Can You Redo Yourself? This morning while driving our grandson to school, his mother called him on his iPhone. (I don’t think 12-year-olds should have iPhones, but his father bought it for him and his parents are divorced—and well—you can imagine the rest.) At least he uses the speaker phone so not to expose his […]
Tag Archives | Kindness
Apologizing
What if you thought of the act of apologizing— not as admitting that you were wrong—but as a mature choice that you get to make to reconnect with someone you love. Just to be clear—I do know people who are chronically apologetic—that’s not what I am talking about. I’m talking about […]
How To Stop Obsessive Thoughts
Many people experience obsessive thoughts of one kind of another. Not only can we drive ourselves crazy with these thoughts, but when our negative obsessive thoughts are about another person, such thoughts are potentially harmful—and at the very least they are unkind. In this article I want to focus specifically on obsessive thoughts (negative ones) […]
Be Intolerant
We are proposing that there are two primary things you need to do to simplify your life so that you can be happy. Last week’s article was written by Hannah, who suggested that kindness is the key. This week I want to share with you the other side of the coin—my side—which says you also […]
Being Kind
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” Dali Lama A patient recently shared with me the difficulties he was having relating with his mother. There were parts of her—certain behaviors and attitudes of hers—that he was having difficulty accepting. He recognized that those qualities in her were not going to change. She […]
The Need To Be Right
“You have your way.I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche Yesterday I drove my mother and father to the VA hospital in Albuquerque for a doctor’s appointment. I had never been to a VA hospital before. I guess […]
Happy Couples — Day 8 — Maya Tulum
We are at the end—the physical end—of this Live Conscious Retreat, in Maya Tulum. But I don’t think of this as an end, instead it is a beginning for the people who came together for the past eight days. As we learned to use a new set of communication tools and we lived together in […]
Learn How To Love in Three Steps
What could possibly be more important than learning how to love? Did anyone teach you how to love? Did anyone teach your parents how to love? Are you teaching your kids how to love? If you want to teach your children how to love, teach them how to live their lives in such a […]
Enlightenment Can Lead To Arrogance
What is enlightenment? I see it as a state of constructive contentment. That is, being constructive—making some sort of contribution—and feeling satisfied at the same time. One of the things about this state of being is that it feeds on itself. If I am content and constructive in this moment, I am likely to be […]
How To Individuate | Step One
This blog post explores how to individuate. In an earlier blog post I wrote more broadly about the Individuation Process. I wrote about the need to individuate if we ever want to become our own person and live a life of our own choosing. I wrote about how individuating can begin in our teens and […]