Growing through adversity is an opportunity to check your privilege.
When you go through a trauma (friends, here’s a reminder of what the definition of trauma is: anything that happens too fast, that is too much and too soon), there’s a really natural thing that happens in which you become the center of your own universe.
Move over sun, it’s time for everything to revolve around YOU.
We need to hydrate, rest, and meditate/write/reflect when healing from a hard thing. What seems traumatic to you, may not be traumatic to someone else.
You know healing is happening when you can…
No matter what your religious identity is.
Human beings are like sponges. Even if nothing religious was explicitly said or imposed on you identity, we’ve absorbed from those around us moral underpinnings that keep us in particular “lanes” of relational commitments.
Mine came from two different streams of thought which collided in an amazingly terrible way. These shiny pieces of personal growth gold shook out in the rubble of post-divorce “autopsy” — asking myself how I got here and where do I go next.
The first underpinning was that negative emotions aren’t welcome. Anger leads to murder, my lizard-brain interpretation…
Let the hard things teach you how to do other hard things.
I recently caught onto bullet journaling “BuJo” — I’m a bit behind the trends. It all seemed overwhelming at first with stickers, stencils, templates, and different colored pens. Why can’t I just write something down?
But it looks so pretty, and the meditative act of filling in a stencil, planning a layout, etc. gets me out of my “thinking” brain and into my more artistic side.
While tracing the lines one day, it occurred to me that I have my own internal stencil — a framework for learning…
Buddhism might tell us everything is fleeting, but some things have a bit more staying power than others.
It’s no secret that meditation helps us cope with stress, improve our mental health, and connect with the present moment. When I first began a meditation practice, the mantra that led me into it was from Pema Chödrön.
Letting my breaths go in and out, anytime my mind stopped on a concept I perceived as permanent, the word “thinking” called out the behavior and led me back to the breath.
With practice, most things float in and out of your mind like…
The internet told me it takes 18 months to heal from divorce (547.5 days)
“Siri, how many days until February 28, 2021?”
I want to write ahead of the day so that when it comes, I can welcome it for whatever it is, maybe without noticing at all.
This is my day. An 18-month old is still testing boundaries, wondering to herself, “Can I really do that?” and delighting when she discovers for herself that “Yes! Yes, she can!”
One could say I’m “cursed with dates” but I also have the super-power of being able to re-remember them. When watching…
And how it’s helping us cope with what comes after.
It’s February 17th, 2021, and Texas has experienced a Winter Storm of snow and ice that’s almost crushed our electrical grid, knocked out water supply in several areas, and closed down our transportation system, among other logistical nightmares we Texans weren’t prepared to face. A few days into this wild ride, I’ve observed some things.
Politics Matter
The people you vote for have the power to make life-or-death decisions about things that deeply impact our day-to-day lives. It isn’t all declaring “Rainbow Day” or hosting egg hunts on the capital lawn. Even…
And one for Trauma that will help you make sense of the inexplicable.
Healing is integrating new learning into your life, patterns, and routine.
Healing isn’t ever complete or finished, but neither is learning. We reach healing milestones, like the first time you hear your own voice express an authentic opinion instead of mirroring someone else’s, or the first time a significant negative anniversary passes without your noticing.
If we aren’t growing, we’re literally disintegrating. If we are never done learning, we’re also never finished integrating that learning into our lives (healing).
The Germans came through with a creepy folktale to illustrate this point (Dankeshoen!).
Allow me to introduce you to: Struwwelpeter (pronounced…
Heel: to walk directly next to, instead of behind or before. A learned patience and pacing to virtuous companions.
Heal: to become sound or healthy again.
I live on a secluded street near a cul-de-sac. No one comes down this way unless they intend to, or they are lost. That said, there’s quite a lot of activity on this street. It alarmed me at first, seeing the walkers.
There’s some snooty ladies who gab and use hand weights on their morning stroll. There’s Bo, the Standard Schnauzer who takes his owner on a long leash along the creek to peer…
One without the other is fraught with peril.
I watched Titanic recently — remember that amazingly underrated/appropriately hyped film from 1998?
The logistics of the lifeboat situation intrigue me.
Three things going on there:
- There aren’t enough of them;
- at first, they aren’t being filled to capacity;
- The process of getting them out and down into the water is one that requires multiple staff members and key elocution in the midst of chaos.
If one person isn’t moving at the same rate as the other, the boat gets off balance and its contents (people) run the risk of falling out…
They didn’t get far listening too closely.
Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Google Reviews, or a large-scale cancel culture take-down, opportunities abound to air one’s grievances publicly for all to see. We’ve seen a variety of approaches to conflict in the age of the internet.
Instagram and TikTok are platforms with a built in set up for re-posting someone’s content with a video’d response, where armies of commenters can be mobilized who fight their battles with weapons of likes, unfollows, and re-posts to potential onlookers of millions. What results is a not-so-cold war of destructive drama.
What’s the difference between this…
