You can use the player below or search for my podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and most other places people get their podcast listen on. ​

When I think about all the conversations I've had in therapeutic contexts, both as a client and as a clinician, I realize that the majority of the work has been about getting comfortable being human. We are both deeply flawed and brilliantly fabulous beings, and we don't come with instruction manuals.

What we do have is a tradition of connecting with sources of wisdom via teachers, elders, philosophers, and others who've committed to making their own journey from wounded to liberated — taking notes and creating field guides for those who follow. The variables and wisdom containers (e.g., yoga, religion, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc.) may change, but the basic axioms and truths stay the same.

To be human is to make mistakes, to be at the mercy of our hormones, social structures, egos, and our deep longing to move though life with ease and abundance. Our lives have periods of learning, growing, loving, maturing, and sharing what we've observed with others. Sooner or later, we leave our physical bodies — none of us gets out of this alive. Getting comfortable being human and cultivating an awareness of the arc of our whole journey is critical to having a more enjoyable ride through life. 

There are a lot of tools and approaches we can use to get comfortable being human, and I've launched a podcast to explore them. You can find the first episode here on the Anchor.FM platform and wherever else you get your podcast listen on. I'll post new episodes every other Friday starting January 3, 2020. 

If you have questions or reflections, I'd love to hear them. You can send me an email or leave me a voice message at Anchor.FM. I look forward to all of us getting more comfortable being human together. 

The heart's job is to beat, the lungs to breathe, and the brain to think. All are necessary for you to function, and they do so with no effort on your part.

As the brain does it's job, you can sift through the thoughts it offers, being careful to notice when those thoughts form chains, and when those chains of thoughts start to create stories about yourself and the world around you.

You can choose to be curious about the validity of those narratives, being especially cautious if they are bitter, hostile, mean, or toxically critical.

Be especially skeptical if you are weaving narratives of hate, blame, and disdain toward yourself.

Stories, by their nature, change as they are told and re-told. As you move through your wholeness journey, part of the work is to observe the stories you've constructed about yourself and others as they  shift. 

​As you recognize your wholeness, those stories begin to move from critical to compassionate while maintaining healthy boundaries and balance. They become more authentic and emerge from a state of emotional stability and presence. Perhaps they are  informed by fear, sure - but  they are not controlled by it.  

Cultivating abiding authentic presence with ourselves, connecting to consciousness & taking a break from mind, and making space for curiosity and compassion to replace the constant critical voice is essential to finding emotional freedom.

Those brain-beats we call thoughts - especially when strung together to conclude that you are something other than capable and lovable - can be noticed and then allowed to move along. Again and again and again - until you are able to  just notice them without being consumed or creating a story.. 

Imagine a weaver, carefully selecting threads to go into fabric for a  fine garment - be just as patient and vigilant as you sift through your thoughts to create your beliefs.