The Blog
Here’s where I share thoughts on the work of moving toward our biggest lives and baddest selves.
21 Years of Healing
August 22, 1996 is kind of a big deal for me - that date marks the near-fatal culmination of an unhealthy teen relationship. I've written about it a bunch, in personal essays, fiction, poetry. I shared it with however-many of the 300,000 readers of the Greensboro...
A Monster’s Wisdom: Finding the Gold in the Rubbish
Whampus was a name that came to me in an instant as I was reading The Artist's Way at Work. The activity at hand was to notice the various voices originating in my grey matter, parse them out, and give them proper names. Whampus was the biggest and baddest of my...
The Terrible, Horrible, Terribly-Useful Thing
In my 30-second ad last week, I told the rad community builders at Network NRV that people often misunderstand who it is I work with - some think coaching is for people who are unholy messes, incapable in some way. The exact opposite is true: I'm lucky enough to work...
A Reflection on Another Revolution Around the Sun
When I was an uncomfortable, awkward teenager, I used to wish that I could sort of konk out until all the big unknowns of my life were known: what I would be doing, with whom I would be spending my time, who I would be... At the time, I imagined it would all be shored...
The Hey-Presto of Transforming Suffering into Compassion
Over the years, my family has had big sprawling Passover seders (the ritual meal) that have required folding tables and folding chairs and food prep that my mom would start weeks ahead of time. I recall one year that we were stretched across the backyard of my...
The Subtle Wobble of Expectation
Last week, a friend shared her favorite quote with me: Expectation is the mother of all heartache. I thought: Yeah! Right on! Down with expectations! Live in the moment, right? Make decisions based on what we know now while releasing the belief that we can control the...
My Socks Have Been Reminding Me to Be Patient with Myself
A couple of weeks ago, I rearranged my drawers. I just made a little extra room for my socks, put the outerwear shirts in the drawer next to the sleep shirts, and the jeans in a drawer next to the non-jeans. Little shifts that just made a little more sense than the...
What I Learned from a Miscommunication and Iggy Azalia
Like many Jewish folks, I tend to toast with the Hebrew conjunction l'chaim which means to life. To me, it's a beautiful sentiment because it's not qualified by anything. It's not to a fantastic life or to a lucrative life or to a peril-free life. It's just to life,...
Celebrating My Third Year of Meditation
Meditation. It's similar to "networking" and "chicken-foot broth" in that it's sometimes tough to get past our initial reactions to the words and get to the core of the concept. It's also similar to being likeable in that the harder we try to be likeable, the harder...
Emotions are like Quicksand: The Play-Along Post
I have to confess, my understanding of Newtonian versus non-Newtonian liquids is as elementary as it gets. On a scientific level, it has to do with viscosity. Newtonian fluids move and react like water. You push your hand quickly through water in the pool and you can...