Not enough of us know how to sit in pain with others. Worse, our discomfort shows up in ways that can hurt people and reinforce their own isolation. I have started to believe that crying with stranger...
Love: We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect,...
Living with air pollution increases your odds of dying early by 5 percent. Living with obesity, 20 percent. Excessive drinking, 30 percent. And living with loneliness? It increases our odds of dying e...
Killing Us Softly 4,6 and Katz’s DVD is titled Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity.7) As
Joseph Campbell wrote, If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.
I’m learning that recognizing and leaning into the discomfort of vulnerability teaches us how to live with joy, gratitude, and grace. I’m also learning that the uncomfortable and scary leaning require...
In either case, if you come across an explanation of vulnerability that doesn’t include setting boundaries or being clear on intentions, proceed with caution. Vulnerability for vulnerability’s sake is...
In a 1968 speech given to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., defined power as the ability to achieve purpose and effect change. This is the most accurate and imp...
If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be...
If we can’t stand up to the never good enough and who do you think you are? we can’t move forward.
If we can find someone who has earned the right to hear our story, we need to tell it. Shame loses power when it is spoken. In this way, we need to cultivate our story to let go of shame, and we need...
If connection is the energy that surges between people, we have to remember that those surges must travel in both directions.
I remain inspired and transformed by something I learned from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Connection.3 Dr. Lerner explains that we all have patterned ways of managing anxiety. Some of us respon...
I know that these examples are symptomatic of the cruelty culture that we live in today and that everyone is fair game, but think about how and what they chose to attack. They went after my appearance...
Hope is not an emotion; it's a way of thinking or a cognitive process.
For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is I didn’t get enough sleep. The next one is I don’t have enough time. Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us aut...
For many of us, our first response to vulnerability and pain of these sharp points is not to lean into the discomfort and feel our way through but rather to make it go away.
C. S. Lewis captured this so beautifully in one of my favorite quotes of all time: To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If y...
As I asked more pointed questions about the choices and behaviors Wholehearted men and women made to reduce anxiety, they explained that reducing anxiety meant paying attention to how much they could...
And often the result of daring greatly isn’t a victory march as much as it is a quiet sense of freedom mixed with a little battle fatigue.