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As hyper agreeable people pleasers, we have become naturally adept at suppressing our emotions and putting on a happy face for the rest of the world.  To the point that meeting everyone else’s priorities at the expense of our own has become second nature.  This is a useful survival strategy in the short term. It can help us avoid conflict and make progress without offending, upsetting and disappointing people;…

It’s amazing how much we physically have to do to feel normal.  It’s like a second job.  From exercise to meditation to journaling to positive affirmation, all of this staying grounded, feeling okay and practicing mindfulness is surprisingly labor intensive.  Who knew that living in peace required us to exert almost as much effort as to govern the world? Who knew that we would actually need time to recover from…

Some people respond to small, irrelevant changes with all grace and agility, while others have trouble accommodating on short notice.  Camus famously wrote that there are people who suffer flexibly and others who suffer stiffly. The former are acrobats; the latter are virtuosos of sorrow.  Think of someone you know from each category. Next, pretend your plans with that person have slightly changed in the eleventh hour.  One friend…

Our problem is, we have zero sense of proportion.  When it comes to major life decisions like preserving our health and doing our work and falling in love, we say yes or no to things without even thinking them through.  Meanwhile, when it comes to inconsequential matters like a typo in an email sent right before going to bed, we fall down the rabbit hole of useless rumination until…

When it comes to public creative expressions like singing, dancing and playing music, my motivation is not to delight, but to disappear.  The goal is not entertainment, it’s abandonment.  And this isn’t about looking cool and impressing others, this is about going to another place and pouring myself out.  It’s just the way my expressive function works. Completely process oriented and internally focused. My art is a temple of…

Anger is not a primary emotion.  It’s a defensive feeling that protects another feeling, like fear or loss or a combination thereof.  And yet, it’s gift. Anger asks us to take action on our own behalf. It’s the emotional stairway that takes us down to more interesting and vulnerable places. ‘ Deida, in his provocative book about unquenchable love, reminds us that anger can provide us with the sharp thunder necessary…

Camus famously wrote in his notebooks about the remora, a fish that swims poorly.  He believed their only chance to move forward consisted of attaching themselves to the back of a big fish. They plunged a tube into the stomach of a shark, where they sucked up their nourishment and propagated without doing anything, living off the hunting and efforts of the beast.  Maybe you know someone like this. The kind…

Saying we deserve something feels empowering, but it’s really just entitlement in disguise.  It’s assuming that we are the center of the universe and cosmic justice revolves around us.  When the reality is, just because we have done the work and put in the time and paid our dues and built up our struggle points, or whatever other socially sanctioned requisite action we think will move our name higher…

There is no right way to believe.  Some of us hold that divine reason has ordained our life to serve a purpose in the overall economy of the cosmos. Some of us are completely free of the binding illusion that their fate is written in the stars. Some of us feel like riffraff on the tide of history destined to be washed away into a whirlpool of meaninglessness.  Fine….

We all seem to be kicking around the same question in many different ways.  How do we stay grounded? How do we restore our spirits when they sag? How do we maintain our center in this ocean of chaos? How do we keep our senses alive in a desensitizing and dispiriting environment?  It really sucks. The exhaustion and overwhelm in is palpable in our words.  And yet, maybe the…