How can you get to a place of safety on a moment’s notice?

In a sad, grieving, anxious or depressed person's mind, their fears are completely normal. You can spend all the time in the world promising them that they are not sick, but they're often unwilling to believe loved ones or even doctors who try to reassure them. In which case, the only effective way to deal with their irrational thinking is to just play along for their peace of mind. And yours too. Because virtually any other response will only enrage...

Who are we when all of our gifts are stripped away? Is that person still worthy? It's tough to imagine when we've invested so much time working on ourselves. Think about the sheer amount of time and energy spent. We treat ourselves as the possessors of unique gifts. We carry the blueprint of them and notice their unfolding. We slowly emerge into the full flower of our gifts through practice and reflection. We apply our life energy toward the expression...

What should we care about? When humanity is dealing with numerous overlapping traumas, how are we supposed to know which problems to prioritize? There are no easy and simple answers for these questions, because there's a mob mentality on what is important. Social pressure often decides what issues deserve our time, money and energy. The squeaky wheels gets the attentional oil. In fact, people might even call you out for not being interested in the social causes they care about....

Discipline takes care of you in ways that motivation can't. Because your action isn't conditional on feelings or mood, it hinges on commitment. Your fuel is not desire but will. Whereas if you work from a place of motivation, there is a particular mental and emotional state necessary to complete your task. Which you may or may not be able to access at any given moment. And that gives you deniability around your own procrastination. The conversation inside your head...

In concentration camps, certain prisoners were selected by their captors to hold more advantaged positions within the population of the camp. Since these people possessed creative, linguistic or industrial skills, the guards viewed them as valuable assets. They gave them access to material benefits beyond those available to others, like warmer clothes, better shelter and more food. My friend wrote and directed a documentary about this very phenomenon. The story was about a man and a woman, both of whom...