You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
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.
I felt divided: light-filled on the outside, a thorn of wrongness so dark as to make me, simply, bad—way down on the inside.
It wasn’t until well into my adulthood that I learned the name for my secret is shame. As is always the case, we create circumstances that become evidence of our unconscious/conscious beliefs—opportunities to see, and heal, what resides within.
I created such a mirror in a very painful romantic relationship (not my ex-husband), one I went back to over and over until I hit rock-bottom, when my healing journey took root in earnest.
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.
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.
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.
