I may have mentioned before how the Hermit card regularly comes up for me, signaling or confirming an instinct to turn inward for an extended period. Yet surprisingly, the card I’ve been drawing with startling consistency during lockdown has been the High Priestess. She taps into the magic that lies Read more…
Yesterday I wrote about the idea of simply showing up to life as a way of escaping the survive/thrive duality. Today I want to get very concrete about how to ground or integrate this energy in your life. Obviously, if you are truly in a survival situation—and I mean one Read more…
I’ve been getting asked about this lately and seeing lots of people talking about this, so that signaled to me it was time to write a bit more about what it means to me to “do nothing.” First, some personal history: When I worked a desk job what I wanted Read more…
There was a time when I would lament—and by that I mean cry like a baby—that I wasn’t a cat. It’s a running joke now, but I‘m serious. This was early on in my dark night of grief and burnout. I would look at these two magnificent creatures who wandered Read more…
A few weeks after my dad died Spirit started whispering “cat” into my heart. I broached the idea with my husband, who just about did a double-take because he too had been thinking it would be nice to live with a cat once again. We were both going through tough Read more…
[This post is for my Dreamers & Schemers, who expressed an interest in learning about my question journal practice at our last meeting.]
One of the lovely outgrowths of my Akashic Records practice is my question journal. It began simply as a way to keep track of the questions I wanted to bring to my Records. I started it on my cellphone because I don’t make a habit of carrying my Akashic Records journal around with me, and I needed a handy way of jotting down questions as they occurred to me through the day. Earlier this year, however, I noticed that my question journal had taken a life of its own. It had come alive for me in the sense that I would jot down questions, and in a span of days or weeks, I would get an answer in the course of my daily life.
Two recent examples illustrate how this can happen in vastly different ways. (more…)
One of the hard-won lessons of burnout for me is that unless I make huge, sweeping changes in my life, I will keep hopping right back on the hamster wheel—not because I’m a workaholic per se, but because I have a certain aversion to moderation. Consistency, predictability, the daily plod…yeah, Read more…
This past Sunday Minds On Fire hosted its first Self Care Shakedown for youth development professionals. By all measures, the event was a success! We were at capacity, and all attendees brought their best selves to an afternoon of challenging internal work. The premise behind the Shakedown is that getting further along in our self care is not a matter of “doing more.” We won’t really be taking better care of ourselves if all we aspire to is to be able to go to the gym more often, meditate for longer, or get more massages. No: The self care journey is about transformation. It’s about figuring out and committing to a new way of being in the world. That’s why it’s a shakedown: We aren’t messing around here! (more…)
I’ve been staring a lot of sacred cows in the eye lately, and it’s been a very productive exercise. In my last post I wrote about empowerment; today I feel like taking on the subject of love. No matter how tough our actual job situations get, youth service professionals firmly maintain our love for the work and the people we serve: “I love working with youth!” “I love my young people.” What do we actually mean by the word ‘love’? More precisely, I should ask, what do you mean when you say the word ‘love’?
There’s been a lot written around the languages of love, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. While it’s interesting to figure out whether you express love through words, action, etc., I’m trying to get at something deeper still: your very definition of ‘Iove.’ In other words, when you tell someone “I love you,” or you prepare a meal for your loved one, or you give someone a hug, what is your intention? (And please don’t say, “To show love,” because that would be circular reasoning.)
If you can’t answer this question, I suggest you take some time to put together your own personal definition of love because this is too important a term to throw around lightly. My interest in love is not born of intellectual curiosity. This has to do with practice. Knowing what you actually mean when you claim to bring love to your work has several very concrete advantages. (more…)
Where have I been all these months? Although I came thisclose to moving to Singapore this year, I’m still here in New York, dividing my time between the city and the Hudson Valley. One thing I realized about my two-week silent retreat and a month-long trip to Singapore and Korea is that if I didn’t make any substantial changes in my life, I would go right back into the habit of overworking no matter how intensive or long of a “rest period” I gave myself. Something had to happen at a deeper level. (more…)