The Blog
Here’s where I share thoughts on the work of moving toward our biggest lives and baddest selves.
Raising the Dialogue, Part 3: When Do I Get to Talk?
A wee sentence tucked into each of my last two posts, each alluding to the need to address problematic words and behaviors, deserves a little attention today. This is where this conversation often gets to: Okay, I’ve listened deeply to them, I’ve listened into myself,...
Raising the Dialogue, Part 2: Listening for the Big Lessons
Last week, I wrote about listening past others’ challenging words as though it’s easy, a switch to flip. “Ah, yes, now I hear the humanness beneath the reactivity. Jolly good!” Ah, but no. Not in real life. In real life, we have someone else whose reactive shouts for...
Raising the Dialogue, Part 1: Listening Past Words
For some time now, it’s felt to many of us as though public dialogue has devolved into different sides shielding themselves behind stone walls while lobbing opinions at one another. Given that human history is a centuries-long, unbroken chain of cause and effect, any...
Sharpening our Tools on the Whetstones of Little Stuff
Picture it: Last Friday, May 1, my yoga mat laid out on the Matisse-reminiscent print of our bedroom rug. Unlike the previous however-many months, my mat had consistently made an appearance there each day of April thanks to a friend inviting me to join her in a 31 day...
The Awful/Good, Awfully Good Practice
People occasionally compliment me for being patient. It makes me giggle. When I tell Theresa or my mom about those compliments, they giggle, too. Patience is most certainly not one of my superpowers. I practice it, though. I practice noticing when my patience is...
Time Travel for the Sake of the Now
While I’m an advocate for and practitioner in living as much in the present moment as possible (an ever-imperfect attempt, for me, at least), there are historically two ways I’ve consistently brought the future into my coaching, both of which, well, inform the now. In...
Generosity and the Gremlin of Not Enough
One of the interesting things about particularly challenging times, be they as common as a suddenly-lost job or as extraordinary as a pandemic, is that they have a way of revealing a whole realm of what was already there but denied. These times act like highlighter on...
Fear in its Right Place
I am a culinary school dropout. The year after I finished my bachelors in psychology, I enrolled in the local community college for the culinary arts adventure I had been dreaming of since junior year of high school. It took only a handful of weeks for me to become...
Laughter in a Locked Ward
There’s a moment from a handful of years ago that I think I will remember my whole lifetime. A deeply courageous, very pregnant woman I knew was experiencing a profound and dangerous bout of depression, likely fueled (or perhaps deepened) by pregnancy hormones....
Escaping Imminent, Gruesome Death in the Backwoods. Sorta.
A couple of winters ago, Theresa and I spent a weekend in a primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere Virginia. It was a little log cabin in a gully by a creek, mostly used by hunters, lit by candles, with a camping stove and propane heater. It was exactly the kind of...