Carrying Extra Weight

I’ve been beavering away on my son’s website, taking what was and stripping the old away to make way for a totally new, clean and improved, simple-y fabulous look. Another couple weeks, perhaps a tad more, and it will be up again, but not at all the same. Isn’t that a wonderful metaphor for life, …

Fear: A Muscle You’ve Built Out of Nothing

Do this; do that. Say this; don’t say that. Wear this; don’t wear that. Buy this; oh my God, don’t buy that. Eat this; whatever you do, don’t eat that.  Everyone’s got something to say, especially when they are selling something to go with it, but it’s shelled out for free too. Consummate salespeople that …

Round and Round and Round

Each ‘you’, could be replaced with I/me. I write from my experience. The habitual keeps you going round and round on the same track. It tends to spiral downward at a slow enough pace that is it unnoticeable. It is not fresh; it is dead. It is old thinking, old fears, wrapped in the guise …

Ease and Grace

It is only natural to want ease and grace, to desire the indisputable revelation of right purpose and true meaning in life. Most of us feel like something is missing, and if we can just find it all will be well. That’s a pretty big draw, a reason to stay in the saddle, to tilt …

A Twist on Life’s Winding Road

Tensing, the body waits for the next shoe to drop. It doesn’t matter which shoe, whether it is a steel toed boot in the butt, or a six-inch heel draped in an unexpected twist on life’s winding road. We humans have no idea how tense we are, how many years of our lives we shuffle …

And Maybe That’s the Point

Many years ago when I volunteered at the prison I was talking to the men about the present moment. Even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that something was off, something very important. For years, the present moment had been offered up as the golden talisman, a charm that once fully …

How Would You Know — It Hasn’t Happened Yet

Boy, if that happened to me, I’d … I remember saying that. If I was diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn’t go through all that. I’d rather die. I said that after my husband died, after watching him fight the good fight for five years. According to medical science he was a survivor. He’d made it …

Begging Your Forgiveness

Dear Sweet Little Body, I am so sorry. I haven’t been a good friend. In fact, I’ve been a stubborn bitch who wants you to be something you aren’t, who ignored you when you didn’t comply, and unfriended you along the way. If I had a friend like me, well, it wouldn’t be pretty when …

Death Throes

Death is the material world’s boogey man and aging signals its approach. It’s not taken too seriously when you are your twenties unless you have illness struggles, but once you cross the threshold of the thirties the fear begins amping up. This is the sales pitch of cosmetics, plastic surgery, and most everything on the …

Does Love Always Win?

It’s a common phrase amongst spiritual folk – Love always wins. Does it? It doesn’t seem like love always wins. It doesn’t even feel like love always wins. So … is it true? Does love win in the long run? If yes, how long a run? In my lifetime? In the lifetime of my children …

Time Machine

To be present means more than I used to understand. I used to say, ‘I’m here, I live in the now’, but I had scarcely scratched the surface of what that meant. I had taken the first step, a step that graciously left time and space, me and others wholly intact. And boy, did I …

It’s Both

Life is a wondrous adventure, a daring escapade, the preciousness of a seemingly separate being, struggling for connectedness amid the vacillating yet compelling uncertainty of letting go in full surrender to our interdependency, our inherent and abundant symbioses. The separate self screams its denial, its holy terror, clutched in outrage, spewing out its abject rejection …

As Within; So Without

As Within; So Without Happiness is where we start. It’s at the heart of us. It is what we are before we layer on all the trappings of hope for an acceptable outcome, expectation that the outcome won’t be acceptable, and resistance to what has come before, to what is, and what will be. Resistance …

As You Are

To be fully you, do you need self-acceptance? Seems logical, doesn’t it? After all, how could you be fully you while wanting to be someone or something else: taller, shorter, thinner, more muscular or richer, smarter, loved by the right one or any of the other things we humans want? That’s how the story goes …

You!

Underneath belief lies fear: every belief, beliefs in religion, beliefs in science, beliefs in humans. Beliefs — this is true — hide fear. Every. Single. One. It’s the reason humans go to war. They are at war within themselves. The inner sense of absolute power, genius and presence is at war with the outer sense …