Living Your Healing Blog

Tennis champion Naomi Osaka is featured on the cover of the July 19th Time magazine issue not for wining another tournament, but for being willing to do something unusual in the field of elite sports. In her essay entitled ‘Gaining perspective’ she shares lessons she'd recently learned by stepping back from a press conference at the French Open to take care of her mental health. After receiving both support and criticism, she expressed hope that people understand that “it’s Ok to not be OK and it’s OK to talk about it”. That may have paved the way for phenomenal...

I have always been inspired by people who have overcome great challenges and who go beyond just surviving to actually thriving. It’s impressive when people chose to test themselves by taking on activities that the majority of people don’t, such as an extreme sport. But the people who really impress me are those who don’t choose the challenge (or trauma) they experience or are witness to and yet, they manage to emerge like a phoenix from the ashes to be or do something extraordinary despite their history or circumstances. When I received a life-threatening diagnosis,...

The desire to 'get back to normal’ has been stirring around the world for over a year. When the pandemic first started and people chose to shelter-in-place or were required to be in lockdown (depending on your perspective and location), many of us thought it would be a few weeks or months at most and then we would go back to the way things were before this all started. One dictionary definition of ‘normal’ is ‘conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected’. These past 15 months have been unusual, atypical and unexpected, and illuminated the fact that some...

One of my recent daily Calm meditations offered the theme of ‘no mud, no lotus’. I knew the beautiful lotus was a water plant, but on further exploration, learned that they must start their life underwater rooted in the mud. The root system consists of rhizomes that fan out horizontally through the mud allowing the plant to survive to regerminate for hundreds, and possibly thousands, of years. When the lotus flower emerges from the water there is no trace of mud on it. And yet, the lotus cannot grow without that mud. Using this lesson from Nature as a spiritual...

While staying home during the pandemic many in our consumer culture were confronted with our ludicrous amounts of accumulated possessions, prompting major decluttering projects and donations that have overwhelmed thrift stores My process started several years ago as my daughters had told me they would hire a junk hauling company to dispose of all my stuff after I was gone. A life-threatening diagnosis and my compulsion to save things from the landfill motivated me to reduce the amount that would be trashed. For 30 years of living in the same house, I was very...