Love Them from a Distance
How Your Worst Days Can Shape Your Best Self
“It is often those moments you feel least connected that you are actually making your greatest progress. The chaos around you is an invitation to pause, reflect, and grow. You are more than equipped to deal with this. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here.” ~Benjamin P Hardy
It’s 1 a.m., and the silence is broken by a cough that can only be described as sounding like someone who has smoked two packs daily for the last thirty years. There’s no way to predict when I’ll be woken again, but if the past week is any indication, this won’t be …
How I’ve Learned to Love My Inner Weirdo
“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.” ~Mary Oliver
I was a beautiful, wild, and exhilarating kid. I marched to the beat of my unicorn drum and, to the confusion of adults, I did not fit into the typical boxes they had been anticipating.
This little kid was ready to thrive!
The freedom did not last long. My zest for life and unicorn drum beat quickly symbolized my weirdness. Adults tilted their heads in perplexity …
Always Exhausted? Native Wisdom to Restore Your Energy
TRIGGER WARNING: This post references sexual assault and may be triggering to some people.
“Spirit carved by Nature
Here I am.
Slowly ascending
toward my own profundity.”
~Elicura Chihuailaf
That exhaustion you feel when your body is fighting something, the feeling of being completely drained to the point where you can barely move your body…. that’s how I felt when I was living with trauma.
Over the years it had piled up inside of me—the sexual assault I survived one night after I’d just turned twenty, the physical and emotional abuse that went on almost daily when I lived with …
10 Unique Lessons from Across the Globe for a Meaningful Life
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ~W.B. Yeats
For a few years of my life, I was lucky enough to have a semi-nomadic lifestyle. A lot of my stuff fit in a backpack, and it was a great joy to move around different regions of the world and have rich conversations with people. One of the most enchanting aspects of my years spent backpacking was the discovery of these magical practices that resonate deeply across cultures.
I started a precious collection of these soul-deep lessons from the various landscapes I passed …
The Simple, Old-School Acts of Kindness Our World Badly Needs
“Whatever is in memory is also in soul.” ~Saint Augustine, Confessions
Memories of my father are etched deeply in me—not for what he accomplished as a surgeon, a pilot, and an outdoorsman, but for what he was about, a truly gentle and generous man. Ironically, one of the most important lessons I learned from and about him came from a stranger.
I was alone in my family’s large Victorian-style house in the heart of the Midwest on a muggy Saturday afternoon. My mother had taken my siblings to a summer reading program at the public library, and my dad had …
Slow Living: A Simple but Powerful Form of Healing
“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.” ~Pico Iyer
On a college orientation trip, at the age of eighteen, I hiked the 100-mile wilderness of the Appalachian Mountain Trail, and my trail name was “caboose.” Slow and steady from behind was where you’d find me. That was my way. I was typically the last to camp, but I could go all night when necessary.
That wasn’t my first experience being the slow one in a group. When …
Trapped in Shame: How I Found Mental Freedom After Prison
“If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.” ~Brené Brown
I was in two prisons.
One physical. One mental.
The physical version was Otisville Federal Prison.
I was living so out of alignment with who I was and who I wanted to become and self-sabotaged in a colossal way, defrauding one of the largest tech companies in the world.
My mental prison, my personal hell, was the all-consuming …
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