How I Found Freedom by Facing My Biggest Secret
Owing back taxes was my deepest, darkest secret for a long time. It held me back from pursuing writing that could be successful, for fear I’d be caught (I didn’t know exactly how much I owed, but I knew it was more than I could pay). I hadn’t intentionally avoided taxes–I did file and pay some years; I’d just kind of flaked out here and there. But still, I felt horrible about it.
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What Does it Mean to ‘Wake Up’ Spiritually?
To paraphrase Ken Wilber in his interview, spiritual awakening isn’t the same as emotional maturity, and those two are distinct from looking at what lies beneath the conscious, our repressed feelings and shadow selves. Awakening doesn’t heal everything or make us perfect — if we were “perfect” (as many teachers say), we wouldn’t be here any more…
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When Thoughts Become Torture
If you’ve never had an intrusive thought, it’s hard to imagine. These are thoughts that appear, unbidden and undesired, and that (in my experience) are immune to the techniques I usually use to stop thinking. I guess the best way to describe it is the example of “Don’t think about a pink elephant.”
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The Core Dilemma: Everyone Believes They are Right
This is a topic I’ve been percolating for a long time, and it comes from a teaching by Tara Brach in which she says, “The world is divided into people who think they’re right.” Nothing illustrates this better than our collective reaction to The Dress. It’s the perfect example that shows people have not only radically different perceptions but different *realities*…
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How to Find Calm Through Fierce Presence
Different teachers define presence in different ways–Dr. Dan Siegel says it’s “being aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.” Eckhart Tolle calls it “rising above thought.” To me, it means being present in my body for all the sensations in and around whatever experience I’m having.
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Gifts of Giving: Kindness as a Wellness Practice
I’ve discovered the secret to living in a world filled with kindness, generosity and compassion: It starts with me.
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How to Get from Resistance to Acceptance
Resistance, the opposite of acceptance, is a blockage of energy. Think about how we experience tension, anger and worry on a physical level: the stomach feels like it’s in knots; our throats clench; there’s a heaviness in the chest. All of those are blocked energy. Often, we don’t even realize we’re resisting. Our minds believe that whatever negativity we’re feeling will make a difference, the same way we think that pressing an elevator button numerous times will make it come faster.
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How to Accept Just This Moment
If I could have a superpower, I would choose acceptance. Whether you call it surrender, alignment, The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle), “loving what is” (Byron Katie), Radical Acceptance (Tara Brach), non-resistance or getting in the Vortex (Abraham-Hicks), all the teachings I’ve encountered point to the same bedrock principle: Surrender to what exists in this moment, exactly as it is.
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Why It’s Important to Acknowledge Anger
When I write out why I’m angry in my journal, one of three things happens: 1) I discover that what I need is compassion for the person, not anger (that happens a lot), 2) I see that the trait that’s angering me in someone else is really glaringly obvious in me, too, and/or 3) The anger passes through my hand into the journal, and I feel cleansed.
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How to Become Present Through Physical Sensations
My mind, when left to its own devices, tends to cause me more pain than joy. It’s a great tool, effective for analyzing data or strategizing, but it has the capacity to bully me, too. The creativity that’s so useful professionally can also create wild stories and vivid dramas that have no root in reality,…
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Balancing Practical and Energetic Actions
I’ve written about how giving money away has a different energetic charge than spending it on oneself, and I’ve seen how that plays out time and again.
In general, living with one foot on the planet and one foot in the energetic world, we’re always balancing the impact of our actions as well as whether they ‘make sense’ in the context of our day-to-day lives.
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How to Become Present Right Now. And Now.
Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or just keeping your mind from looping, this is a practice to help you become present in just a few seconds.
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How to Use Mindfulness to Enhance Your Creativity
Creative ideas don’t come from sitting in a boardroom, at a desk or staring at a computer. These activities – or non-activities – signal our thinking minds to activate, and the thinking mind can’t innovate or create; it can only analyze, strategize and replicate old ideas. We humans are creatures of habit: If we sit in the same place (literally or figuratively), we’ll come up with the same old ideas.
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Surprise! Time Doesn’t Actually Exist
Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question “What time is it?” or “What’s the date today?” – if anybody were there to ask it – would be quite…
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2014 Reflections
I started drafting this post by writing, “This year didn’t go exactly as I’d planned.” Then, as I wrote, I realized just how far I’ve come. Wow. It may not have unfolded exactly according to my directive, with the outcomes I wanted, but it’s still been a miraculous, transformative year. Last December 31, I set…
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57 Simple Ways to Give
As a society, we’ve kind of lost the thread about what “giving” means. Our culture is so oriented around stuff that we’ve forgotten what it means to truly give from the heart. Giving Tuesday is an antidote to all the big holiday sales, a day to give back to the community. Or, to paraphrase Gandhi, to be…
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Lessons I’ve Learned from the Weather
The Pacific Northwest is known for being rainy and grey in the winter. In Vancouver and Seattle, clouds can settle in among skyscrapers, creating the sensation of a neverending (and very damp) night. Where I live, though, is a unique geographical space. First, it’s an island, so weather patterns tend to shift quickly anyway. The…
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How Loneliness Can Show Us Where We Need to Heal
When my only close friend moved away, I realized that I had to learn to give myself all the things I’d wanted from that person.
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