Do you spur on your inner critic, hoping that if you can just be harder on yourself, you can liberate yourself from your pain and inhabit your life more fully? Or do you try to stifle, ignore, or exile your inner critic, believing that the key to happiness is to just think positively and overpower […]
Embracing Your Joys and Your Sorrows: Living Your Whole Life with Presence
Six weeks ago, my home burned down. In ten minutes. While I was out of town. Complicatedly, the building that burned wasn’t my private residence, though it was the heart of the place where I was living and have frequently visited and lived over the past 17 years. Since August, I’d been living at Wilbur […]
Making Nourishing, Accomplishable New Year’s Resolutions Free of Self-Domination, Defeatism, and “Shoulds”
Every year, an estimated 40 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but one study suggests that only 12 percent actually accomplish their goals. Why do so many of us start each new year with resolutions, only to drop them once the hope of a fresh start diminishes? The cultural message about our unsuccessful attempts […]
Releasing Shoulds and Choosing Joy: A Restorative Approach to the Holidays
Six years ago, my grandmother died a week and a half before Christmas. While she was ninety-one and physically incapacitated by ill health, her death was a huge visceral shock to my system. She’d helped raise me from the time I was four, and while our relationship had not been without its pain and complications, […]
From Procrastination to Collaboration: Resolving Inner Conflict By Making Time for All of Your Needs
Why do we do one thing when we’re trying to accomplish another? Our predominant cultural message is that procrastination is personal weakness, lack of willpower, or some other personality flaw that must be overcome—an assessment that more often leads to self-recrimination than any satisfying resolution of the problem. That’s because procrastination isn’t a flaw, it’s […]