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Posts tagged with “stress”

6 Steps to Release Your Fear and Feel Peaceful

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“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.” ~Mary Catherine Bateson

It was a balmy spring morning and I started my day as per usual, but I soon realized that my mind was entertaining fearful thoughts about my financial insecurity.

With many new ventures within the seedling stage, my income flow was erratic and unpredictable, while my financial responsibilities were consistent and guaranteed. At the time I ignored these thoughts as “petty,” like a parent dismissing a crying child after a mild fall on the pavement.

What I didn’t realize was that my mind wanted …

How to Choose Peace Instead of Stressing About the Future

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“If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is.” ~Unknown

I was entering a completely new stage in my life. It could have been the beginning of something great, but it was entirely foreign to me. I could handle being productive, I could handle struggling to survive, but what was hard to handle was wading through the unknown.

After working for six months in Italy and six months in Brazil I was back in the US—floating. I didn’t feel any closer to having a career. I was without a car, job, …

3 Things Panic Attacks Don’t Want You To Know

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“Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists.” ~Eckhart Tolle 

Sunday started out with a panic attack.

It wasn’t little butterflies in the stomach like right before a first kiss. It wasn’t the feeling of anticipation as a rollercoaster slowly climbs the big hill before the drop.

This panic attack felt like I was about to jump off a cliff, while being chased by clowns. Not cute clowns—scary ones. The kind of clowns that were in the paintings at my pediatrician’s office when I was a kid. The clowns that smiled at me smugly when I was getting …

How to Drop the Extra (Mental) Weight and Set Yourself Free

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“Letting go gives us freedom and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” -Thich Nhat Hanh

Most people I know are carrying extra weight—and I’m not talking about gaining a few pounds.

I’m talking about the mental and emotional weight we lug around with us. We carry it everywhere—like a backpack full of bricks—and it weighs us down.

Personally, much of my extra weight comes from the expectations I have for myself to be more—more present, more productive, more enlightened. Although these might be wonderful things to work toward, wanting to be more can easily translate to not being enough …

Are You Too Busy? 5 Signs of Chronic Stress

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“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” ~Socrates

A few years ago, the focal point of my life was my work. It took up and made up a huge portion of my life. In retrospect, I would even say that work became a sort of obsession. I became so obsessed with being productive that I set aside almost every minute of my waking hours for some work-related activity.

I even coupled meals with work; toilet breaks meant mentally drafting reports and traffic jams signaled the start of phone meetings. You may look at this picture and think of me as …

5 Amazing Blessings from Being Fired

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“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.” ~Unknown

I was fired via email as my plane touched down at LAX.

I am not the kind of person who gets fired, who gets dismissed, who is asked to leave and is not welcomed back.

This was not my track record, no. What was happening?

I had seen the ad on Craigslist, and it looked perfect. An educational theater program for kids was seeking instructors and administrators to help revitalize the company. They needed someone with current experience in the entertainment industry who was an educator and also had …

The True Meaning of Patience: Let Go and Take Your Time

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 “Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.” ~Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Patience sucks!

Well that is what I used to think.

I was taught growing up that it was a virtue, but I was never taught why.

In my experience, patience had meant I would miss out on something I desired. So I became the hare in the race and would fast track myself through career choices and opportunities and even relationships for fear that I would be forgotten and miss out again.

But in the story, it is tortoise that wins the …

Your Thoughts Create Your World: Patrol Your Mind

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“Since you alone are responsible for your thoughts, only you can change them.” ~Paramahansa Yogananda

In my second year of residency, I went through my internal medicine rotation. I had just been assigned to a particular patient and was responsible for his care during that part of his stay. His medical chart stated he had multiple systemic issues, including more than one terminal condition.

He had been admitted to the hospital numerous times, but this was our first encounter. As I entered his room, I wasn’t sure what to expect. After all, this was a man with a limited …

How to Deal with Unfairness and Change the Things You Can

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“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” ~Mary Engelbreit

Many times in the past, I’ve complained that things weren’t fair.

Sometimes I was legitimately wronged—like when I was a kid and an adult in my life regularly told people lies about me, seemingly to justify her disdain and mistreatment.

Other times, I victimized myself to avoid taking responsibility—like when I didn’t prepare well and bombed at a community theater audition but attributed my failure to favoritism.

As an indignant adolescent, I blamed many of my difficult early experiences …

How Worrying Makes Life Less Joyful

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“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy.” ~Leo Bucaglia

As I stood on the street corner, tears streaming down my face, I called friends for confirmation that what I had just been told wasn’t true.

My meeting with my “friend” had gone horribly wrong. And when I say gone wrong, that’s because she was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

But what if she wasn’t wrong?

What if her words, which stung so badly that I couldn’t stop myself from crying publicly, were true?

Two weeks prior to this fateful day, three families had gotten …

Creating Peace by Finding a Connection to the Earth

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“You get peace of mind not by thinking about it or imagining it, but by quietening and relaxing the restless mind.” ~Remez Sasson

In a world that constantly barrages us with information, it becomes a daily struggle to unplug and find peace. The “need to” and “should do” and “must do” of our ever-frantic lives overwhelms us and creates a stress that threatens to unravel.

As a child my happiest days were those spent outdoors. Even then, peace came while watching the flowers bend in the wind and the clouds stretch across the sky.

As an adult it became …

How to Feel Less Stressed About the Uncertain Future

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“The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with.” ~Tony Robbins

“Uncertainty” may be one of the least popular places to hang out.

I hear this all the time from my clients, friends, and truth be told, from the voice inside my own head. Certainty is almost always preferable to uncertainty. Humans like to know.

I wanted to know when our house was on the market last year. Would it sell? When would it sell? How much would we get? Should we start packing up closets now, or wait until …

5 Meditation Myths and the Benefits of Starting Today

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“Freedom is instantaneous the moment we accept things as they are.” ~Karen Maezen Miller

My personal rock-bottom wake-up call came a few years ago when, despite having achieved all of my personal and business goals, I found that I still wasn’t content or experiencing peace of mind.

Feeling frustrated, I realized that I could no longer rely on my future to fulfill me. I knew continuing to work so hard to accomplish bigger and better goals wasn’t going to relieve my eternal itch that there must be more to life than this.

To make matters worse, my increasing …

Giveaway and Interview: Learning to Breathe by Priscilla Warner

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In the past decade, I have read more than my fair share of self-help books.

Though I’ve enjoyed the ones with countless action steps and workbook sheets to change my life, I’ve felt the most moved and inspired by honest, personal stories of overcoming adversity.

That’s how I felt in reading Priscilla Warner’s brave book, Learning to Breathe—like I was seeing straight into the heart of someone else …

Giveaway and Author Interview: The Misleading Mind

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Have you ever felt like your mind was controlling you, dragging you along for a persistently bumpy ride?

Research shows the majority of us feel this way, but the good news is that we can do something about—and Karuna Cayton’s book The Misleading Mind teaches us how.

A psychotherapist and practicing Buddhist, Karuna has written an easily digestible book that offers solutions to the mental anguish we often perpetuate …

Giveaway and Interview: The Mindful Manifesto

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If you read this site regularly, odds are you’re familiar with mindfulness, and you may even meditate regularly.

It’s a simple practice that can dramatically improve our physical, mental, and emotional well-being, since it helps ground us in the present moment, and frees us from the burden of dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.

Whether you’re new to mindfulness or not, you’ll likely …

Maybe We’ll Never Arrive

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“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.” ~Matsuo Basho

Once, one of my friends shared a line of wisdom that summed up the dance of wholeness and aspiration I often find myself absorbed in:

“Everything is quite all right; our worth secure and true. Everything’s not quite all right; we’ve worthy work to do…”

Part of the longing and neediness I tend to feel comes from a rift between who or where I am, and where I believe I should be to be “successful.”

My life has been colored by this dichotomy: the strange see-sawing dance …

Keep Moving Forward: 4 Tips to Enjoy the Journey More

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“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” ~Proverb

Five years ago, I decided to fulfill my dream of getting a doctorate. I knew from talking to friends who took on the same endeavor that it would mean many sleepless nights and tons of reading and writing. But nothing prepared me for the path that lay ahead.

Graduate school is often compared to a marathon. Why? At each moment, when you think you’ve completed a major milestone, you realize you have a long road ahead. You just have to keep going …

Control Less, Trust More: How I Learned to Relax and Let Go

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“The closest to being in control we’ll ever be is in that moment when we realize we’re not.” ~Brian Kessler

My nine-year-old son said something so profoundly right that it kept me awake. He said that in order for him to be happier I would need to let go of controlling him all the time.

Now granted he is young, and believe me, if I didn’t tell him to get dressed he’d run outside in PJs, but I was struck by his wisdom because this is also my obstacle to becoming happier.

In the past, the more I felt out …

Releasing the Urge to Push and Being Kind to Yourself Instead

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“Slow down and everything you are chasing will come around and catch you.” ~John De Paola

Pushing has always been the way I get things done.

Actually, I should be more specific: pushing myself harder has been the way I get things done.

I grew up believing that life was hard, and that the only way to survive was to give up indulgences, buckle down, and trudge forward. Uphill. Against the wind.

In my small, suburban high school, I spent hours after my classes ended wrestling with quadratic equations.

I had the overwhelmingly generous help of my teachers, who tutored …