Life Transitions Articles

Every fall, we see the stories of students who seem to have “everything” going for them - great grades, good SAT scores, lots of activities – but their application to a college that should have bee “a sure thing” is rejected. We scratch our heads and wonder why. Well, it has to do with all the individual steps as part of a Smart Plan For College™. One breakdown in the chain can cause the whole thing to fall apart. Yes, the college application is the one thing that will clos

I was volunteering in a job mentoring program and reviewing a participant’s job history which included several short-term jobs. When I asked him why he left each position he replied “It was the people.” After hearing him repeat this four consecutive times, my polite-self left and I said “You’re the People!” He looked startled and said, “What?” I explained that he had two options. He could get a restraining order against these people who were stalking him from

Pop quiz! We are well into the second month of 2011, so it is time to ‘fess up. How many of you made New Years’ resolutions? Let’s see a show of hands. Okay. Now, of those of you who made New Years’ resolutions, how many of you have kept those resolutions thus far? Hands up. Uh-huh. Well, it’s not too late – in fact, it’s never too late – to take stock, make some resolutions, and actually keep them. To further assist you in the “taking stock” phase, I offer the “Self-Analys

“We are all made up of yearning and light, searching for a way out, afraid we will be shut in or cut off or repelled back into the ground from which we are reaching. This is enough to begin: To know, before all the names and histories drape who we are, that we want to be held and left alone, again and again; held and left alone until the dance of it is how we survive and grow, like spring into winter into spring again.” – Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening

When I was young, one of my favorite books was a collection of four short stories called “Nobody is Perfick“. I liked the first three stories, but it was the fourth one, called Nobody is Perfick, that captivated my attention. It was the story about a perfect boy named Peter Perfect. He always had sharp pencils. He always dressed perfectly. He received perfect scores on all of his tests. He had perfect manners and all of the adults in his life adored him.

We learn and heal in ebbs and flows, spiraling around the center of ourselves where our true Self dwells. When we’re in a cycle of growth, we burn through layers of ego fears and touch into that core place of wellness where peace and clarity reside. Our hearts are open and alive and we can receive and give love with ease. This is the gold of being human, and how we long to live there always! But alas, inevitably, when the false self senses that we’re growing “too much” or learning “too quickly”, it bucks like a bull at a bronco, and it suddenly feels like we’re back at square one.

I am passionate about providing education, support and guidance to those facing transitional issues at the mid point of their life. As I was preparing for my day about a week ago I realized how fortunate I am to have been exposed to the materials and concepts I have over the last two years on both accepting and moving forward from change in one’s life. For the last five years as I’ve described to those I come in contact, my life has been a series of different change related e

I receive a lot of questions from course members and clients on the topic of career anxiety: “How do I know if I’m at the right job? How do I know if it’s time to change paths? Have I missed my calling?” (If you’re struggling the myth of a calling, please read this post.) These questions predicate on one of ego’s most compelling beliefs, which is that there’s one “right” path and that if you find it you’ll feel fulfilled and alive. It’s similar to the belief that if you find the “right” partner you’ll be lifted above the messy pain of life and be transported into a land of ete al bliss.

Our stories form a crystal cave of stalactites and stalagmites in our minds, a cool chamber that seduces us with the promise that if we spend enough time there we will divine our answers. How beautiful this cave looks! How many promises it offers! And how familiar this cave becomes when we’ve spent thousands of hours there seeking safety from the vulnerability of childhood. Each stalactite tells a story. Each stalagmite offer the infinite details that need to be figured out.

In response to an email called “Emerging Womanhood” from my Sacred Sexuality course, a member shared the following on the forum. What touches me so deeply about her response is not only the exquisite vulnerability with which she tells her stories of becoming a young woman, but also the ways in which responds to her young self with tremendous compassion. She models two of the essential components to embracing our bodies: excavating the shame stories and learning to respond to our hurt and lonely places from a place of acceptance.

My son and I are driving into town for our weekly Friday morning special time and Suzanne Vega’s song “The World Before Columbus” comes on. It’s a song she wrote for her daughter that I used to sing to Everest when he was a baby, and these lyrics made me cry every time: Those men who lust for land And for riches strange and new Who love those trinkets of desire Oh they never will have you. And they’ll never know the gold Or the copper in your hair How could they weigh the worth Of you so rare.

Over the years, I’ve worked with many clients who have suffered from the intrusive thought, “What if my partner is gay?” (or “What if my partner is straight?” for those in a same-sex relationship), and while I’ve written several posts on the “What if I’m gay?” spike I haven’t written about what is, in some ways, a corollary thought.

When you’re neck-deep and soul-soaked in anxiety, when you’re having trouble eating, sleeping, and basically functioning, when the love you formally felt for your partner has been eclipsed by indifference, doubt, or numbness, when intrusive thoughts invade your brain day and night, you will inevitably ask, “When will I feel better?” This question hits at the onset of anxiety when the symptoms are full-tilt misery, it hits when the excruciating first set of symptoms starts to abate, and it hits when people find my work and sign up for my courses.

One of the blessings of listening to the inner worlds of my global audience is that I hear about the thoughts, feelings, questions, and stories that are archetypal to all human beings. I’ve written extensively about the various intrusive thoughts that enter my virtual office, but there are other stories that tiptoe into the arena as well: stories about worthiness, stories about shame, stories about social fears and questions. There has been one in particular lately that has been calling for attention, and whenever that happens I know I need write about it here.

How would your life be different if you didn’t care what other people thought? How might your relationship, your job, and your day-to-day functioning be different if you weren’t weighed down by others’ opinions? How might you peel and crack out of the shells of your insecurity and arrive more closely at the essence of who you are if you weren’t worried about others’ judgement? What would happen if you made decisions based on the inviolable knowledge of your intrinsic worthiness instead of based on the constantly moving target of exte al approval?

Anxiety can hang its hat on almost any hook. It can focus on relationships, fertility, parenting, health, the world, money, career, death. Within each of these topics, there are endless sub-topics that lure anxiety into its lair. If we’re talking about relationship anxiety, for example, the hook can be: lack of physical attraction, lack of sexual attraction, focusing in any area of perceived lack (education, intelligence, social fluency, humor, wit, height, ambition), religious differences, we never had an infatuation stage, or just a pervasive sense that the relationship is “wrong”.

The anxious mind can latch onto almost any topic: What if I don’t have enough money? What if my kids aren’t okay? What if I don’t get pregnant? What if I have cancer? What if I don’t love my partner enough and I’m making a terrible mistake? What if I don’t have enough friends? What if I’m gay? What if I’m a pedophile? What if I have an STD? What if there’s a terrorist attack ? What if I’m in the wrong career? What if the plane crashes?

Life is so precious. It goes by so quickly. This is why it’s important to be intentional with the way you live your life. If you have specific goals on your heart, take the steps toward those goals. You only get one life. There are no do-overs. If you’d like to make serious life changes for the better, it’s best to focus on these four practices. Become Self-Disciplined If you’re not disciplined, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain the life you truly desire.

A coaching client recently said to me, “You talk a lot about doing “the work”, and I wondered for so long what “the work” was. I thought that if I understood anxiety intellectually I would feel better. And the first time I went through the course I did feel better for a while, which I know is very common for new course members. But then I felt anxious again, and I realized that I wasn’t doing the work.” “How do you understand the work now?”

Sometimes Life throws events into our lives that forces us to adjust to new and different circumstances, a new way of living and to have a major life change, whether we are ready for change or not, whether we like it or welcome it or not. A particular event maybe judged as a positive change or negative change. Whether a change is "positive" or "negative" depends on the perspective of the individual going through the change. rnIn 2001, I went through one of the most challengin

A coaching client recently shared the following (shared here with her permission):

From the time you realized you had the ability to hear sound, the skill of listening has always been available to you. Many consider it the most important aspect of communication. However, it is often a skill not used my many to its fullest potential. If however, one is conscious of what true listening is, versus what it is not, it is one of the most powerful skills that can be developed and used effectively over a lifetime. Much of what happens in day to day conversation is

As always when I run my Sacred Sexuality course, I was blown away by the vulnerability and honesty on the forum on this last round. Where else do we share our deepest, darkest thoughts and feelings around sexuality, the ones we think we’re the only ones having, the ones that cause shame to fester in the dark, damp corners of psyche because they never expose themselves to the healing light of normalization that occurs when we share with others?

A few weeks ago, as I was cleaning out our closet, I stumbled upon a stack of papers from my grandmother. Most of the papers were familiar, but one unfamiliar packet literally dropped onto my lap, a stapled report for an adult-education class in psychology that she took in 1963 that I had never read before. The title was, “My Psychograph and Its Evaluation.”

We hear and read a lot of fear these days in psychological and spiritual circles. Mostly, fear is painted in a negative way as the energy that we have to wrestle with and overcome in order to live a life of joy. Most of the statements and quotes we read about fear pin it in the position of the enemy, the obstacle, the dark road. These quotes are accurate, but they’re only talking about one kind of fear. There’s another face of fear that needs and deserves our attention.

In myths and fairy tales, the banished characters are shadow aspects who represent the inner characters we would like to sequester away in a cloistral tower or banish to the middle of the forest: the virginal maiden representing forbidden chastity, the unattractive witch representing the split-off wild feminine, the evil stepmother representing the dark side of motherhood.

There’s a fundamental loneliness that is part of the fabric of being human. It arrives in the corners of night, when shadows form from curtain folds and the backs of chairs. It seeps in just before twilight, when afte oon exhales its last breath and evening hasn’t yet inhaled. It lives on the edges of exaltation, in the space between the golden hour when the gods breathe their jeweled breath over meadows and in the splintered crack just before night’s multi-colored ink begins to sink into dreams.

He had been waiting for this since he was two years old.

On the last round of Open Your Heart a participant asked: “So if I don’t trust these anxious thoughts then what can I trust? If my truth was really that we are not right for each other then how would I know if I am teaching myself not to listen when doubts arise?” And then she wisely responded to her own question with: “But I can see that is probably another clever resistance pattern.”

Among the many questions that dart through the mind plagued by relationship anxiety, the one that can cause either hope or despair is, “Will this anxiety ever end? The short answer is yes: the acute anxiety that you’re experiencing – the one that wakes you in the night and causes you to lose your appetite, will end when you receive accurate information and can douse the flames of “What’s wrong with me?” with a good splash of truth-water.

Life is a series of micro-moments. Most of the time, we’re floating along in the fast-paced current without self-reflection. But inevitably, at some point, we will get snagged on a branch of anxiety or intrusive thoughts, an uncomfortable feeling, an illness, an argument with a loved one, or a season of depression. The habitual responses to these gifts-disguised-as-snags are to protect in some way: to attack outwardly through blame or withdraw into stony silence.

On the heels of my post on connection, which was both comforting and spike-inducing for some of my readers and course members, I’m elaborating on the topic of connection, specifically this one line: Of course, when anxiety is at the helm, it’s difficult to feel attached or secure anywhere and with anyone.

Being able to enhance your house look is something very important and that demands good attention. You can’t just do something by any way but you must do detailed remodeling.rnFrom time to time it is necessary to make the house look better and you want to do that without spending too much. To achieve that you must try to do all the work that you can do yourself and then outsource the rest.rnEnhance the appearance of your house by extra painting, adding a better look to the

Sacred Sexuality isn’t only about sexuality; it’s about our relationship to our bodies, our creativity and our aliveness. When we learn to rinse away shame layers so that we can inhabit and appreciate the bodies we’re in (instead of the one we’re conditioned to believe we’re supposed to be in ), we find more acceptance and gratitude, and we start to re-open the pathways that lead to healthy sexuality and aliveness in all forms. Along these lines, I’d like to share another magnificently beautiful post from the last round of the course. This post was in response to the following prompt:r

The "holiday season" defines the time that extends from Thanksgiving to New Year's, where all we seem to do is eat, drink and be merry. Just what is it that makes the holiday season so special?nnIt's a combination of things, really. The concept of giving is but one reason. What other time of year do you find yourself encouraged on a daily basis to do or buy not for yourself, but for everybody else? nnThere's also the concept of family: being with family, forging stronger rela

“It’s better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to carefully avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit.” – Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Fear-mind has a special genius for trying to prove that it’s right. It’s like we all have this aspect of our personality – some call it ego, other call it lower self – that has secretly attended law school and graduated at the top of its class. This character, terrified of change, will gather such convincing evidence to support its case that it would win in any court of law, or at the very least in the court of law that takes place inside your mind.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” — Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Our culture fails to teach us the essential skills we need to navigate through life successfully in so many ways. As I discuss often on this site, it fails to teach us about healthy, real love. It fails to teach us about how to feel our feelings and work with our thoughts. It fails to guide us through the potholes and landmines of transitions. And it fails to teach us how to make decisions, both big and small.

Anxiety is a messenger, a symptom, and a gift. I know that statement flies in the face of everything we learn about anxiety in a culture that is pathologically obsessed with eradicating shadow at every turn and consequently attempts to “get rid of” the symptom of anxiety as quickly and cleanly as possible, but I carry a vastly different approach. Instead of immediately medicating anxiety and its cohort of symptoms away, I seek to understand the messages encoded in its underlayers.

At least once a week, a client asks, “I know that love isn’t all butterflies and fireworks, but what should it feel like? Since I’ve never seen a healthy relationship and I’ve never been in one, I have no idea what it should be like.”

The local library in my home town provides its facilities to host a “Professionals in Transition” meeting every other week. Public libraries have always been good providers of resources to people in need. Given the current economy and labor market such sessions have become much more common in many locations. I had the pleasure of attending a recent session this past week and came away inspired by the comments of one of the gentlemen present. We were asked by this week's spea

One of the byproducts of being a highly sensitive person prone to anxiety is that you tend to take on others’ pain and stories. This is particularly true if you had an enmeshed relationship with a parent growing up and didn’t learn to solidify the borders of your skin but instead became a porous sponge that absorbed the emotional world of your parent. But the tendency to take on others’ pain and stories is a common struggle for many people regardless of early relationships and speaks to being both sensitive and not having established a full well of Self.

We spend at least fifteen years in school learning the skills that our culture has deemed essential for a certain type of success in the world. We learn how to read. We learn the basics of math. We learn how to write. If we’re lucky, there’s some art and theater thrown in, but it’s understood that these aren’t the “real skills” we need to succeed. After all, how many artists actually make a living through their art?

Perhaps the area of our lives to suffer most from the increasingly fast pace of the culture is love, for the expectation of immediate results naturally leads to a belief that love should not only be easy, but that when there’s a problem, it should be remediated quickly. Love doesn’t work this way. The truth is that when it comes to intimate relationships – with partners, friends, and children – very few things come quickly or easily.

Every day that I work with clients struggling with relationship anxiety I find myself saying some version of, “Of course you’re scared. Loving is the scariest thing we do.” As I’ve written about several times on this blog, fear doesn’t always present as fear but instead shows up as irritation, annoyance, numbness, ambivalence, lack of attraction, and doubt. It’s a convoluted defense mechanism, the ego’s attempt to circumvent being left or rejected by convincing you that you don’t love or even like your partner anyway, but in the end these are all manifestations of fear.

As evidenced by our high divorce rate and, even more disheartening, how few long-term marriages are thriving and fulfilling, it’s clear that our culture has it all wrong when it comes to love. Not only do we project our gold and gods onto our partners instead of taking responsibility for our own genius and aliveness, but we unknowingly project our negative attributes onto our partners as well.

Projection is one of the most important concepts to understand when you’re stuck in relationship anxiety or any manifestation of anxiety. It’s a psychological term that essentially means we’re stuck in a story about someone or something else with the belief that it’s true, and that if the person or thing would change we would feel better. Everyone will, at some point, find themselves stuck in a projection; it’s part of being human. Projections are a bit challenging to define and even more challenging to see when you’re in one. In Wikipedia’s words:

When discussing the concept that a root cause of relationship anxiety is the fear of being hurt by love, course members and coaching clients will often say, “I had a good childhood with loving parents.

We all know that greens are healthy. We know that meditation can be life-changing. We know that breathwork is deeply healing and that yoga can be a pathway to profound change. We know that exercise is essential. We know that jou aling is a powerful tool. We know it, but what stops us from committing to these actions that will result in change and growth? Resistance. Resistance is one of the most powerful forces that both prevents and, paradoxically, invites change.