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Welcome to my blog, where you'll find substantive, well-researched articles that blend neuroscience, philosophy, poetry, personal reflection, and the latest life coaching tools in service of helping people engage their full potential.
Children know the world through the heart, and as such, know themselves. In our culture, adulthood typically trains us towards the kind of knowledge we accumulate and create through observation and analysis—bodies of knowing such as history and science that are narrative, traceable, cumulative, reason-able, deductive, more or less linear, and “objective.” Such knowledge is of course beautiful; among other things, it helps us discern and explicate the patterns and structure inherent to a cosmology and of ecologies at once bigger than we are and of which we are part.
Feeling lost, scared, uncertain, grief-stricken, heartbroken, guilty, unsure—these emotions are core to the experience of conscious growth: of becoming more authentic, of saying yes to our truest longings, of saying no to what we've outgrown or what didn't fit to begin with, of risking heartache in honor of love, of risking failure in pursuit of our passions, of taking the leap, of having faith.
But when we profane the holy pain of growth by treating it as dangerous, inappropriate, weak, needy, excessive, indulgent, or just plain distracting, we don’t just muzzle self-actualization and cap our impact and potential for success, we become complicit with conformity at its worst: we abandon imagination, the fuel of courageous inquiry and inspired creation, without which innovation sputters, fear becomes status quo, and self-protection trumps co-creation.
… to play our true role in the whole, to feel fulfilled and purposeful, we must be willing, paradoxically, to risk feeling wildly alone: we must be willing to step into vulnerability, to know and then act upon our deepest joys, which also requires accepting and working to heal our deepest wounds.
Courage can be muscular and insistent, but courage can also be quiet and subtle. And it can be both. The courage I care most about cultivating in myself and helping to inspire in others is the courage to live authentically.
Here’s the thing: in my own life, and in working with clients and students, I cannot point to a single instance in which the punitive, impatient, striving quest of the inner critic—no matter how well-intended—has catalyzed lasting healing, happiness, creativity, motivation, joy, or liberation of any kind.
What a strange, echo-y feeling. Suddenly, the twenty years of hands-on mothering that stretched ahead of me as I gave birth for the first time, a tunnel of space that seemed impossibly long because me at fifty-three seemed then to be someone entirely distant from me at thirty-three, feels eerily ghost-like…
As long as we’re stuck in shame, grief’s gift—a process of slow tenderizing, of deepening vulnerability that, over time, expands our ability to feel even more fully and therefore love even more deeply—remains agonizingly just out of reach, behind closed doors whose seeming impenetrability makes them loom monstrously large.
For years after my divorce (and years during my marriage) I felt this nearly unbearable ache. By day, my life was full to brimming; I was creating and growing and caring for and providing, and this richness of doing filled me up. But by night, curled up in my bed, my heart would ache, and I longed for a man—“the man”—that I knew better than to make my answer, my comfort, my medicine, my arrival, my exhale, but nonetheless did.
As you inventory these strengths of yours, remember this: your wish to improve your life, to do better, is less a sign of past failure than an affirmation of your aliveness, of being attuned to the energy of life itself—what the poet Walt Whitman called "the procreant urge"—expressing itself through you.
But what I really wanted, though I couldn't begin to name it then, was to be seen, not for what I thought or fought for, but for who I was. I wanted, desperately, for someone to see past the passionate "expression" to the girl who was in fact wordless when it came to naming my need for love.
To practice one’s pleasure (I do believe pleasure, like love, is a practice we can and must cultivate) in service of a life that’s all-in is above all an act of exquisite vulnerability, because at the heart of what’s pleasing about pleasure is honesty; pleasure is not something we can fake. It’s not a performance. When we inhabit our pleasure we exhale into our authentic selves. We are laying aside self-consciousness and worries about what others think, and we are, for however brief a moment, suspended in oneness with life itself. We are bared. We are open.
This is why nothing hurts quite like being rejected while inhabiting our pleasure—nothing, that is, except living in fear of such rejection and therefore deciding over time that our pleasure doesn’t matter, or worse, that it’s a contagion.
Joy—not glimpsed or tasted, but worn like a silky skin and savored—feels, to me, naked, exposed. Feels trembly. Feels unhidden. Feels all-in. Feels deeply vulnerable. When I anticipate and imagine cultivating and claiming fully my joy, as a spiritual posture, my heartbeat quickens and my chest heaves up then down, as it sometimes does when in an elevator and the body is still traveling between floors, suspended, despite the gentle thud of arrival.
The experience of epiphany is, more than anything, an act of radical belonging: in its midst we learn that confusion is a symptom of over-steeping in the known, a failure of curiosity. We discover that true freedom—that sudden sensation of clear-seeing—is achieved not through isolation, not by stepping-away and seeing anew, but by climbing into the palm of what beckons from beyond and finding we've always lived there.
Nothing illuminates our inner life-source like love does, and nor is there a darker abyss than the one we're plunged into in the wake of love's loss. We are wounded in love, and we heal in love. We lose ourselves in love, and we reclaim--and name ourselves anew--in love.
True healing is only something we can give to ourselves, which means that chronic anger—an emotion that keeps us focused externally—prevents internal healing in the name of self-preservation. But invulnerability in the guise of self-preservation is the insidious cost of anger unexamined. What my own journey of healing has taught me, above all else, is that true self-preservation necessitates feeling fully—with curiosity and compassion, and very often slowly, bit by gentle bit—the very pain we’ve been avoiding when we focus obsessively on the person or circumstance that has hurt us or caused us to feel afraid.
Life's exuberance does not manifest despite the dark, but through it. When we mistake the natural, generative pain of creation as an indication of something gone wrong, we unwittingly overlook the very encounter that will open us fully, that will bring us face-to-face with what it is we need to know, to feel, to gather, to husband in order to make way for the creation that seeks expression through us: our own astonishing capacity for feeling, for ever-more presence to the breadth of our aliveness.
Whether you are celebrating today, or grieving, or aching... Whether you have children, have lost children, chose not to have children, wanted children and could not birth or otherwise raise children of your own... Whether you are with your children, or estranged from them ... You are, yourself, born of a mother, and you are, yourself, called every day into the profound life's work of learning to parent yourself.
Like the mechanism of the beating heart, or the process of birth shared by all mammals, creativity is born not by way of unwavering action, but through the pulse of contraction: surges of energy born on the back of quiet periods that appear, to the observer, so still as to be lifeless: the winter tree shorn of leaves, the tangle of brittle stalks upon which last year’s peonies balanced and billowed, the birthing woman sunk in sudden sleep between the volcanic heaves of her womb’s sharp cinch and release.
When we make a mantra out of overcoming our comfort zones in search of our best selves, we predicate transformation on a lie: that we don't like to strive, that thriving is hard, and that it doesn't feel good. (All of which feels surprisingly and interestingly Puritan, don't you think?)
In contrast, I'd like to suggest that we drop the rhetoric of the "comfort zone" and cut to the chase, call it what it really is: the zone of fear.
When we're stuck, spinning our wheels, not sure how we got here but quite sure we don't want to stay, we're not comfortable—we're afraid.
Am I (with the best of intentions!) gearing up to survivethis season? Or am I setting myself up to thrive?
Maybe the answer to this question is obvious to you, but if you're like me, you're not always sure; survival-mind is so deeply normalized by our culture today that we often don't realize when we're caught in its grip. Hyper-consumption (the f.o.m.o. fomented by Black Friday, Cyber Monday... the belief that eating and drinking well past the point of our body's comfort or health means we're in sync with the "holiday spirit"...), overspending and over-commitment, and habitual people-pleasing are just a few ways in which we perpetuate and naturalize survival-mindset, that deep-grooved network of beliefs that whispers there's not enough, more is better, and that's just the way it is.
You know you're in survival mindset if you're bracing for the days ahead. You know you're in survival mindset if you're letting yourself off the hook with regard to self-care (eating well, sleeping enough, honoring your boundaries and priorities) in the name of being festive, fun, a "good friend" or a "good host." You know you're in survival mindset if you're striving for perfection, if you're spending more time thinking about what others will think of your efforts than you spend enjoying those efforts along the way, and if you're responding to feelings of overwhelm by shifting into auto-pilot, that slightly numb state of being in which we tell ourselves that the delayed reward of "getting it all done" justifies the edgy cortisol high we're riding through a sea of seemingly endless tasks.
