Welcome to 2024, dearests! What are you dreaming into this year? Are there areas of your life that feel stuck where you’re longing for movement? Are your heart and your dreams needing more loving, attuned, responsive support?
How can empathy help us right now?
When lives are at stake, it can feel counterintuitive—and HARD—to slow down and listen. In this space dedicated to the restorative power of empathy, I want to talk with you about how to have conversations about geopolitical violence with people we care about when we have different views or come from different positionalities, to try […]
Wiping Clean the Family Curse: Healing Family Systems, Healing Our World
Have you ever felt that you’re carrying pain that’s not your own? The burgeoning field of epigenetics reveals: “Traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA….The genome has long been known as the blueprint of life, but the epigenome is life’s Etch A Sketch: Shake […]
Why is Self-Compassion So Elusive? (And A Three-Step Process for Priming the Pump!)
When I started learning Nonviolent Communication (NVC) a decade ago, one of my first teachers heavily emphasized self-empathy—that is, sensing into our own feelings and needs as a method to understand and connect with ourselves—as the easiest and most readily available source of empathy and compassion. “Self-empathy is your best friend,” she said. Her preference […]
The Truth about Your Inner Critic
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 […]