Practices for Recovering Resilience
Going In to Find Out
As you read this, I will be heading into a 5-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, a time of deep reflection and perhaps even deeper understanding of the mysterious, imponderable Source of the meaning of all the being-ness and doing-ness that occupies the attention and activities of all of my days. The […]
Retirement as Re-Calibration, as Metamorphosis
When I casually mentioned to several friends recently that I was experiencing my leaning into retirement as a time of re-calibration, we all nodded as though we knew what I was talking about. Turns out, the dictionary’s meaning of recalibration pertains to when a system gradually drifts off course and periodically needs a fresh point […]
What Happened to You? – rather than What’s Wrong with You?
A client referred me to What Happened to You? – Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce Perry, last Wednesday; I got the book from the library Friday, read it straight through Saturday and Sunday, and am now recommending it to clients, colleagues, and readers as fast as I can; […]
Opposites of Fear in Extreme Distress – Being Brave, Being Safe
I was recently interviewed by Hesna Al Ghaoui, former war correspondent for Hungarian television, now a Fulbright scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, studying fear. Hesna found me through my book Bouncing Back on Audible. We had a mutually illuminating conversation about resilience and post-traumatic growth based on her years of experience covering soldiers and […]
Humility in the Face of Awesome Resilience
Humbling is the only word for it. I’ve written and taught about resilience for more than a decade now. In Bouncing Back, I included 5 C’s of Coping: Calm, Clarity, Connection, Competence, Courage. All valid. While the manuscript was in its final edits, I met Kristin Neff at a conference we were both presenting at. […]
Resilience in the Face of Good and Evil
In the last scene of Daniel Roher’s brilliant new film Navalny, the Russian dissident-activist-relentless critic of the authoritarian regime of the Kremlin Alexei Navalny, poisoned on orders of Russian president Vladmir Putin in August 2020, rescued from a hospital in Siberia, five months recovering in sanctuary in the Black Forest in Germany, arrested immediately upon […]
Triumph Over Adversity on Behalf of a Noble Cause
“Triumph over adversity on behalf of a noble cause” has been my preferred film genre for decades. And this weekend I will immerse myself in the inspiration and resourcing available through the California Film Institute’s annual DocLands film festival. 40+ films about the poisoning of Russian anti-corruption activist Alexi Navalny, becoming black lawyers, protecting free […]
Despair Is an Insult to the Imagination
Jack Kornfield shared that homily in his dharma talk last week. I don’t want to insult anyone’s experience of despair. Despair is a bona fide, appropriate human reaction to the losses and devastations we’ve been experiencing and witnessing in recent weeks, in recent years. [P.S. Here’s the link to Michael Shaw’s beautifully crafted documentary, Living […]
Have We Stopped Believing that People Can Change?
Photo Credit: The Campaign to Exonerate Jarvis Jay Masters – https://www.freejarvis.org/jarvis-story I do trust that people coping with adversity and tragedies can discover the better angels of their nature and work cooperatively to recover the better angels of our human nature. [See the recent post Disasters Generate Altruism, citing Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: […]
Praise the Earth While It Is Unravelling
I spent Earth Day last Friday at the U.C. Botanical Garden. Glorying in the earth’s bounty that thrives in the San Francisco Bay Area, from redwoods to Chinese medicinal herbs to succulents to carnivorous plants. A friend who joined me read Drew Dellinger’s poem below. I remember hearing him read Hieroglyphic Stairway years ago at […]