May 11, 2025
The wise quote featured on the header, comes from Roy T. Bennett, from The Light in the Heart. The advice here is clear – let’s use our past emotional experiences as a resource to learn and grow. But, let’s not dwell there. This opportunity exists with all of our emotional experiences, but some feelings can get so stuck, that we […]
June 27, 2024
Continuing the conversation started in Part 1 of this article – several key questions keep surfacing. One is the often unspoken tension between EI (Emotional Intelligence) and what is typically thought of as “therapy.” For anyone who has been involved in a therapeutic process, it’s immediately clear that learning and applying EI principles is very different from being “in therapy.” […]
March 26, 2024
This article was inspired by the work of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, Work: How to Find Joy and Meaning Each Hour of the Day. For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master, poet, peace and human rights activist was exiled from his homeland of Vietnam in 1966. His work, based on […]
January 1, 2024
When was the last time you experienced joy? To answer the question it helps to remember what joy feels like in your body. Like all other emotions, joy has its own unique biological signature. We memorize emotions in our bodies. With those emotions we experience less often, we may have to work a little harder to recall how they felt. […]
May 2, 2023
Most people don’t respond positively to feedback (a.k.a criticism). The expanding knowledge we have about how the brain works is helping us to understand why. Even under the BEST of circumstances, many of us find ourselves recoiling in response to hearing what others think about us. Our receptivity depends on context, relationships and circumstances – but the greatest factor is […]
April 10, 2023
The concept of “acceptance” is misunderstood. In cultures where progress and improvement are a constant quest, accepting what is seems passive. Those of us who grew up in fix-it, more-is-better cultures still bristle at the idea of “letting go.” For a long time I justified “arguing with reality” because I told myself I was a passionate, strong-willed person who was driven to […]
October 20, 2022
More and more people are talking about living in “uncertain” times. It’s now called, “the new normal.” The anxiety over our predicament of uncertainty appears to be a new discovery. Our long-held assumptions about the future are being quickly rearranged. Collectively, our cultures are shifting so fast that we expect to live in an era of uncertainty. Along with the […]
August 11, 2022
“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” ~ R.D Laing The Scottish psychologist, R.D Laing wrote these prescient words in 1970. In our work we see an alarming increase of the effects of overwork and overwhelm on our clients. Many of the […]