Search: fear

Back in November, a friend told me, “There will always be an invitation to the fear party, but you can decline.” Lately, I’m reflecting on how not only is there a perennial invitation to the fear party, but also the grief party and the trauma party. There are endless opportunities for me to worry about [...]

 All week the topic of self-compassion versus self-esteem has come up in conversation with friends. I learned recently that what I thought was self-compassion is actually self-esteem and the two are very different! That matters because self-compassion is the trait that gives us more motivation, more grit, better health, and greater happiness, according to [...]

 I had a humbling experience on Friday. While listening to my new favorite podcast, “The Happiness Lab,” the host Dr. Laurie Santos discussed inattentional blindness, or the inability to perceive objects if we’re not paying attention to them. She ran an experiment with her Yale students where she showed them a video of people [...]

 As a highly sensitive person and an empath, I feel everything. Not only my own emotions, but other people’s too. If the folks around me are scared, I’m scared. If they’re sad, I’m sad. I’ve tried numerous ways of dealing with this high degree of empathy. When I was younger, I did my best [...]

Like many people, Ukraine is on my mind. I’m watching in horror as Russia is brazenly invading another country in a quest for power. Republican Senator Mitt Romney told NBC in January that he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to reestablish what he had before, a type of Soviet Union. And furthermore, Putin is clear he [...]

 My spiritual teacher uses the word “beatitude” a lot because that is his wish for everyone, that we all experience felicity of the highest kind, or consummate bliss. That got me thinking about bliss, what it means to be blissful, and how that squares with, well, life. For instance, on New Year’s Day, my [...]

My body is still stiff and sore from the car accident I was in recently. I can’t turn my neck all the way and it hurts when something as lightweight as my purse presses against my trapezius. Because all human beings have an inherent negativity bias, it would be easy for me to focus on [...]

I keep thinking about an essay I read in the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. He writes about how he lived at the dead end of a dead-end street, two blocks long, at the bottom of a hill in north Seattle. At the top of the hill, [...]

 I read a Rumi quote the other day that struck me: “Move, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.” Wow. What a statement. So often I’ve moved in exactly that way. I’ve let fear motivate me and have made decisions from a fear-based state. I’m not judging myself for it – it [...]