Below the surface of many family holiday gatherings are mini dramas playing out, contemporary grudges and resentments and unresolved childhood issues. Nothing hurts with such emotional depth as these familial battles. For the tender-hearted, this can be a psychological mine field while self-righteous bullies reign unchallenged. Many silently suffer through these events while dutifully and […]
They say opinions are like noses — everyone has one. Whether you like it or not, people have opinions about you. What you do with those opinions is entirely up to you. Consider a coaching client of mine who had a really tough time dealing with her family’s opinion of her over the holidays. On […]
Dictionaries specify that the word “judgment” refers to the process of forming an opinion after careful consideration. Judgments have their place in a court of law where, by social agreement, authority is granted to a judge or jury to determine whether or not someone’s behavior is or is not in accordance with the law. However, […]
Did you ever have a really good friendship where everything was just rolling along until one day you hit an impasse that you couldn’t seem to get past? I’ve been hearing a lot of stories like this lately and have had my fair share as well. So let’s take a look at what could be […]
“There is a struggle that is more interesting than pleasure or ego satisfaction… There is something far more interesting than what money can buy.” — Jacob Needleman I find it fascinating that 92 percent of Americans claim belief in God yet current politics suggest that only 1 percent of us have it all while the […]
The term “karma” is often used with great casualness, with little understanding of its profundity. People dismissively say “it’s my karma,” suggesting that their destiny or fate is merely the luck or bad fortune of the draw. This use of the term suggests a lack of personal power or responsibility for being at both the […]
Sometimes, I walk through this world and just marvel at the fact that we are all souls with individualized karmic agendas. Our lives and stories are woven together in a perfect complexity of clearing our individual and collective karmic accruals. It is as though we have a kind of karmic DNA built into our physical, […]
Over the past week, I have spent more than 15 hours on the phone with technical support for Apple, Time Warner Cable and Microsoft. I’ve spoken to about 30 different people in the U.S., India and the Philippines, and I have lost my mind on several occasions. I started out with one “simple” issue, which […]
Existential maturity (is) a kind of peaceful acceptance of mortality and of the relationship between generations of life that mitigates the pain of our transience by allowing an understanding of how we can die without entirely ceasing to exist. — Linda Emmanuel I must admit that I have fallen in love with this new term […]
Do you feel like you are 5 years old again when you visit with your family? Do you feel like everything is the same somehow? Have you maintained the same role in relationship to your family throughout your life? The shining star? The black sheep? The outcast? The one who just can’t seem to do […]