Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the p...
People don't need to die for us to experience loss. Holly was losing her local family to a move. It felt to her as if there would be a death. In the 1800s, the Irish had emigration wakes for their fam...
One of the secrets of happiness is having a host of activities that we can enjoy when we are alone. The more we can do this, the more likely we are to enjoy our lives as we age.
Lovability
I do it for the relationships. I like to spend my time with people who are trying to make the world a fairer, kinder place. I’ve been in groups like this since college, and they have made me happy.
Good Moral Character
Freedom is the ability to make conscious choices in accord with our deepest values. It is the opposite of reactivity, which we could define as acting on every whim, impulse, and emotion that we experi...
For newcomers from slow cultures, time is a river that flows through their lives. They have no abstract sense of time. Refugees who have been on sun, seasonal, or Circadian-rhythm time find the change...
Education is teaching children to find pleasure in the right things.
As we go about our troubled and sometimes frenzied lives, in this time of the Great Acceleration, we have close at hand ways we can move out of the time zone of our current century and into a transcen...
As a therapist, I tried to help clients create better stories. I asked questions such as, When have you been courageous or stronger than you thought you could be? What would your life look like if you...
Toward our seventies, our bones, shape, vision, sense of smell and taste, and even our teeth change. We react differently to medications. We don’t tolerate the cold as well. As our skin thins, we brui...
Realized that this cactus with its withered arms symbolized what my life would be. It would consist of thorns and fruit, pain and beauty. My body would age; my soul would expand.
Inadequate. Most do not help students with what they need most—a sense of meaning regarding their sexuality, ways to make sense of all the messages, and guidelines on decent behavior in sexual relatio...
Working together, we were experiencing what Nelson Mandela called the multiplication of courage.
With each new stage of life, we outgrow the strategies that worked for us at an earlier stage. We find ourselves in an environment that pelts us with more challenges than our current self can manage....
The INS is incredibly understaffed. For the last few years Congress has funded enforcement but hasn't funded routine service and processing of documents. A recent newspaper article reported that of th...
Our Western mental health system is dependent on verbal expressiveness, self-disclosure, and a belief in individualism. It splits the personal and the professional, the sacred and profane, and the min...
One of the great gifts of our later years is the possibility of authenticity, or what Margaret Fuller called the radiant sovereign self, which comes from growing out of fears into wholeness.
Most refugees end up on welfare. In feet, all of the refugees I know do 3-D work—difficult, dirty, and dangerous.