January 1, 2025
The ancients knew there were many times of the year – and in our lives, that signaled a time to slow down. These were the hours and days for quiet reflection. Clearly, those days are over in “modern times.” The reality of life today is the amount of time reserved for rest has diminished dramatically. Another “casualty” of modern life […]
September 24, 2024
Developing more patience has been a long-time personal pursuit. There’s no formula I can recommend. It takes diligence. It takes commitment. It takes attention. Mostly it takes remembering. Lately, I noticed I’ve been sliding back into some old habits of impatience. On closer examination, they’re predictable.I’ve often written about the power of patience because I have experienced that impatience is […]
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. […]
December 30, 2022
Is there a more resourceful, useful and enabling emotion than patience? The act of being patient is most definitely behavioral – and it requires skill. But patience is also a feeling state – one with very specific (and beneficial) physiological markers. When we are patient, our mind is relatively clear. It is the opposite of a confused, jumbled state of thoughts. […]
March 14, 2022
Writing in The New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope wrote in (Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Suggests) “Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family? That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research called self-compassion – how kindly people view themselves. The research suggests that giving […]
March 11, 2022
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver’s haunting question should become a mantra for life in the 21st century. Seemingly inured to stress, too many of us speed through each day without taking the time to stop and ask – what have I traded a day of my life for today? Jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon dozens of articles still ask, “Can […]
August 18, 2021
“ “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels us to unfold our powers.” Erich Fromm, The Search for Meaning Most of us would agree that whatever we do, we cannot predict the future. Yet, many of us spend an inordinate amount of time trying to control the uncontrollable. This is a […]
January 3, 2021
This post was inspired by the simple, enduring work by the late author, Rumer Godden whose work has touched many lives with its wisdom. More than ever we understand that life is more than the endless to-do lists and bucket lists we create and then relentlessly pursue to achieve “success.” As the poet Yeats said, “Life is not a problem to be […]