We make myriad decisions by ourselves and for ourselves every day. “Do I hit the snooze button one more time?” “What will I wear today?” Sometimes our choices are far more consequential. Will I tell the truth when lying would be easier? Will I honor a commitment when breaking it would give me something I […]
How Do We Do More Being? If you read Part 1 and found yourself thinking, “Yes, I understand the distinction between being and doing, but how do I actually become more rooted in being?” you have already bumped into the delicious paradox at the heart of the matter. We immediately want to know how to […]
Being and Doing – Understanding the Difference One of the fundamental themes that often comes up in my work with clients is understanding the difference between doing and being. It seems to me like most people are engaging in their lives backwards. They focus outward on what they are doing and think that determines the […]
What if: What if some of our fear of death comes from assuming that we know what dying is? We tend to imagine death from this side of the threshold. We picture absence, loss, separation, and the extinguishing of everything familiar. We imagine leaving behind the people we love, the life we know, our bodies, […]
The Problem with Living from the Outside-In One challenge shared by many of my mentoring clients is living in reaction to the outside world rather than navigating the world from a grounded connection within themselves. Their attention is continually being pulled outward responding to: what other people think or expect what has just happened […]
Not Just a Childhood Game Most of us have run a three-legged race at least once in our lives. You stand hip to hip with a partner. Someone ties your adjacent legs together with a length of rope. A starting pistol fires, and suddenly you discover something humbling: you cannot move well by simply doing […]
Keeping the Doors of Love Open Does your relationship feel like a place where you can fully be yourself? Or do you find yourself editing who you are, choosing your words carefully, softening your reactions, bracing for what might come next? Do you walk on eggshells, not quite sure which version of you your partner […]
Know That You Have a Choice In the space between what happens to us and how we act, there is a quiet but profound power. And most of us don’t know it’s there. Most of us move through our days operating on a kind of emotional autopilot. Something happens, and almost before we know it, […]
When Love Meets Difference Most of us have been trained to see life through a very narrow lens. We live in a culture whose values, social norms, institutions, and systems have largely been shaped by a level of human consciousness that is binary in nature. In this way of seeing, we are taught to divide […]
Looking At “Good Enough” From a Different Angle We are all doing the best we can… and this is what it looks like. It looks like misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and moments we wish we could take back. It looks like people acting from fear when they long for love, closing off when they most need […]