The Problem With Pushing Resilience
Personal Perspective: Modern life is hard for Gen Z-ers, as they face permacrisis, endless choice, and other challenges. Calling them snowflakes doesn’t help.
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Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness”
“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” “Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped,” Carl Sagan urged in his beautiful and timely case for moving beyond us vs. them and marrying conviction with compassion. But what does…
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1980s Culture Wars: It Makes You Stupid
In the previous essay in this series I discussed the culture war tactic of criticizing something by alleging it is a waste of time. This is perhaps the mildest culture war tactic with the stronger ones focusing on allegations of serious harm. During the 1980s culture war against gaming, there were such allegations. While…
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Hasslers: How Difficult People Drain Time From Your Life
Difficult people don’t just drain your patience – they may also affect your health. New research on “hasslers” shows how persistent negative social strain can wear us down over time. The people around us aren’t just background characters in the movie of our lives. They are an integral part of the psychological and biological environment…
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Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.” Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time in solitude, in the company of trees, far from the bustle of…
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Florida Heat & Workplace Safety Part I
Living in my adopted state of Florida, I have become accustomed to heat warnings and the local radio station providing advice on how to keep kids from being killed by the heat. Based on my own experience as a runner and doing work outside in the summer, I know that the Florida heat and humidity…
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How Integrative Counselling Works Online
Learn how integrative counselling works online: a gentle, flexible approach to therapy that meets you with care, wherever you are in the world today.
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The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me like the stone thrones of gods, snow-capped over the oracle…
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Why Traumatic Memories Feel Like They’re Happening Right Now
These findings help explain why the brain continues predicting danger after trauma — and could reshape how we understand and treat PTSD.
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Hope Breath: Joy, Compassion, Hope, and Love Have Arrived
Put your finger under your nose, inhale, then exhale. The air comes back warmer, and you didn’t do that. A three-minute practice built on what happens when you stop trying so hard.
