From the category archives:

Acceptance

10 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Family Members

December 22, 2011

You’re sitting around the Christmas tree, or the Menorah, or the fruitcake and bottle of scotch, with your family. Everyone’s in a great mood, grateful for this time together. The glimmer of holiday lights reflects off the blanket of white, fluffy snow.  Alternating scents of pine and apple pie waft thorough the house. Your family [...]

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Self-Esteem isn’t all it’s Cracked up to Be

December 1, 2011

Holding yourself in high esteem seems really important, doesn’t it? For good reason, I admit. It’s nice to think positive thoughts about yourself and that’s exactly what self-esteem is: making favorable evaluative judgments about good ole’ you. Self-esteem is about the thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself. And as you know, thoughts and beliefs [...]

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Gratitude for Being Human

November 22, 2011

Here’s what I’m grateful for right now: being human. The whole of it. Everything that being human entails. I used to think being human kind of sucked most of the time. With our habitual patterns that run on auto-pilot and our irrationally fearful thoughts and our unpredictable emotions. Human-ness felt like a big hassle. I [...]

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How to Get a Miracle (and How I got over my First Love)

October 27, 2011

After 4 years together, my first love and I broke up during our first year of college.  It was mutual and somewhat expected. I took it surprisingly well at first. Until—just a few weeks after our break-up—I found out he was already dating someone else. Someone we both knew. Someone he had been friends with [...]

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What was your most useful failure?

October 6, 2011

My friend posed this question on Facebook. I love it. What was your most useful failure? I’m sure I’ve had a lot of life-saving failures. But two come immediately to mind: 1) Abhorring my first career out of graduate school. I was a trial consultant helping corporate defense attorneys craft lies to win their cases [...]

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I Choose to live in Easy World

September 29, 2011

I read a book by Julia Rogers Hamrick called Choosing Easy World: A guide to opting out of struggle and strife and living in the amazing realm where everything is easy.  Wait a minute…we can just opt out of struggle and strife? There’s an amazing realm where everything is easy? In a sort of epiphany, [...]

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How to change the world

August 11, 2011

(I didn’t write this one…Illuminated Mind did. Originally titled “Change the world by Being Who you Are”) It’s easy to think that we don’t have an impact. It’s easy to say “I’m too small” or think that what you do doesn’t matter. That’s a lie. Every action you take ripples out into the world. Yes, [...]

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Wouldn’t THIS be wild?

July 28, 2011

What if all humans were equal?  Not just created equal…what if we couldn’t help but remain equals our entire lives no matter what happened to us or what choices we made?   What if all the evidence we use to separate ourselves from others; all those facts and all that proof we use to decide that [...]

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How to believe in your positive qualities

July 7, 2011

In the newsletter a few weeks back I told you was reading a book called The Shadow Effect. “Shadow work” is relatively common in the self-help world…it’s about delving into and coming to fully embrace your shadow parts. Your shadow parts are similar to what you might think of as flaws or faults but that’s [...]

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Truth or “La, la, la”?

June 30, 2011

We were at dinner with friends the other night—our friends (another couple) and their teenage daughter. Our friends had just returned from a vacation where they left both teenage daughters at home. I asked the one that was having dinner with us, “So did you and your sister throw some wild parties while your parents [...]

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