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…
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,…
Dear One,
Have you ever been handed a new food plan? A savvy food plan, just for you, promising exactly what you were searching for? Designed to perfectly align with your unique systems biology? To correct nutrient deficiencies and beautifully address your problems like only food can? (Maybe this plan was even endorsed by a favorite NYTimes best-selling author!)
You take it with you, tail…
The other day I saw a client who came to me for help with persistent fatigue, anxiety, sleep problems, and trouble losing weight.
As a shy teenager, life was already hard. Then I asked him to do more hard things. Like change his diet, letting go of comfort foods he loved but were directly linked to how he felt. Like getting more sleep, giving up precious time at night when he felt his best and…
“Keep a green bough in your heart, and a singing bird will come.”
-Lao Tzu
I love this gorgeous quote, and as a bird lover, it blasts my heart right open.
I’m reminded to keep my heart open (the green bough), inviting something magical to cross my path, calling me to see it.
But it’s hard sometimes to have an open heart, isn’t it? It’s a challenge to stay in gratitude and appreciation for…
“We don’t know how to measure what we care about, so we care about what we measure.”
-Richard Tapia
Whoa. That’s powerhouse! And from the mouth of a mathematician!
I think he captures how uncomfortable we are with the uncertainty of our lives (what we care about), so we cling to what we think we know. Isn’t that part of what we get from measuring things? A feeling of certainty? Even if we…
I love the idea of the law of attraction.
You’ve heard of it, right?
The “law” of nature that (purportedly) says, “think it, feel it, celebrate it, take action toward it, and it will come.” That we create our reality. That we can manifest our dreams.
Saying those words fills me with hope. They make me feel I can control my outcomes. Direct my life.
And we can to some extent, right? We know this…
I have a problem with nice.
Do you know what I mean?
Those people who tell you what they think you want to hear? How your hair always looks great (even when you know it doesn’t), or how your food is always the most delicious they’ve ever had (even the peanut butter and jelly sandwich), or what you’ve written is awesome (when you know it’s crap).
I don’t need that. In fact, I hate that.
See, I…
I struck a resonant chord with my discussion about asking for help last week. Thank you so much for speaking up about your troubles and insights—you can be sure there are a whole bunch of others feeling exactly the same way but choose to stay quiet. We have so much to learn from one another!
What did I learn from you?
There’s a whole other angle to the help story that often gets us…