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Make a list of all the foods you love – not the foods you merely pretend to love because it looks good on your resume – but the foods you truly adore. Things like pizza, chips and cheese, sweet and salty faux granola bars, waffles smeared with peanut butter. Now give them all up for …
Thirty years. That’s how long I held a resentment from an episode that happened back when I was a kid. The incident involved getting a hand-colored, Barbie coloring book page from a girl down the block, who we’ll call Stacy. I remember being overjoyed that Stacy would gift me with such a fine item – …
Think back on yesterday, the past week or even the past year. What are the first memories that come to mind? If you’re like most of us, you’re likely to quickly and easily remember anything crappy that happened. Like the waiter losing your debit card, the dog puking in the car on the way to …
When an irritant gets into the middle of a clam shell, it can eventually turn into a pearl. But when irritants pile up in our daily lives, they can eventually drive us insane. A story from a pal we’ll call Midge shows us how. Midge was a no-nonsense, straightforward lady who loved to laugh. But …
We all know those big-huge projects that somehow end up in our laps from time to time. They may be work-related projects our boss demands, or they can be goals we set for ourselves – like losing 15 pounds, finishing a degree, or writing our memoir. A recent one of mine was getting new gravel …
Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You just had a soothing, tranquil experience with a pal, your life coach, at a Reiki share, or some other place and you feel calm, cool, collected and in love with the whole world and everything in it. Then you get behind the wheel of your …
When you’re tired, you sleep. When you’re hungry, you eat. When your fingers and toes get pruny and wrinkled from being in the water, you get you out of the pool. While it’s often easy to change certain situations and circumstances by taking an obvious action, it may be a bit tougher to change how …
Sure, we humans need things like oxygen, food, water and pictures of puppies to survive. But there’s a deeper layer of things we need to thrive. My recovery coach training emphasizes 10 of those needs, and I put them all on a Human Needs Monster as an art therapy project on the topic of support. …
When you leave mounds of clothes and accessories alone in the dark long enough, a strange thing happens. They breed. Some split like amoebas to produce duplicate shirts and pants, while others give birth to litters of new skirts, scarves, hats and shorts you swear you’ve never seen before. It’s a pretty scary thing, which …
I never really knew true agony until my dog Sawyer died. Sure, I had known a variety of pain, various modes of depression, and even different sorts of suffering. But the death of my beloved dog in 2014 pierced my heart with a level of agony that I never knew existed. It actually DID feel …