Restorative Empathy

Transforming Domination Culture from the Inside Out

The Truth about Your Inner Critic

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Do you spur on your inner critic, hoping that if you can just be harder on yourself, you can liberate yourself from your pain and inhabit your life more fully?

Or do you try to stifle, ignore, or exile your inner critic, believing that the key to happiness is to just think positively and overpower or deny your doubts and judgments?

If you regularly use one or both of these strategies, how are they working for you? Are you genuinely fulfilled? Has your critic really gone away? Or are you feeling frustrated and discouraged, wondering why you’re trying so hard and still not getting the results you’re wanting? [Read more…]

Embracing Your Joys and Your Sorrows: Living Your Whole Life with Presence

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Six weeks ago, my home burned down. In ten minutes. While I was out of town.

Complicatedly, the building that burned wasn’t my private residence, though it was the heart of the place where I was living and have frequently visited and lived over the past 17 years. Since August, I’d been living at Wilbur Hot Springs—an off-the-grid historic lodge, hot springs, and nature preserve. Wilbur is where I go for creative renewal and deep contemplation. There is nowhere I feel more deeply nourished, more heart-flung-open to the world, more at home. So when the beloved Victorian-era lodge was largely destroyed in a ten-minute blaze on March 29, I experienced one of my life’s greatest shocks and loses.

Up until the fire, I’d been teaching a weekly self-empathy workshop for Wilbur guests. In that offering, I always shared my favorite Buddhist principle: that every life has 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. I take this to mean that pushing through sorrows and striving toward joys won’t leave us with any more joys, but it will deprive us of the growth, depth of experience, and meaning we gain from offering presence to each joy and sorrow as they inevitably arise.

[Read more…]

Making Nourishing, Accomplishable New Year’s Resolutions Free of Self-Domination, Defeatism, and “Shoulds”

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Every year, an estimated 40 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but one study suggests that only 12 percent actually accomplish their goals. Why do so many of us start each new year with resolutions, only to drop them once the hope of a fresh start diminishes?

The cultural message about our unsuccessful attempts to stick to our resolutions is that we’re lazy, distracted, or incompetent. But the standard resolutions model we’re given actually set us up to “fail” and thus break trust with ourselves, so that we’re left in doubt of our own ability to act from a place of empowered intentionality. When we fail to achieve our goals with that model, we’re told we lack willpower, and to try again. And again, and again, until we get tired and give up. We may get so discouraged and angry that we resolve never to make another “stupid resolution” again. But without setting and acting on our own intentions—whatever the time of year—how can we ever hope to be empowered, fulfilled, and truly free? [Read more…]

Releasing Shoulds and Choosing Joy: A Restorative Approach to the Holidays

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Six years ago, my grandmother died a week and a half before Christmas. While she was ninety-one and physically incapacitated by ill health, her death was a huge visceral shock to my system. She’d helped raise me from the time I was four, and while our relationship had not been without its pain and complications, she’d been the woman who’d sat with me at the kitchen table for thousands of hours, playing games, eating meals, being my life’s most constant companion. She was very much my parent, and after losing her, I immediately released all my usual approaches to the holidays, fully expecting that the inevitable result would be a time of bleakness and unrelenting grief. [Read more…]

From Procrastination to Collaboration: Resolving Inner Conflict By Making Time for All of Your Needs

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Why do we do one thing when we’re trying to accomplish another? Our predominant cultural message is that procrastination is personal weakness, lack of willpower, or some other personality flaw that must be overcome—an assessment that more often leads to self-recrimination than any satisfying resolution of the problem. That’s because procrastination isn’t a flaw, it’s actually an important signal that you have an inner conflict in need of attention. [Read more…]