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Posts tagged with “wisdom”

How I Claimed My Right to Belong While Dealing with Imposter Syndrome

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TRIGGER WARNING: This post briefly references sexual abuse.

“Never hold yourself back from trying something new just because you’re afraid you won’t be good enough. You’ll never get the opportunity to do your best work if you’re not willing to first do your worst and then let yourself learn and grow.” ~Lori Deschene

The year 2022 was the hardest of my life. And I survived a brain tumor before that.

My thirtieth year started off innocently enough. I was living with my then-boyfriend in Long Beach and had a nice ring on my finger. The relationship had developed quickly, but …

Thinner is Not Better – Healthy, Connected, and Happy Is

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“Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~Martha Beck

I have so many women around me right now—friends, mothers, clients that are on a diet—constantly talking about their weight and how their bodies look, struggling with body image.

I am profoundly sad about the frequency and theme of those discussions.

At the same time, I deeply get it; it is hard to detach from our conditioning.

I too struggled with body image at one point in my life, and for a very …

You Can Only Do So Much

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Why Life Felt Hard for Me for Years (and 7 Lessons That Have Helped)

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“You’re so hard on yourself. But remember, everybody has a chapter they don’t read out loud. Take a moment. Sit back. Marvel at your life; at the mistakes that gave you wisdom, at the suffering that gave you strength. Despite everything, you still move forward, be proud of this. Continue to endure. Continue to persevere. And remember, no matter how dark it gets, the sun will rise again.” ~Unknown

All my life I knew I was different. If I didn’t look so much like my mom, I would have believed the jokes my brother told me about how I was …

I Owe It to Myself to Be Happy

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Appreciate Your Wins

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How I Feel the Best I Can Despite My Struggles with Depression and Anxiety

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“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.” ~John Green

I remember being fifteen. I was a high school freshman who loved drawing, books, Harry Potter, and Taylor Swift. I hated math class with a passion. I had a loving family and a small white dog named Maddie. I wanted to be a writer, and to have a boyfriend. I also wanted to die.

It started in seventh grade, when my best friend, Meghan, dumped me. You hear about romantic breakups all the time, but no one seems to talk about friendship breakups. They hurt a …

Truths About People

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Life Does Not Come with Instructions on How to Live

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You’re Never Too Old To Feel Inspired, Excited, and Alive

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“I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” ~Diane Ackerman 

I’m in the business of watching people take risks. I observe them tackling challenges, fear, and discomfort, and sometimes, “making firsts” in their life.

I observe a lot as a flight attendant, and sometimes wonder if my official title should rather be “Human Observer,” or “Social Experimenter.” It feels more accurate, or at least it’s the part that I typically enjoy the most. I’m …

If You Want Your Children to Turn Out Well

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Why Relationships Matter Most: We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home

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“We’re all just walking each other home.” ~Ram Dass

Living in the hyper-individualist society that we do, it’s easy to forget our obligation to those around us. Often in the West, we are taught to prioritize ourselves in the unhealthiest ways, to ‘grind’ as hard as we can to achieve wealth and status.

We are taught, between the lines, that our first responsibility is to create a ‘perfected‘ version of ourselves to such an extreme that it is alright to forsake our relationships with others to accomplish it.

From day one, it is embedded in us that it …

An Unhealthy Parent Denies It Ever Happened

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How to Ease the Pain of Being Human: From Breakdown to Breakthrough

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“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know” ~Pema Chödrön

We are all works in progress.

We all have skeletons in our closets that we may wish to never come out. We have all made mistakes. We will all make mistakes in future. We all have our scars.

None of us are close to reaching that mythical ‘perfect’ status. Never will be.

None of us should consider ourselves fully evolved. Not even close. There will always be space for improving an area of our lives.

Truth be told, most of us are a contradictory …

The Absence of Empathy and Understanding

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You Can’t Be Best Friends with Everyone

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How Yoga Helped Heal My Anxiety and Quiet My Overactive Mind

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“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are” ~Carl Jung

Yoga is often celebrated for its physical benefits: greater flexibility, increased strength, improved circulation, and so on. But nothing could have prepared me for the transformational effect that yoga has had on my mental health and well-being.

I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when I was fourteen, and I have struggled with both for most of my life. My mind was my worst enemy, constantly worrying and criticizing to the point where it became hard to do anything. Even the things I really wanted to …

8 Ways You Can Help Fight the Loneliness Epidemic

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“The antidote to loneliness isn’t just being around random people indiscriminately, the antidote to loneliness is emotional security.” ~Benedict Wells

Emotional security. The feeling of being at home in the presence of another. Safe to be who you are, good times or bad. Feeling seen and seeing the other clearly, accepting the other’s whole lovely mess. It’s good stuff, and it can be hard to find.

In fact, ever-increasing loneliness stats have led many experts to describe the problem as epidemic. You might assume it was caused by the pandemic, but it was a crisis long before lockdowns and …

The Butterfly Is Only Beautiful Because…

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Trust Restored: Why I’m Letting Go of Preconceived Ideas About People

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“The problems around us are only compounding. We will need to rediscover our trust in other people, to restore some of our lost faith—all that’s been shaken out of us in recent years. None of it gets done alone. Little of it will happen if we isolate inside our pockets of sameness, communing only with others who share our exact views, talking more than we listen.” ~Michelle Obama

I’m up at the American River, one of my favorite summertime spots. I have a ritual of floating down it, then hiking back up the hill to my clothes. I love how …