Posts tagged with “wisdom”
Accepting People You Dislike as They Are: How It Benefits You and How to Do It
“We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” ~Aesop, The Eagle and the Arrow
We can sometimes have difficulty accepting our friends, family, and loved ones as they are when their habits, quirks, or behavior annoy us. Our natural tendency is to try to change what we don’t like about them, which often leads to resentment. Nonetheless, given their importance and presence in our lives, we are usually willing to make an effort to accept them as they are.
But what about people we dislike—people who cause us grief? For example, an overbearing boss, a scheming …
The Most Powerful Tool for Healing: Tell the Right Stories
TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.
“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful parts of ourselves.” ~David Richo
In my mid-thirties, I had what I experienced as a breakdown.
If you had asked me ten or even twenty years earlier whether I had been sexually abused, I would have said no. But in my mid-thirties, strange and scary memories started surfacing in my body—along with pieces of story and language.
These pieces of memory and my responses to them seemed to glue together …
There Are a Gazillion Little Ways to Be Kind (and It Benefits You Too)
“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.” ~Robert M. Pirsig
One day while grocery shopping I was reaching for a head of lettuce when I heard a shrill, high-pitched wail from a few aisles over. It sent shivers up my spine. It was one of those sounds that grabs your breath and pulls it to your heart.
It brought me back to a time I had long forgotten—a memory engrained in my brain from about twenty-two years ago when my children were toddlers. I remember those days of being exhausted and …
To Reduce Stress, Stop Globalizing and Put Things in Perspective
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” ~Mark Twain
Life happens. And sometimes when life happens, we can get pretty stressed out. I’ve found that the way we view situations can either reduce our stress or make it worse. Here is just one way we aggravate situations, possibly unnecessarily, and how we can adjust our perspective to keep stress in check.
A colleague of mine claims that he is “calendar-challenged.” He is often unable to attend meetings at the last minute or shows up late. I am, by contrast, a planner. I live …
How to Start Dating from a Place of Self-Love
“You must learn to love yourself before you can love someone else.” ~Sonja Mylin
It’s tough being out there.
I remember myself some years ago embracing the world of online dating. Everyone kept telling me “be yourself” (and I kept telling myself that), but when I was actually on a date, “myself” would fly out the window.
I’d go hard on the impressing, second-guess myself, drink too much, look for every little thing we had in common (even if the person did not feel right), feel devastated if I was rejected, and utterly lose sight of what I was …
8 Things I Learned from Watching My Mum Die
“Pain changes your life forever. But so does healing from it.” ~Kayil York
In 2012 my mum got diagnosed with cancer. After an operation, she was cancer-free for some time when in March 2017 it was discovered that the cancer had returned and had spread everywhere, notably to her lungs.
She was adamant that she did not want further treatment, which would have been palliative at best anyway and would have had significant side effects. Nobody was able to make a prognosis regarding how much longer she had left. Being seventy, there was a chance that it would develop slowly.…
We All Need to Define “Success” for Ourselves
“There’s no such thing as what you ‘should’ be doing with your life.” –Lori Deschene
How often have you thought about what success means to you?
If you’re anything like my younger self, that would be almost never. It’s not that I didn’t want to be successful. It’s just that it wasn’t something I’d given much thought to. No one ever asked me about it or even encouraged me to think about success. I’d just absorbed it from the people and culture around me, watching how they lived and what was important to them.
From what I saw around …
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