What is wrong with us? I heard resilience described the other day as a coat hanger. Or rather, we are the coat hanger who gets bent out of shape; the coat hanger’s structural ability to be bent back into shape is what we call resilience. […]
All posts filed under: wellness
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 […]
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 […]
Our primal relationship with numbers
Judging from how many articles there are out there with headlines like, “The 8 Top Anti-Inflammatory Foods for Anxiety” and, “The Only 5 Things You Need to Live a Good Life,” we appear to be in love with numbers. We just are. In fact, they […]
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. […]
What’s really going on in our mind
I have bipolar. However, what I’m really having a harder time reconciling about myself is being one of those people with bad allergies. Honestly, I just finished coughing my way through the last 8 weeks because I wasn’t going to be a person with allergies […]
Advice from a strange place
A hypochondriac might not be the first person you’d go to for advice about managing anxiety in a pandemic, but a recovering hypochondriac…now that’s a different story. They’ve figured out how to look their own fear in the face and not freak out. For that […]
What can you do when there is no way out?
One of the hard moments in my life as a mother was when my distraught teenage daughter pleaded with me to fix one of life’s bad situations. “Mom, make it go away,” she pleaded. While I can no longer remember what was wrong, two things […]
The shape we take
Personality has always seemed a solid thing to me, as part of the original package as our genes. After all, who we are certainly couldn’t be developed as haphazardly as a bad habit we pick up. And yet as Lao Tzu maps it out, there […]
A spectacularly bad idea
When I was in college I worked in a traveling tent theatre for a summer. A guy from my hometown was also employed with this outfit and so at the end of the summer I caught a ride home with him. His plan was to […]
Full-body immersion
I read a memoir once about a high-level executive who lost her job, sending her into a downward spiral. Her recovery involved a lot of therapy and soul searching from which she learned a great deal about herself. As she went through the process of […]
The doodle that gets it done
I managed to lure a co-worker over to my house so she could lay on my kitchen floor for two hours and create this unbelievably beautiful piece of artwork called a mandala. (The funny thing about this arrangement was that Jen Boothroyd, the artist of […]
Be cool. 