I needed to speak to you: lost one. You know who you are, the one who wrote to me for help. You're the one who reached out in those last hours of your life. You are the one who told me your story. You're the one who doesn't go a day without crying. You're the one at rock bottom. The one whose been too far lost now for far too long.
Coming Home
I think this is what happens when a heart gets broken too many times. When a person gets criticized too many times. Or when a body is lonely for too long. To save our own lives, we cut pieces of ourselves off in an attempt to drag ourselves to whatever we are desperately seeking.
Looking Into the Eyes of Freedom
These were little compromises, tiny seemingly-harmless shape-shifty-things. I'd backed myself into a corner of a very small cage. And I wasn't okay in there. Something needed to change.
The Dark Side of People-Pleasing
The problem is that many of us confuse people-pleasing with actual kindness. And these two are easy to confuse because on the outside the behavior can look very similar. Yet, internally, they are vastly different and the key to their differences comes down to one thing: motive.
The Cure for Anything
Every dream comes at a price. Sometimes the price is on the smaller side: a few sleepless nights, a few extra dollars, maybe even a tax on basic self-care needs. Sometimes the price is an internal shift: learning to be vulnerable, learning to let go, learning to have faith. But there are other types of dreams — the ones that keep us up at night, the ones that gnaw at our hearts, the ones that haven’t left us alone, for days, months or even years — and those are the most expensive dreams of all. Those dreams mark the threshold between who you are now, and who you are meant to become.
A year and a half ago, my dream was born from a puddle of tears (as most important dreams are). After ten years of pouring my heart into my life coaching career, I came to the heartbreaking recognition that although my tools were helpful and even life-changing for some, they were falling far short of what many of my students needed. I had come to the last inch of a dead-end road with my career...
3 Key Steps to Self-Compassion
Most of us have a natural compassion towards others. We see someone struggling or suffering and it's our human nature to want to extend a hand, to offer loving kindness and to want to help. Yet, when we look inward, many of us struggle to offer ourselves the same kindness.
Self-compassion means to extend love, friendliness and acceptance to one's self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering. To some extent, self-compassion also has the meaning of trusting oneself - trusting that we have what it takes to know ourselves thoroughly and completely without feeling hopeless, without turning against ourselves because of what we see. Self-compassion is a form of faith: a faith in the way we hold our conversation with life.
The Dalai Lama says that having compassion for oneself is the basis for developing compassion for others. When we have learned to have compassion for ourselves, this leads us naturally to unlimited friendliness toward others.
10 Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy
Most of us want to live happier, healthier and more meaningful lives. In this pursuit, we often look at what we should DO to be happy, and that seems pretty obvious: do more things you like and less things that you don't like. But, we often look for happiness in all the wrong places. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress, and suffering — and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress-free and happy — we cling to them. The Buddha called this habit "mistaking suffering for happiness," like a moth flying into the flame. This means that we confuse our temporary sense of relief or pleasure for happiness rather than seeing how it creates long-term suffering.