Life Lessons
When Receiving is Really Giving
“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self sufficiency.” Mahatma Gandhi I was what people now refer to as a “free range child,” which is a pleasant way of saying that no one had any idea where I was for large portions of the day. I was the opposite…
Read MoreHow Persephone Found Heaven in Hell
Most of us know Persephone as the young woman taken by Hades into the underworld. Once associated with innocence, flowers and spring, she became Queen of the Underworld, a woman capable of moving between darkness and light because she understood them both. Her story is often presented as one of innocence lost, yet I have…
Read MoreThe Best of Both Worlds: Finding Home in Two Places
After my niece was tragically killed in 2011, I started going home to Western New York more frequently to be with my family. It started with three weeks at a time and renting summer cottages, then evolved by 2021 into staying for several months as my mother’s dementia got worse. I became an expert at…
Read MoreWhen No Answer IS the Answer
Closure is something I hear people searching for all the time, especially when a relationship or friendship ends without the conversation they desperately wanted or the answers they believed they deserved. There is something particularly difficult about an ending that does not feel finished. For many of us, closure has come to mean receiving…
Read MoreThe People Who Remember Who We Used to Be
Yesterday I received news that a friend from back home had passed away. I immediately was transported back to a time when he came to visit and several of us went to the Santa Monica Pier. Sadly, I realized that out of the five of us that were there that day, two are now in…
Read MoreHave You Made Peace with Your Anger?
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carl Jung Few psychologists have influenced my thinking more profoundly than Carl Jung, perhaps because he never asked us to become less human in order to become more whole. Instead, he invited us to stop running from the parts of…
Read MoreThe Stories We Mistake for Truth
I recently heard a medium on television confidently state that 80% of the population dreams in black and white. The comment immediately caught my attention, not because I considered it impossible, but because it seemed inconsistent with my own experience and with the thousands of conversations I have had over the years with clients, students,…
Read MoreThe Quiet Strength of Grieving People
There are certain readings that will stay with me forever. Not because they were dramatic or filled with grand predictions, but because I was sitting with someone whose life had been permanently altered by loss, and yet somehow they were still standing. I’ve recently read for a few parents who have lost sons in their…
Read MoreThe Lost Art of Deep Conversations
I’m not good with small talk and have often been told I am “too intense” because of this. If I am having a conversation with someone, within minutes we will be discussing topics like childhood traumas, crop circles, relationship patterns, aging parents, or death and dying. I simply am only wired for deep and meaningful…
Read MoreWhy Emotionally Unavailable People Feel So Magnetic
Intense chemistry in a relationship is not always a sign of compatibility, and like many before me, I have learned this the hard way. Sometimes what we actually experience is an activation because something unresolved inside of us gets stirred awake by a person who feels emotionally difficult to fully reach. Then, because the feelings…
Read More