Really Seeing One Another
Really Seeing One Another When we encounter someone for the first time, what do we see? To know that, it’s helpful to understand what it is we’re looking for when we look at them. I had an encounter recently that only lasted a fraction of a second. It’s stayed with me because in that brief […]
Which Voice Shall I Listen To?
Which Voice Shall I Listen To? Sluggish, like a slug. That’s how I seem to be feeling these mornings after having had knee surgery. At the same time, I’m asking myself, “why can’t I get anything done, I can hear another voice, a quieter one, saying, “That only means your day is unfolding differently than […]
Self-Consciousness and Self-Confidence Are Like Two Sides of a Coin
Self-Consciousness and Self-Confidence Are Like Two Sides of a Coin I’d like you to imagine you have a coin in your hand. It’s like a regular coin, with two sides, but on this coin, one side represents self-confidence, and the other side represents self-consciousness. Just like a real coin, when you’re looking at one side, […]
Want a Simpler Life?
Want a Simpler Life? What does it take to live the simple life? More stuff? More rituals of various kinds? More complications in our lives? One of the things modern, sophisticated people are especially good at is making most aspects of our lives much more complicated than they really are or need to be. So […]
No Diagnosis Big Enough
No Diagnosis Big Enough Like me, you may have noticed how attached we can become to our psychological diagnosis. They become something we cling to and appear to provide a strange form of reassurance: “Ah, now I understand the nature of my brokenness.” Diagnoses are conceptual boxes that never fit everything we are. To try […]
Being At Your Best
Being At Your Best Just what exactly do we have in us that allows us to be at our best? For most of us, it can feel like that thing, whatever it is, is fleeting, sporadic, and undependable. Wouldn’t it be a relief to discover we’re able to be at our best more of the […]
Is it Harder to Feel or Not to Feel?
Have you ever noticed yourself doing whatever you could to avoid actually having to feel what you were experiencing? Humans spend a great deal of time and energy doing this. Lots of us will be willing to experience something as long as we don’t have to feel it. Huh? That seems to suggest we’ve decided […]
Trusting Your Superpowers
Do we have superpowers? When you’re talking with someone, and you open your mouth to speak, how often do you know exactly what you’re going to say? When I say “exactly what you’re going to say,” I mean to the point of having precisely planned the sequence of words you’re going to say. That’s probably […]
What if it’s Already Perfect?
As a recovering perfectionist, I’ve come to appreciate how little of life I have to improve, correct, or perfect. And I’ve come to realize how I can stand in the way of perfection that already exists by my attempts to have life conform to my idea of what’s perfect. Perfectionism is an attempt to control […]
Forgiving the Unforgivable
What if nothing is unforgivable? I recently heard someone describe what they felt to be a particularly egregious transgression as “unforgivable.” I didn’t catch the specifics of just what the person felt was unforgivable, and for just a second, I was curious about what it possibly could have been. I didn’t have much time to […]