My Blog
Fall Meditation Series
Interested in slowing down intentionally together, and tapping into the quiet wisdom of your own heart? We’ll incorporate self-compassion and awakening joy practices to help ease this transition into the darker days of Winter.
Please join me for a 4-session meditation and discussion group. We’ll start with a few minutes of Qi-gong, a moving meditation, and then sit for 30 minutes together, followed by a discussion and integration. You’ll leave with home practices to continue between sessions.
Seeing a Difficult Person as a Gift
I bet you have someone in your life that you’d call a “difficult” person. No matter how hard you try, this someone is a struggle to work with or get along with. You can’t avoid them, either, so this person is a source of pain. Work colleagues, friends, acquaintances, family members, in-laws, ex-partners, you name it…difficult people come in all shapes and sizes. For some reason they rub a sore spot in your soul, and you can’t just walk away and ignore them. Instead of spending time wishing they would change, or trying to placate them, If you’re up for some internal transformation, try this practice instead. Create an internal perspective shift.
Being with (and Easing) Unpleasant Feelings
Sometimes when we’re feeling angry, annoyed, sad, embarrassed, or any other generally unpleasant emotion, we just want the feeling to go away. Here’s a simple practice to try the next time you are feeling a difficult emotion at work or at home. This method will help you safely go into the feeling, which will allow your own self compassion to rise gently within you. And slowly but surely, it will release you from the suffering, or at least gradually diminish the intensity. (It’s more effective than ignoring it, pushing it down, or wishing it wasn’t happening!)
Get your Veggies! A Time-Saving Salad Tip
If you’re like me, you love a fresh healthy salad for lunch in the summer but you’re too busy to make one every day. It’s a pain to cut and chop and clean every morning as you’re trying to get yourself and your family out the door. And paying $10 for a fresh salad from the local salad bar just won’t do. So what to do?
Here’s my favorite preparation tip that adds those delicious fresh veggies to your week while saving you time and money. The salad assembly line: 10 minutes for a week’s worth of nutritious homemade lunches.
The Words We Say to Ourselves Matter
I just had a session with a client who started by telling me she had just woken up from a midday nap. She’s rightfully absorbing the last few days of being on her own schedule, before starting a new high profile, high stress job in 2 weeks.
“Oh how amazing!” I reflected back to her, noticing my own envy at the thought of a nap.
“I know, it’s so self indulgent,” she quickly followed in a self-critical tone.
Wait, what? She went from a moment of real self-care, allowing her body to recognize what it needed, and giving it just that, to a biting criticism of herself.
Sound familiar? Maybe you let yourself briefly experience the pleasure of a day off, a decadent dessert, a promotion or raise, and suddenly just as quickly as you enjoyed it, you subconsciously follow it with self criticism, which knocks the joy down a notch. As in…
Moving Away From Doing it All…
When you’re overwhelmed and realize there’s too much on your plate, you need to prevent more things from getting on our list in the first place, by setting boundaries.
Having good healthy boundaries means you won’t be cracking under the pressure of too many deadlines and too many hours of work to finish in a day. You won’t be utterly exhausted, irritable, crying at work (or after work.) You’ll have time for your health, your morning yoga, lunchtime jog, after-work acupuncture/ massage/ dinner date. And, since you’ll have the time for adequate rest and replenishment, when you get back to your work, the work itself will be more fulfilling, you’ll be more pleasant, and actually do better work.