirsty and more anxious. The tour company sent water, and we had a working restroom on the bus, so we were okay. The boys were hungry, but we’d eat again later.

    We heard stories about people on the other busses yelling at their drivers, threatening, cursing, and acting badly. No one on our bus was doing that, which was another reason to be grateful.

    Before it got dark, our driver told us the cruise line was holding the boat because eleven busses were stuck in the traffic jam. We truly had nothing more to worry about.

    It got dark out and the moon was shining when the bus started moving again. We had been stopped for ten hours! The boys fell asleep on the bus, and we finally got to the boat at midnight. They had a big buffet for all who had been stuck and we were on our way.

    Sometimes when we anticipate something for a very long time, it turns out much differently that we’d imagined. I’m so glad I recognized a test when it presented itself. Now whenever I find myself being tested, I try to apply the lessons that served me so well in a traffic jam in the most breathtaking spot you could ever be stranded.

    Acceptance, gratitude, calm. Embrace the situation for what it is. Find something to appreciate. Keep things in perspective. Things often aren’t as bad as they seem, and even when a lot is beyond our control, we can always control our attitude and how we respond.

  • 3 Negative Inner Voices and How to Challenge Them

    3 Negative Inner Voices and How to Challenge Them

    “Beautify your inner dialogue. Beautify your inner world with love light and compassion. Life will be beautiful.” ~Amit Ray

    There is no better way to feel good about yourself than changing your internal dialogue. Yes, you have the power to change your inner voice. You can choose to speak to yourself in a positive way or a negative way.

    Stop all activity for a moment.

    Be still. Notice what your inner voice is saying. Do you hear anything? If not, ask your inner voice this question: How does it feel to be still?

    Listen.

    Is your inner voice declaring that you are too busy to be chillin’? Or is it supporting you, happy to be playing this hanging-out-and-noticing game?

    Get to know your inner voice.

    Over the next few days stop and listen to your inner dialogue. Especially notice what your inner voice says as you are about to make a decision. Does it say, “I think, I can, I think I can” or does it say, “There is no way, I can’t do that, I can’t do that.”

    Powerful Lessons from a Little Children’s Book

    I hung out with a two-and-a-half-year-old the other day. He wanted to read a book and brought me The Little Engine that Could, by Watty Piper.

    This book was read to me as a child, and I heard the voice in my head chant, “I think I can, I think I can” as I opened the book’s cover. The part I didn’t remember was the lessons of the trains.

    As I read this little children’s book written way back in the 1930’s I felt the power of the lessons and how they apply to my own self-speak today.

    The Little Engine That Could

    The story is about a little train who wants to bring presents over the mountain to children who are patiently and excitedly awaiting their gifts.

    However, on the way to the town, the little engine breaks down. The toys are very upset, and one of them, a funny little clown, sets off to find another train to help them.

    Lessons on Self-Talk from Four Trains

    1. The first train has a Shiny New Engine.

    The Shiny New Engine didn’t want to help the little toy train because he was too special, too proud. He looked down on the little train and said a resounding “NO.”

    I thought of my shiny arrogance that I’d polished for years. I’d told myself I was too special, too important to waste my time and attention on certain tasks and people.

    Even though I’ve worked on this character defect, I know I have some of this self-speak going on inside of me. I noticed it the other night when I went out to dinner with a friend who brought along a friend of hers.

    The woman appeared to be in her sixties with huge fake boobs. She dressed in a tight, sparkly sundress that emphasized her boobs and wore high heels with gold doodads pasted on. She talked about how her love life was filled with younger men who were her “F–k buddies.”

    The moment she said this, I felt superior and stopped listening to what she shared. The next two hours I spent wishing I was at home watching Netflix. My inner voice said she was desperate.

    What did I miss out on? She could have been a kindhearted, fascinating person, even if she dressed provocatively and made choices I wouldn’t make. Where was my compassion or at least my curiosity?

    2. Next comes a Big Engine.

    The Big Engine says he is too important and won’t “pull the likes of you.”

    That got me thinking of my judgments. How do I judge others? Have I missed out on opportunities and connections because my over-inflated ego tells me that I’m too important to get involved with that person or situation?

    My lesson on this came from an Alanon meeting. Well, actually, two separate meetings.

    I rushed into my regular Alanon meeting a bit late and sat down in the only open chair. Once I arranged myself I noticed the man I was sitting next to had a scraggly beard, his clothes looked like they’d been slept in, and he smelled a bit. I scooted as far as I could from him in my chair and held my nose in the air.

    When he shared in the meeting I chose not to listen. My inner voice said, “He has nothing to share that could be of value.” I knew that at the end of the meeting I’d have to hold his hand. My inner voice said, “No way.” So I slipped out right before the closing of the meeting.

    A week later I arrived at my Alanon meeting on time and sat beside a good-looking man in a neat business suit. He piqued my interest. I’d never seen him at a meeting before, and I always appreciated a good-looking, well-groomed man.

    When this good-looking man shared, I listened intently and nodded my head in agreement with much of what he said. My inner voice said “yes” to holding this man’s hand at the end of the meeting. As we grabbed hands, I gave his an extra firm squeeze as my way of saying, “I’m glad you are here.”

    As we released our handhold, I turned to the nice-looking man and said, “My name is Michelle, welcome.” I’ll never forget how he looked at me with his deep blue eyes and asked, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I nodded my head “no,” thinking to myself I’d surely remember him if we’d met before.

    He said, “I was here last week, a bit disheveled, as my best friend who suffered from alcoholism had killed himself. This Alanon meeting was recommended by my therapist to get help and support. I was so distraught I wasn’t eating, sleeping, or taking care of myself. I noticed you wanted nothing to do with me.”

    It dawned on me as he spoke that he was the homeless-looking man from the week before. I turned bright red, mumbled an apology, and ran out of the room.

    I never saw the man again, but I do think of him often and consider him an angel sent to stop me from my “I’m better than” inner voice.

    3. The Rusty Old Engine comes next.

    The Rusty Old Engine sighed and said he could not. He was too tired and weary.

    I personally am not familiar with this inner voice. My inner voice tells me I can do anything and handle most things that come my way, to a fault. But I’ve watched others run this internal narrative. One of them is Jean.

    Jean was a vibrant, gorgeous woman who owned a successful advertising company. When the advertising business began to shift away from print toward the Internet, I watched as she became defeated. She told me she was too old to make the changes she needed to make.

    Her business began to fail, and as it did Jean failed as well. She stopped doing her movement practices, gained weight, and subsequently had two hip replacements. Her financial picture grew dim, and Jean was forced to sell her beautiful condo. She gave up on the life she’d so artfully created for herself over decades.

    I saw Jean a couple of years ago. She was a shell of her former self and shared she felt old and tired.

    4. Lastly comes the Little Blue Engine.

    Chugging merrily along. The dolls and toys didn’t have to ask this train for help. She asks them, “What’s wrong?” As she hears of their plight, she tells them she isn’t very big and has never been over the mountain.

    She thought of what the kids would be missing if this little train didn’t bring the gifts to the boys and girls on the other side. So she said, “I think I can, I think I can.” It was a supreme effort, but she hooked up to the train, began chugging along, and kept going all the way over the mountain by saying to herself over and over again, “I think I can.”

    I know this voice.

    I recently changed my business model from brick and mortar, which I knew I could do, to an online business, which required a supreme effort. I’ve gotten up every morning for over a year chanting, “I think I can.” I’ve put my head down and chugged through twelve-hour days, and you know what? I did it. I made it over that mountain. My online business is going strong.

    Inner Voice Lessons from The Little Engine That Could:

    1. Listen for your arrogant inner voice that tells you that you are better than anyone else. Tell yourself to remain curious and compassionate.
    2. Listen for your inner judgments. Say to yourself, “I’m grateful for the people that I meet; they might teach me something.”
    3. Listen to your inner voice of defeat that tells you that you are too tired. Change that voice to “I’m not handed anything I can’t handle.”
    4. Take the next adventure you encounter and say to yourself, “I think I can. I think I can.”