Browse Life Transitions

I find myself at that awkward stage in life, somewhere between 50 and death. That being the case, at this stage in my life I better become whatever it is I want to become. Actually, I like being older better than being younger. When you are younger the potential for screwing up is so much greater, and the consequences can last a lifetime. I think I’ve made most of my major mistakes by now, and have learned from most of them. Now I feel brave enough to embrace success or risk failure. If I make a mistake that lasts the rest of my life, well I’m 50… how much longer could that be?

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When I first began doing research for Conscious Motherhood - both the book (yet to be published) and the website - I was struck by the recurrent theme among new parents about how challenging it was to let go.

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Around the sixth month of my pregnancy with my second son, my hip locked up to the point of debilitating pain. I had experienced something similar in my first pregnancy, but the second time was more extreme and I knew I needed help. I booked an appointment with a bodyworker and hobbled my way to his office. He asked if I was enjoying my pregnancy and I said, “I love that I’m pregnant but I hate being pregnant.” He laughed and said that when his wife was miserably pregnant he conducted an informal poll, asking pregnant women everywhere if they enjoyed it.

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“Perfection is for the Gods; completeness and wholeness is the most humans can hope for.” – Marion Woodman

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I wish I had been given one. I wish we all had been handed a Love Manual in a class in high school, and taken levels two and three in college. For there are basic laws and practices we could have learned that would have made the path of intimate relationship so much easier had we only been given the proper roadmap.

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Inspired by the courageous, wise members of my July 2014 Trust Yourself program. Quotes from the forum reprinted with permission. *** My family and I were driving into town last summer when we saw a blue van pass by with the words “Mr. Pool” printed on the side. “There goes Mr. Pool,” I said, as we had just hired him to finish hooking up our pool heater. And I had this moment of appreciation for the person who started Mr. Pool.

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There is so much pain in this world. There’s personal pain that often takes the form of anxiety, depression, addictions, and intrusive thoughts. There’s the physical pain of illness, injury, and disabilities, both short-term and chronic. There’s relationship pain when we endure conflict with partners, children, friends, colleagues, bosses, and family members. There’s community pain when we witness homelessness, poverty, isolation, and elder and child abuse.

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If you follow my work you know that I view anxiety quite differently than most people. Instead of seeing it as something to eliminate as quickly as possible – usually with medication – I see it as the soul’s way of communicating, via the vessel of the body, that something is awry inside and is ready to transform. Eradicating the anxiety before you understand its message would be like stamping out a headache every time one appears and then realizing that the headaches were trying to communicate an imbalance in your brain chemistry that needed attention.

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“I’m just an anxious person,” I often hear my clients and program members say. The statement underlines a common globalization belief intrinsic to many who struggle with anxiety, which is: I’m anxious, I’ve always been anxious and I’ll always be anxious. In other words, anxiety is just in my wiring and it’s here to stay.

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When my grandparents got married in the 1930s, I’m quite certain neither one of them had the kind of engagement anxiety I see among people today.

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Most people in an intimate relationship will, at some point, find themselves stuck in a projection about their partner. Projections are a bit challenging to define and even more challenging to see it when you’re in it.

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“Our eyes are not viewers; they are also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing that script. Now fear is going to be a player in your life. You get to decide how much. You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment which are based in either love or fear.” - Jim Carrey’s Secret of Life

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We hear a lot about the power of gratitude lately. There seems to have been a hundredth monkey leap in consciousness, a global awareness that gratitude is a powerful and relatively easy way to sweep out the propensity toward negativity and connect to what’s good and right in our world.

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My clients call me with a variety of anxiety-based questions (many of which I’ve discussed in previous articles): Does my anxiety mean that I don’t love my fiancé enough? How do I know that I’m making the right decision? Is there someone out there who’s better for me? Does the fact that I’m not excited about planning my wedding mean that I’m making a mistake? Embedded in all of these questions is another question, the one that they’re trying to articulate and hoping I’ll be able to answer: Will my marriage last?

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These are statements I hear quite often in my practice: I feel like I’m lying when I say I love you to my partner. I feel like a fake, an imposter, like I’m leading him/her on. If I don’t feel love, how can I say it? And I’m not always feeling it. In fact, it seems like more often than not I’m not feeling in love, or loving feelings at all. So how can I be genuine and say I love you?

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One the many problems of living in an image-based, superficial culture is that we learn to take life at face value. You have a dream about having sex with someone other than your partner and you latch onto the most obvious interpretation that you secretly want to have sex with someone else. You find yourself obsessively thinking about your ex and you assume it means you still want to be with him or her. You bolt awake in the middle of the night with unexpected doubt about whether you love your partner enough and you assume that you don’t love your partner enough.

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Light fading, time passing, big boy is ten, baby isn’t a baby and the time for having babies is over. The pregnant woman in the check-out line and it’s eleven years ago, pregnant with my own belly of hope and love, on the threshold of everything new and exciting. There was pain then, too, but it’s the joy and anticipation that come flying from past to present now, another layer of recognition that a stage of life is over. Oh, this life. Oh, the highly sensitive soul with the acute awareness of the passage of time and how it just keeps on marching on.

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Love cannot be measured. It cannot be placed in test tubes in a science laboratory or placed on the great scale of life to determine whether or not there’s enough. The anxious/sensitive mind longs for a definite answer to the questions that swirl through its brain - Do I love you enough? What is enough? Do I love you as much as you love me? - praying that a divine hand will reach down from the heavens and seal the relationship with a stamp of approval. But love is not an exam you take in school where you can receive a letter grade.

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We have an idea in this culture that you either have it or you don’t: You’re athletic or you’re clumsy; you’re a great orator or you stumble over words; you’re talented artistically or you can barely draw a stick figure; love comes easily to you or you struggle to find flow in relationships. While there’s no denying that people are born with gifts, there’s also no denying that with enough accurate information, support, and practice, you can excel at almost anything.

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A few weeks ago my family and I spent five days up in the mountains. Overall, it was a lovely vacation, with much laughter, hiking, game-playing, and boating. But for some reason my husband and I were in one those spells when we bumped heads at some point each day. Perhaps it was hormones or lack of sleep; whatever the cause we weren’t in our best flow.

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There is a room in your heart where sadness dwells. Each story of sadness lives there like a stagnant, frozen particle of light waiting for you to see it, to hold it, to wrap it in a blanket and bring it tea. When you visit your grief place with love, the particles of light start to shimmer and move – dance, even – for all things, even our pain, especially our pain, only want to be seen and loved.

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We all carry within us a well of Self. We can’t see this well, but we know when the waters are clear and full or when they’re low and flecked with the dark matter of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We know when the waters are warm from the time, interest, and compassion we pour into ourselves or cold from being ignored. Like a child, the Self thrives under the sunlight of focused and loving attention, and withdraws when you, as the loving parent, make everything else in your life more important.

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At the core of each human being rests a heart full of love, tinged with sadness and aching with longing. Some would say this longing points to our awareness of our original separation from a divine source, the knowing that we are all one yet painfully separated from each another because of this form of a body. We ache to merge back into our source, to float in the sea of oneness that is only love. But we can’t quite get there.

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Transitions provide continual opportunities to practice the art of the letting go. At each new threshold, the task is to let go of the old lifestyle, identity, and belief systems that are no longer serving us so that we can gracefully move into the new stage. The adolescent lets go of childhood. The high school graduate lets go of living at home (and the parents enter the transition of empty nest as their final child departs and so lets go of their primary identity being parent).

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A few weeks ago I met with two women from my spirituality group. They had never been to my home, and as we stepped onto the deck to begin our meeting they both remarked on the beauty of our land. I found myself qualifying and explaining about the dirt and weeds: “It was a lot more beautiful before the flood,” I said. But they both replied with, “You can feel the beauty. It’s still here.”

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When fear pricks the heart it flies in the face of every message about love we absorb from the culture: that love should provide a safe haven against the storms of life; that love should be easy; that love and fear are mutually exclusive, and that if fear enters the picture it means something is wrong.

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Sometimes an anger surges up in me about how abysmally this culture guides and takes care of its members around transitions. We expect engaged women and men to put on a happy face from proposal through honeymoon, ignoring their innate need to grieve the loss of their singlehood and honor their fears about getting married. We applaud pregnant women and new mothers for not allowing their baby to interfere with their regular life.

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Transitions are always opportunities for growth and healing. Sometimes we need to heal ways of being in the world that are no longer serving us – like my clients who realize, through the wedding planning, that they’re suffering from the disease to please and that they need to learn how to put themselves first. Sometimes transitions provide opportunities to expand our internal resources – like the new mother who thinks she doesn’t have enough patience to handle the needs of her newbo and yet, through time and the immensity of her love, her patience grows.

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Transitions render us more vulnerable emotionally and psychologically than during other times in our lives. Being in a transition means that we are between stages and identities: no longer single but not quite married; no longer a non-mother but not quite a mother. These in-between zones are typically scary places when the familiar realm is out of reach and we’re left feeling disoriented and uncertain.

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When my clients are struggling with engagement anxiety and marriage fear, they often ask what they can do between sessions to help alleviate their suffering. I offer a variety of specific exercises depending on the details of the client’s story, but there is one exercise I suggest to all my clients: daily jou aling. I ask, “Do you journal?” to which they often reply, “I used to, but not anymore” or “Sometimes, but not regularly.” For jou aling to be effective, it needs to happen every day for at least twenty minutes.

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While I was researching and writing “The Conscious Bride” thirteen years ago, I simultaneously took notes and interviewed for the obvious sequel, “The Conscious Groom”. But when I presented the idea to my publisher they said that there simply wasn’t a male market for that kind of book. Perhaps they were right, but since that time I’ve received thousands of emails and posts on my message board from men who are seeking consciousness.

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The holidays are supposed to be a happy time of the year. We have time off, we get to see our families, our kids are excited about this magical time of the year, etc. But for many people the holidays only mean stress, anxiety, and grief. If you have lost a loved one, you may be experiencing this grief already. I call it holiday grief. It is most prevalent if you have lost someone in the past year, but it can stay with us year after year after year. We don't realize what an impact it makes on our ability to be happy when we are still holding on to grief.

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HOLISTIC STRESS MANAGEMENT There are times in our lives when nothing works. When you feel that no matter what you do, things will never get better. That your life can not possibly change. When you have these feelings there are some things you can do to overcome them. Here is a list of tips to help you “work through the bad times”.

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We all long for a peaceful life. We search for peace through the mediums that our culture sells: through spending, watching television, searching the Internet, finding the “perfect” partner, having a baby, and a variety of other misguided methods. We even meditate, practice yoga, and attend retreats in an attempt to find peace. But none of these activities work if we’re using these tools as a way to escape or transcend the pain and messiness of life. Unless we’re willing to feel our pain and other uncomfortable feelings, the peace that we chase will perennially elude us.

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A baby is born. You gaze upon the baby and see an angel’s face, impossibly smooth skin still flecked with gold, hair like spun silk, clear eyes, and then the smile that breaks your heart into a thousand pieces. You see the inca ation of goodness, the flesh definition of purity and light. You see love. Can you imagine seeing a newbo baby and not seeing goodness? It’s impossible.

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Tell me what feelings come to mind when you hear the words, "Job Fair" or "Networking Event"? I'd be willing to bet for many of you the feelings aren't in the category of "optimistic or enthusiastic." Instead -- my experience of many people who find themselves chronically unemployed, under-employed, or unhappily-employed DREAD the idea of another employment-related event. Why?

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When we lose our “mojo” and self-confidence is not only painful, but it can keep us stuck in a fearful and emotionally uncomfortable place. “Mrs. Doubtyourself” is the name I give that voice in your head that is your voice of doubt. If you listen to it, it will keep you stuck, scared and keep you from moving forward. It is important to identify it for what it is, push it aside, and let your confident voice take over. Once you know the enemy (Mrs. Doubtyourself) you can more easily defeat it. It is paramount to understand that this voice speaks to everyone, as we all have self-doubt.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about projection lately, especially since many of my engaged and newlywed clients have been perseverating on the thought, “I don’t love him/her.” This is such an important and complex topic that I’ve written about it several times, but let me say it more clearly here: Projection is a defense or an addiction against feeling the natural fear and grief associate with a transition and the anxiety, self-doubt, and old traumas around love of your wounded self.

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Fear’s entire mission in life is to keep you safe from the risk of loving. It sees love as a dangerous cesspool where the invisible sea creatures lurk beneath the dark surface, waiting to snatch you into their murky waters. Fear believes that if you risk your heart through committed loving you will endure unbearable loss: you will either lose yourself in some way or you will lose your partner. Either way, fear tells you to run because it’s trying to protect you from an unpredictable risk.

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“Something valid and necessary takes flight when it senses deep attachment, and this flight also seems so deeply rooted as to be an honest expression of soul. Our ultimate goal is to find ways to embrace both attachment and resistance to attachment, and the only way to that reconciliation of opposites is to dig deeply into the nature of each. As with all matters of the soul, it is in honoring its impulses that we find our way best into it mysteries.” – Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships, p. 3

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A few weeks ago had a great session with the man I’ve referred to as “Matthew” in these posts. We’ve been working together for quite some time and have uncovered layer upon layer of false beliefs that are contributing to his unhappiness. But in this particular session we uncovered what I believe to be the core belief that is keeping him stuck.

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I was in my thirties before I realised that I was in an emotionally abusive relationship, and it’s a sad fact that many women don’t realise they are. I’ve now learned what a respectful relationship consists of. I know that every relationship is different and everyone’s experiences are different, but for the sake of this article and because I want to help you I will list a few things that I was putting up with. This may be what you are experiencing or this may be similar to what you are experiencing.

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Most people would admit that they would like to be wealthy but did you know your relationship with money will determine whether you will become wealthy or not. Our beliefs and perceptions about money can help us or hold us back, for instance look at these two meanings. Money is the root of all evil or Money makes the world go round. What meaning you attach to money will either move you towards it or away from it.

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At the heart of transitioning consciously is the willingness to grieve. Sometimes grief arises unbidden as a pang of emptiness; sometimes it wells up in a bubble of memory about a former house; sometimes it appears as a longing for a past experience or stage of life; sometimes it comes barreling into the psyche on tidal wave of sorrow for a deceased relative or an estranged friendship. It can be attached to a memory or it can appear “out of the blue” without a specific content or story riding in its waters.

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My son is still struggling with his nighttime fears. He’s been engaged in this battle for a year and a half and, while he’s no longer in a state of terror, the fear creeps up steadily enough to prevent him from falling asleep easily. We’ve introduced him to every technique and tool we can think of to manage the fear, from talking about it to guided imagination work where I’ve led him to his “special place” and taught him to invite magical friends to advise him on the fear.

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One of the slogans in the 12-step programs is One Day At A Time. In the life of someone enduring a transition - whether in the midst of a break up, becoming a mother, trying to conceive, or retiring - a more appropriate and helpful phrase is One Moment At A Time.

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During my search for new recipes for my little vegetarian son (who declared he was a vegetarian about nine months ago; you can read about it on my blog), I stumbled upon a beautiful and inspiring book called, Healthy at 100, by John Robbins (author of Diet for a New America). As my current life affords scant time for the luxury of reading, the book sat around the house in a variety of locations for a couple of weeks. But a few days ago something urged me toward the book, and even though work and kids called as always, I picked it up and started to read.

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Self-esteem is a term used for the way we think and feel about ourselves. It's the key to either success or failure. The direction of your life will depend on your self-concept. It's a fact that successful people have healthy self-esteem and respect themselves, while those that struggle with life have low self-esteem and a negative view of themselves. Most psychological problems/disorders can generally be traced back to one having a low or poor concept of 'self'.

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Transitions, like grief, have their own timetable. Despite one's best efforts to rush along the difficult feelings and anxious thoughts, each person will traverse the terrain of transitions according to their own internal needs and rhythm. While major life transitions like getting married or becoming a parent usually follow a two year course (engagement to one year anniversary or pregnancy through baby's first birthday), this time frame can vary dramatically depending on the deeper issues that are triggered during the transition.

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Living with kids close to nature and on a creek, I find that my fear-mind has many opportunities to reveal itself. In spring, when the creek swells to river stature and rushes in white-lipped rapids, I worry that one of my kids will somehow escape through the gate and… In summer, as we gleefully splash in its pools and rock-hop to the other side, I worry about one of them slipping on an algae-covered boulder and… And now, in winter, as my older son courageously and curiously wants to explore the multi-faceted and miraculous displays of ice, my worry-mind sees the ice cracking, breaking, and…r

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At some point in my counseling work, I hear a recurrent belief or thought that surfaces for my clients. It’s the belief that tends to wreak havoc on my client’s psyche, the one that’s been with him or her since childhood. Most people are so fused with this false belief or negative thought that they can’t even hear it. It’s like the news banner that runs across the bottom of the TV screen: you know it’s there and you subconsciously absorb the information but you don’t give it much thought. In other words, it’s always in the background, like a running commentary.

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I’m delighted to share this guest post by Dianne Rishikof, a registered dietician and licensed nutritionist, where she shares her extensive knowledge on the connection between anxiety and gut health. I first read Dianne’s incredible book, “Health Takes Guts: Your Comprehensive Guide to Eliminating Digestive Issues, Anxiety, and Fatigue”, last year when I became aware of some of my own untreated gut issues.

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“Whatever we have taken from them, the founding story of our lives, imposed on us by a mother and father who in turn inherited a faulty script from their own parents, isn’t even ours.” – Derren Brown in Happy

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In response to an email called “Emerging Womanhood” from my Sacred Sexuality course, a member shared the following on the forum. What touches me so deeply about her response is not only the exquisite vulnerability with which she tells her stories of becoming a young woman, but also the ways in which responds to her young self with tremendous compassion. She models two of the essential components to embracing our bodies: excavating the shame stories and learning to respond to our hurt and lonely places from a place of acceptance.

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We all have inside of us a well of Self. This is a fluid well that is continuously being drained and refilled by how we spend our time, depleted and nourished by how we move through our inner and outer worlds. When the well is full, we are resourced and regulated, which means we’re more adept at handling life’s stressors, including the inevitable anxiety that frequently traipses through the door of the highly sensitives.

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Whenever I meet someone new and we talk about how my 15-year old son is a pilot, they look at me sideways and say something like, “You’re a brave mom to let him fly.” As I’ve written about in other posts, allowing him to fly does, indeed, drag me into a regular practice of facing my fears and letting go, but the joy I experience watching his joy far outweighs the fear. His passion is a gift, and I know how rare it is to have such a clear calling so early in life, how passion can be the fire that burns through layers of the fears that want to keep us small.

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I hear a lot about sex in my work with clients. I hear about their fantasies, their shame, and their shame about their fantasies. I hear about their arousal confusion, their sex anxiety, and their struggle with desire. I hear about the common arc of sexuality in long-term relationships: the high of the early infatuation stage (if there was one at all) that reaches a zenith then plateaus into normal, everyday life. And from there arises the most common statement from women that I hear about sex: I would be fine if I never had sex again.

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Western culture places a premium on feelings in the form of moods. While we diminish the importance of experiencing difficult emotions like sadness, disappointment, frustration, fear and jealousy, we worship at the altar of moment-by-moment impulses. This sounds like: I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like exercising. I don’t feel like working. I don’t feel like jou aling. I don’t feel like cleaning. I don’t feel like organizing. I don’t feel like studying. I don’t feel like cooking. I don’t feel like being loving with my partner.

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This is a story about what happens when we forget to make room for grief around transitions. It’s a story that illuminates the heart of a highly sensitive person, and how easy it is to overlook and minimize the tende ess of our hearts. It’s a story of remembering my own medicine, and how easy it is to forget.

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Whenever a theme arises in my weekly work with clients I know it’s important to write about it here. Last week the theme was: “I married the wrong person” or “It would have been easier with someone else.”

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“One of the big traps we have in the West is our intelligence, because we want to know what we know. Freedom allows you to be wise, but you cannot know wisdom. You must be wisdom… The intellect is a beautiful servant, but a terrible master. Intellect is the power tool of our separateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.” – Ram Dass

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In April 2015, I had a dream while on vacation in Los Angeles: Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst who has informed so much of my work, came to me and said, “It’s time to write another book and it’s mostly written.” I woke up, faithfully wrote it down as I do with most of my dreams, then filed it away in some far-back recess of my mind.

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In 2008, shortly after we moved from Los Angeles to Denver with our two-year old son, I adopted a weekly ritual in honor of the Jewish sabbath: to shut down my computer for twenty-four hours. This was before the era of smartphones and before I was pouring my energy into my online business daily, but even back then it was a weekly challenge to rip myself from the seductive distraction of the computer and literally shut it down.

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As always when I run my Sacred Sexuality course, I was blown away by the vulnerability and honesty on the forum on this last round. Where else do we share our deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings around sexuality, the ones we think we’re the only ones having, the ones that cause shame to fester in the dark, damp corners of psyche because they never expose themselves to the healing light of normalization that occurs when we share with others?

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A coaching client recently wrote to me to share the following (shared with permission): Each time of the three times I spoke to you, you told me something that has been a huge lifeline for me: “If two people are willing to make it work, they can make it work.” You mentioned this to me three times and it’s been my mantra when I’m in the thick of things. That topic I know could help so many people, including myself. If you ever feel like you can share that beautiful wisdom in a blog post, that would be wonderful.

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It was one of those moments that I could have easily pushed aside and continued on through my evening wrapped in the spiderweb of distraction. It was a moment so small that I almost missed the worlds of beauty and pain that lived within it, like a monarch butterfly floating past and I, caught in the clouds in my head, fail to recognize the utter miracle of this creature’s existence.

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Our culture entrains us not to know who we are. From the time we’re born and continuing into our early years, we’re conditioned to exte alize our sense of self through being told when and how to eat, sleep, play, socialize, learn. Although this may be changing, the dominant child-raising culture teaches parents and educators literally to train babies and children to eat and sleep on a schedule.

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Sacred Sexuality isn’t only about sexuality; it’s about our relationship to our bodies, our creativity and our aliveness. When we learn to rinse away shame layers so that we can inhabit and appreciate the bodies we’re in (instead of the one we’re conditioned to believe we’re supposed to be in ), we find more acceptance and gratitude, and we start to re-open the pathways that lead to healthy sexuality and aliveness in all forms. Along these lines, I’d like to share another magnificently beautiful post from the last round of the course. This post was in response to the following prompt:r

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We spend at least fifteen years in school learning the skills that our culture has deemed essential for a certain type of success in the world. We learn how to read. We learn the basics of math. We learn how to write. If we’re lucky, there’s some art and theater thrown in, but it’s understood that these aren’t the “real skills” we need to succeed. After all, how many artists actually make a living through their art?

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There are so many ways the ego tries to dismantle real love, and it’s favorite is to perseverate on a single question until it tires itself out, then jump to the next story. I’ve dissected many of these questions on this blog and in my courses, approaching each in the same way: name it as an intrusive thought, douse it with truth water, then ask: What is this thought protecting me from feeling?

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People often ask me why they’re struggling with relationship anxiety or social anxiety or any other kind of anxiety when other people seem to glide through life more effortlessly. The subtext embedded in the question is, “Is there something wrong with me?” or “Why am I being singled out or punished?” In our culture that is dominated by the pursuit of the happy face and the false correlation of vulnerability with weakness, these questions and assumptions are understandable.

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“The final stage of healing is using what happens to you to help other people. That is healing in itself.” – Gloria Steinem “Why me?” people often ask when they’re dragged into the underworld of anxiety in any form. “Why do they have it so easy? Why does it look like everyone else glides through life when I struggle?”

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These are words I find myself saying multiple times a day: to my clients, to my sons, to myself. Breathe it in. We see a prairie dog hit by a car lying on the side of the road. I turn to look at my son’s face to see if he sees it. As we live in a rural area, he’s learned over the years of seeing too many dead animals to look at the fields and mountains instead of at the side of the road while we’re driving, but sometimes his eyes veer to the telltale lump of fur. “A prairie dog, Mommy.” “I know, love. Breathe it in.”

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I receive a lot of questions from course members and clients on the topic of career anxiety: “How do I know if I’m at the right job? How do I know if it’s time to change paths? Have I missed my calling?” (If you’re struggling the myth of a calling, please read this post.) These questions predicate on one of ego’s most compelling beliefs, which is that there’s one “right” path and that if you find it you’ll feel fulfilled and alive. It’s similar to the belief that if you find the “right” partner you’ll be lifted above the messy pain of life and be transported into a land of ete al bliss.

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How would your life be different if you didn’t care what other people thought? How might your relationship, your job, and your day-to-day functioning be different if you weren’t weighed down by others’ opinions? How might you peel and crack out of the shells of your insecurity and arrive more closely at the essence of who you are if you weren’t worried about others’ judgement? What would happen if you made decisions based on the inviolable knowledge of your intrinsic worthiness instead of based on the constantly moving target of exte al approval?

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A coaching client recently shared the following (shared here with her permission):

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One of the blessings of having a second child is that we, as parents, gain some skills by walking with the first one through predictable stages of growth, maturity, illness, and emotional challenges. When our firstbo had a high fever, we panicked. When the younger one has a fever, it’s old hat. When our firstbo struggled with separation anxiety we thought he would never leave our side. With our second born, we trust that he will find his way with time (and some help, if he needs it).

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One of the blessings of having a second child is that we, as parents, gain some skills by walking with the first one through predictable stages of growth, maturity, illness, and emotional challenges. When our firstbo had a high fever, we panicked. When the younger one has a fever, it’s old hat. When our firstbo struggled with separation anxiety we thought he would never leave our side. With our second born, we trust that he will find his way with time (and some help, if he needs it).

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“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” said Kierkegaard as quoted by Mark Nepo, who continues with, “The truth is that every fresh experience has this dizziness of freedom that we have to move through. Every time we reach beyond what is familiar, there is this necessary acclimation to what is new. It is the doorway to all learning. We needn’t be afraid of it or give it too much power. We simply have to keep leaning into what we are learning.”

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Among the many questions that dart through the mind plagued by relationship anxiety, the one that can cause either hope or despair is, “Will this anxiety ever end? The short answer is yes: the acute anxiety that you’re experiencing – the one that wakes you in the night and causes you to lose your appetite, will end when you receive accurate information and can douse the flames of “What’s wrong with me?” with a good splash of truth-water.

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A few weeks ago, as I was cleaning out our closet, I stumbled upon a stack of papers from my grandmother. Most of the papers were familiar, but one unfamiliar packet literally dropped onto my lap, a stapled report for an adult-education class in psychology that she took in 1963 that I had never read before. The title was, “My Psychograph and Its Evaluation.”

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Let’s blow the cover off of another taboo topic in our culture, one that causes my clients to barely be able to whisper their experience loud enough to share it with me: “falling in love” with people other than your partner, including bosses, celebrities, religious figures, and even your therapist.

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One of the most common questions I’m asked during a coaching session is, “What are red flags? You say that if I’m suffering from relationship anxiety and I’m in a healthy and secure relationship without red flags then the anxiety is a manifestation of pain that needs attention as opposed to intuition that I’m in the wrong relationship. But what exactly are these red flags?”

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Shame is often a placeholder for powerlessness and a protector against grief. Instead of feeling the rawness of grief, the mind latches onto a shame story that says, “I’m broken.” Instead of surrendering to the powerlessness of painful situations that had nothing to do with you, like your parents’ divorce or any other trauma, the shame story says, “It was all my fault.” Instead of leaping off the cliff of thoughts and diving into the sea of vulnerability that defines being human, the shame story says, “I don’t deserve love.”

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We hear and read a lot of fear these days in psychological and spiritual circles. Mostly, fear is painted in a negative way as the energy that we have to wrestle with and overcome in order to live a life of joy. Most of the statements and quotes we read about fear pin it in the position of the enemy, the obstacle, the dark road. These quotes are accurate, but they’re only talking about one kind of fear. There’s another face of fear that needs and deserves our attention.

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Anxious people aren’t typically the most easy-going people on the planet. Because our high sensitivity wires us for hypervigilance, which then causes us to scan the horizon for danger, we’re physiologically primed to have a more tightly-wound nervous system. Unless you received guidance as a child for how to work with this propensity to worry, all of those worry-strands continued to coalesce and gather strength in your body and psyche over the years, forming a tightly wound ball of twine until it reached a breaking point.

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In every session with clients, I drop down into the core of myself, breathing and opening into the vessel of being so that I can listen with the ears we do not see, the ones that hear unde eath the top layers stories into the invisible layers where the gem that needs to be revealed rises gently to the surface, glimmering with joy at being found.

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Like all forms of anxiety, health anxiety is on the rise. With information about our health more available than ever, the anxious mind that seeks control at all costs can easily latch onto health as a hotbed theme that invites this mind to shift into overdrive. You mea I can prevent catastrophic events from happening if I only take these actions? Nothing could make the ego happier than jumping onto a train with control as the conductor. But there is no true happiness that arises when ego becomes perseverated on a theme. In fact, it’s nothing short of hell.

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Our culture worships the gods of youth and ete al happiness. If we could bottle and merchandize the elixir of youth, most people in the Western world would purchase it no matter the price. We extol the blemish-and-wrinkle-free face and lay ourselves prostrate at the feet of the toned body. A full head of luxurious hair is enough to sell cars.

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What would it be like to throw yourself full-bodied and without restraint into love’s arms, to set the fear voices and inherited scripts that say, “Love isn’t safe” on the fence of your mind and walk through the tattered gates of your heart that are still trying to keep you safe?

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A great deal of my work centers around shattering myths about love, romance, and intimacy that cause untold amounts of anxiety in relationships and sexuality. If we start with the very basic “doubt means don’t” slogan that permeates the culture of romantic love, we see immediately what happens when we dismantle this pernicious myth: we’re free to experience the very common and often necessary doubt that arises in the face of real risk, and we realize that the more we make room for the doubt, the more it shrinks.

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Among the many misconceptions that people have about love – that it’s only a feeling, that the feeling of being “in love” should exist from day one, that attraction is static and based on exte al attributes – the faulty belief that often gets swept under the rug more than any other is that love is ambivalent. What does this mean? It means that: Love includes doubtr Love includes indifferencer Love includes boredomr Love includes numbnessr Love includes irritationr Love includes the need for spacer Love includes doubtr Love includes – dare I use such a strong word – hater

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There is often a predictable arc to relationship anxiety that includes three stages.* The first stage is characterized by typical symptoms of anxiety and panic: Can’t sleepr Can’t eatr Tearful Depressedr Bolting awake in the middle of the nightr Difficulty functioning at workr Fluttering stomachr Racing heartr

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It’s a thought that arises frequently for those struggling with relationship anxiety: “I have to be single in order to heal.” Offshoots and extrapolations of this thought sound like: • “I have to backpack by myself across Europe.” • “I have to live in a loft in New York.” • “I haven’t dated enough.” • “I have to leave my partner in order to find myself.”

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When the same thought, image, dream, or motif shows up across cultures and crosses all of our lines of classification (age, gender, geography, race, religion), we call it an archetype. For example, the dreams where you show up at school without your pants on or have forgotten to study for a test are archetypal dreams. The character of the wicked witch or the evil stepmother are archetypal symbols.

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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about. Rumir

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At least once a day the phrase “it’s hard being human” enters my brain. It usually arrives on the heels of my sons arguing with each other and me trying to teach them how to communicate more effectively. As a result of feeling hurt, one will lash out at the other, and before we know it the great domino effect of anger feeds off each other until they’re both in a rage.

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“I’m always comparing my relationship to other people’s relationships. Why does everyone else look like they’re so in love?” “I have such a hard time making decisions. Sometimes I can’t even decide what to order at a restaurant!” “I worry about whether or not my family likes my partner. I always care so much about what they think.” “I believe every anxious thought that enters my brain. It’s exhausting.” “What if I’m gay? What if I’m a pedophile? What if I have a terminal illness?”

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I recently came across the following in a book called “The Middle Passage” by James Hollis:

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There’s a fundamental loneliness that is part of the fabric of being human. It arrives in the corners of night, when shadows form from curtain folds and the backs of chairs. It seeps in just before twilight, when afte oon exhales its last breath and evening hasn’t yet inhaled. It lives on the edges of exaltation, in the space between the golden hour when the gods breathe their jeweled breath over meadows and in the splintered crack just before night’s multi-colored ink begins to sink into dreams.

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One of the biggest obstacles to finding more wellness and equanimity is the belief that we shouldn’t be feeling what we’re feeling; that if we were more evolved or healed or with a different partner we wouldn’t feel so ________ (anxious, depressed, lonely, confused, empty, bored). Because we live in a culture that disseminates the message that everyone else is living a happy life, it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that there’s a manual that you didn’t receive that outlines the steps for happiness.

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Once again, I turn to the poet and mystic Mark Nepo and The Book of Awakening for gems of wisdom about the stones that block our hearts from fully loving: “It seems this is the never-ending work of relationship, each of us in our own time and way moving the stones between us, repositioning the heavy things that get in the way, so the life of feeling can continue.”

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There have been countless times over the many years of my marriage when my husband will say something that makes me feel loved or do something that gets us back on track when we’ve been in a negative feedback loop and I’ll think, “Oh, so that’s how you love!” It could be something as small as walking me to the door to say goodbye instead of being satisfied with a kitchen goodbye or apologizing with a hug and an “I’m sorry” instead of just the words, and I’ll look at him with a certain amount of awe because he seems to know innately these simple ways of loving and repairing that I’ve had to lea

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One of the blessings of listening to the inner worlds of my global audience is that I hear about the thoughts, feelings, questions, and stories that are archetypal to all human beings. I’ve written extensively about the various intrusive thoughts that enter my virtual office, but there are other stories that tiptoe into the arena as well: stories about worthiness, stories about shame, stories about social fears and questions. There has been one in particular lately that has been calling for attention, and whenever that happens I know I need write about it here.

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When addressing anxiety effectively, we must attend to all four realms of self: physical, emotional, cognitive, and soul – or body, heart, mind, and soul. Attending only to one of the four realms is helpful, but it won’t help you heal anxiety from the root. By “attend” I mean we need tools to work with all four realms, and the tool I’m going to share today will help you on the cognitive/mind realm.

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“It’s better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to carefully avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit.” – Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

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As I’ve written about before on this blog, one of the privileges of being the position of guiding people through the darkest aspects of their psyche and soul is that they share thoughts and feelings with me that they wouldn’t share with anyone else. Part of the reason why they share openly about these shadow regions is because they trust that I rarely take these thoughts and feelings at face value.

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The first part of this post appeared on Instagram this week. I’m expounding upon it here. Real love is available love. It’s not the chase. It’s not drama. It’s not longing. It’s not the kiss at the end of the movie or finally snagging the one who got away. Real love is here-and-now, human, messy love. It’s two imperfectly whole people committing to sharing and creating a life together – a life that will include as much heartache as joy. It’s the commitment that matters. The commitment to wrestling with the fear when it shows up, as it will.

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The topic of world and eco-anxiety seems to make the rounds in my practice every few months, and last week was one of those times. Between longterm clients, new clients, and course members, the theme was flooding the room. I’d like to break it down for you using the principles of my work to see if I can offer some ease.

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Just as there are no rules for life, there are no rules for relationships. That statement can be triggering for the ego, the part of us that insatiably demands definite answers and craves formulas. “Tell me how to live and how to love and then I’ll know that I’ll be okay!” the ego thinks, then pushes us to perseverate on an unanswerable question in its attempt to gain a foothold into the ever-shifting landscape of a life where there are no guarantees. For those struggling with relationship anxiety, these questions sound like: “How do I know if I’m in love?”

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When the fear-fog clears, when the projection that has kept him separate from you and sealed a barnacle over your heart finally shatters, you see your partner as if for the first time. Not only do you see her clearly, in all of her sweet and simple splendor, but the delusions of separateness fall away, and you can see how under the hooks of hair or teeth or height or education or ambition or boredom or do we have enough to talk about or he’s wrong for me or she’s not attractive enough or I’m always irritated or mannerisms or humor or social fluidity orr

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While flipping through one of my favorite bedside stand-bys, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, I came across the following passage and chuckled out loud: “My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn’t take much to make me feel I’ve lost the Castle, it’s gone. One way to lose the Grail is to go a cocktail party. That’s my idea of not being there at all.” p. 76

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Fear-mind has a special genius for trying to prove that it’s right. It’s like we all have this aspect of our personality – some call it ego, other call it lower self – that has secretly attended law school and graduated at the top of its class. This character, terrified of change, will gather such convincing evidence to support its case that it would win in any court of law, or at the very least in the court of law that takes place inside your mind.

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Last Monday, after a typical Colorado October snowstorm, my sons and I drove into town to serve dinner to the homeless. Consistent with this time of year, the snow started to melt just hours after it fell, and what was left was a stunning display of beauty where the golds and reds of autumn kissed the snow-covered foothills in the foreground with the pure white Rocky Mountains jutting up above it all. The juxtaposition of colors took my breath away and shook off the last shroud of the gray morning that had settled into my soul.

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Our culture fails to teach us the essential skills we need to navigate through life successfully in so many ways. As I discuss often on this site, it fails to teach us about healthy, real love. It fails to teach us about how to feel our feelings and work with our thoughts. It fails to guide us through the potholes and landmines of transitions. And it fails to teach us how to make decisions, both big and small.

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Perhaps the area of our lives to suffer most from the increasingly fast pace of the culture is love, for the expectation of immediate results naturally leads to a belief that love should not only be easy, but that when there’s a problem, it should be remediated quickly. Love doesn’t work this way. The truth is that when it comes to intimate relationships – with partners, friends, and children – very few things come quickly or easily.

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Our era has been called the Information Age, the Technology Age, and the Digital Age. But it could also easily be called The Age of Anxiety, for anxiety is rampant and can manifest in so many ways: social anxiety, test anxiety, work anxiety, relationship anxiety, sleep anxiety, fertility anxiety – just to name a few.

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When discussing the concept that a root cause of relationship anxiety is the fear of being hurt by love, course members and coaching clients will often say, “I had a good childhood with loving parents.

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl

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He had been waiting for this since he was two years old.

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We live in an ageist culture. It’s not only that we’re terrified of death and hurry to sequester the topic away under the nearest rock or stuff it into the closest corner; it’s that, in a culture that reveres youth, beauty, and physical perfection, we fear aging itself. We fear the lines that inevitably appear on faces. We fear the roundness and softness of skin and bodies. We fear the gray hairs that sprout out as if to say, “Welcome to aging!

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When we spiral down into the deeper layers of anxiety – whether relationship anxiety or any other form that anxiety takes – we find some universal root causes that live at the center. These exist on both the emotional and psychological/spiritual planes, and they all need our attention if we’re going to heal.

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Projection is one of the most important concepts to understand when you’re stuck in relationship anxiety or any manifestation of anxiety. It’s a psychological term that essentially means we’re stuck in a story about someone or something else with the belief that it’s true, and that if the person or thing would change we would feel better. Everyone will, at some point, find themselves stuck in a projection; it’s part of being human. Projections are a bit challenging to define and even more challenging to see when you’re in one. In Wikipedia’s words:

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If you’re familiar with relationship anxiety, you know that it doesn’t take much for a flyaway thought to send you into a tailspin of anxiety that then leads you to question if you’re with the right person. This thought could be, “I’m not feeling in love” or “My partner always irritates me” or “I’m not attracted right now.” Because we’re not properly educated both about how to work with thoughts and how relationships actually unfold in the real world (as opposed to the media world), it’s a quick jump from the normal thought to the assumption: “I’m with the wrong partner.

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Life moves along in flows and eddies. The more you attend to your inner world and heal the long-standing and deep-seated pain and trauma that live at the root of intrusive thoughts, the longer the stretches of eddies and the time you’ll stand amongst the reeds, flowing with the small moments of life as they arise, both the poetry and the pain. But we cannot live in the eddies forever, and it’s often when the earth tilts and its relationship to the sun shifts – in the crack between two seasons – that the next layer of grief bubbles up to the surface.

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A theme has been constellating lately in my professional and personal worlds, and when I see a theme I’m compelled to write about it here as it’s my indicator that we’re tapping down into the realm of the collective unconscious: the invisible realm where we’re all connected, all struggling with different variations of the same hooks, all holding hands beneath the surface as we glide along our stories aboard spaceship Earth.

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One of the most challenging elements of relationship anxiety to understand is that, if you’re in a healthy, loving relationship with no red flags, the anxiety is projection. This means that the parade of intrusive thoughts that tortures the anxious mind and sensitive soul are actually pointing to areas inside of you that are crying out for your attention. This is such a reversal of our literal, read-everything-at-face-value culture that it can take a while for the shift of mindset to sink in.

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My son and I are driving into town for our weekly Friday morning special time and Suzanne Vega’s song “The World Before Columbus” comes on. It’s a song she wrote for her daughter that I used to sing to Everest when he was a baby, and these lyrics made me cry every time: Those men who lust for land And for riches strange and new Who love those trinkets of desire Oh they never will have you. And they’ll never know the gold Or the copper in your hair How could they weigh the worth Of you so rare.

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We long for rapture. We long to be transported to an otherworldly place where the problems that weigh heavily into our souls and the pain that pierces our hearts lift away, if only for a moment. We long to feel profoundly alive and deeply fulfilled. We long for ecstasy.

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Every day that I work with clients struggling with relationship anxiety I find myself saying some version of, “Of course you’re scared. Loving is the scariest thing we do.” As I’ve written about several times on this blog, fear doesn’t always present as fear but instead shows up as irritation, annoyance, numbness, ambivalence, lack of attraction, and doubt. It’s a convoluted defense mechanism, the ego’s attempt to circumvent being left or rejected by convincing you that you don’t love or even like your partner anyway, but in the end these are all manifestations of fear.

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There’s nothing like the first. The first family. The first friend. The first kiss. The first job. The first baby. The first heartbreak.

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“Love is one of the great enlargers of the person because it requires us to ‘take in’ the stranger and to understand him, and to exercise restraint and tolerance as well as imagination to make the relationship work.” – May Sarton, journal of a Solitude

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As evidenced by our high divorce rate and, even more disheartening, how few long-term marriages are thriving and fulfilling, it’s clear that our culture has it all wrong when it comes to love. Not only do we project our gold and gods onto our partners instead of taking responsibility for our own genius and aliveness, but we unknowingly project our negative attributes onto our partners as well.

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I spend a lot of time thinking about our culture, and it’s a topic I bring up almost every week in my blog and courses in some form. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how terribly sad and actually tragic it is that culture should support its members into becoming more of who they are, but we, in Western culture, suffer under a mainstream mindset that undermines the realization of our full development.

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In myths and fairy tales, the banished characters are shadow aspects who represent the inner characters we would like to sequester away in a cloistral tower or banish to the middle of the forest: the virginal maiden representing forbidden chastity, the unattractive witch representing the split-off wild feminine, the evil stepmother representing the dark side of motherhood.

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It took me many years to learn how to love my husband well, and, of course, I’m still learning. Like many people, I didn’t grow up witnessing a healthy model of true partnership. My parents, like all parents, did the best they could and they gave me many gifts, but I’m sure even they would agree that role-modeling a healthy and loving marriage wasn’t one of them. Coupled with growing up in a culture that transmits abysmally dysfunctional messages about what real love and real attraction are and aren’t, I reached adulthood quite clueless about how to love well.

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We all know that greens are healthy. We know that meditation can be life-changing. We know that breathwork is deeply healing and that yoga can be a pathway to profound change. We know that exercise is essential. We know that jou aling is a powerful tool. We know it, but what stops us from committing to these actions that will result in change and growth? Resistance. Resistance is one of the most powerful forces that both prevents and, paradoxically, invites change.

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One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How come other people don’t suffer in this way?” It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about relationship anxiety, friendship anxiety, social anxiety, or any other hook that anxiety hangs its hat on, when you’re the one suffering it feels like you’re the only one suffering. As I recently shared on Instagram, one of the reasons why we struggle with so much shame around anxiety is that we’re disconnected from the real fabric of humanity, the village where friends meet at the well or in the field and talk about their places of struggle.

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When I was in graduate school twenty-five years ago, we learned many essential principles and tools for becoming a skilled healer in the counseling arts. We thoroughly covered various modalities, including the depth psychological perspective that informs all of my work, and spent countless hours practicing the sacred art of listening, tending, and receiving. But there is one element that was left out – or at least it wasn’t explicitly discussed as an essential ingredient for healing – and it took me years before I understood why. It’s the element of love.

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“Probably the next important evolution of Western humankind is to find a proper container for religious life so that we do not unrealistically expect another mortal human being to carry this high value. In short: don’t ask a human to be God for you.” * Robert Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” * Robert Johnson, We: The Psychology for Romantic Love

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“Much of our anxiety and inner turmoil comes from living in a global culture whose values drive us from the essence of what matters. At the heart of this is the conflict between the outer definition of success and the inner value of peace.

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In response to one of the assignments in my Sacred Sexuality course to watch the film “Enchanted April”, a member of the forum shared the following. I was so moved by her response that I asked permission to share it here. She wrote: This film touched something deep inside me. After I watched it, I wrote the following in response to Lottie’s comment that “it is a wonderful thing to get on with one’s loving.”

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Over the years, I’ve worked with many clients who have suffered from the intrusive thought, “What if my partner is gay?” (or “What if my partner is straight?” for those in a same-sex relationship), and while I’ve written several posts on the “What if I’m gay?” spike I haven’t written about what is, in some ways, a corollary thought.

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When my boys were learning how to write, they would freeze in their tracks for fear of making a spelling mistake. Their perfectionist tendencies were not a surprise to my husband and I – after all, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – and it was both fascinating and painful to see how powerfully the perfectionist halted their creative and free expression. I would say to them over and over again, “Make mistakes! It’s how you learn. I don’t care about spelling mistakes.

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One of the most common questions I receive in my work is: How do I know the difference between fear that’s coming from anxiety and fear that’s coming from intuition alerting me to a real problem?r

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The following is from course member findingpeace28, who shared this on the e-course forum two weeks after her wedding. As soon as I read it, I knew had to share it with those of you struggling with relationship anxiety and, in particular, the connection spike, to offer you a lifeline of hope and a rope of inspiration. As she wrote to me when I asked for her permission to share her words her, “I honestly feel like if I could get through, anyone can. I hope to provide encouragement to those who need it, because I’ve sooo been there.” ***

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On the last round of Open Your Heart a participant asked: “So if I don’t trust these anxious thoughts then what can I trust? If my truth was really that we are not right for each other then how would I know if I am teaching myself not to listen when doubts arise?” And then she wisely responded to her own question with: “But I can see that is probably another clever resistance pattern.”

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A coaching client recently said to me, “You talk a lot about doing “the work”, and I wondered for so long what “the work” was. I thought that if I understood anxiety intellectually I would feel better. And the first time I went through the course I did feel better for a while, which I know is very common for new course members. But then I felt anxious again, and I realized that I wasn’t doing the work.” “How do you understand the work now?”

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At least once a week, a client asks, “I know that love isn’t all butterflies and fireworks, but what should it feel like? Since I’ve never seen a healthy relationship and I’ve never been in one, I have no idea what it should be like.”

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Transitions, as breaking and renewal points, offer choice-points that determine how we unfold into the next stage of our lives. Many people find me during their wedding transition when when they’re broken open not only by relationship anxiety but also by the earthquake of feelings that erupt because of the transition itself. The same is true for the transition into parenthood, career changes, moves, and deaths.

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Anxiety is a messenger, a symptom, and a gift. I know that statement flies in the face of everything we learn about anxiety in a culture that is pathologically obsessed with eradicating shadow at every turn and consequently attempts to “get rid of” the symptom of anxiety as quickly and cleanly as possible, but I carry a vastly different approach. Instead of immediately medicating anxiety and its cohort of symptoms away, I seek to understand the messages encoded in its underlayers.

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For those of you who are struggling with relationship anxiety, you probably saw the title of this post and wondered if I was going to talk about when to leave a relationship, and perhaps felt nervous that it was going to spike you.

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One of the common fear-lines that arises when the ego is trying to deconstruct the idea of relationship anxiety and convince you that your truth is that you’re just with the wrong person is: “If what Sheryl says is true, why don’t more people talk about it?”

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When you’re neck-deep and soul-soaked in anxiety, when you’re having trouble eating, sleeping, and basically functioning, when the love you formally felt for your partner has been eclipsed by indifference, doubt, or numbness, when intrusive thoughts invade your brain day and night, you will inevitably ask, “When will I feel better?” This question hits at the onset of anxiety when the symptoms are full-tilt misery, it hits when the excruciating first set of symptoms starts to abate, and it hits when people find my work and sign up for my courses.

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Anxiety can hang its hat on almost any hook. It can focus on relationships, fertility, parenting, health, the world, money, career, death. Within each of these topics, there are endless sub-topics that lure anxiety into its lair. If we’re talking about relationship anxiety, for example, the hook can be: lack of physical attraction, lack of sexual attraction, focusing in any area of perceived lack (education, intelligence, social fluency, humor, wit, height, ambition), religious differences, we never had an infatuation stage, or just a pervasive sense that the relationship is “wrong”.

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In last week’s post, I wrote about the essential task of attending to our four realms of Self in order to find wellness and equanimity, and that in order to do this we need to have a loving, competent and clear inner parent at the helm of psyche. Just as kids feel safe when there’s an attuned parent sitting at the head of the metaphoric dinner table, so our inner characters – our Anxiety, Judgement, Fear, Jealousy, Critic, Taskmaster, Good Girl/Boy – feel safe when there’s a loving, clear, attuned parent at the head of the table of psyche.

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One of the byproducts of being a highly sensitive person prone to anxiety is that you tend to take on others’ pain and stories. This is particularly true if you had an enmeshed relationship with a parent growing up and didn’t learn to solidify the borders of your skin but instead became a porous sponge that absorbed the emotional world of your parent. But the tendency to take on others’ pain and stories is a common struggle for many people regardless of early relationships and speaks to being both sensitive and not having established a full well of Self.

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“We are all made up of yearning and light, searching for a way out, afraid we will be shut in or cut off or repelled back into the ground from which we are reaching. This is enough to begin: To know, before all the names and histories drape who we are, that we want to be held and left alone, again and again; held and left alone until the dance of it is how we survive and grow, like spring into winter into spring again.” – Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening

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At the core of anxiety – whether health anxiety, death anxiety, relationship anxiety, or generalized anxiety – is the need for safety. As I’ve been writing about in my last few posts, left to our own unguided minds, the ego will latch onto our stories to try to gain a foothold into the ever-changing flow of an uncertain world in an attempt to create safety. This never works.

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Oh, the list of thoughts that try to prevent us from taking the risk of loving wholeheartedly is quite long, but there are a few that always top the list, buzzing and darting in and around your ears like mosquitos in summer. I recently wrote about the “I wish he was taller” thought, and I’ve written extensively about the “I’m not attracted” thought. This week’s thought that topped the charts of my sessions was “I wish he was funnier.” Here’s an excerpt from a client (published with permission):

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I met Andrea in my first round of Open Your Heart in May 2013. Every time she posted on the forum, I was moved and inspired by the depth and clarity of her writing, and her ability to transpose her inner world into words. When she shared this story with me over email, I immediately asked if she would be willing to share it on my site, as I knew it would provide light and inspiration for those struggling through dark night of the soul, especially when sexuality is effected.

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The connection question is one of the most common spikes that darts across the screen of my clients and readers’ consciousness when they’re struggling with relationship anxiety. Do we connect enough? Do we talk enough? What if I feel bored sometimes? Is there a meeting of the minds? Do we have enough chemistry? What is chemistry? What, oh what, is this elusive thing called connection that everyone keeps talking about and how do I know if we have enough of it?

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On the heels of my post on connection, which was both comforting and spike-inducing for some of my readers and course members, I’m elaborating on the topic of connection, specifically this one line: Of course, when anxiety is at the helm, it’s difficult to feel attached or secure anywhere and with anyone.

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The anxious mind can latch onto almost any topic: What if I don’t have enough money? What if my kids aren’t okay? What if I don’t get pregnant? What if I have cancer? What if I don’t love my partner enough and I’m making a terrible mistake? What if I don’t have enough friends? What if I’m gay? What if I’m a pedophile? What if I have an STD? What if there’s a terrorist attack ? What if I’m in the wrong career? What if the plane crashes?

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When working with anxiety and intrusive thoughts, the essential component is to resist the gravitational and habitual pull to attach onto the stories that appear like planets in our inner galaxy and assume that they’re true. The story of the day – whether it centers around your relationship, your fertility, your job, your health, or your children – occupies so much space and presents its argument with such conviction that the untrained mind will naturally attach and interpret in a lightening flash second.

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My favorite fairy tale when I was a child was Rumpelstiltskin, the story of a girl who makes a bargain with an imp-like creature in exchange for saving her life from being executed by the king. First she gives the imp a necklace, then a ring, then promises her firstbo child. But when her child arrives, she begs the imp to let her keep it. He says he will if she can guess his name.

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Our stories form a crystal cave of stalactites and stalagmites in our minds, a cool chamber that seduces us with the promise that if we spend enough time there we will divine our answers. How beautiful this cave looks! How many promises it offers! And how familiar this cave becomes when we’ve spent thousands of hours there seeking safety from the vulnerability of childhood. Each stalactite tells a story. Each stalagmite offer the infinite details that need to be figured out.

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One of the essential spokes of the growth and healing wheel is being willing to see our parents clearly. As children, we almost have no choice but to see our parents as infallible heroes and gods, and many people continue to carry these fantasies into adulthood. But if we’re to know ourselves, which is essential to healing ourselves, we need to know where we come from. We need to be able to trace at least some of the lines of our negative patterns back to their origin.

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There’s a common concept in our culture – one that I’ve adopted myself at times – that fear is our enemy. When we’re caught in fear’s offspring of anxiety and panic, it certainly feels like we’re been taken into enemy territory and are being held hostage. It feels like someone wraps a gloved hand around our throat and is sitting on our chest with a fifty pound bag of bricks. Anxiety in any form around any storyline – relationships, health, impending loss/death – is an unmanageable state that feels like torture.

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As humans in an uncertain world, we seek certainty in a variety of ways. We ask questions that are fundamentally unanswerable. We ruminate and obsess on a single thought (otherwise known as intrusive thoughts). We Google and text and seek reassurance in a variety of increasingly technologically oriented ways. When I see someone falling into these common mental habits, the first questio I encourage them to ask themselves is, “What are these thoughts/actions protecting me from feeling?”

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We are addicted to our stories. The thoughts come in and take us away on their magic carpet promise of arriving in a land of certainty, where the vulnerability and pain of life can’t touch us. We learn early to climb aboard this carpet because, as young people, we usually don’t know how to manage the big feelings of life. Big feelings coursing through a little body are only manageable when that body is being held in the arms of a loving, solid caregiver who can transmit the message, “You’re okay. It’s okay. I’ve got you. It’s a big feeling but it won’t hurt you. Let it come. Be loud.

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Let’s imagine that there are invisible tracks streaming like ribbons in the ether of psyche. Some of these tracks resonate at a higher vibration and some move at a lower vibration. The tracks of higher vibration carry the feelings that emanate from the source of ourselves: sadness, joy, contentment, fear, uncertainty, disappointment, and, of course, love and gratitude. When the channels are clear, we can easily connect to these source feelings, which allows us to remain in the flow of the river of life without obstruction.

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On a daily basis, my assistant and I receive the following email: “Can you recommend a therapist in my area who is familiar with your work?” Sadly, I don’t have a database of like-minded therapists, and, even more sadly, I know that many therapists fall into the “doubt means don’t” mindset and end up creating more anxiety for their already anxious clients. As such, I can understand the reluctance to start therapy with someone who could very well tell you to walk away from your loving, honest, trustworthy, like-minded partner as soon as you hint at doubt.

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We hear a lot about the importance of loving ourselves these days, and how we can’t love someone else until we truly love ourselves. While I don’t entirely agree with that statement (adult attachment theory shows that it’s through secure attachment to loving others that we feel loved and, therefore, learn to love ourselves), I do know that loving ourselves is a key component to wellness. Yet what does it mean to love ourselves?

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We hear a lot about the power of fear these days, and the way we culturally/psychologically talk about it speaks to our beliefs that there are forces “out there” that are dark or evil that we need to overpower. In the early days of my work, I also spoke of fear in these terms, but over the years I’ve softened my perspective and have come to see fear as an inner bully that doesn’t need our aggression as much as our loving attention. When fear takes over, especially in the form of debilitating anxiety, it’s easy to feel like fear is the aggressor and you’re the victim.

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Our hearts are encased in protection, layers of materials like iron or brick that create a fortress around our most sensitive selves. When these material first arrived, they came as friends, for our hearts as young people didn’t know how to rest undefended. We needed to harden in order to survive. But one aspect of growing up means realizing that our greatest strength is what we have become conditioned to believe is our greatest weakness: a softened heart is a wise heart, and it no longer needs the armor it thought it needed to keep it safe.

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Life is a series of micro-moments. Most of the time, we’re floating along in the fast-paced current without self-reflection. But inevitably, at some point, we will get snagged on a branch of anxiety or intrusive thoughts, an uncomfortable feeling, an illness, an argument with a loved one, or a season of depression. The habitual responses to these gifts-disguised-as-snags are to protect in some way: to attack outwardly through blame or withdraw into stony silence.

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When I was young, one of my favorite books was a collection of four short stories called “Nobody is Perfick“. I liked the first three stories, but it was the fourth one, called Nobody is Perfick, that captivated my attention. It was the story about a perfect boy named Peter Perfect. He always had sharp pencils. He always dressed perfectly. He received perfect scores on all of his tests. He had perfect manners and all of the adults in his life adored him.

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For all humans, but especially the highly sensitives, one of the most difficult truths to accept is that all seasons pass, all stages come to an end, all beings die. Just as the gorgeous peach tree in full-tilt pink spring bloom drops its blossoms to reveal summer fruit, then drops its leaves in autumn’s melancholic dance to stand bare-limbed in winter, so we watch with grasping hearts as life closes out: from people and animals we love passing from this planet to childhood ending to the day’s close.

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A subset topic of the million-dollar question – is my anxiety/doubt evidence that my truth is that I’m with the wrong partner or does it mean something else? – is the issue of intuition versus anxiety. In other words, embedded inside every question of the mind suffering from relationship anxiety is, “Isn’t this anxiety really my intuition telling me to leave?”

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I’m standing on the edge of my life, as if on the shores of a cold but beautiful lake. I want to dive in but I’m scared, only the fear doesn’t sound like fear as much as doubt, anxiety, uncertainty, and ambivalence. What if I make a mistake? What if the water is too cold and I can’t breathe? What if there’s a better lake out there: warmer, smoother, less dangerous? I’m here but I do not move, too scared to fail, too scared to risk, too scared to live.

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We learn and heal in ebbs and flows, spiraling around the center of ourselves where our true Self dwells. When we’re in a cycle of growth, we burn through layers of ego fears and touch into that core place of wellness where peace and clarity reside. Our hearts are open and alive and we can receive and give love with ease. This is the gold of being human, and how we long to live there always! But alas, inevitably, when the false self senses that we’re growing “too much” or learning “too quickly”, it bucks like a bull at a bronco, and it suddenly feels like we’re back at square one.

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Somewhere along the road of childhood into adolescence, a belief is transmitted that says: Follow the roadmap that culture presents and you will find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This roadmap looks like: Graduate from a 4-year university, land a corporate job then climb the ladder, get married, buy a house, then have a couple of kids (in that order).

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We live in uncertain times, and that statement alone can send an anxious-sensitive personality type into a tailspin. But the truth is that we’ve always lived in uncertain times. Because death exists, our lives hang in the balance on this precious and precarious planet. The threats change faces – where once we feared our babies getting eaten by a wild hyena or dying of tuberculosis now we fear terrorist attacks and school bombings – but the threat is more or less the same as it’s always been.

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To be human is to know that we are imperfect and whole: we will hurt and be hurt; we will feel disappointed and will disappoint; we will stumble and fall and get back up again. To be human is to remember that this being human is an experiment without a goal or destination but with a plan that includes learning about love at its center.

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Last week, I had the blessed opportunity of having a closure session in person with a beautiful woman with whom I’ve worked for almost six years. As we sat face-t0-face (as opposed to screen-to-screen) and the session’s minutes clicked toward the end of our hour together, I told her that I wanted to make sure we had ample time to talk about our work and reflect on her growth over these past six years. She immediately dropped into her heart and, through tears, expressed her gratitude.

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The following question is one I often receive from my clients who are struggling with the specific spoke of relationship anxiety that contains the longing to feel more love, connection, and attraction for their partner (and let’s remember that I use attraction or lack of attraction in the broadest sense of the word to talk about all of the ways in which you believe your partner is “not enough” that then cause you to retract, judge and withdraw. This “lack of attraction” can focus on any perceived lack: physical, intellectual, humor, social, or simply “we’re not connected enough.”).

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“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” — Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

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I could have titled this post with any of the phrases I hear every day from my clients and course members: - "I wish she was thinner." - "I wish he was more successful." - "I wish she had better skin." - "I wish he was more assertive."

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I often receive a version of the following email:

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My yoga teacher has said this phrase dozens of times, but one morning it went in differently and landed in the places where breath meets bone, where sinew aches with loss and the water in the pelvic bowl of my hips shimmered like a moonlit lake.

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We are addicted to our stories. The thoughts come in and take us away on their magic carpet promise of arriving in a land of certainty, where the vulnerability and pain of life can't touch us.

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We hear a lot about the importance of loving ourselves these days, and how we can't love someone else until we truly love ourselves.

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Most people are familiar with the heart-aching pain of grief. Most people can identify the empty thud of loneliness. Most people know when they've been pricked by the green-eyed monster of jealousy, or taken under the thick, gray blanket of shame. But how often do we talk about longing?

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Fear is a part of life. Sometimes we can keep it at bay, but eventually, with certainty, it will creep in like a red tide on an otherwise calm beach. We try to run, but it's faster than we are. We try to hide but it discovers all of our hiding places.

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While Valentine's Day can be the most romantic day of the year for some of us, it can be downright torture for anyone who's single, especially if they are single. Especially newly single. Any woman who has been recently divorced needs to find a way to "turn it around" and make it a day to enjoy and celebrate her "newly-liberated" status! The trick, is to remember that you are in charge of your happiness and destiny. "Indulge yourself during these times.

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This actually happened to me. I was applying for a call-center position as a Technical Service Representative in one of the local business process outsourcing companies. I have already gone thru the earlier stages: preliminary phone interview; English grammar, syntax, and words familiarity tests; typing speed evaluation; and customer satisfaction assessment. As last part of the online examination, the proctor told us to write an essay within 15-minute time allotment, "Who I would like to meet in hell, and why."

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A recent and continuing occurrence, which happens to someone close to me, set me to thinking about the supe atural world. She claims to see dark apparitions of human-like figures lurking in the shadows of their house, sporadically appearing on no particular occasion, whether other persons are present or not, threatening enough to appear in her dreams. Except for wanting not to be left alone in odd or rarely frequented places of the domicile, she remains the vibrant and lively and strong-willed girl she has always been.

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After more than fifty years, my aging father sought closure of the previous life he had before he and my mother lived together. He had another family prior to the war in the town of Dalaguete 72.5 kilometers (25 miles) south of the city of Cebu, and where he begot six children.

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We humans need to communicate with one another; we must interact and express our intentions to each other, the more preferred method being through verbal means. Our history as an entire specie is filled with examples of civilizations rising to full heights when we fully understand what is expected of everyone - be it as priest, soldier, or slave. Progress never materializes when we do not talk.

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I used to pass by this fly-over bridge to and from work while still employed as a call-center agent. Very visible from the top was a triangular billboard structure designed to present one face to the traffic coming up and another face when going down. The advertisements were for a Christian FM station, judging from the exhortations, auspiciously encouraging people to listen to inspired music. Smaller boards were posted below the main signs, each of which contains a popular bible verse. One of these quotes was “Come unto me, all you heavily laden, and I will give you rest”.

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Miracles are all around us. They are so numerous and common that they have become unnoticed in the daily round of existence. Take for example: the incomparable beauty of a flower or intricate web of a leaf, the astonishing diversity and prevalence of life forms in the world, the mathematical precision of earth location parameters in the universe.

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I started out my professional life as something else other than a Writer. I was actually a Chemical Engineer for more than enough years to qualify for a pension, and I may probably rightfully boast of having been a good one, having risen from humble baseline positions to managerial posts, especially in Quality Control and in Research and Development.

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Perhaps you say: ‘Give me some space to think about that’. Or: ‘I need a breathing space before I can take that on’. So space is very important to us. But how can we understand that need for space? And what can we do to get it? This is an important part of self-positioning – it aims to ‘position’ us as we are now in relation to our past and future and in relation to other people, so the space we occupy is a crucial part of this. Perhaps you have failed an exam, or lost a job. Perhaps your child or your partner has left you.

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Oppis are a central feature of self-positioning. Oppis are opportunities. An opportunity is just that: a chance you can take, or not, as you wish. It is offered to you alongside many other opportunities: you take up the ones that are relevant to you, miss out on those that do not seem right for you at the moment. An oppi may not seem right for you now, but you may remember it, and come back to it. Or another one may come along that comes at the same issue from a different angle and appeals to you more.

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The founder of the Hospice movement, Dame Cicely Saunders, identified four important human tasks that people want to complete during the process of dying. They are: • To say ‘goodbye’ – to people, animals and things that have been important to them • To say ‘thank you’ – for a life together, for help and care provided, perhaps particularly in this last period when extra care has very often been needed. • To say ‘sorry’ – perhaps for failings or slights or demands, or especially for being difficult to live with, in the last illness. • To say ‘I love you’.r

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The founder of the Hospice movement, Dame Cicely Saunders, identified four important human tasks that people want to complete during the process of dying. They are: • To say ‘goodbye’ – to people, animals and things that have been important to them • To say ‘thank you’ – for a life together, for help and care provided, perhaps particularly in this last period when extra care has very often been needed. • To say ‘sorry’ – perhaps for failings or slights or demands, or especially for being difficult to live with, in the last illness. • To say ‘I love you’.

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The Writer's Magic Wand If anybody should ask, which profession comes closest to having the power of the Creator, almost every one would cite his own: The priest would say he preaches, so he has the spirit. The engineer would say he builds, so he likewise creates. The lawyer would say he finds truth, so he dispenses justice. The educator would say he teaches, so he molds a person's mind. The politician would say he administers, so he controls the people. The father would say he works, therefore he supports life. The mother would say she cares, therefore she loves. Et. al.

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Self-positioning is a process for personal self-reflection; you can do it on your own, as a personal development exercise, or with a group of people who agree to work with you for the mutual benefit of all of you. It is based on the psychology of social skills development.

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Some people who come across self-positioning ask: why is it about your ‘self’? Isn’t that selfish, self-interested, self-absorbed? Shouldn’t we be thinking about others, outward-looking, rather than concentrating on ourselves?r

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The Corridor Principal Did you know that when you launch out on your goal or vision the moment you take your first step in that direction you are thrusting yourself into a corridor. A hallway with many doors, the funny thing is that you won’t see the doors till you get closer to them and only as you are walking. Stepping out in life, exposing your dreams and desires at first is scary. We’ve all been there, fewer might admit it, but the risk of being exposed can make your heart pound faster than blinking your eyes 10 times fast.

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Sometimes we encounter real resistance when we are attempting to go in a new and sometimes threatening direction in our lives. We find that despite the best treatment, support, motivation, and medications; we are resistant to change. We have chronic illness, chronic pain, chronic sadness and a sense we are overwhelmed. In these cases it is sometimes beneficial to attack the problem from a loss benefit analysis. Even though the old thought pattern, illness, or behavior has tangible negative impact on our lives, there is a reciprocal benefit which may be known only to the presenter.

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More than a tag line, “From Vision to Victory” is a way of life. It is the heart of self growth. It’s the story of my life and it can be yours in seven simple steps. At what seemed like a stopping point to me, Napoleon Hill’s classic book, "Think and Grow Rich," had me thinking. “What if--what if I could become a mid-level manager in five years?” I would be on easy street instead of the poverty level. Audaciously, I wrote that thought on paper as though it were a goal then went back to work. It seemed like an impossible dream. I was just a part-time admin person.

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Effective Communication Skills are the Mark of an Achiever. Have you ever blown a deal, a job interview, a promotion, or a relationship, because of your communication skills? Maybe you just couldn’t think of the right words to say. Has your tongue ever seemed disconnected from your brain? You can easily overcome anxiety, expand your abilities, and empower yourself for success by using these tips.

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Prosperity can be whatever you deem it to be, but what is a mindset? A mindset is defined as: “a habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.” How do you feel about making money? Does the idea of being rich turn you off? A prosperity mindset encourages you to take action each day to improve your life on numerous levels, such as health, wealth, love or anything else you deem important. You must have the right mindset to succeed.r

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There are times in our lives when the world seems to buck us off and knock the wind out of us. Things happen that blindside us and leave us gasping for breath. Even if we know a change is coming or a major transition must happen, it is easy to become overwhelmed and to feel defeated. Sometimes, we face situations that force us to re-evaluate everything we believe in and test our commitment to ourselves and our dreams. This is the proverbial “where the rubber hits the road” or “where the horseshoes hit the trail” – you know that place.

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One of the things I love most about South Florida is how “Doggie-Friendly” it is. Many places here – especially in Delray Beach – are tolerant and even happy when a dog accompanies you as you shop. Many restaurateurs allow you to dine in outside seating with your canine pal. Sipping on a beverage while kicked back with one of “The Boys” (our Poms) and people/pet watching is a fantastic way to relax.

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Your career is like a ship and you're the captain. You can drift along or take command to guide it in a clear and positive direction. These are some suggestions for setting your course and sticking to it so you so wind up where you want to go. Setting a Course for Your Career 1. Conduct a thorough self-assessment. Think about your interests and skills. Consider what you're good at and what you like doing. Maybe you like working independently or perform best when you're part of a team.

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Dear God,

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Top of the morning to you! Hi there! Good morning! Morning! These are some of the few ways I greet you online and in person. Sometimes, it’s accompanied with a hug, but always with high energy and a big smile. So, this morning I hope you feel my sheer joy, enthusiasm and thankfulness to you, as I help you start your Monday on a favorable note.

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Why is it that we speak more kindly to our friends, neighbors and family than we do to ourselves? What would happen if you routinely called your best friend names like stupid, fat or boring? That person probably wouldn't be your friend for very long. Yet, we talk negatively to ourselves all day, most of the time without even being aware that we are doing it. Sometimes we disguise negative self talk as humor, "I was having a dumb blonde moment!" The majority of the time, the thing we tell ourselves isn't even true.

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A Different Kind of Running Coach Introductionr When one thinks of a coach for an athlete, the first thing that comes to mind is the coach out on the field, in the gym, trackside or poolside, yelling commands, blowing a whistle, and monitoring with a stopwatch. More and more, athletes are looking to another kind of coach to support and motivate them to achieve greater goals. This is the personal development coach, or more specifically, a performance fitness coach.r

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Every time I hit the pavement I delight in how great running is for stress relief, meditation, feeling freedom and nature (which in Chicago could be joyous or extremely irritating, even within minutes of one another…) but ultimately, for the process of generating unexpected ideas, and on occasion, moving revelations. Today was one of those days. As some know, I made a huge decision to divert from a “successful” career to pursue my deeper desires, and hopefully in the process, empower others to freedom and inspiration along the way. This has been a freeing, exciting, and terrifying path!

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How dare they. You spend your hard earned money on those books engaging and enticing you with the exciting new joys and opportunities awaiting you, and then the author sends you off into the world without a magic genie to grant your every wish! Wouldn’t that be great? Well, that is not how it works, nor is it intended to. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say- “I read that book. It was a great read, a lot of really powerful stuff. But my life didn’t change!” Of course it didn’t.

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When business building & networking, pretty much daily the question comes up, ‘Why do you do what you do?’ Before digging deeper, there are many common responses: 1. I have a strong skill set here and a lot of value to add to growing businesses. 2. I find this work fun & fulfilling, let me take the load off for others who don’t enjoy it so they can focus on their core genius. 3. There is a huge need here I am honored and thrilled to be able to fill it. And the list goes on…

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Have you ever ordered a piece of ‘assembly required’ furniture, glanced at the cryptic instructions, put them down in frustration and tried to figure it out on your own, because, really, how difficult could it be? Perhaps it isn’t so difficult, but planning would better ensure the intended end result. Be honest, how many of us have taken a look at our final masterpiece, and realized some unfinished wood was on the outside instead of the inside?

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Of the infinite benefits of social media, another has been the introduction of new jobs and opportunity into the economy at a time when it is critically needed. The other side of this coin is that many people believe that because they spent years using Facebook, they automatically qualify as a “Social Media Expert”. Businesses often fail to look beyond the lack of business world application due to their urgency to get online, and resist making the financial investment to do it strategically.

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Traditionally, the presumption of ‘fearless leader’ has been held in high regard. Someone who takes risks, who takes charge, and keeps full control and power in the face of adversity. What had not historically been considered was the impact yielding of such power and control had on the supporting individuals and thus, the dynamic of the entire community. It is not a surprise this is often used in conjunction with the term ‘dictator’. In a business situation, do you want a fearless leader, or an emotionally intelligent leader?

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A friend of mine asked me how I feel about success and balancing my hectic schedule. To me one of the key factors is developing my self-awareness.¹ Why is self-awareness such a key factor? We all measure success differently.² Maybe you want to change something in your life. So you begin to search. You go to the book store or a class to seek out that illusive something. You start a new exercise program, new diet or new hobby. Your body starts to come alive, you feel younger; your clothes fit differently and as your perspective changes you are discovering self-awareness.

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There is something indescribably beautiful about the Truth. Well, I’m sure there would be if it could be found. When I was seventeen, about to set off into the big wide world, finally on my own (well, besides the financial, emotional, and general all-round support of my parents), the pursuit of Truth was foremost in my mind. Years of Catholic schooling ensured that the way, the truth, and the light were inextricably linked. So of course my search for this elusive Holy Grail led me through lofty endeavours, deeds of goodness, places of purity.

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I am not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on television! I am someone who has lived with chronic pain all of my adult life. My pain can manifest itself physically, emotionally and spiritually. Whatever way it chooses to manifest itself, it can be extremely debilitating. Over the many, many years, I have gone to one medical professional after another and another. Each one prescribed something different that dulled the pain temporarily. I was even told that it was all in my head and promptly sent off to see a therapist. Fine, but I was still in pain.

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It has been said that what you focus on expands. This is very true, yet there is one critical element to focus – it is your choice what you focus on. You can consciously choose to focus on those things that do not serve you and do not add value to your life – like scarcity, lack and not enough. Or, you can choose to deliberately focus on the things that you desire and want to see expand in your life – like prosperity, health and wealth.

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“A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli “In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.” ~ Anthony Robbins Being consistent is critical to on going and long-term success. It is easy to be a one-hit wonder; but manifesting prosperity means being consistent. The word “consistent” means “harmonious uniformity or agreement among things or parts” meaning the same throughout in structure or composition.

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Living abundantly is something I believe everyone aspires to. Yet, very few people truly live an abundant life. Rising poverty, divorce and unemployment rates speaks of more and more people not living a prosperous and abundant life. Part of the problem is most people are turning their attention to the wrong thing. After seeing movies and reading books like The Secret, there is this misconception about manifesting prosperity. Firstly, prosperity is and never was about money; and so many are focused on the money. Money is a means to the end, not the end itself.

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"Be around people who can keep your energy and inspiration high. While you can make progress alone, it's so much easier when you have support." ~ Dr. Joe Vitale “Who is the most nutritious person in your life? Think about how that person makes you feel about yourself. Does he or she constantly challenge you; constantly encourage you; cause you to come up just a little higher than you would normally?

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"You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them." ~ Michael Jordan, basketball star Throughout the course of my coaching practice, with individuals and groups, I often hear women say things like, "But it's so hard!" or "That's easier said than done." M. Scott Peck's wonderful book The Road Less Traveled opens with the line, "Life is difficult." So, my question as a coach is yes, life is difficult, now what? Okay, we have established that life is difficult, life is full of obstacles, challenges, disappointments, and upsets. That is a given.

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"NOW is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don't need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating." ~ Sam Ewing Is what you are consistently saying to yourself contributing to your fears? Are you allowing your negative self talk to dictate your life and sabotage your dreams? Are your fears being fueled by the energy of your negative inner chatter?

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Why Tens of Thousands of People are Becoming Life Coaches About 5 years ago I wrote an article entitled “Healing from the Inside Out” that was published on this site. It stated that the consciousness movement around the world reflected advancement in human evolution – a growing recognition, ...Why Tens of Thousands of People are Becoming Life Coaches

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“Grant me daily the grace of gratitude, to be thankful for all my many gifts, and so be freed from artificial needs, that I might lead a joyful, simple life.” rn~ Edward Hays Throughout all of the writings on manifesting prosperity there is one common denominator – gratitude. We are told over and over, again and again, that unless we are in a spirit of gratitude, we cannot manifest what we truly desire. I have read dozens of books, reports, and articles on creating an abundant life and manifesting prosperity, and they have all spoken of gratitude.

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