It’s crazy how much energy we spend trying to avoid these hard topics when they’re really the only ones that can set us free.
It was divine intervention—the act of starting to turn on the lights to alleviate my discomfort made me think of my favorite quote about darkness and compassion from Pema Chödrön, who writes: Compassi...
It was a long year. I lovingly refer to it on my blog as the 2007 Breakdown Spiritual Awakening. It felt like a textbook breakdown to me, but Diana called it a spiritual awakening. I think we were bot...
If we want to reignite innovation and passion, we have to rehumanize work. When shame becomes a management style, engagement dies. When failure is not an option we can forget about learning, creativit...
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...
I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.
I believe Black Lives Matter is a movement to rehumanize black citizens. All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psycholog...
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...
Cultivating intuition and trusting faith: letting go of the need for certainty 6. Cultivating creativity: letting go of comparison 7. Cultivating play and rest: letting go of exhaustion as a status sy...
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...
At the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of my life, I want to say I contributed more than I criticized.
Anne Lamott, whom I once heard say, Laughter is a bubbly, effervescent form of holiness. Amen!
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.
And if our faith asks us to find the face of God in everyone we meet, that should include the politicians, media, and strangers on Twitter with whom we most violently disagree. When we desecrate their...
Again, there’s no question that feedback may be one of the most difficult arenas to negotiate in our lives. We should remember, though, that victory is not getting good feedback, avoiding giving diffi...
Acknowledging vulnerability is possible only if we feel we can reach out for support. To do so, we must feel some competence in our relationships. The likelihood of our finding the insight and courage...
According to Bishop, the author of The Big Sort, in 1976 less than 25% of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. In other words, we lived next door to and attended...
When we engage in dehumanizing rhetoric or promote dehumanizing images, we diminish our own humanity in the process. When we reduce Muslim people to terrorists or Mexicans to illegals or police office...
What’s the most significant barrier to creativity and innovation? Kevin thought about it for a minute and said, I don’t know if it has a name, but honestly, it’s the fear of introducing an idea and be...
We live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Not only is this wrong, but it’s dangerous. Shame is highly correlated with add...