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As a child I always wanted to please my parents and when I didn’t I started a life-long collection of shadows that would soon fill this invisible long bag that I dragged behind me. By the time I started school the bag became quite large. By the time I was a teenager my bag was a mile long with more bag stuffing in high school and college. I had spent the first twenty plus years deciding what parts of myself I put in this bag and I have been trying to get them out ever since

Although I don’t consider myself an old dog, I am not a puppy either. I am in the saddle of life living at a beautiful time where I am old enough to have amassed some wisdom and young enough where I still have my puppy like curiosity and the energy to make things happen. Some people choose to look at this mid life time as a crisis …. to me it’s all about embracing and loving change. I have recently reconnected with an old and dear friend of mine and we are starting to writ

The first time I heard “comfort is overrated” was on a men’s weekend and I thought the man who said that had lost his mind. I have worked many years to create some comfort in my life and now I was being told what I had worked towards was overrated. Why do all this emotional work if the end product might be more discomfort? These are some really good questions and it led me to even better questions. The biggest one was “What change in my life that has had a significant impa

I have been playing music on and off my whole life and have always known I had a passion and connection around music…….it just took me a while to figure out why. For years I thought it was all about the guitar and I took lessons once a week for ten years. I was driven, determined and passionate. I even had re occurring dreams that I would get very, very close to jamming with Stevie Ray Vaughn (my guitar hero) and then I would wake up……it never seemed to happen. I played in

My lessons in life come in weird and wacky ways sometimes….other times they are right in front of me. I especially like the “wake up” messages that come repeatedly before I get the BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious). That is what happened with this lesson. This lesson is about opposites, duality, and building versus fixing. My most recent lesson came in my yoga class from my instructor Robert Boustany. I was recently told what a maverick he is in the yoga field and I a

My life has been a series of passages. This week was a very significant passage for me. My youngest daughter, Kelsey, turned 21 years young and in our culture this is a significant rite of passage. This is the passage into adulthood. It’s not that one day you are a child and the next day you’re an adult, it is a passage. This passage has been going on since my oldest daughter Madison, turned 21, a little over 3 years ago. I believe there is a physiological shift in all o

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is a saying whose roots go back into the mid 1800s. Apples may be good for us but it wasn’t their precise medicinal properties that were being exalted when this phrase was coined. In Old English the word apple was used to describe any round fruit that grew on a tree. The meaning was that if you do something good for yourself, good things come of it. I have adapted the same rhyme to a slightly different wording. I substitute the word “

Since we all live in a world of duality, it is very easy for us to understand hot and cold, stop and go, good and bad, right and wrong, up and down or on and off. If we take it a little further it may look like this……war and peace, brilliance and stupidity, love and hate or blessing and criticism. This is the foundation of how I grew up. I also grew up to stay on the “good” side of these dualities. I was taught to be nice not mean, smart not dumb, early not late, brave not

When two of my teachers both talk of the same topic, it is time for me to pay attention. This week in yoga class, Robert talked about something Jimmy, my acupuncturist and good friend, has talked about for a while now…….open focus. I learned about open focus in the context of what happens to me when I get in fear. When I get in fear, my perspective narrows, and consequently I get what looks a lot like tunnel vision. My breathing gets very shallow, my pulse rate increases an

Oh how I love the wisdom of rock and roll. This is what I grew up with and has become the foundation of the music that moves me, speaks to me and in this case gives me a mantra, if you will, for how I strive to live my life. There are many, many lyrics of songs that I grew up with that have had an impact on me and how I see life. It still amazes me how many people quote Bob Dylan and I am not sure he even knew when he wrote these songs, what impact he would have not only on