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 [...]
Are you an Empath?!? Maybe you KNOW you are or maybe you're new to the concept and wonder how it might apply to you... And whether or not you define yourself as one, you might still feel the affects of your sensitivities and like to have an easier time navigating this journey and this life. Do you ever walk into a room and just start feeling "off"? Are you easily affected by the emotions of others, even if [...]
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 [...]
Why Loving Yourself Isn't EnoughDo you get told when relationships are challenging, or you're not exactly receiving the love that you desire that you just need to love yourself more? And that somehow, self-love is the magic ticket that will solve all your relationship (and life!) problems? I've been hearing for a long time, and maybe you have too, that in order to have love you just need to love yourself... more. While I DO believe that loving yourself is [...]
Re-writing your love story You might not realize it, but you have a love story. I'm not talking about your fairytale-princess version of love, your knight-in-shining-armor kind of story- what I'm talking about is a whole lot more personal and a whole lot closer to you and your life. The love story I'm talking about is the story that has been written into your subconscious through your lived-experiences in life, starting with your family. Our childhood experiences of [...]
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 [...]
Finding who you BE beyond your family Through some deep work and exploration with one of my clients, what I'm coming to see as a real step into adulthood is being able to create yourself and your life beyond your family. That is, to choose for you your own beliefs, thoughts, ideas, or ways of being. To make choices about how you spend your time and run your life based on what you want and what works for you, [...]
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 [...]
Lessons from Depression I'm no stranger to depression. It's something that has been part of my reality, probably since I was about 11 when my beloved teacher of four years died of cancer and I was moving away from childhood into puberty. Dealing with hormonal changes and confronting the realities of life and death at 11 on my own were way too much for my 11-year-old self to handle. So I just kind of cut myself off from [...]
How far have you already come? Have you ever changed something or overcome something in your life and then almost forgotten about it, or who you used to be? Like the way you are now is the way you've always been? Sometimes what I've noticed happens after a big shift or transformation, is that we feel different and once we've integrated the shift we proceed from that different place as if it's our new normal. Because it now [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
What Else is Possible When You Surrender the Past and Truly Create Your Life from the Present? Welcome to this New Year! This new moment that is full of possibility that has never been before. How true is that of every moment, not just the turn of the year? How true is it for you? Most of us are not living from a place of connection to the possibility within each new moment. Most of us are busy [...]
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 [...]