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When practicing yoga, where the eyes go, the body follows.  It’s the strangest thing. Simply by lowering your gaze from the wall to the floor, you automatically advance the posture. Because your eyes have just signaled to your brain that everything is okay, and now it’s time to bend down.  And so, you do. No matter how temping it is keep your gaze still. Where the eyes go, the…

I recently heard an interview with a successful psychotherapist, who was asked if handling the emotional demands of her patients ever got exhausting. And without missing a beat, she replied, it’s not exhausting when you have proper boundaries.  What a brilliant insight. Not just for mental health professionals, but for anyone who wants to take control of their life. I struggled with setting boundaries for many years. Until I finally…

Life is an ongoing process of deepening our empathy. Understanding how others feel based on how they see the world. Being aware of what simply is, without the need to label it, and remembering that the soul cannot bring forth aliveness in an environment of judgment.  It’s a neverending compassion meditation. A challenge to the parts of ourselves that judge. And it’s hard. Because our default is myopia. We…

I’m not a planner by nature.  I’m just wandering through life, looking for the next open door.  But don’t let the free spirit fool you. My approach to work less spontaneous and more intentional than it sounds. There is a structure and an awareness and a discipline. There is initiation and momentum and follow through. Not all who wander are lost.  At the beginning of each year, I’m always ambitious to carve out…

My yoga instructor often reminds us that our main teacher is in the mirror. That the students are to become their own gurus.  Yes, the instructor will help to keep pace and control the heat and make corrections, but ultimately, it’s through the process of confronting of ourselves, warts and all, that activates real growth.  What a powerful tool to deepen your practice as a yoga student. In fact,…

Rollo’s research on identity was way ahead of its time.  First published in the early fifties, during a postwar age of overwhelming anxiety, he found several interesting commonalities among his psychotherapy patients that still hold true today.  Namely, that every man needs relationships with other people in order to orient himself. After all, he’s a social animal. The human being gets his original experiences of being a unique self out of…

Joni invented everything about her art.  From performance style to lyrical content to musical genre to guitar tunings to creative process to production style to melody structure to piano voicing to chord progressions to career trajectory, there wasn’t an element of her work that wasn’t original.  That’s the real art. Not just the force of her message, but the fearlessness in inventing whole new ways of creating it.  Joni…

A clearing house is a central institution or agency that collects, maintains and distributes something between parties. London coined the term back in the early nineteenth century.  Lubbock’s built a single room where clerks for local banks met each day to exchange checks and settle accounts, pioneering an innovative exchange process that helped streamline operations, save time, reduce labor, decrease cost, increase efficiency, mitigate risk and ultimately strengthen the…

Hempton, the great acoustic ecologist, has circled the globe three times in the last thirty years in pursuit of the earth’s rarest nature sounds. His audio work is a stunning reminder that we should always respond to nature as part of ourselves, not as a stranger or alien available for exploitation.  After all, the imagination of nature is far greater than the imagination of man. It has its own…

Nisbett reminds us that when we have the beginnings of an idea about something, the worst thing to do is consult the literature before we get started to work on it. In doing so, he writes, we will be certain to assimilate our potentially original idea to something that is already out there.  But it’s just an ego vortex. A safety drill. It’s creative resistance in disguise. Because we’re…