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When people are ready to launch something new (…a workshop, a business, a creative work of art), they’ll sometimes take steps that are too small for them. This often stems from a fear of expressing their true vision. It also happens when they’re concerned about spending money on something that has an unknown outcome (…when we launch something new, we are by definition stepping into unknown territory).

For example, my client Mary wrote up a workshop description that she’d been talking about for mo

An interesting question to me is the chicken or egg question. I get distracted by this question. What comes first, cognition or affect, thought or emotion? Do I choose to feel what I feel at some level, or does it just happen to me? How autonomous am I in determining the quality of my own life? Do I have emotions, or do they have me?

Historically, as we know, Plato thought that emotions were just one component of the mind, along with desire and intellect. Aristotle on the other hand, made emotion

I recently started a new painting, using a canvass big enough to use up some old paint.  It was to be a study of yellows, with burnt sienna, vermillion red and other odds and ends I had accumulated over the years.  So I mixed the old paint with walnut oil, hoping to reconstitute it enough to have it slide on the canvass.  I quickly discovered that is not how it works.  I ended up with thick leaden lines that killed any life in their vicinity.  So, I left it for a while, thinking I would see it w

In the garden

I bury the remains of the mothers  -

The fish whose bones line the roots of my tomatoes-

That is how I pray

I kneel in the soft earth and look

Through the lattice of dark green leaves

There, yellow as buttercups in the sun,

Incipient fruit

Await the annunciation

I can already sense the bulging clusters

I take my well-sharpened scissors

And make space for the new life

Carefully pruning away the excess

To leave the essential

Isn’t it so with life?

I did an experiment once

I let the tomatoes grow

“This is our meditation practice as women, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves……”–Clarissa Pinkola Estes

In her dream, a woman finds a pile of bones out behind the place in which she is living.  This is a disturbing image–with its suggestion of a crime have been committed, an act of brutality, or harm having been done.  Although the dream does not provide information about the actual events that occurred, it marks a dark history.  The remnants of that history–the bones–hav

American psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton identifies our very human tendency to ignore difficult realities and overwrite them with thoughts and beliefs that are more palatable as "psychic numbing." This allows our ego to distract itself enough that it doesn’t have to engage with inner and outer voices and images and movements that go beyond the mainstream consciousness (in Shulman-Lorenz & Watkins, Toward Psychologies of Liberation).

When we witness instances of ecocide (ecological suicide) in the w

I dream about foxes living on my property—a silver fox and a red fox.  In the dream, I do not see them, but I know that they are there—mysterious presences that come through the woods and occasionally make themselves known.  In the waking world, I have seen the red fox.  Once, in the dead of winter, I looked out my dining room window and saw it walking on the surface of our frozen pond.  The contrast of color was startling—its bushy rust colored coat framed by the white and gray tones of the ice

"Scientific study, cognitive behavioral techniques, self-help books, and political action will not do the trick. We will not achieve the fundamental level of change and understanding that is called for unless the archetypal, transcendent, sacred and mythical dimension of the psyche is engaged. The sense of the sacred Carl Sagan saw as necessary to save the environment will not be developed. Our educational systems will not be able to teach from a deep, holistic, integrated perspective unless the