The V-Word

It has been a long time since I recalled being a little girl, in love with her dad; but since my father has passed away, the block that prevented me from recalling what it felt like to be loved by him, to trust him completely, has fallen away. Mostly it makes me feel really sad about all the things that kept me from feeling that way about him again. Even with all of the efforts I made in the last...

One of the things that death clarifies like a magnifying glass on a dying leaf in the summer sun is the regrets that collect inside of us over a lifetime. These regrets are kind of like soul missions that we missed the cues on. They require an immense capacity for forgiveness. I began to understand the quality of these regrets while listening to the outpouring of love for a young woman who...

Sometimes, waking up on Monday gives me a stomach ache. I think about all the things before me and am overwhelmed before I put my feet on the floor. I don’t want to have this relationship to life on any day. So I have come up with a few antidotes to the Monday internal crunch. First, I meditate, usually on the powerful Shakti goddesses that fill me up with protective energy and the feeling of...

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

My father died last weekend, peacefully in his sleep. He was sick and unhappy for a very long time, so while his death was anticipated, the reality of it still surprised me. Even as I worked with hospice and caregivers daily over the last few weeks anticipating the moment, when death arrives, it turns...

 “Whenever we perceive ourselves as less than worthy of love we need forgiveness.”

I have spent the last four years seeking forgiveness with my father. Multiple trips with my family to Florida, a cruise for his 80^thbirthday… nothing softened him. He was consistent with his anger and demeaning ways right to the end, but now that he is laying in his final hours in a hospice, the secret door to the...

“The art of love… is largely the art of persistence.”  ~Albert Ellis

If we could learn just two things about love that might just cure us of our broken relationships and dissatisfying sex it is this- that love does not come made to order and that we must be willing to ask for what we want. These two misunderstandings about the limits of relationships wreak havoc in the development and maturity...

The Olympic coverage has to make you think about how we learn courage. Watching people throw themselves in the air for 3 or 4 spins to land perfectly on their feet is mind boggling when you consider what happened inside of them on the first day they decided they were going to learn how to do this trick. What is that special energy that opens us up to the unknown, the potential of serious injury...

Sometimes I can’t figure out how to create a positive relationship to what is happening in and around me. A young woman I know, who has been struggling with a disease they have no cure for, lays in a coma after a brutal procedure to stabilize her neck. Cancer metastasized in another young woman fighting for more time with her young kids. It is difficult, witnessing old age turning diseased and the...

When I believe that I am unlovable, the world closes in. This is true for all of us. The only real opening any of us can work towards, pray for and believe in is our own inherent loveablity. For this we need only practice being loving. Most difficult, especially when things are not working is to love ourselves. I have been praying and chanting and suffering these last days, waking up anxious,...