Tiny Buddha

Tag: wisdom

  • Beyond Coping: How to Heal Generational Trauma with Breathwork

    Beyond Coping: How to Heal Generational Trauma with Breathwork

    “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.” ~Akshay Dubey

    The realization came to me during a chaotic day at the Philadelphia public school where I worked as a counselor.

    A young student sat across from me, her body language mirroring anxiety patterns I knew all too well—the slightly hunched shoulders, shallow breathing, and watchful eyes scanning for threats that weren’t there. She responded to a minor conflict with a teacher as though she were in genuine danger.

    Something clicked into place as I guided her through a simple breathing exercise. The patterns I saw in this child weren’t just individual responses to stress—they were inherited responses. Just as I had inherited similar patterns from my mother, and she from hers.

    At that moment, looking at this young girl, I saw myself, my mother, and generations of women in my family who had the same physical responses to authority, conflict, and uncertainty.

    And I realized that the breathing techniques I had been teaching these children—techniques I had originally learned to manage my own anxiety—were actually addressing something much more profound: generational trauma stored in the body.

    The School That Taught the Teacher

    My decade as a school counselor in the Philadelphia School District shaped me in ways I never anticipated. Every day, I worked with children carrying the weight of various traumas—community violence, family instability, systemic inequities, and the subtle but powerful inheritance of generational stress responses.

    I came armed with my training in psychology, cognitive techniques, and traditional counseling approaches. Helping these children understand their emotions and develop coping strategies would be enough.

    In many ways, it helped. But something was missing.

    I noticed that no matter how much cognitive understanding we developed, many children’s bodies continued telling different stories. Their nervous systems remained locked in stress responses, and no amount of talking or understanding seemed to shift them completely.

    The same was true for me. Despite my professional training and personal therapy, certain situations would still trigger physical anxiety responses that felt beyond my control—particularly interactions with authority figures or high-pressure social situations.

    The patterns were subtle but persistent. My voice would shift slightly, and my breathing would become shallow. My authentic self would recede, replaced by a careful, hypervigilant version of myself—one I had learned from watching my mother navigate similar situations throughout my childhood.

    The Missing Piece

    Everything changed when I discovered therapeutic breathwork—not just as a temporary calming technique but as a pathway to releasing trauma stored in the body.

    While I had been teaching simplified breathing exercises to students for years, my experience with deeper breathwork practices revealed something profound: the body stores trauma in ways that cognitive approaches alone cannot access.

    My first intensive breathwork session revealed this truth with undeniable clarity. As I followed the breathing pattern—deep, connected breaths without pausing between inhale and exhale—my body began responding in ways my conscious mind couldn’t have predicted.

    First came waves of tingling sensation across my hands and face. Then tears that weren’t connected to any specific memory. Finally, a deep release of tension I hadn’t even realized I was carrying—tension that felt ancient, as though it had been with me far longer than my own lifetime.

    By the session’s end, I felt a lightness and presence that no amount of traditional therapy had ever provided. Something had shifted at a level beyond thoughts and stories.

    Bringing the Breath Back to School

    This personal revelation transformed my work as a school counselor. I began integrating age-appropriate breathwork into my sessions with students, particularly those showing signs of trauma responses.

    The results were remarkable. Children who had struggled to regulate their emotions began finding moments of calm, and students who had been locked in freeze or fight responses during stress began developing the capacity to pause before reacting.

    One young girl, whose anxiety around academic performance had been severely limiting her potential, explained it best: “It’s like my worry is still there, but now there’s space around it. I can see it without it taking over everything.”

    She described precisely what I had experienced: the creation of space between stimulus and response, the fundamental shift from being controlled by inherited patterns to having a choice in how we respond.

    However, the most profound insights came from observing the parallels between what I witnessed in these children and what I had experienced in my family system.

    The Patterns We Inherit

    Through both my professional work and personal healing journey, I came to understand generational trauma in a new way.

    We inherit not just our parents’ genes but also their nervous system patterns—their unconscious responses to stress, conflict, authority, and connection. These patterns are transmitted not through stories or explicit teachings but through subtle, nonverbal cues that our bodies absorb from earliest childhood.

    I recognized how my mother’s anxiety around authority figures had silently shaped my own responses. Her tendency to become small in certain situations also became my reflexive pattern, and her shallow breathing during stress became my default response.

    These weren’t conscious choices—they were inherited survival strategies passed down through generations of women in my family.

    The most sobering realization is that despite my professional training and conscious intentions, I had unconsciously modeled these same patterns for the children I worked with.

    This understanding shifted everything. Healing wasn’t just about managing my anxiety anymore—it was about transforming a lineage.

    The Three Dimensions of Permanent Healing

    Through both professional practice and personal experience, I’ve come to understand that permanently healing generational trauma requires addressing three dimensions simultaneously:

    1. The Mind: Traditional therapy excels here, helping us understand our patterns and create cognitive insights. But for many trauma survivors, especially those carrying generational patterns, this isn’t enough.

    2. The Body: Our nervous systems carry the imprint of trauma, creating automatic responses that no amount of rational understanding can override. Somatic approaches like breathwork provide direct access to these stored patterns.

    3. The Energy Field is the subtlest but most profound dimension. Our energy carries information and patterns that affect how we move through the world, often beneath our conscious awareness.

    Most healing approaches address only one or two of these dimensions. Talk therapy targets the mind. Some somatic practices address the body. Few approaches integrate all three.

    Breathwork is uniquely positioned to address all dimensions simultaneously, creating the conditions for permanent transformation rather than temporary management.

    Beyond Management to True Healing

    Working in Philadelphia’s schools, I saw firsthand the difference between management approaches and true healing.

    Management strategies—breathing techniques for immediate calming, emotional regulation tools, cognitive reframing—all had their place. They helped children function in challenging environments and gain more control over their responses.

    But management isn’t the same as healing.

    Management asks, “How can I feel better when these symptoms arise?”

    Healing asks, “What needs to be released so these symptoms no longer control me?”

    The difference is subtle but profound. Management requires effort and vigilance, while healing creates freedom and new possibilities.

    This distinction became clear as my breathwork practice deepened beyond simple management techniques to include practices specifically designed to release stored trauma from the nervous system.

    As this happened, I began noticing subtle but significant shifts in how I moved through both my professional and personal life—particularly in situations that had previously triggered anxiety.

    Interactions with school administrators became opportunities for authentic connection rather than anxiety triggers. Speaking at staff meetings no longer activated the old pattern of becoming small. My voice remained my own, regardless of who was in the room.

    I wasn’t just managing my anxiety anymore. I was healing it at its source.

    Practical Steps to Begin Your Own Breath Journey

    If you’re carrying the weight of generational patterns that no longer serve you, here are some ways to begin exploring breathwork as a healing tool:

    Start with gentle awareness.

    Simply notice your breathing patterns throughout the day, especially in triggering situations. Do you hold your breath during stress? Breathe shallowly? These are clues to your nervous system state.

    Practice conscious connected breathing.

    For five minutes daily, try breathing in and out through your mouth, connecting the inhale to the exhale without pausing. Keep the breath gentle but full.

    Notice without judgment.

    As you breathe, sensations, emotions, or memories may arise. Instead of analyzing them, simply notice them with curiosity.

    Create safety first.

    If you have complex trauma, work with a trauma-informed breathwork practitioner who can help you navigate the process safely.

    Trust your body’s wisdom.

    Your body knows how to release what no longer serves you. Sometimes, intellectual understanding comes after physical release, not before.

    Commit to consistency.

    Transformation happens through regular practice, not one-time experiences. Even five to ten minutes daily can create significant shifts over time.

    Breaking the Chain

    Perhaps the most profound lesson from my work in Philadelphia’s schools and my personal healing journey is this: We can break generational chains.

    The patterns of anxiety, hypervigilance, and trauma responses that have been passed down through generations are not our destiny. They can be recognized, released, and transformed for our benefit and those who come after us.

    I saw this truth reflected in the children I worked with. As they learned to recognize and release stress patterns through breathwork, they weren’t just managing symptoms—they were developing new neural pathways that could potentially interrupt generations of trauma responses.

    I experienced this truth personally, watching as my healing journey created ripples in my relationships and interactions.

    The anxiety patterns that had been silently passed down through generations of women in my family were being interrupted. The chain was breaking.

    Breathwork offers a profound gift: personal healing and the chance to transform a lineage.

    The chains of generational trauma are strong, but they’re not unbreakable. And in their breaking lies personal liberation and the possibility of a new inheritance for generations to come.

  • Your Nervous System Relaxes Around People Who…

    Your Nervous System Relaxes Around People Who…

  • How I Stopped Overthinking and Found Inner Peace

    How I Stopped Overthinking and Found Inner Peace

    “You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” ~Dan Millman

    For as long as I can remember, my mind has been a never-ending maze of what-ifs. What if I make the wrong decision? What if I embarrass myself? What if I fail? My brain worked overtime, analyzing every possibility, replaying past mistakes, and predicting every worst-case scenario.

    Overthinking wasn’t just a bad habit—it was a way of life. I’d spend hours second-guessing conversations, worrying about things beyond my control, and creating problems that didn’t even exist. It felt like my mind was running a marathon with no finish line, and no matter how exhausted I was, I couldn’t stop.

    But one day, I reached a breaking point. I was tired—tired of the mental noise, tired of feeling anxious, tired of living inside my own head instead of in the present moment. I knew I had to change.

    The Moment I Realized Overthinking Was Stealing My Peace

    It hit me during a late-night spiral. I had spent hours replaying a conversation, obsessing over whether I had said something wrong. My heart was racing, my stomach was in knots, and I couldn’t sleep.

    In that moment, I asked myself: Is any of this actually helping me?

    The answer was obvious. My overthinking had never solved anything. It had never prevented bad things from happening. It had only drained my energy and made me miserable.

    That night, I made a decision: I would stop letting my thoughts control me. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew I couldn’t keep living like this.

    How I Learned to Quiet My Mind

    Overcoming overthinking didn’t happen overnight. It took patience, practice, and a willingness to let go of control. But here are the key things that helped me find peace:

    1. I stopped believing every thought I had.

    For years, I assumed that if I thought something, it must be true. But I started noticing that most of my thoughts were just stories—worst-case scenarios, exaggerated fears, self-doubt.

    So I began questioning them. Is this thought a fact, or is it just my fear talking? More often than not, it was the latter.

    By learning to separate reality from the stories in my head, I loosened the grip overthinking had on me.

    2. I created a “worry window.”

    At first, I thought I needed to stop worrying completely, but that only made me stress more. Instead, I set aside a specific time each day (ten to fifteen minutes) when I allowed myself to worry as much as I wanted.

    Surprisingly, this helped a lot. Instead of overthinking all day, I trained my brain to contain my worries to one small part of the day. And most of the time, when my “worry window” came, I realized I didn’t even need it.

    3. I practiced “letting thoughts pass”

    One of the biggest shifts came when I stopped trying to force my thoughts away. Instead, I imagined them like clouds in the sky—passing through, but not something I had to hold onto.

    Whenever I noticed myself overthinking, I’d take a deep breath and say to myself: I see this thought, but I don’t have to engage with it. And then I’d let it go.

    4. I focused on the present moment.

    Overthinking is all about living in the past or the future. So, I started grounding myself in the present.

    Simple things helped:

    • Focusing on my breath when my mind started racing.
    • Noticing small details around me—how the sun felt on my skin, the sound of birds outside, the smell of my coffee.
    • Reminding myself: Right now, in this moment, everything is okay.

    The more I practiced this, the easier it became to step out of my mind and into my life.

    How Life Changed When I Stopped Overthinking

    I won’t pretend my mind is quiet 100% of the time. Thoughts still come, but they no longer control me.

    Now, instead of analyzing every possible outcome, I trust that I’ll handle whatever happens. Instead of reliving past mistakes, I remind myself that I am constantly learning and growing. Instead of worrying about what others think of me, I focus on how I feel about myself.

    Most importantly, I’ve found something I never thought was possible: peace.

    A Message for Anyone Struggling with Overthinking

    If you’re stuck in an endless cycle of overthinking, I want you to know this: You are not your thoughts.

    Your mind will always try to keep you safe by analyzing, predicting, and controlling. But you don’t have to engage with every thought that comes your way.

    Peace isn’t about never having anxious thoughts—it’s about learning to let them pass without letting them rule your life.

    And trust me, if I can do it, you can too.

    While these tools can be powerful, it’s also important to recognize that overthinking doesn’t always come from everyday anxiety. If your thoughts are tied to past trauma or feel too overwhelming to manage alone, please know there is no shame in seeking help. For those living with PTSD or deep emotional wounds, professional support from a therapist can offer safety, healing, and guidance tailored to your experience.

    You don’t have to go through it alone—and needing support doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.

  • I’ve Come to Realize…

    I’ve Come to Realize…

  • This Era Is Called

    This Era Is Called

  • 4 Ways to Get Better Sleep for Increased Spiritual Wellness

    4 Ways to Get Better Sleep for Increased Spiritual Wellness

    “Happiness in simplicity can be achieved with a flexible mindset and nine hours sleep each night.” ~Dalai Lama

    It happened again. I got up after being awake all night, wondering where I’d gone for the past nine hours. I remember laying my head on the pillow, exhausted, happy to finally close my burning eyes. My body settled sweetly into the mattress, and I thanked the universe for our heavenly bed.

    Just moments away from slumbering bliss, I said my prayers and did my usual practice of releasing energy from the day and honoring my blessings. For the moment, my mind was still and peaceful.

    I fell into a space between the dream state and wakefulness. A place I know well. It’s not necessarily a bad place to be, but when I’m in it, I’m fully aware of the fact I’m not sleeping; my brain isn’t in REM. I tried breathing exercises and meditation only to feel like I was ready to run a marathon. After a few hours of this, sleep anxiety crept in, bearing gifts of thoughts and frustration.

    The countdown of the hours until it would be time to get up began. The list of things I needed to do the following day danced in my mind like a marching band tooting its horn and ringing bells—because if I couldn’t sleep, somehow running through my to-do list felt productive. When the morning came, I was not the calm presence I aspire to be. The Tiny Buddha inside was napping.

    When I was a kid, I had no problem falling asleep on the bus, in class, watching TV… pretty much anywhere I could lay my head down and close my eyes. But as I’ve grown older, sleep hasn’t always been as accessible. In fact, with everything going on in the world over the past few years, sleep has become a modern-day luxury.

    As a spiritual seeker, I find that when I don’t get a good night of sleep, it’s harder to drop in for meditation. I’m more irritable. Less sharp. My intuition feels clouded. And my ability to focus on my goals and manifest my visions can be hindered.

    I wondered if I’d spend the rest of my life chasing sleep to catch up to my dreams.

    Then, I started talking to friends. They’re struggling too. Whether the problem is falling asleep or staying asleep, almost every person I talked to is suffering from some form of sleep deprivation. Is this a natural part of aging or an unspoken epidemic? Even my daughters in their early twenties wrestle with insomnia.

    These types of problems always make me ask, “What is the lesson here?” But as I started to look for answers, what became more interesting was the link between sleep and spirituality.

    As it turns out, there is a parallel between sleep quality and spiritual connection, which means prioritizing sleep hygiene is not only important for biological processes but for spiritual wellness.

    During sleep, the body repairs muscles, organs, and tissues. It also regulates hormones, detoxifies, and boosts the immune system. Sleep also bridges the conscious and subconscious mind. This allows us to process the experiences of our day, the emotions that may have arisen, and the spiritual insights that help us create meaning in our lives. Therefore, prioritizing sleep hygiene can be an act of spiritual self-care that nurtures the mind’s capacity for deeper spiritual insights and greater overall wellness.

    It’s clear that sleep hygiene is extremely important both to our biological and spiritual processes, but let’s take a closer look into the sleep-spirituality connection.

    If we are sleep deprived, we are not thinking clearly, and, therefore, we are less connected to our intuition, which is directly linked to our imagination. Studies have shown that a lack of sleep can have a major impact on our ability to access creativity and problem-solving skills, so it makes sense that struggling in these areas has a negative influence on our spiritual well-being. So, what can we do to ease this struggle that many of us share?

    4 Ways to Improve Your Sleep Hygiene for Increased Spiritual Wellness

    Nighttime routine

    Set a consistent time to go to sleep and wake up every day, even on weekends. A more structured sleep routine helps to align your circadian rhythm, resulting in more consistent sleep. 

    Sleep sanctuary

    Design your environment to support your sleep goals by reducing screen time, turning lights on low an hour before bed, mitigating noise pollution with healing frequency music or a white noise machine, and turning the thermostat to sixty-five degrees.

    Preparation practices

    Create a spiritual bedtime ritual that you devote yourself to every night in honor of sleep. My ritual includes taking a bath or shower, gratitude journaling, prayer, and yoga nidra. I spray the sheets with a lavender water and essential oil blend before I lay my head on the pillow and rub magnesium oil on the soles of my feet as a final good night. The key is to create a simple process that feels nurturing and peaceful.

    Track your sleep and spiritual practices for a month.

    Journal every morning with just a few words about the quality of your sleep and every evening about your meditation results for the day. By tracking how your sleep and spiritual wellness connect, you will be more motivated to stick to best practices for a good night’s sleep. Ultimately this will benefit your mind, body, and spirit.

    The biggest lesson I’ve learned in this exploration is that we’re not alone in our quest for a nourishing night of sleep. We need to have compassion for ourselves on the nights where we find it challenging to drift off into dreamland.

    If you realize you’re in the pit of sleep anxiety, cut yourself some slack. You are not failing. Accept and surrender to the moment, and trust that simply resting will be enough to get you through the next day.

    Sleep restores a sense of peace and divinity within, but rest is just as important. By making sleep a priority, your mind will feel calmer, quieter, and more focused during meditation, allowing you to feel more spiritually connected to your life mission, every day.

  • Be the Umbrella

    Be the Umbrella

  • 365 Days of Wonder: The Magic of Starting an Awe Journal

    365 Days of Wonder: The Magic of Starting an Awe Journal

    The news: everything is bad.
    Poets: okay, but what if everything is bad and we still fall in love with the moon and learn something from the flowers. ~Nikita Gill

    My dad died when I was thirty-one. I wasn’t a child but barely felt like an adult. He had reached retirement, but only just. Mary Oliver got it right when she wrote, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”

    A few months later, I pulled myself out the door and off to work. The December weather and my heart were both raw. Then I saw it: a single rosebud on a ragged bush.

    I laughed aloud. A rose blooming in winter? And then I started to cry—for the wondrous absurdity of a tiny, lovely thing proclaiming its place in a dark world.

    This pink bud did not make things “all better.” And yet, for a moment, I remembered that my heart was capable of feeling more than grief. It had space for wonder and delight.

    I have spent the last three years studying the emotion of awe. I could share studies about how experiencing wonder makes us more generous, humble, and curious. I’ve written a whole book on the emotional, psychological, and cognitive benefits of this feeling.

    But here’s one thing I really love about this thoroughly human emotion: awe doesn’t require anything from us but our attention. We don’t have to do anything to feel awe. We don’t have to be anything we are not. We just have to show up in the world, eyes and ears open.

    When researchers ask people around the world to describe a moment when they experienced awe, they often point to ordinary moments. A piece of music that brought tears to their eyes. A stranger helping someone in need. A blooming cherry blossom tree. The smell of the earth after the rain. Holding someone’s hand in their final days.

    This year, I made a resolution to keep an awe diary. I call it “365 Days of Wonder.” I’m drawing inspiration from my late grandmother. She kept a daily diary for over fifty years, and most of her entries are only one or two sentences. Taken together, these micro-entries paint a rich picture of the rhythm of her years.

    So I feel no pressure to write a long journal entry each day. Just a sentence or two about something I saw, heard, tasted, smelled, or learned about that day that made me say, “Oh wow.”

    It’s now mid-March, and I have written seventy-seven entries. Can I share a few of them?

    Day 9:

    Listening to President Carter’s funeral, I was touched by this reflection from his grandson, Jason Carter: “In my forty-nine years, I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one. He was the same person. For me, that’s the definition of integrity.”

    Day 27:

    Last night I randomly grabbed some old fortune cookies before driving home a group of teenagers. “Here, check out your fortunes for the week,” I said. The first teen read, “You will be surrounded by the love and laughter of good friends. Ha! Well, that one already came true.”

    Day 34:

    While on a morning walk, I got a text from a friend. She had woken up to the sound of a neighbor shoveling her driveway—a reminder, she wrote, that there are “good people everywhere.”

    Day 37:

    A beautiful family friend died today. She was ninety-five, and I remember when—at nearly eighty—she spotted our family across the beach and ran full throttle to greet us, with a hand atop her head to keep her sunhat from blowing away. I want to age like that.

    Day 38:

    I brought Humfrid the Octopus with me on a school visit today. At the end of my presentation, a kindergarten sidled up: “Can Humfrid give me a hug?” I replied, “With eight arms, he can give you a quadruple hug!”

    Day 41:

    Finding a moment of wonder was harder today. So this afternoon while driving, I tried to keep my senses open. And almost instantly, I got stuck behind a school bus.

    But, but, but . . . while stopped, I noticed a border collie sitting at attention. The moment his teenage person stepped off the bus, he bolted down the long driveway and danced happy circles around his kid.

    Day 42:

    It was fourteen degrees when I took the dog out this morning, but the dawn was full of birdsong. In a month, the migrating birds will start returning—but I’m so grateful to the hardy little birds who stick around all winter.

    Day 62:

    I backed into a car last night in a small, dark parking lot. Tears. I couldn’t find the owner, so I left a note with my info and contrition. The owner texted me later, we shared all pertinent insurance details, and then he wrote this:

    “The car is a car. They make thousands, if not millions, of them, and it’s no good for me to be angry because of an accident. Things happen. Better energy with happiness and kindness. Hope you have a lovely day.”

    Day 65:

    I came home late from a meeting last night. My thirteen-year-old was still up—writing heartfelt thank-you notes to people who had supported a service project she had helped organize.

    Day 73:

    Took my dog to be groomed. While he ran around the groomer’s backyard with her pups, she showed me an envy-inducing “She Shed” that her dad built for her last year. Mind you that she is my age and he is in his 70s. She got teary and said, “He’s the best man I’ve ever known. I’m so lucky.”

    Day 74:

    I didn’t need my Merlin app to identify woodpeckers today. At least three were rattling the neighborhood at dawn with their hammering. In other news, I heard my first red-winged blackbird of the season.

    Day 76:

    I wasn’t sure whether my youngest still believed in leprechaun magic and did the usual low-key-but-fun mischief around the house after the kids went to bed. When he came down the stairs this morning, he broke into a huge grin and whispered to me, “You did a good job this year, Mom!” And there it is. Another kind of magic.

    Seeking out wonder has become a habit. I find myself looking up when I go out to walk the dog, paying more attention to good news in my doom scrolling, and pausing to listen when I hear something lovely. Like finding that rose on a December day, these moments of wonder don’t fix what hurts. But they whisper each day, “This world is hard. And this world is so, so wonderful.”

  • Why I Don’t Want to Become Enlightened Anymore

    Why I Don’t Want to Become Enlightened Anymore

    “Being free isn’t actually that easy.” ~Unknown

    I’ve always been an achiever. I’ve worked hard to reach goals: I was good at school, then got a good job, and ended up making good money. My colleagues valued my clear view of the goal, my ability to break down the big task into parts that one can work on, casting it all as individual problems that one can solve. I was diligent, hard-working, and reliable. An employer’s dream employee.

    At the same time, I’ve always had a wish to be “free.” Not so much from outer constraints, but from inner ones—depressive episodes, difficult feelings, painful experiences. It sounds terribly naive when you put it like that, but I guess it was a wish to live “happily ever after” at some point in the future.

    And I was willing to work hard to achieve that, too.

    In hindsight, it all seems clear how that was bound to fail. But working hard was the one thing I knew how to do, so I applied it to everything, including the wish for happiness, the wish for inner freedom.

    I tried a range of different things and ended up connecting with Buddhism. I think what appealed to me was the clear outline of a path to achieving happiness, the methods, and the way the goal was described: enlightenment, awakening, the ultimate inner freedom. So I learned about the methods and began applying myself to them.

    With my scattered mind, I sat down trying to watch my breath. With aching knees, I sat for hours repeating mantras, counting how many repetitions I “got in,” making progress toward the numeric goal of 100,000 repetitions of various things. That took years.

    I think my wife noticed long before me that there was something unhealthy in my approach. She pointed out how I came down the stairs with a “forced smile” after a long meditation session. She tried to encourage me to “live.” It was no good; I wouldn’t listen.

    The harder I tried to work at it, the more frustrated I became. Since I didn’t see the progress I craved— like peace of mind, like mental calm—I thought the solution was clear: I had to try harder. Devote more time to it, reduce other activities more. Retracting from the world, rather than living in it, my wife called it.

    The big irony was that, in order to feel more alive, I cut myself off from life more and more. I tried to achieve inner freedom by applying the same habitual patterns that governed my life: striving hard, unrelentingly.

    I once saw a postcard with the drawing of a parrot walking out of its birdcage, while wearing a small birdcage like a helmet around its head. The words on the card said, “Being free isn’t actually that easy.” I think it summarizes very well how I was trapped trying to be free.

    When my tenacious striving ended up threatening my marriage, I sought help from a therapist, and that’s when things started to change.

    I became aware of the pattern I was caught in. The narrow-mindedness of feeling that I had to achieve something big. The unspoken wish that one day, someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Well done.” The rejection of life in the name of an abstract goal—ironically, in my case, the goal of wanting to be truly alive.

    I can’t say change happened overnight, although there was this one therapy session where I had a sense that I could feel that inner truth of just being, of awareness. That felt real and true—and much more than any external rules and descriptions of a path, it has been my compass, my guiding light ever since.

    What amazes me most is that for so many years, I just didn’t see the obvious: that I was applying my habitual patterns of ambition and goal-oriented striving to meditation, to the search for inner freedom. How on earth did I not see that?

    Frankly, I think it’s like with the fish and the water. The joke of the old fish meeting two young fish and asking them, “How’s the water today?” and the young fish responding, “What do you mean, water?” It’s so around you, so much an integral part of your lived experience, that you don’t even notice.

    After that recognition, I think the process has been gradual, and I would say it’s ongoing. The key thing is that I recognize striving as striving now. I’m in touch with the emotional tone that comes with it and have gradually learned to take it as a warning sign. Whenever I feel the narrowness of wanting to achieve, I now pause to check if I’m just digging myself into a hole again.

    As a result, there is now a sense of acceptance, of acknowledging that some things cannot be achieved by willpower. That feeling alive isn’t really something you can work at. In fact, today I’d say it’s the opposite: the way to feel alive is to relax into the reality of the moment, again and again. It’s admitting to myself what’s really there, in every situation, pleasant and unpleasant. It’s breathing with the pain, cherishing the pleasant moments. Valuing the people in my life.

    In short, I’ve given up on the “big goals.” I still meditate every day, but I do it differently now: I always try to work with what’s really there in that particular moment—sitting quietly with the breath on some days, working with emotions on others, maybe formulating wishes for well-being on the third day… There are so many options, and the key to making it a living practice, for me, has been to allow myself to start with what’s really there, every day anew.

    If any of this rings a bell, if you feel stuck trying to live a meaningful life, here are the lessons I’m drawing from my experience.

    1. Choose a direction, not a destination.

    To me, owning my life is a cornerstone. Grabbing the steering wheel, deciding on my own priorities rather than simply living according to a script that’s provided from the outside. So I totally stand by that original aim of wanting to live with inner freedom.

    In fact, if you don’t already have a clear sense of what you want your life to be, I strongly recommend taking some time to explore that question for yourself. There are great methods for this—reflective prompts or journal exercises that help you envision your ideal future.

    I’ve realized that what matters most is the direction I’m giving to my life—not so much a specific outcome, let alone a timeline for achieving it. Attainable goals have their place with respect to the outside world, such as working toward an education or a place to live, but with respect to inner processes, I’m now convinced that you cannot force things. At the same time, my orientation in the present situation matters deeply and makes all the difference.

    2. Be patient and gentle with yourself.

    This is the hard part for an achiever like me. My habitual disposition is wanting to measure progress. So after I realized the dead end I had maneuvered myself into with that goal-oriented approach to meditation, it’s been an ongoing challenge. The creature of habit in me continues to want to “be good at it,” to achieve.

    The process has been, and continues to be, getting to know that driven feeling and learning to actively soften it whenever I notice it. One helpful practice has been tuning into the tone of my inner voice—the one reminding me to let go of goals and relax. How friendly or harsh does it sound? And if it’s rather impatient, can I soften that too?

    Suddenly, rather than chasing some goal, I’m exploring what’s really there in myself, discovering and cultivating a friendly stance every day anew.

    3. Connect with your inner compass.

    I’m a rational person, and I often insist on spelling out the reasons for a decision. As far as things go in the world out there, I think that’s useful, even though I tend to overdo it sometimes.

    At the same time, I believe that I have an “inner compass,” which I discovered during my therapy sessions and that I find difficult to put into words. It’s a sense of whether something feels right that I can somehow feel in my body.

    I value this sense as extremely precious, even though I cannot describe it well. This inner compass is the most important guiding principle for me regarding “inner” topics, which cannot always be explained through logic or reason. It’s about whether something feels healthy, whether it seems to move you in the right direction.

    Tuning into this compass, even when I can’t explain it, helps me stay true to myself, no matter what situation I’m in.

    —

    To me, the result of applying these principles has been great. I guess I won’t be enlightened any time soon, but the good thing is, I’m much happier with that now than I’ve ever been in my life.

  • To the Dreamers Reading This, I Want You to Know…

    To the Dreamers Reading This, I Want You to Know…

    There I was, eating cereal and watching a CNN documentary about Kobe Bryant—yes, I mix deep life reflection with Raisin Bran—when his old speech teacher said something that made me pause mid-chew. He described Kobe’s approach to life as giving everything—heart, soul, and body—to his craft. No halfway. Just all in.

    I sat there thinking, “Yes! That’s it!” That’s the very thing I try to convey to my students in class, usually while making wild arm gestures and accidentally knocking over a marker cup. I believe in that philosophy with every fiber of my chalk-dusted being.

    High Risk, Deep Roots

    But here’s the deal: it’s also terrifying.

    This idea of going all in on your calling—it sounds noble and exciting and worthy of a motivational poster—but the truth is, it’s a gamble. A high-stakes, heart-first kind of gamble. Especially today.

    I mean, the ancient world totally backed this idea. Aristotle called it arete—excellence as a way of life. The Stoics preached about inner strength, Japanese samurai gave us Bushidō, and every jazz musician who ever improvised their way to bliss knows the power of flow. Even athletes talk about that magical zone where time melts away and it’s just you, the court, the ball, and that buzzing sense of rightness.

    Modern Metrics vs. Timeless Passion

    But our modern world? Eh, not so much. Today, we value your output. Your metrics. Your monetization plan. It’s like we collectively replaced passion with performance indicators.

    Don’t get me wrong—I’m not against paying the bills. I enjoy food, shelter, and the occasional streaming service. But if you’re a young person with a dream that doesn’t come with a subscription model or an app-based hustle plan? Welcome to what I call “existential whiplash.”

    You’re told, “Follow your bliss!” and “Live with purpose!” But the next second someone’s asking, “Yeah, but how will you monetize that?”

    This contradiction is exhausting. And it gets inside your head. You start to think, “Maybe I’m wrong to want this. Maybe I should just do something safer. Maybe dreams are for people with trust funds.”

    But here’s where I get a little loud in class—yes, I stand on chairs occasionally—and say: No. Your dream is not a liability.

    It’s a pulse. A heartbeat. A spark. And you owe it to yourself to explore it—even if it’s hard.

    Now, I won’t sugarcoat this: you can throw your whole self into something and not get the rewards you hoped for. I’ve lived that. I’ve made documentaries that reached small audiences. I’ve written things I thought would change the world and heard nothing but crickets. I’ve built programs that vanished when the grant money dried up.

    But here’s the weird thing: I still wouldn’t trade it. Because in the pursuit—yes, even in the flops—I found something essential.

    The Gift of Flow and Presence

    Flow. Purpose. Connection.

    When I was filming at dawn in a mountain village in the Philippines, or listening—really listening—to a student struggle their way into their voice, I wasn’t thinking about success. I was there. Fully. Mindfully. There’s nothing else like it.

    Those moments are why we do the risky thing. Because we’re not robots. We’re not spreadsheets. We’re meaning-makers. And when we pursue something with full attention and intention, we tap into something sacred.

    Still, let’s be real. In our society, even mindfulness has been commodified. There’s a subscription for calm. A brand for stillness. A market for minimalism. If I sound cynical, it’s because I’ve watched so many of my students get talked out of their deepest truths by the crushing logic of “practicality.”

    Redefining Success

    So, what do we do? How do we hold on to our inner compass when the GPS keeps yelling “Recalculate!” toward a safer, more profitable life?

    I think it comes down to redefining what “success” really means.

    I tell my students: don’t measure your life by likes, views, or even income (although, yes, make sure you eat). Measure it by the depth of your experience. By the risks you were willing to take. By the people you helped. By the moments you felt alive and grounded in something real.

    A Quiet Life Can Still Be Epic

    Because that’s what makes a life worth living. Not perfection. Not applause. But presence.

    You can live a small-looking life with a vast inner world. You can chase something meaningful and not be famous. You can teach or paint or write or code or dance or build without needing to “go viral” to matter.

    Yes, there are trade-offs. Believe me, I’ve wrestled with them. I’ve had months where I wondered if I made a mistake, if I’d be better off in a more stable career. I’ve asked myself whether it’s selfish to keep chasing ideas when I could be saving for retirement instead.

    But then I remember: a life without dreams, without creative risk, without vulnerability? That would break me faster than any unpaid invoice.

    This Is the Gift (and the Gamble)

    To the dreamers reading this—especially the young ones, or the older ones just beginning again—I want to say this:

    Don’t let the world’s cynicism shrink your vision. Stay mindful, not just in meditation, but in how you choose—how you spend your time, your energy, your attention. Live with full awareness, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

    Because that’s the gift of mindful living. Not constant calm or peace—but full contact with reality. The beauty and the fear. The creativity and the chaos. The risk and the reward.

    Show Up Anyway

    And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. That life isn’t about winning. It’s about showing up fully, heart, soul, and body. Just like Kobe. Just like all of us trying to do this thing with courage.

    I’m not indispensable. I’m not a guru. I’m just a guy who still gets goosebumps when a student discovers something real inside themselves. I’ve lived long enough to know dreams don’t always pay off, but they always teach you something vital—about who you are and what you care about.

    And for me, that has always been enough.

  • One of the Marks of a Truly Safe Person

    One of the Marks of a Truly Safe Person

  • Burnout Doesn’t Always Look Loud

    Burnout Doesn’t Always Look Loud

  • We Are Not Machines

    We Are Not Machines

  • How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” ~Gabor Mate

    Most of us avoid experiences not necessarily because we don’t like them or want them, but because we don’t want to feel how we will feel when we go through that experience.

    Our lives become altered by the emotions we don’t want to feel because we don’t want to move toward the thing that could bring strong emotions like fear, shame, sadness, or disappointment.

    We don’t want to go to that party because we’ll probably feel awkward and embarrassed.

    We don’t want to chase that work opportunity in case we feel disappointed if it doesn’t work out.

    We don’t want to take that trip because it might feel scary.

    We don’t want to slow down our busy lives because it feels too terrifying to contemplate emptiness and quiet.

    And then we get this idea about ourselves that this is just who we are. We are just:

    • People who don’t like parties
    • People who don’t travel
    • People who are fearful
    • People who are procrastinators
    • People who are just busy but intensely stressed

    We have this idea that this is just who we are, and therefore, this is how we should live. Perhaps we feel an anger or an anguish at being “this type of person.” Or maybe it just feels so unconscious, so embedded in our personality, that we don’t do certain things, that we accept it as just the way we are. 

    For most of my life I thought I was a nervous, cautious, fearful person. That was just how I was born. I thought I couldn’t change it, just like I couldn’t change my hair color or my deep love for mashed potatoes. It felt biological. Some people were brave and courageous; I was fearful and afraid of almost everything.

    I carried this with me, this idea about who I was, until I learned that emotions like fear and terror, anger and rage, and despair or sadness are just emotions that we need to learn how to be with. And if we don’t learn how to be with them, they can create an outsized influence on our lives—creating this idea about who we are and what kind of personality we have and causing us to avoid things that trigger these feelings.

    But what we are actually avoiding is not the experience, people, or things but the feelings we feel when we think about that thing or try to do it. The feelings around meeting new people, starting a new work project, being in the thick of the uncertainty of traveling, etc.

    It’s the feelings that are so difficult for us, not the experiences. So we start to make choices on what we are prepared to do and what we are not. We mold our lives around the things that generate emotions we don’t know how to be with. And we don’t head toward things we don’t like because of how we will feel and what we think will happen when we walk toward that feeling.

    Because our body isn’t used to really being with the emotion we are avoiding, or it has proved problematic in the past.

    This is because a lot of our emotions activate our survival network. And when our survival network has been activated, things feel urgent, maybe even dangerous, unsafe.

    Maybe we have sweaty palms, a feeling of doom in our bodies, a racing heart, a desire to escape quickly, panic, or even an abundance of uncontrollable rage.

    So our brain starts to associate this emotion with survival being activated. It’s like it labels “new work opportunity” or “traveling” as an undesirable or unsafe experience because of the emotions that generate around that experience.

    We just don’t know what to do with these emotions.

    Our brains say, “Don’t go near that! It’s dangerous!”

    So we become like a player in a video game, running around avoiding falling boulders, jumping over pits of snakes, maneuvering out of the way of giant fireballs.

    But what our brain perceives as threats are not actually threats but emotions it doesn’t know what to do with.

    The pits of snakes aren’t snakes but fear around traveling. Or the boulders are the fear of disappointment or despair. Avoiding the fireballs is trying to avoid shame.

    The harsh thing, though, is that even though we are trying to sensibly avoid these emotions, these survival reactions, we don’t get to avoid them completely.

    The shame, the fear, the rage, the terror—they are there in our body and popping up in other places. We can’t avoid them completely, and by trying to avoid them, we simply make our lives smaller and smaller and smaller.

    Are we doomed to spend our lives in avoidance mode?

    Do we just have to accept that some things are just  “too hard,” “too stressful,” “not for people like us”?

    No. Way.

    That is the really exciting thing about our brains. We have learned to be this way because of how we learned to deal with emotions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a new way. That we can’t ‘rewire’ the responses we have learned.

    By working with my own fear, by learning how to be with it, I stopped feeling so scared about everything in my life. I totally changed how I saw myself.  I no longer believe myself to be a fearful, overly cautious person.

    I gave myself time to learn to be with the energy of the fear in a way that was so gentle and slow that it helped me to feel safe around the emotion in a way I never had before.

    I realized that the problem is not that we are avoiding our emotions on purpose; it’s that we don’t understand them.

    This is what is so hard about how so many of us learn to live our lives.

    We aren’t given the tools to work with our emotions (most of us aren’t anyway), and then we are cast out into the world to just ‘make a life.’

    Have good relationships!

    Be successful! Get a good job!

    Cope with work colleagues / clients / stressed-out bosses.

    Deal with grief, aging, health problems, loved ones dying!

    Be a good parent, even if your parents were a little shoddy, absent, authoritarian, unloving.

    How are we supposed to navigate the world when it generates so much emotion for us and we never learned how to deal with emotion? When we feel constantly pushed hither and thither either by our emotional reactions or other people’s?

    Awakening the act of self-compassion and empathy for the emotions we struggle with is one of the most powerful steps we can take when we start this journey.

    Deciding: Wow, I wasn’t given the tools to navigate the whole myriad of emotions that I encounter every day! And that is tough!

    Giving ourselves a little grace, a little tenderness, a little understanding around this is such a powerful step away from how we normally respond to emotional activation.

    Can we offer ourselves some kindness and understanding instead of blame and judgment? It makes sense I feel like this—I haven’t learned how to deal with emotions like shame, fear, grief, etc.

    Offering compassion in the face of strong emotional reactions is a powerful step because normally we are in the habit of trying to dismiss/justify/vent our feelings: I shouldn’t feel like this! It’s all their fault! I am such a terrible person! Everything is so terrifying! They made me angry!

    Instead, can we decide to start walking toward being on our own side? Can we accept the challenges we have faced with emotions? And instead of blaming and shaming ourselves, can we decide instead to move toward kindness, understanding, empathy, and compassion?

    When we allow our emotions to exist and meet them with empathy, creating a sense of internal safety around them, it’s much easier to support ourselves through experiences that might activate them.

  • I Will Always Be Thankful for…

    I Will Always Be Thankful for…

  • 5 Powerful Mindset Shifts to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think

    5 Powerful Mindset Shifts to Stop Worrying About What Other People Think

    “Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” ~Lao Tzu

    We carefully pick out what we wear to the gym to make sure we look good in the eyes of the other gymgoers.

    We beat ourselves up after meetings, running through everything we said (or didn’t say), worried that coworkers will think we aren’t smart or talented enough.

    We post only the best picture out of the twenty-seven selfies we took and add a flattering filter to get the most likes to prove to ourselves that we are pretty and likable.

    We live in other people’s heads.

    And all it does is make us judge ourselves more harshly. It makes us uncomfortable in our bodies. It makes us feel apologetic for being ourselves. It makes us live according to our perception of other people’s standards.

    It makes us feel inauthentic. Anxious. Judgmental. Not good enough. Not likable enough. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough.

    F that sh*t.

    The truth is, other people’s opinions of us are none of our business. Their opinions have nothing to do with us and everything to do with them, their past, their judgments, their expectations, their likes, and their dislikes.

    I could stand in front of twenty strangers and speak on any topic. Some of them will hate what I’m wearing, some will love it. Some will think I’m a fool, and others will love what I have to say. Some will forget me as soon as they leave, others will remember me for years.

    Some will hate me because I remind them of their annoying sister-in-law. Others will feel compassionate toward me because I remind them of their daughter. Some will completely understand what I have to say, and others will misinterpret my words.

    Each of them will get the exact same me. I will do my best and be the best I can be in that moment. But their opinions of me will vary. And that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with them.

    No matter what I do, some people will never like me. No matter what I do, some people will always like me. Either way, it has nothing to do with me. And it’s none of my business.

    Ok, “that’s all well and good,” you may be thinking. “But how do I stop caring what other people think of me?”

    1. Know your values.

    Knowing your top core values is like having a brighter flashlight to get you through the woods. A duller light may still get you where you need to go, but you’ll stumble more or be led astray.

    With a brighter light, the decisions you make—left or right, up or down, yes or no—become clearer and easier to make.

    For years I had no idea what I truly valued, and I felt lost in life as a result. I never felt confident in my decisions, and I questioned everything I said and did.

    Doing core values work on myself has made a huge impact on my life. I came to realize that “compassion” is my top core value. Now when I find myself questioning my career decisions because I’m worried about disappointing my parents (a huge trigger for me), I remind myself that “compassion” also means “self-compassion,” and I’m able to cut myself some slack.

    If you value courage and perseverance and you show up at the gym even though you are nervous and have “lame” gym clothes, you don’t have to dwell on what the other gymgoers think about you.

    If you value inner peace and you need to say “no” to someone who is asking for your time, and your plate is already full to the max, you can do so without feeling like they will judge you for being a selfish person.

    If you value authenticity and you share your opinion in a crowd, you can do so with confidence knowing that you are living your values and being yourself.

    Know your core values and which ones you value the most. Your flashlight will be brighter for it.

    2. Know to stay in your own business.

    Another way to stop caring about what other people think is to understand that there are three types of business in the world. This is a lesson I learned from Byron Katie, and I love it.

    The first is God’s business. If the word “God” isn’t to your liking, you can use another word here that works for you, like the universe or nature. I think I like nature better, so I’ll use that.

    The weather is nature’s business. Who dies and who is born is nature’s business. The body and genes you were given are nature’s business. You have no place in nature’s business. You can’t control it.

    The second type of business is other people’s business. What they do is their business. What your neighbor thinks of you is his business. What time your coworker comes into work is her business. If the driver in the other car doesn’t go when the light turns green, it’s their business.

    The third type of business is your business.

    If you get angry with the other driver because you now have to wait at another red light, that’s your business.

    If you get irritated because your coworker is late again, that’s your business.

    If you are worried about what your neighbor thinks of you, that’s your business.

    What they think is their business. What you think (and in turn, feel) is your business.

    Whose business are you in when you’re worried about what you’re wearing? Whose business are you in when you dwell on how your joke was received at the party?

    You only have one business to concern yourself with—yours. What you think and what you do are the only things you can control in life. That’s it.

    3. Know that you have full ownership over your feelings.

    When we base our feelings on other people’s opinions, we are allowing them to control our lives. We’re basically allowing them to be our puppet master, and when they pull the strings just right, we either feel good or bad.

    If someone ignores you, you feel bad. You may think, “She made me feel this way by ignoring me.” But the truth is, she has no control over how you feel.

    She ignored you, and you assigned meaning to that action. To you, that meant that you were not worth her time, or you were not likable enough, smart enough, or cool enough.

    Then you felt sad or mad because of the meaning you applied. You had an emotional reaction to your own thought.

    When we give ownership of our feelings over to others, we give up control over our emotions. The fact of the matter is, the only person that can hurt your feelings is you.

    To change how other people’s actions make you feel, you only need to change a thought. This step sometimes takes a bit of work because our thoughts are usually automatic or even on the unconscious level, so it may take some digging to figure out what thought is causing your emotion.

    But once you do, challenge it, question it, or accept it. Your emotions will follow.

    4. Know that you are doing your best.

    One of the annoying things my mom would say growing up (and she still says) is “You did the best you could with what you had at the time.”

    I hated that saying.

    I had high standards of myself, and I always thought that I could have done better. So when I didn’t meet those expectations, my inner bully would come out and beat the crap out of me.

    How much of your life have you spent kicking yourself because you thought you said something dumb? Or because you showed up late? Or that you looked weird?

    Every time, you did the best you could. Every. Single. Time.

    That’s because everything we do has a positive intent. It may not be obvious, but it’s there.

    Literally as I’m writing this post sitting in a tea shop in Portland, Maine, another patron went to the counter and asked what types of tea he could blend with his smoky Lapsang Souchong tea (a favorite of mine as well).

    He hadn’t asked me, but I chimed in that maybe chaga mushroom would go well because of its earthy flavor. He seemed unimpressed with the unsolicited advice and turned back to the counter.

    The old me would have taken that response to heart and felt terrible the rest of the afternoon, thinking how this guy must think I’m a dope and annoying for jumping into the conversation uninvited.

    But let’s take a look at what I had in that moment:

    • I had an urge to try to be helpful and a core value of kindness and compassion.
    • I had an interest in the conversation.
    • I had an impression that my feedback might be well received.
    • I had a desire to connect with a new person on a shared interest.

    I did the best I could with what I had.

    Because I know that, I have no regrets. I also know that his opinion of me is none of my business, and I was living in tune with my values, trying to be helpful!

    Though, I could also see how, from another perspective, forcing my way into a conversation and pushing my ideas on someone who did not ask may have been perceived as rude. And rudeness goes against my core value of compassion.

    That leads me to the next lesson.

    5. Know that everyone makes mistakes.

    We live in a culture where we don’t often talk about how we feel. It turns out we all experience the same feelings, and we all make mistakes. Go figure!

    Even if you are living in tune with your values, even if you are staying in your own business, even if you are doing your best, you will make mistakes. Without question.

    So what? We all do. We all have. Having compassion for yourself comes easier when you understand that everyone has felt that way. Everyone has gone through it.

    The only productive thing you can do with your mistakes is to learn from them. Once you figure out the lesson you can take from the experience, rumination is not at all necessary, and it’s time to move on.

    In the case of the tea patron-interjection debacle, I could have done a better job of reading his body language and noticed that he wanted to connect with the tea sommelier and not a random stranger.

    Lesson learned. No self-bullying required.

    At my last company I accidentally caused a company-wide upset. A friend and coworker of mine, who had been at the company for a few years, had been asking to get a better parking spot. One became available as someone left the company, but he still was passed over.

    He’s such a nice guy, and as my department was full of sarcastics, I thought it would be funny to create a pun-filled petition for him to get the better spot.

    I had no idea that it was going to be taken so poorly by some people. It went up the chain of command, and it looked like our department was full of unappreciative, needy whiners.

    And our boss thought it looked like I used my position to coerce people into signing it. He brought the whole department together and painfully and uncomfortably called out the whole terrible situation and demanded it never happen again.

    I. Was. MORTIFIED.

    He hadn’t named me, but most people knew I created it. I was so embarrassed and ashamed.

    But here’s what I did:

    1. I reminded myself of my values. I value compassion and humor. I thought I was doing a kind but funny act for a friend.
    2. When I found myself worrying about what other people must now think of me, I told myself that if they thought poorly of me (of which I had no evidence), all I could do was to continue to be my best me.
    3. When flashbacks of that awful meeting came back to mind, flushing my face full of heat and shame, I remembered to take ownership over how I felt and not let the memory of the event or what other people think dictate how I feel now.
    4. I reminded myself that I did the best I could with what I had at the time. I had a desire to help a friend and an idea I thought was funny and assumed would go over well.
    5. I realized that I made a mistake. The lesson I learned was to be more considerate of how others may receive my sense of humor. Not everyone finds me as funny as my husband does. I can make better decisions now because of it.

    And after a short time, the whole incident was forgotten.

    Stop worrying about what other people think. It will change your life.

  • If Today Feels Heavy, Carry It Lightly

    If Today Feels Heavy, Carry It Lightly

  • Why You’re Not Happy (Even If Life Looks Fine)

    Why You’re Not Happy (Even If Life Looks Fine)

    Do you sometimes see people running around enjoying life and wonder what you’re missing? Sometimes I used to think I must be a horrible person. I had so many things going for me, and I still couldn’t be happy. I would ask myself, is there something wrong with me? Am I a narcissist?

    Then sometimes I would decide I was just going to be happy. I would fake it until I made it and just accept that’s who I was. But it wouldn’t take long for me to feel overwhelmingly depressed.

    I had a little dark hole that would constantly pull at me, and I didn’t have the energy to keep ignoring it. My attempts to do so just made it scream louder, and then I really was in a mess. This, of course, made me feel worse because it would remind me that I must be crazy.

    As I worked through my healing journey, I discovered there are three key reasons why we can’t just muscle up and be happy. We need to work through these three obstacles to move from just surviving and having moments of happiness to thriving and living a life full of joy and inspiration. To living a life where we love who we are and what we are doing and have hope for the future.

    Life is never perfect, but it sure is a lot more enjoyable and fun when we love, enjoy, and fully experience the present moments we are in.

    So what are these obstacles? And what strategies can you use to work through them?

    1. Validate Past Experiences

    When you don’t fully validate and process painful past experiences, the energy of those experiences gets trapped and contained within your body.

    It takes consistent and continual emotional energy to keep the walls around those experiences high and the energy within contained. The energy and emotion inside are deep and strong, and to keep these feelings away from our consciousness. we can’t allow ourselves to experience any deep or strong feelings, even the good ones.

    Allowing yourself to pull down these walls and grieve all the deep and strong feelings inside will free your emotional energy to feel deep and strong happy feelings too.

    For me, this meant feeling and processing the sexual abuse I endured as a child.

    For years I convinced myself that I was fine and that it happens to almost everyone. I tried to minimize my experience and leave it in the past. The walls I had built to keep all the grief and pain of those experiences out of my conscious daily awareness drained me and prevented me from feeling life in real time. I was guarded, with very shallow access to my feelings.

    No one wants to go back and work through the pain of the past, but I discovered that doing grief work with my therapist allowed me to truly let go of the pain and thrive in the present.

    2. Let Go of the Need for Control

    When you’ve been hurt in the past, it is normal to want to curate a life where you can’t get hurt again. We create a sense of safety by ensuring our life is as predictable as possible. Any time someone in our circle acts in a way that is outside our control, we ensure they “get back in line” so we feel safe.

    For example, if your partner doesn’t immediately return your text, you might get upset and lash out about how disrespectful he is being. If your kids don’t seem to be as concerned about their grades as you think they should be, you might panic and shame them, saying they will be stuck working in fast food restaurants for the rest of their lives. We want everyone to act as we think they “should,” so our world feels nice and safe and predictable.

    Zoom out and look at this scenario… Could it be any more boring? No wonder it’s impossible to feel true joy and happiness. Joy and happiness come from the ability to be spontaneous, light, free, and unpredictable.

    I think a lot of people mistake feeling safe for feeling happy. Being in a constant search for safety keeps us in survival mode. Knowing you are safe with yourself no matter what allows you to move out of survival and into a higher consciousness that brings joy, pleasure… and happiness.

    It is true that many of us have very real pain from the past, and it is perfectly normal to want to protect ourselves from feeling that pain again by attempting to curate a life we can fully control. This is an unconscious decision we make out of self-protection.

    Choose to make the conscious decision to let go of control. Trust that you now have all the resources within yourself to feel safe, no matter what happens. Releasing the need to control will bring you the ability to feel joy, pleasure, and fun again.

    This one was difficult for me and took a long time to integrate. Because of my abusive childhood experiences, I overcompensated for my feelings of worthlessness and lack of safety with a drive for success and perfectionism to try to control how others perceived me.

    If my co-worker wasn’t pulling her weight, I would stay late and work weekends to ensure the work was done, and done well. If my husband wouldn’t spend time with me or plan dates, I would plan dates and put all the reservations in his name so it looked like he was investing in me and our relationship. If my kids were not interested in wearing outfits that I thought would make our family look perfect, I would bribe them with candy so we could look good and put together as a family.

    I thought that making myself and my family look like we had it together meant that we did, and we would therefore be happy. Man, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and it actually drove not just myself but everyone in the family system in the opposite direction.

    No one likes to be manipulated, and even if we can’t exactly identify that’s what is happening, we feel it. Honestly, I had a bit of an identity crisis as I let go of how I wanted life to look and embraced living and feeling life in real time. What I can say is that since I’ve let go of control, life has been full of more peace and joy than I knew possible.

    3. Look for Happiness

    What we look for, we will find. There is a reason we constantly hear people talk about gratitude. When we look for things we’re grateful for, things we enjoy or love, we create more of those things in our lives. We begin to see how much joy and happiness we already have.

    We so often completely overlook the goodness that’s all around us because we are preconditioned to see and experience all the things that are going wrong.

    This third step is caused by not working through the first two. When we haven’t validated our past painful experiences, we look for validation in all our current painful experiences.

    It’s like those experiences keep haunting us until we take the time to turn around and look at them. They cloud our ability to see the happiness we already have all around us. We can’t experience the innocence and joy in our children. Nor can we accept the love and connection our friends want to offer us or appreciate all the amazing things we are doing well at work.

    When we are stuck in the need for control, we look for all future outcomes that will help us to stay safe instead of looking for all the joy and pleasure that is already in our life. We don’t have enough bandwidth to do both, at least not all at once; so, for example, if we spend all our time subconsciously looking for ways someone else might hurt or abandon us, then we don’t have the energy left to look for joy and pleasure in our relationships.

    One day I had to make a choice. I decided I had had enough of being tired, frustrated, and miserable. I knew it would take a while for my circumstances to change, but that didn’t mean I had to stay stuck and feel isolated, frustrated, and lonely.

    I made the hard choice to look for happiness. At first, I would journal things I found happiness in, and over time it became more subconscious than conscious. It also helped to talk about it with a good friend, as we both challenged each other in looking for happiness.

    Sometimes I still struggle. If I haven’t been taking care of myself, this one is the first to slip. I start to slide back into an old pattern of looking for how life is screwing me over. I know that I’m better able to keep my mindset in happiness when I engage in self-care as often as possible.

    If enough is enough and you are ready to move on from feeling like you are just surviving life, implement the following three strategies to overcome the obstacles to joy.

    First, start journaling or processing your feelings about past experiences. It could be a good idea to do this step with a professional, depending on what you have been through.

    Next, start identifying how much control you have over your life and the people around you and see where you can loosen up the reins a little.

    I can almost hear you saying back to me, “But everything will fall apart if I let go!” Let it fall apart. You don’t want a partner and kids who live only to make you satisfied and “happy.” Let life get a little messy. They (and you) will be so much happier if they just get to be themselves, make mistakes, and develop connections out of genuine love and respect… not out of fear of failure or mistakes.

    This last one is pretty simple: start looking for joy. Get curious when you find it hard or upsetting to look for joy. Often, turning things around is simply a choice. Change your subconscious conditioning from looking for what is going wrong to looking for what is going right.

    These three steps will help you attract the people and experiences that will bring you everything you are looking for.

    Before you know it, your past pain will be a distant memory that doesn’t impact your day-to-day life. Instead, you will feel a sense of freedom and joy because you’ll be able to live life in the moment rather than in your head trying to predict outcomes, and because you’ll have reset your pre-conditioning to look for the good in life everywhere you go.

    This is what it takes to be one of “those people” who just seem happy and full of life. Which strategy will you try first?

  • If You Don’t Know What You Want

    If You Don’t Know What You Want

  • Trichotillomania to Triumph: How I Found Acceptance and Freedom

    Trichotillomania to Triumph: How I Found Acceptance and Freedom

    “Your either like me or you don’t. It took me twenty-something years to learn how to love myself. I don’t have that kinda time to convince somebody else.” ~Daniel Franzese

    Everyone has a bad habit or two, right? Whether it’s a major vice or a minor annoyance, we all feel the discomfort of at least some behaviors we would rather not have.

    You know, like nail biting, hair twirling, procrastination, having a car that doubles as a convenient trash receptacle…

    I’ve been guilty of all the above at one point or another in my life, but the one that has had the biggest impact on me is trichotillomania, or hair pulling.

    If you’re not familiar with it, “trich” is a condition akin to OCD (but not actually a type of OCD, as it is often mistaken for) in which people experience difficult-to-control urges to pull their hair out.

    Cases vary from mild to severe, and some pullers are able to manage their urges with strategies and coping tools so that their hair loss can go undetected by the casual observer. However, other sufferers are so afflicted by it that they end up missing entire rows of eyelashes or eyebrows or even become completely bald as a result.

    Chances are you know someone with this condition, although you may be unaware of it because so many people suffer in shame and silence. Estimated rates of trich in the US are about 1-4% of the population (although the actual number is probably much higher due to underreporting), making it about as common as having red hair.

    No one knew I was pulling my hair out for twenty years.

    I was twelve years old (trich commonly starts in adolescence) when my mom noticed that I had a couple of bald spots on my head. I honestly didn’t know the damage I was doing at first. Sure, I knew I played with my hair a lot and sometimes pulled it out, but surely, I wasn’t doing it enough to cause bald spots, right?? It was unclear, so I kept quiet as she made an appointment for me to see the doctor about it.

    When the first treatment for a fungal infection of the scalp didn’t yield improvement, the next step was to see a dermatologist. By that time, I knew I was the one causing my hair loss, but my shame and confusion kept me from speaking up about it. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t stop.

    The dermatologist ran some tests, including a biopsy, and diagnosed me with alopecia areata, a medical condition resulting in hair loss. Conveniently for me, around the same time, my grandpa developed (a real case of) alopecia areata. And when we were informed that it was a genetic condition, no one really questioned it for me.

    As a teen, it required much effort to style my hair to hide my bald spots, and from time to time I had to clean up my secret pile of hair between my bed and the wall, but mostly I went on to live a normal life. I found out in my mid-teens, while reading an article in the teen magazine Cosmogirl, that what I did had a name—a complicated one that I wouldn’t be able to remember for years, but it was my first inkling that I was maybe not alone in my weird compulsion.

    I graduated high school, got my associate’s degree, then got married and had kids. I was incredibly embarrassed about my missing hair, but when it couldn’t be concealed, I relied on the medical condition as my trusted excuse, even to my husband.

    I was thirty-two years old and working toward my master’s degree when I sat down in an on-campus therapist’s office and opened up for the first time ever about my hair pulling. The eighty-mile distance between home and school, plus the promised confidentiality of therapy helped ease my fears that others would find out just enough for me to go through with it.

    He was a new therapist, still in training. After I disclosed my humiliating habit, I remember he asked me, “Why are you shaking?”

    “Because I’ve never told anyone this before.”

    As I answered, I could see the surprise on his face. “You’ve never told anyone?”

    I saw him one more time before he completed his training and transferred me to another, more experienced, therapist. Now two people knew my life-long secret. It’s no exaggeration to say that this new therapist guided me to life-changing insights, but he still knew nothing about how to treat trichotillomania. “Let’s focus on all the other stuff first,” he redirected.

    A few months later, I collected enough courage to share my problem again with a close friend whose daughter had OCD. She felt safe because I had heard her talk with such concern and care for her daughter. Afterwards, I asked her, “Do you think I’m crazy?”

    Not long after, I disclosed my hair pulling to my husband, and he responded with what I now call “pseudo-support.” He wanted me to be helped, but only if he could be my savior. He was okay with me telling a couple of people in his family, but no one else.

    I had learned about a national conference hosted by an organization called TLC for people who pulled their hair or picked their skin, and I wanted to go. My husband agreed that it might be helpful but didn’t think I was capable of making the trip by myself (because I would almost certainly get lost in the airport or encounter some other tragic mishap), so he offered to come along.

    I attended the conference alone after I moved out and filed for divorce.

    What I experienced at the conference was incredible. I was surrounded by hundreds of people, knowing that I wasn’t being judged and learning more about trich in these few days than I had been able to in the years prior.

    At dinner that evening, I sat at a large round table for eight, chatting about our experience with hair-pulling and skin-picking. For the first time, I talked about my hair pulling as freely as I would have said what city I had flown in from. The experience was liberating, and I could feel the shame slowly starting to melt away.

    Gradually, I shared my trich with an ever-growing list of people, each time feeling a little less worried about their reaction. I began to weave it into casual conversations rather than treating it as a huge burden for me to offload.

    When I started dating again, I decided to tell men up front to help “weed out” anyone who had a problem with it. By then, I was cautiously optimistic that I might be worthy of acceptance, and anyone who responded with judgment wasn’t a good fit for me.

    Surprisingly, as I continued to speak up, I found that the information was generally well-received. Some people shared that they also had trich or knew someone who did. Others were curious and asked questions to understand it better. In other situations, the conversation just moved along naturally.

    Of course, there were occasional encounters where I felt awkward or misunderstood, but I kept moving forward in my quest to be seen. Over time, I realized that I had been hanging on to my secret for so long based on inaccurate assumptions that others would not accept me if they knew… but I was proving myself wrong with every new person I opened up to.

    Today, I’ve found that wigs are the perfect solution for me, and as many other wig-wearers have experienced, they’ve become a fun hobby. Wigs keep my hands from stealthily navigating to my hair to pull, and even when I do play with my (purchased) hair, the sensation stays in my hands rather than tracking to my scalp to initiate an urge. I’ve also noticed that the slight pressure on my head from the wigs significantly reduces my urges to pull.

    When someone compliments my hair, I’m very open about my wigs, and when curious minds ask why, I confidently share that I have trich. I understand that I could hold a boundary and decline to provide an explanation, but I choose to take the opportunity to spread awareness.

    It was not easy or comfortable transitioning through my paralyzing shame to radical self-acceptance, but it’s been well worth the journey. Through these experiences, I have a deeper understanding of shame, confidence, acceptance, and myself.

    I’ve learned that shame is toxic and isolates us from truly meaningful connections. When we hold a part of ourselves back in our closest relationships, we tell ourselves that we aren’t good enough just as we are. This perpetuates the belief that we are broken or unworthy and can only be accepted if we portray an alternate version of ourselves to the world.

    I’ve learned that when it comes to confidence, it’s best to start with a leap of faith, because waiting to feel confident first rarely works out. The transformation starts with us entertaining the idea that we might not be rejected if we share our true selves, then taking action to test it out.

    I’ve learned that we are all worthy—just as we are, no modifications needed, no strings attached—and when I accept myself for who I am, others follow along. When I encounter someone who expects me to be fundamentally different to fit their own agenda, I choose to limit the energy I put into that relationship.

    Most importantly, I’ve learned the power and freedom of being true to myself, and I won’t keep that a secret.