Are you living the life you want to be living—an inspired life? What’s it take to live an inspired life? We learned so much about this in the past year since we were inspired to sell our house in Santa Fe and move to Hawaii. It was pure inspiration. And we acted on it. But […]
Author Archive | Jake Eagle
Is Your Compassion Conditional or Unconditional?
Are you a compassionate person? I suspect that most people will answer by saying things like, “most of the time,” or “generally, yes.” But I’m intentionally looking for a “yes” or a “no” answer. And although this may cause some people to squirm a little, there’s a reason I ask the question this way. We […]
How To Deal With Despair
What emotion do you find most challenging? For me, it’s despair. I leave myself empty with despair. I used to find it hard to see any value at all in despair. Despair is not like anger—with anger I can motivate myself in constructive ways. It’s not like depression—when I depress myself I often gain valuable insights. Despair […]
What I Love Most Today
The Answer To Life’s Problems
Are you ready for a New Year? How different will it be from last year? Will you be far less anxious? Will you have much greater clarity about your life purpose? Will you free yourself of your negative self-talk? Will you love your partner as well as you’d like to—or finally attract the kind of […]
Presence Trumps Force
There are two ways to be powerful—one is to use force, the other is to embody presence. Force may get you want you want, but you’ll leave behind messy emotional footprints. Embodying presence will get you what you really want—if you want a life without suffering. In the US elections in 2016 we see two […]
The Path of Self-Improvement
What’s the right path for you? Where are you going—in terms of your self-improvement and personal growth? And how are you going to get there? Is there only one way, or many? Charting your own course This is kind of how I think about psychotherapy, as a chance for each of us to chart our […]
The Emotional Olympics
What are the Emotional Olympics? They are contests we all participate in every day. There’s the 100-meter dash in which our tempers flare up and we’re crossing the finish line before we even know it. There’s the 800-meter run in which some dysfunctional dynamic goes on and on and on until we have totally exhausted […]
The Secret That Drives Us . . . Limits Us
For the first many years of my life I sought ways to make myself feel safe. I sought out people who were safe and avoided those who were scary. Even before I had words for “safe, safety” and “scary,” my instincts guided me. This is true for most of us. Abraham Maslow, an American psychologist, […]
Can You Hear Me? — it’s so painful not to be heard
Maybe one of the more painful, or even frightening things, is when we are unable to get another person—especially one we love—to hear and understand us. The person listening doesn’t necessarily even need to agree with us—if only they would listen and understand our experience. Can you hear me? Is that too much to ask? […]