Nobody likes to make mistakes. But I really don’t like to make them. I have not liked to make them so much I would not even try, not publicly anyway. For years I paralyzed myself with a fear of failure, linking it to even the smallest of errors. I called it “hiding in plain sight.”…
What societal principles guide our lives? Many of course, and many that are invisible to us. The one that presses most into our lives is the cultural pace, what I like to call the societal metronome. Without any conscious choice our lives are keyed to this cultural metronome that has evolved to a rate that…
Many of us spend a lot, no really a ton, of time in meetings. During a meeting of my client’s I sat in on to observe recently, I noticed no clear requests were made and subsequently no promises either. In the debrief meeting, the first question I asked was, if there was an agenda? There…
Dear Ones: Will this world ever rest in peace? In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing and the incredible trauma it caused for so many, we have been thinking about what to offer to our community. I keep trying to find what I wrote after 9/11, and have felt the discomfort of realizing that…
In yoga class, and other mindful movement forms, we learn that breath directs our attention, and we learn to slow down transitions between postures. I’ve taught yoga and I’ve said such words. Great ideas! Fun in class! But off the mat, I’m not so sure I lived like these truths were true. This spring-time energy…
fail (feyl) to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved (from www.dictionary.com) It doesn’t take us long to develop a comfort zone. Our comfort zone contains those areas where we are reasonably confident we’ll succeed—whatever that means to us. Even as kids we have one and that’s during the time of our lives when we are the most willing to fail. Stepping outside…
My colleague pinged me late last night and asked if I posted a blog. (Monday’s are my posting day.) “No,” I replied, “I have nothing to say.” I mean, I have a few half written blogs and poems in various states of completion, but … nothing feeling urgent. Then I realized: that is it. . . I…
“Little by little, we change the world we live in. Even the grand, earth-shaking events of history have their origins in individual thought.” Eknath Easwaran Terror-ism. “Ism” is a suffix that means “the adherence or following an ideology,” (online dictionary), making terrorism the ideology of terror or fear. Fear and terror are powerful forces. They motivate…
If life resides in the present moment, life might have felt like too much for many of us last week. I’m not even sure we needed to live in or near Boston to feel rattled by the bombing that radically effected so many people. It’s still too raw, still too early, too many unknowns. Too…
I’ve had lots of conversations over the past few years initiated because aging parents have downsized or a remaining parent has died leaving their children to sort through all their accumulated stuff. I found the process of sorting through my mother’s things difficult because in some way I felt like I was disassembling her actual…