This is a story about a panic attack that threw a top-level, high-performing, rock-solid leader for a loop. For decades she’d been the person — at work and home alike – everyone turned to for steadiness, for staying power, for perspective, for answers. I will […]
All posts filed under: self-care

A thousand tiny humble things
When I was younger, I was overtaken by premenstrual syndrome (PMS) in a way that sometimes made me nervous to get in the car for fear I might do something impulsive when PMS was behind the wheel. I made an appointment with my OB/GYN but […]

Super Slow
A natural response to an urgent call to action – be it in our minds or real — is to bring the energy of that frenzy into our body and go turbo fast. And if you are already high-twitch, well, we can go from zero […]

Abracadabra. The (Delusional) Stories We Tell Ourselves
I once knew a couple who took stock of their marriage every year to decide if they were going to renew the contract. There is something ghastly about undergoing an annual performance review of your love, but it does speak to the need to ward […]

How Does Your Dinner Taste
Sometimes we get so tangled up in our mind we have a hard time seeing clearly — being able to see where we are — which is why this poem by a young Japanese schoolboy* is so startling: In the middle of Japan, surrounded byThe […]

Tapping into our deep stories
Deep stories, the ones we tell about ourselves that keep us stuck in a different point in time…that is the stuff of therapy, for sure, but it’s also the stuff of a technique called tapping. Tapping is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you […]

Elephant droppings. Pace yourself
Over the span of two weeks back in August I got really old. All of a sudden, I had become a person who groaned when getting up in the morning. Getting out of bed had turned into a slow, creaky process practically overnight. Everything ached. […]

The holistic significance of hair
Back in 2012 I was on standby for a phone call from my friend, Kerry, who would tell me, this is it. Meet me at Debbie’s. Debbie was the hairdresser who would shave all of the hair off of Kerry’s head. She would be bald. […]

Bread in one hand; grief in the other
A while back I asked my sister if she was exhibiting any weird behaviors that could be associated with the pandemic. She gave it some fair thought and said not really. Like many folks here,* she’s a leader in a healthcare system and has been […]

Respectable you
I went to work on Monday, March 16th. About 2 o’clock that afternoon my manager called to say it’s happening; pack up your laptop and go home. In the span of about a minute I became an instant remote employee along with many other people. […]