fbpx
Menu

Search Results for "trust " — 1349 posts

You Never Know What Someone Is Going Through, So Be Kind

by

“Give everyone the benefit of the doubt today…” ~Lori Deschene, Tiny Buddha’s 365 Tiny Love Challenges

Here’s something I’ve learned firsthand: No matter how someone looks or acts, you truly never know what’s happening in their lives.

Five years ago my husband Walter was dying from cancer. Twice during a thirteen-month period he was hospitalized, thirty minutes away from our home.

I spent about ten hours a day at the hospital, plus travel time during those long weeks. I was a wreck.

I don’t know what I looked like to the outside world. Inside, I felt impatient, angry, sad, out …

How to Live Out Loud: 8 Lessons for an Authentic, Empowered Life

by

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Growing up, I was shy, bullied often, or ignored because I couldn’t stand up for myself.

My parents, immigrants from Colombia, South America, bequeathed me an inheritance of brown skin, brown eyes, and a language full of emotion. Nothing like the world I was thrown into.

I started kindergarten not knowing a word of English, trying to find my place in a sea of white faces. I stood out like a fly in milk.

I was teased and …

Book Giveaway: Tiny Buddha’s 365 Tiny Love Challenges

by

UPDATE – The winners for this giveaway are:

  • Melissa Ballinger Dees
  • Julie C. Perry
  • Bobby Irion
  • Michael Jon Piper
  • Hannah

Sometimes the world can feel like a lonely place. There are billions of people on the planet, and many of us encounter hundreds in the course of our daily lives. Yet it’s easy to feel disconnected from most, if not all of them.

The many strangers we pass on a given day, who may avert their eyes to avoid awkwardness, can start to feel like part of the scenery—like cars parked in a lot or leaves floating in the wind.…

10 Surprising Reasons To Stop Trying To Please Everyone

by

“Lean too much on other people’s approval and it becomes a bed of thorns.” ~Tehyi Hsieh

Let’s be honest with each other.

You’re a people-pleaser

So am I.

And so is Oprah, the President of The United States, and the guy next door.

We’re all people-pleasers to some extent. And that’s okay. Wanting to be approved of—and loved—is as natural as wanting food and shelter.

It’s when you try to please everyone that it becomes a problem. In fact, more than a problem, a disease. Harriet B. Braiker called it “the disease to please.”

And …

How to Prevent Fear and Insecurity from Ruining Your Relationship

by

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” ~Jack Canfield

Buried deep within the broken heart of every great loss is a nugget of wisdom. I experienced the greatest grief of my life just a few months ago, and with it came an opportunity to uncover ugly truths about myself I’d been hiding from.

In facing my pain, I have discovered that underneath the conscious, big-hearted, beautiful person that I am lives a small girl who is terrified of being misunderstood and abandoned by those she loves most.

The surface signs alerting me to these fears looked something …

When Mindfulness Hurts: Feeling Is the Key to Healing

by

“You start watching your breath and all your problems are solved. It is not like that at all. You are working with the heart of your experiences, learning to turn towards them, and that is difficult and can be uncomfortable.” ~Ed Halliwell

Can mindfulness be bad for you?

I had been expecting it: Once you become a regular at it, mindfulness permeates all aspects of your life.

I only sit in meditation for twenty minutes daily (and a full hour on Sundays), but I carry its effects with me the rest of the time, elevated levels of awareness and all.…

4 Relationship Traps to Avoid & Other Ways to Keep Your Love Strong

by

“Love does not obey our expectations; it obeys our intentions.” ~Lloyd Strom

When I started dating, I did a terrible job of it.

I fell in love at the turn of a unique smile and fell out of it with the first sign of a stubborn bad habit. Despite that, I was a serial monogamist. I didn’t know how to develop the mental fortitude one needed to end things when they were ready to be ended, so I let them crawl on.

Teenage emotions are hard. Adult ones are hard, too.

Three years, four years, three and a half …

10 Lessons My Mother’s Death Taught Me About Healing and Happiness

by

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” ~Joan Didion

This spring marked ten years since I lost my mother. One ordinary Thursday, she didn’t show up to work, and my family spent a blur of days frantically hanging missing person fliers, driving all over New England, and hoping against reason for a happy outcome.

My mother was prone to frequent mood swings, but she also talked to my two older brothers and me multiple times a day, and going off the grid was completely out of character. How does someone just vanish? And why?…

Is Your Life Really as Perfect as It Looks on Facebook?

by

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.” ~George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

So would most women.

This is the way we have encountered life so far. Better to show the world just the socially acceptable and shove the rest under the rug. That’s where the hard truths go.

But we all know the trouble with the rug. Stuff builds up under the rug and eventually you land on your face. Hard truths don’t go away.

Social media is exacerbating the historical tendency to present only the pretty, so we’re justifiably, and understandably, really scared …

The Good News About Feeling Bad (And How to Get Through It)

by

“To honor and accept one’s shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It’s whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.” ~Robert Johnson

There’s nothing worse than having a bad day (or week or years…)

Or when emotions take over and carry us away.

Or when our relationships bring challenges.

Or when we endure great loss.

Or when we wish that just once when things started getting good, they stayed that way.

But difficult times are really offerings that show us what no longer serves us. And once they’re cleared, they no longer have power over …

How to Raise Your Self-Esteem So You Can Thrive in Life

by

“Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.” ~Iyanla Vanzant

Aren’t you tired of it?

You know, that sneaking suspicion you aren’t enough.

That inner commentary about where you fall short all the time. The mean internal remarks about your ability to handle life and how you just don’t measure up.

And aren’t you fed up with how it’s been holding you back from pursuing what you truly desire?

A better relationship or more meaningful …

Get Out of Your Head: The Life-Changing Power of Embodying Your Body

by

“The modern individual is committed to being successful, not to being a person. He belongs rightly to the ‘action generation’ whose motto is ‘do more but feel less.’” ~Alexander Lowen

I’ve always been a little bit scared of my body. And when you’re scared of something, you tend to avoid it at all costs. So that’s what I did for most of my childhood and teenage years.

I avoided it in lots of different ways, and most dangerously, I avoided it unconsciously.

I was bought up doing a lot of physical activity—gymnastics, dance, basketball, and horseback riding. Although this wasn’t …

How to Boost Your Resilience So Nothing Can Keep You Down

by

“No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear” ~Greg Kincaid

How is it that some people can breeze through physical and emotional pain, whereas others wince at the mere thought of it?

Is it their genes? Their individual circumstances? Their support network?

Or is it a certain strength of character, something each and every one of us can develop with the right tools and training?

Two years ago I found myself needing to answer these questions.

I was sitting in a cafe in East London wiping the tears …

8 Meditation Mistakes to Avoid if You Want to Feel Calm and Peaceful

by

“Three things you cannot recover in life: the word after it’s said, the moment after it’s missed, and the time after it’s gone.” ~Unknown

Do you meditate?

I do. I come from a Buddhist family, and meditation is like an heirloom to me.

I didn’t start meditating until I was an adult. But when I did, I meditated diligently. From forming a meditation habit to getting the latest meditation app, I’ve done it all.

And one day I got a little worried.

I didn’t feel much difference. I didn’t feel calm and peaceful like I was supposed to feel.…

How to Make Life More Exciting and the Benefits of Switching Things Up

by

“If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” ~Stephen Hunt

Isn’t it funny how metaphors for life exist in all of our everyday experiences?

I found myself on a mountain the other day (no, that’s not the metaphor), where the route through the particularly rocky bits was marked with cairns. (For those non-mountain runners, a cairn is a man-made pile of little rocks indicating the pathway.)

Even though I was following a fellow runner, I liked to lag behind to enjoy the solitude and absorb the surrounding energy of nature. That’s the hippie in me.…

Abuse Isn’t Always Physical, and We Never Deserve It

by

“A bad relationship is like standing on broken glass. If you stay, you will keep hurting. If you walk away, you will hurt but you will heal.” ~Autumn Kohler

It happens little by little, bit by bit. So very slowly that before you know it, you can’t recognize the person you lie next to at night and you hate the person you see staring back at you in the mirror.

Who is that person?

Where is the strong, capable, unflappable, and carefree person that you once were? When did you become someone so pathetic, so small and malleable?

I have …

Why It’s Okay to Feel Lost (And How to Find Your Way Again)

by

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.” ~Alain de Botton

Do you feel lost and alone?

Adrift and confused about which way to go?

Do you long for “something more” but have no clue what’s missing?

Maybe you’re not miserable exactly, but you’re not animated and in love with life either.

Your circumstances may even look pretty good on the outside.

But on the inside, where truth resides, you are bored to tears, unfulfilled, and restless.

Or maybe you are miserable, stuck in a painful place, silently suffering.

Trust me; …

How to Reconnect with the Inner Light Below Your Pain

by

TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of physical abuse and may be triggering to some people.

“What hurts you blesses you, darkness is your candle.” ~Rumi

We are all born with it. The beautiful bright light in our soul, filled with love and happiness.

I remember having that feeling of being so alive and free and untouched by fear or worry.

This is who we are at the core of our being. This is our true authentic self, from before the world told us who we needed to be and negative outside circumstances started to tear down …

Follow Your Heart, Not Your Fear: How to Make Choices That Are Right for You

by

“Unnecessary fear of a bad decision is a major stumbling block to good decisions.” ~Jim Camp

Twenty years ago, my wife and I decided to move from Montréal, where we had lived for the first thirty-five years of our lives, to Nova Scotia, 800 miles away, where we had no connections whatsoever. Neither a small decision nor undertaking, since this involved our four kids and the entire contents of our house (not to mention a dog and two cats).

Why were we moving? We were not moving because of a job opportunity; we enjoyed the life we had in Montréal. …

Two Kind Words That Can Change or Save a Life

by

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” ~Leo Buscaglia

My fiancé and I escaped to the northern wilderness. We wanted to build our home and our life off grid, off the beaten path, far from civilization.

It didn’t matter that I was a city girl who couldn’t handle a chainsaw, fix a pickup, or read the warnings of wind and sky. My fiancé was a mountain man, skilled in survival. …