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...
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...
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...
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...
A Broader Awareness Can Lead to Uncertainty
Consistency, in practice and in thought, guides the creation of our stories and narratives. Selecting from the potentially overwhelming data of the world, our stories support what we believe and ignore or actively dismiss that which doesn't. "New" information is...
Life as a Learning Process
Approach life as a learning process and ask yourself "What do I believe?" The result will likely be a cascade of memories highlighting actions, thoughts, and experiences fitting a particular set of Virtues, or Values-in-action. The whole of this cascade will...
Healing from Trauma
Question from Quora: Can one heal from PTSD without using medications? I hear PTSD doesn’t just apply to war veterans. It could be affecting anyone and we wouldn’t know it ourselves unless someone brought it to our attention. Photo by Dan...
An Issue of Interruption
We really need to feel we belong. Relationships, of whatever kind, provide the means for fulfilling that. Interruptions are a way of mitigating anxiety when we're uncertain about those connections.
Shyness: A Struggle for Social Confidence
Often when making dire universal assessments about our lack of something, it’s more about us not seeing what we already have or are doing, and because of that not growing from a place of presence.
Skills: The Foundation of any Healthy Relationship
There is simply no relationship problem that is different in kind between any form of relationship. The differences are always the particular variables involved, not some issue uniquely found within a particular relationship form.