Practices for Recovering Resilience
Re-couping from the Revving Up and the Shutting Down of a Hard, Hard Year
This weekend is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. On Sunday, June 20, at 8:31pm Pacific Time, the earth will reverse the tilt of its axis and begins its remarkably long journey toward winter. For many of us, this seasonal turning into official summer issues in warm sunny days, school vacations, and a time […]
Using the Inner Protector to Calm the Inner Critic
I often teach about retiring (re-wiring) the inner critic, in these posts and in workshops everywhere. And I often re-post, with permission, the Just One Thing e-newsletters of my colleague and friend Rick Hanson, because Rick can present deep and practical wisdom in such clear and immediately useful ways. Here’s Rick’s latest on using […]
The Wisdom and Courage that Graduation Now Requires
Students are graduating en masse this month, from colleges and universities, from high schools and middle schools, even my neighbor’s son from his pre-school. Many of whom have not been able to attend school in person during this pandemic year with their peers, their friends, their teachers who care, year after year, and who this […]
Mindfulness – Radically Different from Distraction or Flow
A participant in my Building Resilience in Challenging Times webinar last week asked how mindfulness was different from distraction or dissociation. Good question, so here goes… Mindfulness is the practice of being aware of what’s happening in the moment while it’s happening (and aware of our reactions to what’s happening) so that we can see […]
Nothing Is Lost
The Practice of Poignancy, my post this week on Memorial Day, continues. I received the good news that colleagues on the East Coast are returning to work in person in their offices this week, and yet the sponsor of my webinar last weekend with psychology students at Maltepe University in Istanbul, Turkey, says they probably […]
The Practice of Poignancy
Today, May 31, 2021, the last Monday in May, is celebrated as Memorial Day in the United States. Poignant, that the meaning of a holiday, begun in 1868 to honor the men and women who died in military service for this country, has come, for many of us, to signal the unofficial beginning of summer; […]
Imagine What We Could Build
I finished reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness last week, the 10th anniversary edition, the original staying at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for almost five years. For good reason. Widely and highly praised for its hard-hitting, unflinching clarity about the realities of […]
The Light in the Darkness
Yes, I do post a lot of poetry as both resource and refuge for resilience. As my friend Roger Housden, author of the Ten Poems to Change Your Life series (…to Set You Free, …to Open Your Heart, …for Difficult Times, etc.) says: Great poetry speaks truth in a universal language that crosses cultural boundaries […]
Pandemic Easing; Staying Woke to Confronting Prejudice
My last direct connection with Pepperdine University was with Louis Cozolino, a mentor for me about the neuroscience of attachment. His The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain and The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain provided great guidance in understanding the neurobiology underlying some of our most frustrating experiences […]
One Door Opens…Another Door Closes
I shared this moment last week: driving through Golden Gate Park, a squirrel suddenly ran in front of my car. I braked; he swerved and ran back the other way. He lived, and I was so grateful. That moment of euphoria lasted not even a full five minutes. Driving on, I came upon another squirrel […]