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“Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.” ~Henry David Thoreau I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I was standing just outside the circle. Not always, but whenever I stepped back and looked at the whole of my life, the thread running through has been a sense of being on…

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ~E.E. Cummings When I was a little girl, I had the smallest bedroom in the house. It was tiny. Honestly, probably the size of a small walk-in closet. But it was mine. And for the first time, I got to choose what it…

“Peace is not the absence of resistance. It is learning to stop judging yourself for being human.” ~Unknown At the time of writing this, I am on vacation. My wife and I are parked beside a quiet lake in our RV, our small moving version of home. We’ve always loved that part of it: bringing…

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ~J.R.R. Tolkien It was my son’s fifteenth birthday. His basketball game got canceled, so my wife,…

“Rule your mind or it will rule you.” ~Buddha Some mornings I wake before dawn and lie still, listening for signs that the house is awake. A cough down the hallway. The sound of a drawer opening. Water running softly in the kitchen sink. My mother is ninety-seven years old now, and before my feet…

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers I remember sitting on the living room floor one evening while my boys were playing nearby. One of them was trying to build something out of Legos and getting more and more frustrated every time it…

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” ~Laurell K. Hamilton My older sister had four years over me. As a kid, I worshipped the ground she walked on. She was so smart, so pretty, so cool. I wanted to be wherever she was,…

We are truly free when we let go of the thought that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard. The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of…

“Music gives color to the air of the moment.” ~Karl Lagerfeld I used to think I was a good listener. I could hold eye contact, nod at the right moments, ask thoughtful follow-up questions. But one afternoon, sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat in a small studio in Rishikesh, I realized I had never truly…

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” ~Rumi I grew up in a council house in the 1970s, in a world where children were seen and not heard. We were kicked out in the morning and told to come back when the streetlights came on. On the surface, it looked normal. But…