Being Fully Present for Daily Life – The Art of Showing Up
There’s a phenomenon that takes place when exercising that’s been catching my attention lately. I’m talking about the tendency to be less than fully present for our immediate experience. This can come in a couple different forms. How Absence Emerges Anything that takes us outside ourselves distracts us from the actual experience we’re having – what’s […]
Restorying Your Life
Have you ever wished that you could live a different life? Or felt tired of the story you were telling about the one you have? When we cast ourselves as a desperate victim, angry instigator, or caterer to everyone else’s whims and needs, we may not realize it, but we quickly wear a groove for […]
Creative Thinking: How to Move Forward with Your Ideas
Whether you are an entrepreneur, an artist, or a community activist or are engaged in solving a family dilemma, you have likely experienced the precarious point where ideas must turn into action. This usually involves the generation and identification of viable options (i.e., creative thinking)…followed by a decision of some sort, whether made by you […]
The Secret to Liking Yourself
One of the things I love most about coaching is the privilege of holding space for someone as she dives into her own experience. As the relationship deepens and trust is tested and found to hold strong, we go on inspiring journeys together. Often the journey is one I think of as “the road to […]
Choosing Your Response to Big Emotions
What happens when we are faced with the more extreme emotional experiences of life, whether good or bad? Do we differentiate among these, or does the possibility of simply experiencing extreme emotions itself challenge us in ways that require courage and conscious choice, regardless of the quality of those emotions? I’ll give you a couple […]
Rethinking Stress – It’s Not All Bad
How do you define ‘stress’? And why do we talk about it as if it’s necessarily a bad thing? What impact does this have on our interpretation of the situation we’re in when we experience stress? And what impact does that interpretation and experience have on our long-term health? What is ‘stress’ anyway? One of […]
Give Yourself a Break! Plan a Mini-Retreat
This past November, I was lucky enough to be invited up to Blue Mountain Center – where I had previously had the good fortune of spending one of the best months of my life – for an impromptu retreat weekend with a group of writers, artists, and activists. The opportunity came at a time of […]
Frustration: The Invisible Trigger
Frustration is an under-appreciated emotion. The emotions that typically demand our attention are the power players, like anger, joy, love, sadness, and fear. We tend to give certain “secondary” emotions like happiness, longing, boredom, and shame significant air time as well, especially when it comes to explaining our behaviors and desires. Those discussions and insights […]
Yes or No, Which Way Do You Lean?
I’ve been thinking lately that there are times in our lives when we need to say more ‘yes’ and times in our lives when we need to say more ‘no.’ How do we identify when those times are? What are the signs that we might need to practice more of one or the other? And […]
Who Owns Your Dream? Taking Charge of Your Own Outcome
I have a friend who really wants to take the steps necessary to turn a business dream of hers into a reality. She put a lot of thought into developing a fantastic and detailed plan, complete with all the activities she needed to tackle in order to make it happen. My friend is highly self-aware […]