Before Returning to Your Normally Scheduled Lives

For the last month, you’ve probably been off-schedule, regardless of how or if you’ve celebrated the holidays. Truth is, like infants, it’s surprisingly easy to get us humans off-schedule. In somatic terms, we become more disregulated. For many of us who have healthy-enough nervous systems, we can get back in gear with a few practices and some time. Many of us don’t even realize we’re doing it, when we cut out sugar, return to a regular bed-time, return to baseline on the amount of human contact we allow in a particular day.  Come January 2nd, you step back into ordinary life. And while the season’s stressors are a relief to see in the rear-view mirror, most of us, even those who really hate this time of year, may feel a bit of a let-down. Somehow, the banal suggestion that one find a way to carry some wisdom, or some element of beauty, into mundane life feels lame.

And yet… Continue Reading Before Returning to Your Normally Scheduled Lives

Ready for the Holidays?

We are resourceful, creative creatures! And we can reclaim this holiday season for our own. We can defy the commercialism, the expectations of others, the din of the desperation surrounding us and instead use this time to heal, cultivating a deeper spiritual awareness, inner peace and joy. Continue Reading Ready for the Holidays?

Boo!: In Praise of Getting Scared

why would I love this season of intended scariness? Why would I encourage you in the joy of “boo”? Because practicing a little frisson of fear, from time to time and in good company, inoculates us from that very anxiety. Think of it as exercise. We do reps. We do laps. We rest between, and recover. In that way, we build strength without becoming overwhelmed, without injuring ourselves. The scary moment in the movie is followed by a funny one, gets resolved at the end. The scary halloween house is visited and then left, as your children turn towards you for assurance and find it. Fear, unlike anxiety, is based in the present, and the conditions inciting it can therefore be managed, giving us a sense of confidence around scary sensations that can be expanded to those selfsame anxious sensations. The breath we automatically take after the monster is vanquished, the laughter when the loud noise turns out to be a cat, the shiver of delight are all, also, forms of discharge, teaching our nervous systems to handle fear and anxiety more effectively. Continue Reading Boo!: In Praise of Getting Scared

Good Will

But that has nothing to do with the season marking a return to the light. Whether its Solstice and its Nordic expression, Yule, Hanukkah’s menorah marking the miracle of a light refusing to die, Kwanzaa’s candles commemorating principles for living…or Christianity’s celebration of the birth of a savior, the recognition of a craving for light, and regardless of non/belief in God, some sweet and powerful Light is international and intercultural. In my loneliest hours, I crave luminosity. Its vibrancy, its energy, its warmth. I seek inspiration. I seek a spark. Not only to energize myself, but to share that with others. I would like to think of myself as a person of good will. Continue Reading Good Will

Valentine’s Day: Love and Sacrifice

It’s Valentine’s Day, and either you’re going on a date, staying in with your beloved (?), bemoaning the lack thereof, or oblivious. Because Valentine’s Day is for lovers, right? Wrong! Well, at least not always. Until the 14th century and Goeffrey Chaucer, it celebrated a multitude of saints and the value of sacrifice. In the… Continue Reading Valentine’s Day: Love and Sacrifice

Keeping Change Fresh: the Power of “New”

The chance to start over again is like walking in newly-fallen snow. So fresh! So clean! So begging to be marked! Like newborns with extraordinary intelligence, we blissfully revel in opportunity, our life opening to our desires in a way that’s refreshingly different…. most of the time, it’s hijacked by practicality and fear. At the… Continue Reading Keeping Change Fresh: the Power of “New”

Resolving To Be New: The Art of the Successful Resolution

Ah, New Year’s. That time once a year when things are new and shiny, and hope springs, singing “I can CHANGE!” What a lovely, lovely idea…if only we could change that easily, I would be out of a job and into my fallback career as professional storyteller. Let’s get real. If I said to myself… Continue Reading Resolving To Be New: The Art of the Successful Resolution

Gut Yule! and the Spirit of Reconciliation

Gut Yule! Did you know that the date set for Christmas was actually an act of conciliation? It seems strange to me that at this time of the year, there’s so much tension about what we’re celebrating, when in one form or another, we’re all celebrating the light.   According to some historians, the first… Continue Reading Gut Yule! and the Spirit of Reconciliation