Blog Posts
Exploring ideas related to life, relationships, spirituality and mental health.
(43) Interview with Juan Lee: Love Made Simple
Juan Lee is an author and teacher on the powerful principle of love. Raised within the Christian church, Juan has turned to teachings about love over the years to find strength, understanding and hope. As a child, Juan was the youngest of four children raised by a...
How to Win: Life is Not a Battle Between Good and Evil
Today we will explore the idea of good and evil, that there are "good people and evil people", the foundation of the last untruth explained by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book "The Coddling of the American Mind." In response to the three untruths, in...
Value-Based Goals: How to Get the Results You Want Now
Value-based goals can be difficult, both in creating them and in following through. Further, the fact that they're difficult is itself a frustration because goals are what is believed to guide the direction of our lives. Rather like mileposts on a highway counting...
Conspiracies – Patterns We Create to Feel in Control
“Fear is the mind-killer.” So says the Bene Gesserit, a female-only religio-political group from the sci-fi epic series of Dune by Frank Herbert. The aphorism concerns the tendency for humanity to forget its more rational potential in the face of a lack of control....
Anxiety is Obnoxious and Mindful Acceptance Can Help
The old saying that nothing stays the same except death and taxes is about as useless during tax season as it is when faced with a global pandemic. Both situations induce anxiety to varying degrees and both are subject to change given the degrees of governmental...
Sleep is the Cornerstone of Healthy Habits
It all starts with sleep. How you finish your day determines how you start your day. A good night’s sleep is the cornerstone of healthy habits and healthy habits are the foundation of self-care. No matter what your objectives are, it is difficult to implement...
The Secret to Self-Care
I don't know about you but I am always surprised by how difficult I find it to maintain my self-care routine. I know how much better I feel when I do 30 minutes of cardio or 30 minutes of mobility exercise (which is stretching/strength training in motion), and...
Self-Control Is A Conversation With Who You Wish To Be
Situations happen, more often than we are comfortable admitting, where we wish we’d done something other than what we did. We may attempt to pass the behavior off as a result of hunger, lack of sleep, another person’s actions towards us, or a mental diagnosis, but...
Getting Buy-In for a Vision
The game of 'telephone' was great for giggles when a pre-teen. However, the real-life effects of communication failures as adults rarely get the same response. Certainly the consequences tend to be larger and often longer-lasting, especially when attempting to have...
Judgment – Losing Sight of the Real You
Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing someone else's face. Frightened? Confused? Wondering whether you're dreaming? The level of concern here connects us to why we get frustrated when other people don't seem to see us accurately. We act in an 'as if' universe,...
Sharing Humanity Within Conflict
Raised voices. Increased heartrate. Narrowed vision. All the physical hallmarks of a discussion that devolved into argumentation and conflict. That these same physical experiences can also be seen when participating in a game with a team or during intensely...
Dialogue as Reality Shaping
Communication is more than words being exchanged between two or more people. It's also more than the non-verbal physical cues made famous by such shows as "Lie to Me." When people engage in dialogue, they're seeking to build a relationship of perspective with...
We Cannot Divorce People From Culture
Does the clothing make the person or the person make the clothing? While this question is typically related to dresses and women, the inquiry knows no gender or culture. At the heart of the question is a consideration of the relationship between the created and the...
A Universe of Perspective
Stories are how we bind individual perception and social reality. Social reality, our combined stories, is a universe of perspective. Consider from a nautical metaphor, where stories are the lines connecting individual boats with the social pier. Sure, the boat...
Stop Setting Goals, Start Living From Values
Starting from a deficit is always frustrating because after all the work done and resources used to get oneself to the surface, you often find yourself exhausted by the journey. Further, deficit thinking has us defining ourselves from the perspective of where we're...
Putting Consequences in their Place
Working with clients going through difficult times, many questions come up concerning fairness, justice, and responsibility. The world, it becomes painfully obvious, doesn't respond to our thoughts the way we'd like. Our pictures/stories of 'what should be' rarely...
You Are Not the Sum of Your Parts
When I was a kid there was a toy I loved, a kaleidoscope of sorts, where you looked in one end and by turning the other end, sifted grains of multi-colored sand to make different patterns. You couldn't add any new grains, you couldn't change the colors. The only...
Reminding Yourself of the Ground
How much of your life has happened without your conscious awareness? Sure, there's the approximately 8 hours a day of sleep, which, doing the math, is 2920 hours, translated to 121 days or 4 months. Yup, 4 months out of the year is spent sleeping. Now let's expand...