If you’re on the “2016 Sucks” bandwagon, I get it. Lots of stuff went down this year – deaths of beloved icons, a heated presidential election – but bad stuff happens every year – and it’s never, ever the year to blame. Was the year that innocent kindergarteners were gunned down in their classroom worse?…
Category: Zen
Gratitude Confetti When Times are Tough
How many times have you been to hell and back? Maybe in this post-election, holidays-are-coming time of year, you feel the embers of hell at your feet right now. Any type of suffering…physical, mental, familial…it’s hard. The only way to get through it is to sort of turn your hell beast into some sort of…
2015: The Year for Living Boldly
“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass Happy New Year, readers! While a new year may just be another number, every day is an opportunity to fully live, right? If you are like me and last year threw you for a loop,…
Get Real: Rudolph and the Land of Misfit Toys
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is more than a story about a reindeer born with a deformity (a glowing red nose) that ends up saving Christmas. It’s a metaphor for misfits everywhere. Along with Mary Poppins and the Wizard of Oz, Rudolph has spiritual meaning we can apply to our journey. Hermey: [musically] Why am I…
Get Happy Week 4: Fire in the Belly
I don’t know what it’s like to be a man, but in writing from a male perspective in my current work-in-progress, I’ve thought a lot about it, interviewed a lot of vets and have tried to immerse myself in the world of Jake, my twenty-two-year-old Iraq war vet amputee who is back home in a…
Get Out: Hike This, Hear That
I grew up with weekends at the lake, my fishing pole sitting idle while I scrambled through the tall grass looking for horned toads and fleeing from crickets. Summer vacations were on the road, in the RV, bunking with my sisters and playing cards until it was time for us to tumble out and play…
Get Out Series: Inspired by Walter Mitty and Marina Keegan
On a scale of 1 to 10, how adventurous is your life? How many new places and new experiences have you had recently? I’m shifting my Get Real series to Get Out for the summer, which goes with my own shift from more introspection to extroversion as spring turned to summer and I realized I…
Get Real: Finding Flow and Navigating Transformation
In today’s final mediation in the Finding Flow series, Deepak said, “beautiful truths that lie dormant are not enough.” If you REALIZE something but do not ACTIVATE it into the world, then we are not taking the crucial step necessary to being true to who we are. I radiate light. That was today’s centering thought, but…
Get Real: Are you attracting what you want?
Do you know what you really want and how to get it? This week we’re getting real about the Law of Attraction (which was around long before The Secret came out). Quick definition: “I attract to my life whatever I give my attention, energy, and focus to, whether positive or negative.” It’s pretty no-nonsense, basic…
Get Real: My Top 5 Parenting Fails
Out of all the weeks I’m “getting real” about this year, this one might be the hardest. Why? BECAUSE PARENTING IS THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD. I know we all know that, but because we don’t get a degree for it and *some* of us didn’t take family and consumer sciences in high school,…
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