When a crisis strikes – whether in our personal lives or on a larger scale – it’s only human to have an emotional reaction. The trouble begins when these overwhelming emotions cut us off from our inner wisdom and cause us to react in ways that often multiply our stress (and don’t help solve the problem we’re facing). What we really want is to be able to access our inner wisdom to make constructive decisions, from a place of calm, that actually help us move through the crisis.
Read More...When Grief Keeps You Paralyzed: 6 Gentle Steps to Move Forward
Grief is a universal human emotion. At some point, we all experience it – whether we lose someone dear to us, suffer a trauma or tragedy, or simply live long enough to feel the ache of loss that accrues naturally over a lifetime. And although grief affects us all, it’s rarely easy to deal with. Our ancestors marked death with lavish feasts, loud and sustained lamenting and the wearing of mourning clothing for at least two full years – yet grieving today has mostly become a solo endeavor, and one we’d better hurry up and get through.
Read More...Small Changes That Create Big Results (And a More Peaceful Life)
Why does change often feel exhausting and unmanageable for so many of us? In a culture where advertising constantly promises us overnight results, we’ve been indoctrinated to think that if something doesn’t change fast, it’s not going to change at all. Simple, incremental changes are not very sexy, but if you look back on your life, the changes you made incrementally were far more likely to result in a tangible shift than those high-velocity leaps that lasted for a few days but didn’t stick for the long term.
Read More...Learn from Your Mistakes and Move on with Self-Compassion
Have you made a mistake today? If so, welcome to being human. Mistakes are an inevitable part of life. But what is the secret to learning from them and moving on quickly? In our rather punitive culture, we often head straight for self-recrimination. We berate ourselves, magnify the meaning of the mistake, or get stuck in replaying it in our minds. Researchers at Duke and Wake Forest Universities suggest, however, that the opposite approach – self-compassion – may be much more effective.
Read More...Learn to Respond, Not React
Learning to respond, not react, starts with noticing your body’s tension when you’re in a stressful situation. This is your cue to calm down before reacting or engaging in a manner likely to make things worse. In this post, I’ll step you through an exercise for reprocessing past situations so that you can then approach future stress with the calm and clarity essential for a constructive response.
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