It’s that time of year again! Our mailbox is filling with catalogs … tempting pictures of small appliances to make my life easier, holiday clothing to help me look good, fruits, nuts, and cheeses to gift to friends. One catalog’s cover even boldly announced “PEARS, LOVE and JOY.” Today’s pile of catalogs arrived along with […]
Mindfulness and Community
Have you ever tried to meditate? Maybe you’ve downloaded some apps, tuned in and benefited from taking this time for yourself. If so, congratulations on taking this important step! I started meditation (many years before apps) by reading about it in the one book I could find, and then trying to implement what I had […]
Mindfulness Changes Relationships
Why do so many people worldwide practice mindfulness meditation? Because of its proven physical and mental health benefits! Mindfulness helps relieve stress, treats heart disease, lowers blood pressures, reduces chronic pain and insomnia, alleviates gastrointestinal difficulties, is used in treatment of depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, couples’ conflicts, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Overall, it […]
Lessons from the Nest
As I inspected my backyard garden on a late March afternoon, a mallard duck unexpectedly bolted from underneath a rosebush and landed in the adjacent bay. Quacking angrily, her message was clear. Curious, I peeked under the bush. To my utter delight, I discovered a nest with five large eggs! I paused just long enough […]
Remember the Heart
My son had a piano teacher who lives and breathes music. While to me it was great accomplishment that a 10 year old could play a complicated sonata with only a few mistakes, this teacher cared less about wrong notes and much more about the emotion expressed by the passage. “This phrase is the voice […]
Listening to the Whispers in Your Body by Ed Feldman
Trungpa Rinpoche, Pema Chodren’s Buddhist teacher, observed in his visit to the United States that “Most people don’t feel themselves properly.” This leads to a lot of ‘over-efforting’ in daily life which results in a lot of unnecessary tension and work being done by the body. This ‘compulsive’ efforting is not without cost. Many of our […]
Grateful for You
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. Though written in 1992, Leonard Cohen’s counsel is appropriate during our country’s dark period of uncertainty, prejudice, polarization and increasingly frequent random acts of mass murder and gun violence. I […]
The Falling Leaves
Ah … fall. With its glorious colors, crisp air and even some blue skies (finally!). In my pine forest backyard, some leaves have dropped, but many more are still clinging to their twigs and branches. How does a leaf know, I wonder, just when to let go? With the changing of the season, I’ve been […]
Understanding Trauma and Chronic Stress
Renowned trauma experts including Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine know that “our issues are in our tissues.” Accessing the felt sense of the body through Somatic Experiencing®, mindfulness, trauma sensitive yoga, or other body centered modalities is an important piece of healing the aftereffects of physical and emotional trauma, post traumatic stress, overwhelming […]
Where is your community?
Growing up, I was part of a neighborhood … a community. Members of my extended family lived within a three-block radius. We ran into friends and neighbors at local restaurants and shops. On our block, kids of all ages played together and somehow always found a way to get along. We could rely on people around […]