Tag: Personal Development
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The People We Pick
How do they arrive? This year, in Brady-Bunch squares. Or, sometimes, 6 feet away on the porch. My world feels both bigger and smaller now. So few people are physically in my space. I can count the people I’ve hugged without using all the fingers on one hand. At the same time, next Friday I’ll…
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The Shift from Control to Contribution
One of the most challenging lessons I have had to learn in my spiritual journey is my relationship to control. It was a tough pill to swallow, to confront how little control I have in and over life. As human beings, we tend to seek control because we think it provides us with a sense…
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Fragments of Souls
It’s difficult for me to throw away pictures of people. People I love are the hardest, not really surprising at all. But a close second are the people pictured on packaging, especially if their faces are meant to evoke the workforce that brought the product to me. Of these, one of the most difficult is…
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The Medicine of Walking
How Walking Makes Us Human In his incredible book, In Praise of Walking, author Shane O’Mara writes that walking separates humans from other animals. Walking upright “frees our hands for other tasks…makes our minds mobile…and changes our relationship to the world.” O’Mara even concludes that a baby who grows up in a non-human environment will…
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Sensing Another’s True Nature
Often when we meet someone for the first time, we introduce ourselves by saying what we do, where we live, what we enjoy. Rarely do we speak about the most elusive yet most important aspect of our lives: who we are. This is very possibly because we don’t know, not really. This is because each…
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Opening Windows
Othering lives within me. The parts of me that I love and the parts that I don’t. What gets neglected in me The corners of my soul that I don’t visit for fear of the unknown Or because I have forgotten. There are rooms in my soul that are filled with dust, Webs, and darkness.…
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Renegotiating When Circumstances Shift
I recently got together with some friends for the first time since March. This event was a big deal for the whole group. To ensure everyone would feel comfortable, we agreed to get Covid tests and self-quarantine in the week leading up to our get-together. And yet, I still felt very wobbly about the whole…
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The Tiger, The Strawberry, and the Role of Beauty
There is a well-known Zen story about a rather non-conventional response to impending doom. A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him…
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The Deeper Invitation in the Story of the Empty Boat
Like the Taoist Farmer story, the story of the Empty Boat is often used by coaches to help their clients gain perspective. Here’s a short version: A fisherman is on the water at dusk with poor visibility. He sees a boat coming right towards him and starts getting frantic and yelling for the fisherman steering…
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Autumn’s Concerto
First Movement: Reminiscence The avenues were lined with gold, and the cobbled pavement, buried in brilliant scarlet. Poetically, that would have been how I’d like to describe the scene. Spending my third fall in the US and that clichéd touristy image of fall with its rich amber maple trees remains a fantasy. One reason was…
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Shaping Our Presence to Be More Supportive
This article was originally published on the Mindful Leader Blog in June of 2020. In these days of heightened anxiety and insecurity, many of us are drawn to be a safe and reassuring space for those who are in crisis and afraid. And, when we’re in that often unavoidable place ourselves, we’re grateful to the…
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Chatting with Your Inner Critic
In a recent post on my blog, I offered some thoughts on how shifting mindset from a place of fear to possibility can help during challenging moments. It certainly helps to approach change and uncertainty with an expansive, adventurous mindset, but doing so doesn’t mean that we pretend we’re not scared. In her book Big…
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Sitting in Squares
I now meditate every morning in a little square, my green meditation cushions backed up against the wall under some forest photos my aunt took. I’m the first up in my house, save for the cat playing with my feet. The same friends I meditated with at work meditate, plus some new people. Now we…
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In Our Eyes
I had been staying with my mom for a month, nursing her 98-year-old body back to a relative state of health after a downturn. I am not sure what really happened prior to me getting there, but I think she had kind of thrown in the towel. For almost every moment of her life, she…
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Balancing Ourselves Using the Six Streams of Competence
This post was originally published on the Mindful Leader blog in April 2020. In these times of massive change and disruption, many of us are looking inward to see how we can be of greater support to our communities and the world. Integral Coaching, which is a sustainable, self-generating framework for developing ourselves and others,…
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Our Commitment to Anti-Racism
Dear friends, We live in a society plagued by injustice. The past several days have shone a bright spotlight on just how insidious, systemic, historical, evil and dehumanizing many of these injustices are for the black community. As an organization whose purpose is the flourishing of life, we stand for the flourishing of black lives.…
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Turning Toward Sorrow
In the midst of all the suffering that our world is feeling—with the current events in the United States that reveal clearly the ways in which our communities of color continue to suffer directly from discrimination and oppression, while we continue to be in the middle of a pandemic that has people fear not only…
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A Call to Heal Together
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” —Václav Havel, Czech leader Our country is hurting, and it has been for a long time. It is just now with the demonstrations that have given voice to the desperation…
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Self-Leadership in Unprecedented Times
In the last months, our worlds as we knew them have shifted and changed, and we are all making sense in our own way. To quote a friend: “The challenge is to find a balance between being pollyanna-ish and alarmist”. As I participate in conversations with different groups – coaching community, executives, leaders, global and…
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When Productivity Takes a Backseat to Survival
Since early February, we’ve all been dealing with extreme stress and uncertainty. No one knows how the pandemic will affect them in the short or long term. The virus can feel simultaneously very far away and right at our doorstep. You may be worried about money or toilet paper or what will happen if someone…