Practices for Recovering Resilience
Working Together to Celebrate/Save the Earth
Tomorrow is Earth Day, calling our attention to both the miracle that our planet exists at all, and the immediate escalating threat to its continued existence at all. We all feel alarm and despair in our own way, in the deepening realizations of how right now-imminent the full-blown climate catastrophe is; we all act from […]
The Flexibility Sequence that Leads to Resilience
In this latest book, The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think about PTSD, George Bonanno, chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology and director of the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, shares the 40 years of research that demonstrates that […]
Content to Be Without a Bucket List
My official, full retirement is now 12 weeks away. When friends ask me what I plan to do next, I’ve come to realize I really do want to follow the advice of William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes. To honor the essential need for a neutral zone, trusting the time of letting go […]
A Rejuvenating Workshop-Vacation on Cape Cod
Thirty years of clinical practice, a full decade of teaching clinicians and lay folk how to cultivate resilience and bounce back from ordinary disappointments and extraordinary disasters, will come to a quiet close with The Resilience Mindset workshop at the Cape Cod Institute, June 27-July 1, 2022. One may stand on these shores and put […]
A Delightful Workshop-Vacation at Kripalu
Apparently when investigators asked the pilots, who made an emergency landing in January 2009 of US Airways flight 1549 on the freezing Hudson River in New York City after both engines were struck by birds, if they would do anything differently if they could do it over, the co-pilot quipped he would do the landing […]
Disasters Generate Altruism
Amidst the images and stories of the bombings of hospitals and schools in Ukraine, we’ve also seen, every day, images and stories of people sheltering together, people carrying elderly and injured on their backs to safety, people setting up soup kitchens and sharing food, blankets, medicines. I’ve been intrigued as well with the stories and […]
The Resonance Today of Szymborska’s poem Hatred
The headlines are hard these days. Perhaps they are always hard, for someone somewhere. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, wrote the poem “Hatred” in 1993; she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her words still ring true with this morning’s headlines. Hatred See how efficient it still is, how it keeps itself in […]
Pushback on My Definition of Resilience
Abi Blakeslee is an experienced trauma therapist, currently training therapists in Hungary (online through traumahealing.org) in tools to help Ukranian refugees cope with the trauma of the invasion and bombardment of their country. Abi and I were teaching at the recent Psychotherapy Networker Symposium on the same day, so I didn’t get to attend her […]
No One Leaves Home Unless Home Is the Mouth of a Shark
Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine one month ago today. We all have had to come to terms with the suffering and devastation wrought by Vladimir Putin’s madness. (“Thug” was the term used in the last week’s Guardian Weekly.) And we do that in a multitude of ways, offering housing for refugees, sending donations to […]
Shifting Perspective – Making the Invisible Visible
I had a five-hour flight to teach at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium last week, enough time to read one entire book, start to finish. And to relish not only the time to focus on one project and only one project for that long, but to relish that my brain could still focus on anything for […]