“The more I see, the less I know for sure.” -John Lennon
It has been a while since a pain in my neck has captured my full attention as it has today. Something cramped in my upper back over night and all my best attempts to let it go and work it out, mostly served to remind me that it wasn’t going anywhere.
Transition is a close friend of stress, I remember and even with all the optimism and faith...
“He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.” -Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
There are some 25 million people in transit as I write this; on their way home to someone. It is one of the busiest travel days of the year: millions of people spending millions of dollars to be close to others that they love, that have shaped their lives, that taught them something about...
“This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety. It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon to establish happiness and peace.” -Dalai Lama
I have been studying the experience of anxiety lately, and thanks to arriving at day 327 of this positivity quest, I am able to be a reliable witness. I am not...
“There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.” –Arnold Bennett
I married into a family whose primary operating principle was “If something is wrong, don’t talk about it.” Even as a young woman in my early twenties, I knew instinctively that silence in...
“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.” ~Franklin D. Roosevelt
School politics and reform has always been a vocation of sorts for me. My first child had special needs when she was young so I learned a great deal early on about the magic that can happen in a class room. In one of my daughter’s first immersion classes, Mark, a graduate student in...
“Once again, we see why human beings do not thrive as the “existential cowboys” that so much modern thought celebrates. While it may be literally true that “we are born alone” and that “we die alone,” connection not only helps us to make us who we are in evolutionary terms, it helps determine who we become as individuals. In both cases, human connections, mental health, psychological health, and...
“This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.” -Bertrand Russell
My son fell from a roof last week and just like that all of life was different. This is often how life catches us off guard; with accidents, health emergencies or just bad weather consequences. Suddenly all that we take for granted, that we hold as the fabric of...
“Good sex isn’t about just elevating your heart rate — it’s about elevating your heart.” -David Schnarch
The crossroads between our genitals and our neurology turns out to be a super highway. One of the most powerful transformers in the new science of brain re-wiring occurs during deep intimate connection. As some of the mystery of sexual intimacy is revealed through the emerging science of...
“Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” -Madonna
It occurred to me the last time that I was in the throes of passion, when I have some of my best thoughts, that so much about our sexual experience is connected to our ability to give ourselves permission to explore the far reaches of arousal. The permission that I am referring to is not really the cerebral ‘thinking...
“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.” -Jonathon Kozol
Most of the arguments that couples have about their sex lives are not about sex. Sex is the container, where we are most acutely aware of the spaces in our relationship that fail to connect, that make us feel small, unloved, invisible, and that reflect our deepest conflicts. It is a little ironic that our potential for our...
“Deep listening is miraculous for both listener and speaker. When someone receives us with open-hearted, non-judging, intensely interested listening, our spirits expand.” -Sue Patton Thoele
I have never been much of a listener. I have always used my ability to articulate as a way to know myself. I am a fast thinker and am often onto the next idea while half listening to the people I love most. I...
“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity” -Francois Gautier
Clarity is another act of grace. It is not at our beck and call, but rather an internal re-organizing and fresh perspective that comes through us when we are open and listening. Clarity is attracted to humility. It can fill us with an authentic and deep connection to our own truth when we give up the idea that...
