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Have you ever tried to be helpful, to contribute to one another’s well-being, only to find that your attempts simply fall flat? If we truly want to love each other well, we need to cultivate a deep attunement to and honoring of the people we’re trying to love. Here are 5 ways to do just that.
What does it mean to grieve well? How can we stay in relationship with these inevitable and natural experiences of loss, in the most life-affirming and healing ways? Here are a few suggestions.
Many of you have been telling me lately that you’re feeling exhausted by the pandemic and volatile global events. In times like these, I often find myself drawing on these five key practices that help me find my way through what sometimes feels like a dense darkness.
When something goes wrong, most of us respond by looking for something or someone to blame. We default into asking, “What’s wrong?” and commonly answer that question with either “You!” or “Me!” Judgments, criticisms, analyses, diagnoses, and power struggles usually follow, and we all know how those conversations go. It’s not really our fault, though. Let me explain.
I spent my middle-school years in a tiny town in the northern part of South Africa in the early 1980s, and my very favorite memories of that time in my life involved going to the game parks. Game watching was serious business. We’d get up early in the morning, tin cups of instant coffee with milk and sugar in hand, driving quietly and slowly through the African savanna looking for animals.
For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. After today, our days will start getting longer and lighter again. I find myself reflecting on the themes of dark and light. We talk about the light of awareness, the light of consciousness, the light of the soul or spirit, and bringing light to dark spaces. So, what does it mean for people to be a light in the darkness?
Learning how to work with life, instead of against it, has been a lifelong practice for me. Over the years, I’ve explored a new way forward when things seem to be going wrong, including some useful mindset shifts, and three words I use to get unstuck from ideas of wrongness.
“And” helps us bridge differences, make connections, and see our shared humanity and shared needs. Once we decide to let go of our defensiveness, our fears, our resistance, and instead start working with life on its terms, we free ourselves up for more play and creativity in all aspects of our lives.
In your relationships with other humans, you tend to get more of what you focus upon. Here’s how to express a heartfelt appreciation towards someone you care about.
Most of us were raised in what I like to call domination cultures. Domination cultures run on power and control, shame and blame, fear and righteousness. In these cultures, we’re conditioned to see the world through one primary (often unconscious) question.
I learned recently that airline pilots spend about 90% of flight time off-course. Using feedback from their on-board guidance system and from air traffic control, they constantly course correct for turbulence, winds, and weather conditions. The same can be true of our lives and our inner state, and here I offer 4 ways to get back on track.
I often ask people to assess how resourced they believe they are to have a particular conversation, and this often leads to a tilted head and raised eyebrows. Here I cover what it means to be “resourced” and offer 4 questions you can ask yourself when you’re trying to figure out how resourced you are.
Developing our emotional literacy is a significant aspect of becoming more resourced to have difficult conversations, but what does it actually mean to have emotional literacy? Here are 5 ways we can work with our emotions.
The psychological and physical violence that wants to erupt is calling for an equal and opposite healing presence from those of us who feel called to live into a new way of being. So, how do we change things? How can we become a more humanizing force in our communities?
I used to think that having a boundary meant proclaiming ultimatums, drawing lines in the stand and then defending them resolutely. I used to associate having good boundaries with being disconnected and cut off from others.
I often think of conversations as the life-force that enlivens – or throttles – relationships. Conversations are never really complete. They are ongoing. Winding. Emergent. Unpredictable. And, when they are life-affirming and generative, conversations tend to go through some very predictable stages.
Today, I have two questions for you:
What conversations do you wish you were having, but aren’t?
What gets in the way of you initiating the conversations you want to have?
I spent this weekend immersing myself in the latest research on narcissism, psychopathy, grandiosity, magical thinking, and delusional disorders, and I’m feeling deeply disturbed. It’s hard for me not to just throw up my hands, announce that the world has gone mad, find a cabin deep in some remote forest, and busy myself with feeding squirrels and reading poetry… I find myself turning to principles of shared humanity, intellectual humility, kindness, and my deep dedication to learning and growth.
Our human experience is multi-layered; things are rarely what they seem. It’s easy for me to forget about the importance of these layers when something I don’t like happens. At these times, I sometimes notice myself slipping straight into judgment, evaluation, irritation, and analysis. But, when I get irritated, or annoyed, or judgmental, here’s one simple trick that I have always found profoundly helpful.
If we want to overcome defensiveness, we need to make peace with ourselves and develop trust in ourselves. We need to lean into our experiences instead of bracing ourselves against them.
When I mentioned to my mother that I was going to be offering a workshop on how to approach “the vaccine conversation” nonviolently, she laughingly empathized with, “Oh my, you’ve just put yourself in the middle of a hornet’s nest.”
It certainly feels that way.
When we get triggered and reactive, let’s practice loving up our inner child. Let’s see our reactivity as a childhood fear of punishment and then work compassionately with that. In loving ourselves up, we help ourselves mature into more empowered ways of being, and we finally help those little selves grow up just a little bit more.
Each of us will bump up against our empathy edges, those places we just don’t want to go, those people we just won’t let into our hearts.
I was recently invited to a social event with a group of people who know me in a very particular work-related way. They were used to seeing me teaching, speaking, and writing about nonviolent communication, integral theory, positive psychology, and mind-body practices, and I noticed an unexpected reaction in me when I attended this event.
Have you been noticing the various stages that we all go through on our healing and personal transformation journeys?
Here I share some general principles and some useful word-for-word scripts that you can use the next time you’d like to nonviolently disengage from a conversation, friendship, or relationship.
Here I’m outlining key differences between power-over versus power-with consciousness, and we’re exploring the nonviolent, compassionate use of personal power and the impact that differences in power have on our relationships.
I just returned from a week in Egypt and the journey home was…challenging. To put it mildly. The experience reminded me about the power of choicefulness, how I can respond in the moment, and the way our nervous systems can adapt over time.
I am all about the self-healing and self-loving journey… What I didn’t know when I began this journey, however, was how messy it really is. I heard someone recently say, “When it comes to healing, we glorify the glow-up.” I can relate.
Have you found yourself wondering if you’ll ever find “your people”? I’ve been hearing about this a lot recently … People feeling deeply lonely and isolated in their primary relationships. People wondering if “their people” are out there, and if they are, where to find them. People dating and just not finding the love they’re seeking.