“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.” George Bernard Shaw... Today is the day when many people in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. Like many of you, I will be sharing a collaborative meal and what should be some good connection time with some of my family. I am thankful for that. I’ve had quite a few not so stellar holidays in my life. I will tell you though, I do not honor this day as “Thanksgiving...”
Have you ever thought you had one kind of relationship with someone only to feel burned as you discover they had a totally different understanding of what you were to each other? Let's get up under some of those disconnects and offer a different way forward.
An Honest 4th of July “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” (Ida B. Wells-Barnett) Many of you know that I don't celebrate Independence Day. It’s not because I am not patriotic, or because I don't believe in...
“If you never go out on the branch, you’re never going to get the best fruit.” (Sarah Parish) New Year, New Word While I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions, ( see why here ,) I do pick a word for each year. This word is...
“You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.” (Navajo Proverb) I’ve been hearing and reading an awful lot of people lately expressing surprise over how messed up things seem to be right now. Costs are going up, customer service has become a...
“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars and change the world.” (Harriet Tubman) We Can Do Better I’m grateful that a lot of people have abandoned the...
“Santa had the right idea: Visit people once a year.” (Victor Borge) Holiday Lights December is a month filled with holidays of all kinds. Some are religiously oriented, some culturally oriented, and some exist just because we want some fun! I’ve noticed that a whole...
"We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains. Now that hope is gone. They have passed the mountains and have settled upon Tsalagi (Cherokee) land. They wish to have that usurpation sanctioned by treaty. When that is...
None of us are free None of us are free None of us are free; when one of us is chained, None of us are free. (Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Brenda Russell) NOTE: When a Person of Privilege celebrates the accomplishments of People of Color...
Last week I gave you an exercise using music to help you make better informed choices about your intentions for the coming year. This week, Music Therapist, Jazmyne Craig, LPMT, MT-BC, will tell us more about how all of that works, and how Music Therapy...
“When we don’t know who we are, we act like someone else.” (Tiffany Sankofa) It’s Social Media’s Fault I was trying to wake up this morning and started scrolling social media. Someone close to my age had a 1980’s “mixtape” challenge, ( youngheads click here...
Being reactive and screaming might feel cathartic in the moment, but sustainable change is born out of centered responsiveness. Inde-WHAT-ence Day? It’s interesting to me that we are about to celebrate another “Independence Day,” right on the heels of a Supreme Court decision that goes...
“Love involves a peculiar, unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.” (Diane Arbus) This Is Us Let me start by saying that I am one of those people; The ones who cried every week at the TV show, This Is Us , and are feeling ridiculous...
On June 11, 1967, I was seven and a half months old. On June 11, 1967, my husband, Amari, was six and a half years old. On June 11, 1967, “interracial marriage” was illegal in the Commonwealth of Virginia and 20 other states. If Amari...
“Mothers are the Mt. Everest of Relationships.” (Tiffany Sankofa) Not That Kind of Blog So, before you go assuming that I had some wonderful relationship with my mother, we were best friends, blah blah blah… Please know this isn’t that kind of post. Neither is...
“An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.” (James Baldwin) Recap In Step One , you tuned into your gut brain and realistically assessed where you were in the Cycle of Readiness for...
“Changes begets change as much as repetition begets repetition.” (Bill Drayton) Mini Review Ok! Look at you! You listened to all three brains and started to understand all the ways you feel about the change you want to make in Step One . Then you...
Hard changes are made up of a gazillion small, easy decisions. As mentioned in the introduction to this blog series, we need different strategies for different parts of our movements toward lasting change. In step one , I noted that we need to listen to...
“Your body is like the quiet talker with the most important thing to say.” (Anonymous) As I mentioned in last week’s blog, making up the mind in between our ears just isn’t enough “juice” to get us to real and lasting change. I also mentioned...
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” (Socrates) But how?? Say you want to make a big change in your life. You want to lose weight, exercise more, stop smoking, step...
Most People are “Expecting” this Holiday Season! “Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.” (Brandon Sanderson) While some of you are expecting babies… that isn’t what I’m talking about today. The rest of us are...
"Holidays have this way of pushing us to do an inventory on whether our lives and relationships are what we want them to be or others are telling us they 'should' be, especially when people or dreams have died, when relationships reveal themselves as unhealthy, when people disappoint us or leave us or blow up our goals and dreams, when we feel like we are not measuring up to what and who we 'should' be? We are going to feel some very un-holiday-like feelings. "In other words, the field is ripe for both depression and grief. "Depression and grief are these obnoxious doppelgänger emotions. They can look so much alike on the surface, but they have opposite needs. It’s sort of like 'Starve a fever, feed a cold.' But fevers are obvious. Depression and grief? Not so much..."
Sometimes we get so used to words that we look right through them. Have you ever really thought about the word, “’belonging?” We long to be. Just, to be; To be who we are, and still find ourselves connected to others. Isn’t that the dream? Belonging. Are you longing to be? To be seen? To be valued? To be joined? To be embraced? Some people are longing to be left alone, feeling crowded out by people who are nearby, but not safe-enough people to just “be” with. Our places of belonging hold up a mirror to show us who we are, what gifts we bring, and how we fit into something bigger than ourselves. Belonging shapes our sense of purpose and our sense of identity.
Although the world is full of pain, it is also full of overcoming it. (Helen Keller) And then… So this has been a fun week… Regardless of where one’s politics land, the Capitol building being breached, two people killed and four others dead is just...
“Grief always comes bearing gifts. Unfortunately, they are sometimes wrapped in barbed wire.” Seeing clearly Welp… To be fair, I really did believe that 2020 was going to be a year of focus and clarity. I wasn’t wrong. I really wish it had been delivered...
“You find peace, not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.” (Eckhart Tolle) There’s that internal locus of control again Well thank you, Eckhart Tolle. Frankly, there are an awful lot of circumstances of our...
“Before you heal someone, ask him if he’s willing to give up what made him sick.” (Hippcrates) Holiday challenges and New Year’s resolutions Given that most of us are now officially in one iteration or another of “the holiday season,” I thought it might be...
“People can’t hear what you don’t say. Thinking isn’t communicating.” ( Frank Sonnenberg) Asking and guessing My 23-year-old daughter explained the concept of “Ask v. Guess Culture” to me the other day. Apparently it’s been “a thing” for a while, but I missed it. The...
We here in the United States have an unhealthy obsession with final results. Just think about most New Year's Resolutions: Stay on my diet and lose (XYZ number of) pounds Make more money than last year. Get married Meditate at least 4 days a week....
"We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope. " (The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) It is so easy to lose hope, especially when the pressures in our lives seem to be chronic and endless. I encourage you to find...
As we walk into that time of year when people take stock of their lives and make their plans for the coming year, we would be wise to consider what does and does not work in achieving our goals. Those of you who have worked...
About those Hallmark holidays... My Mom hated them. She saw the game for what it is - Hallmark and other retail businesses exploiting some important piece of our lives for profit, manipulating us to try to make us feel bad if we don't fork over...
Mother’s Day is complicated for an awful lot of people. This isn’t exactly surprising considering that mother issues tend to be equally complicated. Mother’s Day brings all of that unresolved muck rushing to the forefront as the culture around us screams out demands that we...
It is officially gift-giving season around these parts. For some, it is an Olympic sport. Joey gave something THIS big to Veronica, so now Veronica has to give something even bigger to Joey. So then Joey feels compelled to give even more to Veronica, even...
Happy happy happy! Joyful joyful joyful! ‘Tis the season to … …Be depressed out of your mind because it seems as though the whole planet is spending their time with magical, loving, warm families engaged in holiday traditions, while you are carrying an oppressive lump...