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Write Your Own Story
I was sitting in a restaurant last week surrounded by friends, and we were all laughing, eating, drinking, and toasting the guest of honor. The long table was filled with people from all over the world who I didn’t know just a few short months before moving to Italy.
As if art imitated life (or life imitated art?), I zoomed out from that table scene and thought of the film “Eat, Pray, Love.” While there are so many uncanny parallels to my own story, there is a scene where Elizabeth (who has come to Italy to start her new journey) finds herself sitting at a table with the new friends she’s made, and they are all eating, drinking wine, and laughing. I’d thought of that scene so often since first seeing the film, and I remember wishing one day to live my life just like that.
The Pause
This month, I started working with a new holistic coaching client. We’ll call her Jill. Like many of us, Jill is having some recurring issues and situations that are unpleasant and have plagued her most of her life. She knows she is ready to finally bring them to the surface and then purge them once and for all. Wanting to escape or circumvent the pain is a natural human reaction, so you can imagine her annoyance when I said that this would be our starting point. If we don’t look at our pain, we have no idea where we are wounded, and if we can’t identify our wounds, how can we ever know where to start the process of healing them?
No Regrets
When I sit down to write, I often reflect on what is happening in my own life or what is swirling around the collective. Lately, I’ve been having many conversations with friends and coaching clients who are expressing regret that they didn’t make certain decisions in life when the opportunities to do so presented themselves. These regrets can be relatively small - “I should have taken that great apartment when it became available,” “I wish I had stuck with playing the piano,” “Why did I buy that expensive dress I’ll never wear?” - and don’t impact one's life trajectory too much. But then there are the regrets that have much deeper consequences and leave us with lifelong wounds.
Beginner’s Mind…Again
Last week, I was excited to see my personal belongings being loaded on a truck and headed to NY, where they will set sail to meet me in my new home across the sea.
As the moving van pulled away, I was reminded of the first trip I took there in April. Leaving Rome and heading deeper into the countryside, I had a bit of a panic attack as I started to ascend the road leading to “the rock” upon which my hilltop city rests. Within minutes of arriving at the place where I was staying, it suddenly hit me that I had never been to this part of the country before, didn’t know a soul, and didn’t speak the language. But fear of the unknown quickly turned to excitement of the unknown as I reminded myself that I was going to have the opportunity to have beginner's mind again and to see so many new things that were waiting for me to discover.
The Open Palm
When I was a young child, I couldn’t wait until I was an old person (which I was sure all 40-year-olds were). I thought the years of working would be finished, and there would be financial security, a solid relationship with the person I would grow old with, and a house full of children and grandchildren. Naively, I thought that all of the trials and tribulations of life would be behind me. But as I have exceeded the doddering age of 40, I have come to see that the picture doesn’t always look the way it was envisioned in youth and that those lessons, and the pain that often accompanies them, do not stop.
Permission
I’ve been asked a lot lately about what possessed me to make the radical changes to my life I’ve made this past year and the even more radical ones I am embarking on in the next couple of months. What made me leave the comforts of the life I knew is a question I get from people (particularly women) excited to see me designing a whole new life but seemingly resigned to not daring to dream themselves.
Love Warriors
February is a very dreary month in many parts of the world, so it’s easy to forget that it is also the month when we celebrate the most powerful force on earth - love. It’s actually quite extraordinary that a species that can be unspeakably hateful, destructive, and evil to our fellow man and our planet home actually stops to acknowledge and celebrate love, albeit for one day. For most, Valentine's Day is a celebration of romantic love, which is a beautiful connector between two people lucky enough to find it. But if we take a look at love past the intimate relationship, chocolates, and greeting cards, we might start to wonder why we don’t celebrate this with the rest of humanity every single day.