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Maisel’s comforting book about making your creative mark reminds make a key point about identity management.  He says that we must know what to do when we think we’ve lost our right to call ourselves something. We must have a game plan, orchestrated in advance, so that when our identity weakens, we know exactly what useful things we intend to do to strengthen it.  During my own low periods of doubt,…

Expectations are the bones from which the soup of suffering is made.  Any time we are anticipating future satisfactions, living for events or people or conditions that are yet to come, it’s detrimental to our serenity.  Any time we build up some future pleasure in our minds to such an unrealistic pitch, the actual experience is guaranteed to be disappointing.  It’s like the time my publicist assured me that…

Enjoyment is a skill.  It’s that experience where we switch off our brains, surrender to the moment and let life carry us to a place of peace, relaxation and contentment. Even if only for a few minutes at a time.  Unfortunately, that skill is no longer a priority in our culture. We’ve completely lost the ability to enjoy anything. Because we’re too busy finding fault, being offended, intellectually deconstructing the…

Each day, we take a small step toward change.  Each day, we allow ourselves to do whatever it takes and whatever works. Each day, we trust that a little effort on our part should open more doors to what we want. Each day, we respect the journey we are on. Each day, we steal period of time alone where we can get in touch with the center of our being. …

Anytime we embark on another relentless quest to fix ourselves, we enter into a totally antagonistic relationship with ourselves.  And that mindset rarely helps us solve anything. How limiting to let that attitude define us.  It reminds of a memorable passage from alcoholism recovery devotional.  When we fight a problem, we tend to think about it all the time. We build it up in our minds so that it occupies…

It’s important to honor our own natural and healthy urge for independence.  Doing so reinforces our sense of efficacy, agency and power.  But when we cross over to the stubborn desire to perfectly handle everything ourselves, that’s when get into trouble.  Rollo’s book on the cry for myth reminds us how we foolishly think we can take care of ourselves without any support from others. How our pride balks at the…

A writer friend of mine once told me the reason why he stayed single for all these years.  Women are either in my work, or in my way.  It sounded like a poetic and noble mantra at the time. But ten years after the fact, it actually sounds more compulsive than courageous.  It’s something recovery literature helped me finally understand. Because for workaholics, anyone who gets in the way…

Fantasy is central to our lives and essential to our wellbeing.  When we let our imaginations soar in a way that serves, these fantasies can help charge and organize our lives for the better.  However, there’s a fine line between consciously imagining from a place of inner connection and joy, and using fantasy to avoid reality. When fantasy becomes a way of trying to escape life, to outfox it,…

One of the many practices group therapy has helped me master is how to check in with myself.  How to step back from the chaos of life for a moment, take a few deep breaths, ground my feet into the earth and ask a few fundamental questions.  Here are a few from my collection.  What sensations are happening in my body?  What feelings and emotions do I notice?  What…

Everyone knows someone who is the classic chaos magnet.  The kind of person who is either feeling a cold coming on, suffering from a cold, or getting over a cold.  And of course, in the unlikely event of a time without a crisis or drama, fear not, that will inevitably be followed by some new whirlwind that will attempt to suck you right in.  Are your shoes tied? Because…