“When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to perceive my world in a new way and to go on.  It is astonishing how elements which seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.”   -Carl Rogers

Lately, I have had the honor and privilege to create and deliver a workshop on love and positivity for a handful of cancer patients and survivors. Our weekly curriculum is a...

Learning to pay attention is one of the great triumphs and challenges of the human mind.  Yet our internet technology drives us culturally and personally to increasing levels of distraction at breakneck speeds. Don’t miss Nick Carr, Pulitzer prize nominee and NY Times bestselling author of The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains, provide the insight and wisdom to make you re-think...

Throughout human history, what has created community and provided the structures that build into friendship and intimacy is shared work. We have lost sight of this fact in our highly technological and automated world, and it is rare that we find ourselves at work with people of all ages, side by side moving gravel or tilling fields. Our Positive Change Memorial Courtyard is offering us this...

“Pleasure is the object, duty and the goal of all rational creatures.”  Voltaire

The experience of pleasure is how we say yes to life. Allowing oneself the gratification of our senses is how we embody the joys of life. Think mouthwatering flavors, the first scent of summer evenings, the soft cheeks of a sleeping baby, the refrain of a beloved tune. Our human capacity to sense the world brings life...

“We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.” 

-Sherry Turkle

A couple of years ago, not long after I won the Angel Conference I got a text message from a successful local businessman who had agreed to become our CEO and probably had a lot to do with my winning...

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”  ~Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden, 1854

Our time is our life. How we spend the hours of our days is the truest measure of what we create, what we value and how we invest our life energy. This is why the recent statistics regarding the social takeover of Internet gaming and social media should give us pause for wonder and concern....

“Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.”   -Aberjhani

One of the most common ways that we leave each other while staying together is to remove sex from our relationship. This is not a new topic. In recent...

I haven’t seen my brother for 25 years. We were both in our 20s then; young enough to believe that aging was something that happened to other people. Our faces were unlined and our family wounds still fresh enough to be leading us around without our knowledge. Our family wounds went deep. Our parents’ divorce happened when stigma existed behind the word. Their subsequent pain, the ways they dealt...

“There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”  -Shauna Niequist

Leaving is bittersweet. Knowing when to leave is not always a simple equation. Even the departing itself is rarely an experience of simple...

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay

Three years ago today it was a Wednesday afternoon when a beautiful girl named Sydney went into a closet and ended her life with her father’s gun. It was a particularly humiliating high school break up that...

“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” -Elizabeth Barrett Browning

We are not a happy sexual bunch. According to a recent CNN poll nearly 40 million Americans are stuck in a sexual rut, and more than 52% of us are...

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” -Helen Keller

When we end our relationships badly, we get stuck in a continuous rebound relationship cycle. Tragically, the most common and destructive bad endings that plague millions of relationships is when we use infidelity as an exit...