Spiritual Toolbox

Do you ever get stuck, like really stuck? Where you just can’t get your body - your energy - UP in order to take any action beyond the “must dos” in your life? It can feel like paralysis. You know that you should take some action, little or big, but you just can’t break the stasis.

Not everyone will relate to this experience. It belongs to a subset of us who are “centered” in a way which inclines us to get stuck in a thinking and feeling cycle. To be sure you are part of this subset (with me)…

We can all find ourselves in moments of frenzy.

This morning I caught myself loading the dishwasher WHILE tucking in my shirt. 😵‍💫

Our frenzy isn't always visible on the outside but is certainly still felt inside. It's even possible (and common in the clients I see) for the inner frenzy to lack any cause at all. It's just there, brewing inside. 

Whether your inner experience is one of high stress and anxiety, deep turmoil and depression or just generally feeling "off", your nervous system n…

Here's a little tool I use a lot in my therapy room. 

It has a very clinical-sounding name: bilateral stimulation. But no need to be intimidated - no electricity, probes or other devices are involved in this endeavor! Just your sweet little hands and your good ol' reliable breath. 🤲 🌬

Bilateral stimulation essentially means that you are stimulating both hemispheres of the brain, just as we do during REM sleep. In doing so, the reptilian brain that powers your fight/flight response becomes di…

There’s a song I’ve sung to both my children called “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. It’s the story of this brave quest to find a bear – perhaps you can view the bear hunt as a metaphor in this case for enlightenment or some other spiritual goal.

In this preschool song there are MANY different obstacles on the path to this “bear”: swirling snowstorms, gooey mud, deep dark forests. Let’s say that each of these obstacles are the aspects of life that we feel threatened by, such as our wounds, our e…

The road to a spiritual life is different for everyone, but spiritual bypassing is a potential hazard for all. Sometimes our spiritual journey can feel so slow-going that to think that we go too fast seems a far-fetched idea. Some spiritual awakenings can feel like a blissful catapult into a new mind-blowing paradigm where nothing feels the same anymore. Regardless of the route your journey takes, the skipping of important turns happens far more often than you might think. 

Spiritual bypassin…

This morning I found myself in an unexpected argument with my husband. 😬

It was supposed to be a mildly mundane conversation about our schedule wherein I offer to take on more time with our children. But all of a sudden he's upset with me and I'm completely baffled. 

I'm convinced that I'm acting from my pure and perfect True Self, that he's rejecting me and that something therefore must be wrong with him. 

My conclusion? He's help-rejecting. He's not really listening. He's projecting onto …

Time is one of those concepts that would likely implode our brains if we ever fully grasped it. All my brain can manage to hold onto is a collection of little stories that secretly hold the definitions of time.

One of these stories comes from the show MacGyver, a 1980's American television program I loved to watch as a child. It was about a hunk of a man with a feathered mullet who always seemed to find himself in a room with a ticking time bomb. And yet, as the seconds counted down, he resou…

We all have a little Inner Drill Sergeant in us. You know, the voice that drives you along and tells you to push harder and do more?

While some might find benefit from more of the internal nagging, in many cultures it can be such a strong force that it drives us to dis-ease. In Japan there is even a name for it: karoshi, which literally means “death by overwork”. But no one works longer hours than the Americans. And this is nothing to brag about. 

Stress and fatigue are the first rebellious …

It happened again this morning. I was scraping the ice off the windshield of my car and I noticed this all-too-familiar feeling inside me.

It was part anxiety, part guilt. The ominous feeling that I had done something wrong. 

And I was already punishing myself, imaginary whip in hand, deep in self-flagellation. 😔

Had I actually committed some egregious act? NO! Absolutely not! 

But somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, my psyche had been doing a slow rolodex crawl through the recent his…