What is love anyway? "There's a hundred shades of love, and a million in-between, if you can't get enough, then there's more you haven't seen" ~Andrew Donovan “I LOVE YOU” What does that mean? What does it mean to love someone, what does it mean to be loved? What is love anyway? I started to ponder these questions when I noticed this gap between someone telling me they love me and how I felt in relationship to their [...]
Happy Holidays?!?Or are they? For many people this time of year can be stressful and or challenging on many fronts. What would it take for you to have a truly happy holiday that you enjoy and that works for you? Here are some tips and tools for helping you truly have a Happy Holiday:1Stop taking on other people's stuffHow much of the stress, anxiety, discomfort etc. that you are aware of during the holidays is actually yours? Could you [...]
Love and Not Love I recently saw a post on facebook about a study showing that spanking is harmful even if the parent has a warm and loving relationship with the child. Wow, ok, so this really set some wheels spinning for me... Inflicting physical harm or pain on other human beings is considered violence, aggression, assault or abuse. Nowhere else in our culture do we sanction inflicting physical pain/harm on another human being, not even on violent [...]
Subconscious Family Patterning Have you ever noticed that family relationships can be some of the most challenging? This is often because there is a lifetime of history we are bringing into each interaction, history that often includes painful experiences of not having our needs met from people who we have an evolutionary expectation to meet them... history that often includes struggles for power in one way or another, struggles to meet those needs, or get the people we [...]
Emancipating Your Anger So, I recently spent the whole day super duper depressed. That doesn't happen to me very often anymore but when it does it can be super intense. There are those days that I experience a little wave of depression and easily find my way out of it, (Hint: Who does this belong to?) and then there are those days when nothing seems to help. This was one of those days. What I discovered at the end [...]
Lessons from Depression Lesson Number Two: There's some part of me that I'm denying Another discovery I'm having around depression is that when it is mine, it usually means that I'm cutting myself off from some part of myself- that I am engaging in some form of self-denial. This could be something I don't want to be aware of- like how angry I am- or having lots of judgment and wrongness toward myself rather than space and acceptance. How [...]
Choice I’ve been thinking a lot about choice and the power of choice and how it’s the magic and the secret to having what you desire in life… Really. Think about it for a moment. What you choose really does determine the life you’ll have both now and in the future. So many of us desire, dream of, wish or pray for change in our lives, and yet, what we choose stays the same. If we don’t make [...]
Can We Meet Again for the First Time? What would it take to receive each new being freshly? To live on that edge of expectancy and discovery of finding out who you and they are? What would it take to meet each person in your life again for the first time? Can you receive them with that much freshness? Can you let go of everything you've ever known or created about them to discover who they are and [...]
Who is Anyone to Anyone? How the conceptions we have of others keep us and them from changing or being known for who we truly are I go through lots of change. The person I was three months ago, doesn't actually exist anymore. Except to the people I haven't seen in three months, that's how they know me- or even more likely they don't actually have the three month old model of me but one much older than that which is [...]
What do YOU know about YOU? What If somewhere deep down inside of you you KNOW what is true for you, YOU know what is going on for you and what you need to do to shift the places you are stuck or that you feel aren't working in your life? What if no-one, no matter how educated, smart, perceptive, intuitive, or magical knows better than you what is right and true for you? Yet, how often do [...]
Lessons from Depression: Lesson Three: Your Body Might Need Some Support From You As much as I see depression as a symptom- often of something going on in the psyche, some place we are cutting ourselves off from ourselves and our awareness- I know for me it was also important to address the condition of my physical body. Your body also might desire and require additional support and help to balance that it hasn't been getting. I started feeling [...]
Bars! What the heck are Bars? They are points on the head where you hold the electromagnetic charges of your thoughts and beliefs, and when you "have your Bars run" you can discharge and re-set these charges to create more space, peace and possibility. Sound like a whole lot of hocus-pocus? Yeah, that's what I thought too... until I got off the table and experienced such a deep sense of space, peace, calm and self-connection that I'd been [...]
Some Thoughts on Maturity What does maturity mean to you? What makes someone mature or immature? I began to more-deeply investigate the question of maturity when I noticed I was repeatedly judging someone in my life as immature. Being a practitioner of Nonviolent Communication, which invites us to move beyond our judgement to see more clearly what is actually occurring, I wanted to really unpack what behaviors or ways of being I was labeling as immature. What I came to see [...]
Compliments that ConnectHow able are you to accept a compliment?We all know we “SHOULD” accept compliments when we receive them, but here's the funny thing about compliments- they often come in the form of judgment:“You're so pretty” “You're so smart" “You're such a calm person” “You're so kind and considerate”Have you ever noticed that you might feel slightly uneasy with these compliments even though you “should” be able to take a compliment?The thing with these types of compliments [...]
The Voice That Speaks InsideThe Voice, by Shel SilversteinAhh, yes! The voice that speaks inside. And yet, how often do we deny or crush that voice? How often do we argue with that voice or make it wrong?What if you're not wrong? What if you stopped drowning out that voice and started listening to its every little whisper? What would it have to tell you? What would it show you about your life, about your heart, about your [...]