Dear One,
I don’t know about you, but I’m ditching all social media and news forever! And maybe all casual conversation with strangers while I’m at it. Have you ever heard so many locked down stories in your life? How things are. How we should behave. What must happen. Yada, yada. I’m sick of it.
You’re absolutely right—I’m being triggered. And that’s about me, isn’t it?
So, I pull out my…
Stay curious.
Lately I’ve been studying my ass off, scouring the scientific literature to learn as much as I can about COVID-19—the virus associated with it, how it’s behaving, who is affected and why, what effective strategies can be used now and in the future, and what we’re learning to protect us going forward.
I love how the global impact and novelty of this situation is driving a hunger…
Dear One,
We weren’t broken then.
We aren’t broken now.
Not us.
Not our world. Not our communities. Not the planet.
If not broken, what the hell are we? What kind of Pollyanna idea is “unbroken” anyway?
I’ll tell you what it means. We’re … Complicated. Messy. Mean as hell. Heartbroken. Scared. Gorgeous. Amazing. And Beautiful. All these things. All at once.
But not broken.
Because we are…
Dear One,
In recent conversations with good friends—smart and worldly friends—I realized how uncertain and scared many of them are about the COVID-19 pandemic. More than I expected.
Like, what it is. How it affects us—really. Why we are responding as we are. What we can do to protect ourselves and others. How we safely move forward with our lives.
I’ve heard remarks like, “I didn’t think…
What I’ve learned from my own healing and those of my clients, is that deep, sustainable recovery from suffering, pain, and chronic illness can’t be done in the usual, outdated twentieth century way. We can’t do it with conventional medicine—a brilliant model of healthcare designed to address urgent problems.
As a doctor, that was something I didn’t come to understand overnight. I heard my…
Healing is ours. Our birthright. The primary urge of all nature. But we must claim it as our own. No one else can do this for us. Our healing, our wholeness, our potential rests squarely in our own hands.
This is power. This is our power. This is the promise of our amazing humanness.
It all begins with a simple decision. A “yes,” softly spoken, perhaps tentatively at first, that precedes…
Healing is ours. Our birthright. The primary urge of all nature. But we must claim it as our own. No one else can do this for us. Our healing, our wholeness, our potential rests squarely in our own hands.
This is power. This is our power. This is the promise of our amazing humanness.
It all begins with a simple decision. A “yes,” softly spoken, perhaps tentatively at first, that precedes…
How does it make sense to use “anxiety” and “empathic wise guide” in the same phrase?
Isn’t the opposite true? Aren’t our anxious minds—you know, the way they churn and burn with worry about the past, present, and future—our downfall? A whopping character flaw? A total loss of control? The terrible, shameful energy that keeps us separated from our true selves and happiness…
Dear One,
“You’ll never get people to change.”
“It’ll bring down the whole economy.”
“People aren’t ready for it—they’re too much in crisis mode.”
“You’re too idealistic.”
What are they talking about?
This is the flack I’ve been getting for speaking out about what we’re called to do. How the pandemic and the suffering it’s brought is illuminating our weaknesses (it’s blinding!). How…
Dear One,
First, we survive.
Then we step back and ask, what am I called to do next?
And we realize, we knew it all along, didn’t we?
We knew where our reverent care of ourselves was taking us.
Resilience.
And we know in our guts—This. Is. Our. Call.
The global pandemic of COVID-19 is one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced—personally and collectively—in any of our…
We’re smack in the middle of a global viral pandemic (COVID-19) unlike anything most of us have ever lived through. It’s a stark and sudden reality. We’re isolating ourselves and taking precautions. And we’re scared.
What else can we do? What else should we do? How do we take care of our whole selves?
Right now, protection has two dimensions:
We’re in the eye of the storm, aren’t we?
Never have we been called to navigate our safety and survival with so much uncertainty. We’re scared. Many of us are wondering what’s best to do to stay safe, to remain strong, and to thrive in the face of it all.
These are my top ten recommendations for navigating—and thriving—through the storm of a global pandemic.
First and…
Sometimes we work so hard and keep showing up and still aren’t where we want to be.
Take my client, Grace, for instance.
She’s been sick for twenty-five years, mostly without a diagnosis. (And, to be fair, we still don’t have “a diagnosis,” we’ve got a chronic problem that’s created a wide path of destruction—it’s no longer “a diagnosis” but a constellation of dysfunctions, all needing our…
The chronic fatigue of hypothyroidism is ‘just the smoke’ rising high above the smoldering fire that lies beneath the surface. Said another way, the fatigue of hypothyroidism is a symptom–it’s not a disease. It’s not the defining thing that is wrong with you. It’s just one–of many–surface-level indicators of much larger and deeper problems: ‘the…
Dear One,
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
—Mary Oliver, The Wild Geese
Who among us hasn’t worried about being good enough? Guilty of being ourselves? Shameful for having our own minds, hearts, and ideas about what’s true?
I’ve spent a…
You were born to heal. No exceptions!
How do I know?
It’s science-y stuff, but it’s the message of hope we all search for to end our suffering, to improve our performance, and to deepen our experiences as human beings.
It’s the science of human potential applied to our daily lives:
Dear One,
“What do I need to heal?” (She pleads to God, the angels, and anyone who will listen, as she sits, feeling overwhelmed, eyes closed, in morning meditation.)
“And, please bring it to me in a tangible form that I can understand for once!” (She demands in her uppity way.)
Flump!
In the next second, her thirty-pound fuzzy canine love-bomb abruptly plops himself in her lap, no permission,…