Category: relationships
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Wearing Pink
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, it’s the time we celebrate survivors and the time we remind ourselves that prevention can save lives. There’s lots of pink and lots of events where we can honor the journey we have survived or honor the lives of those whom we have lost. But the message is much…
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Transformation
I’ve been thinking about the concept of transformation. The word and the concept feel sort of magical to me. It’s the caterpillar becoming a butterfly and the ugly duckling the beautiful swam and it’s the change we sometimes see when someone’s face alights with a smile that lights up a room. But is it really…
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Doing Hard Things
So much of the direction of our life reflects our personality. We see it in our relationships, in our work, in our choices. We play our roles in life firmly based on who we are and who we have always been. That’s not to say we can’t learn and grow and change along the way.…
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From Generation to Generation
By the time I was born, both of my grandfathers had been gone for many years. My paternal grandmother died when I was a year old and my maternal grandmother turned 80 when I was a toddler. I believe she’d understood English fully, and likely spoke it well in younger years but, by the time…
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Letting Go and Holding On
One of the absolute highlights of my work life is having the opportunity to teach yoga to the elders who live in the communities where I work. We do chair yoga and, especially in the long term care setting, almost all of my yogis are in wheelchairs. I will tell you, without question, that these…
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Doing What’s Right
For those of us of the Jewish faith, we are about to begin a New Year. It is a time, as with the secular New Year, when we reflect on the year that is ending and the year that is ahead. In our Jewish tradition, we specifically focus, during the ten days between the New…
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Addicted to Busy
I have never quite been able to figure out where my personal “off” switch is, physically or mentally. My mother’s most frequently used expression with me was “Would you please light somewhere?” She didn’t mean that in the “shine your light” sense but rather in the “please land and stop moving around” sense. Stillness has…
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Is Civility Dead?
There were a lot of behavioral norms drilled into me by my parents. And I passed them along to my children. As I was, they were taught to say “please” and “thank you” and “excuse me.” We all learned to be respectful of others, to treat one another with kindness and to remember that “we…
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When the Student is Ready
How often have we heard the expression, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It’s one of those phrases I tend to grimace a bit at, feeling that “wait and see” is not really the way we make changes in our lives. And yet, I have come to realize that there is more…
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Living in Truth
Often I find that with a larger group, especially one that does not connect all that often, that starting a meeting with an “icebreaker” can be not just a good introduction but a way for folks to find points of commonality with one another. I see it as one more tool in the toolbox for…
With a Full Heart 