If you’re impatient, skip to the second paragraph. I will be 40 in August. I’m not particularly tall or short. I’m height-weight proportional, with a healthy BMI score. My hair is an unexciting shade of brown, peppered with a little gray, but I don’t suffer from male pattern baldness. While…

There are certain people, places, things, and ideas in each person’s life that tend to hurt them the closer they are to them. Such things are, figuratively speaking, emotional cacti. Maybe it’s the parent who uses guilt to try to manipulate or motivate. Maybe it’s the emotionally unavailable or distant…

Sometimes, an inch apart from one we love or desire feels like all the space between the stars. Emotional maturity is beneficial, despite its tendency to throw into stark relief our isolation from others, without doing much to draw us closer to them. Having the maturity to see how close…

Reason and judgment have an important role to play in human life. Nevertheless, we can take too far the use of even our most valuable tools. When we focus on one thing enough to form an opinion about it, we often narrow the scope of our inner vision to such…

The feeling or belief that your circumstances are inevitable or unchangeable, or that you are on a path from which there is no exit, is an illusion. Nothing is absolute. Everything changes. People, too, are constantly changing. You are not the same person you were seven years ago. Physically, many…

Relationships often fall apart because we simply neglect them. Sometimes we push away from other people. Other times we just drift apart, and the inertia of life carries us away from others. Neglect of a relationship might be intentional and conscious. We might choose to do that for a specific…

Recently, I suffered severe emotional trauma caused by the breakdown of a relationship. I have been making every possible effort, despite great resistance, to repair that relationship and reconcile with the other person. The traumatic breakdown of this relationship, and the comprehensive, holistic approach I have taken to personal growth…

Compassion & Presence How are you showing up in others’ lives? Are you intentionally present? Are you holding open a space in your heart and in your dialogue with others, for them to freely share their thoughts and feelings without analysis, evaluation, criticism, judgment, or diagnosis — without trying to advise or fix…

The Essence of Courage Courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to take action in spite of it. Fear is primal and natural, useful and healthy. Courage is virtuous and human. Courage Illustrated If you have no fear response, something is neurologically wrong with you. If you deny your fear response, something is…