It’s easy to become wrapped up in what is wrong and difficult in our lives, easy to lose perspective of the larger picture. But when we shift our perspective, life gets better.

One of the most difficult challenges we have as humans is facing what is, especially when life presents you with things you didn’t order and don’t want: like everything in 2020

Loss and grief come in many forms, all of them real, all of them wrenching. My book, Grief Girl’s Guide, is here to help you with your grief.

There is a mantra I love that can help enormously with this process we call Life, a mantra that really should be a Core Principle for Living. Here it is.

By becoming present and receptive to the subtle and small, life is suddenly no longer a freeway race from birth to death; instead, it becomes a backroad exploration with multiple stops to take in the sights.

Division, anger, violence … our political landscape is truly disturbing. Here are some gentle reminders of how to avoid the “us and them” trap.

This horrid little virus has spurred limitations the likes of which most of us have never seen. But there is an upside to limitation … Read on.

We get to choose our attitude and approach to life, even in the storm. That choice is very simple: Do I choose fear, or do I choose love?

Chinese medicine calls viruses “Pernicious Evil Influences,” which sums it up pretty perfectly. They are all three of those things. But while viruses are nasty, the anxiety they generate is worse.

For most of my life, I have been a seeker: a seeker of truth, understanding, and also happiness. Seeking understanding and wisdom is honorable enough, but the happiness bit has been somewhat challenging.

On this Valentine's Day, I thought a little education on the heart and on the origin of the holiday might be of interest. An alternative, if you will, to the sentimentality imposed by Hallmark & Florist’s Day, February 14.

A long time ago, just out of graduate school and some 2,500 hours into a five-year process of becoming a counselor, I sat down with my supervisor and announced that, while I enjoyed working with clients, there was something more pulling at me.

I’m not in sync with this Christmas ho-ho. There are reasons. I have issues with the consumer crush. While I enjoy gift-giving as much as the next person and am a big fan of the cute shops in my quaint, historic town, the capitalist push of Christmas leaves me, well, I’d say cold, except that it’s warm.

I know exactly one person who loves getting together with family for the holidays. She tells of wonderful parents and siblings and spouses who actually like one another and who sit around laughing and drinking cider and playing Yahtzee. I don’t buy this story for one minute, but I nod and smile.

Two weeks ago, I was about to get to writing a little something about gratitude for this newsletter when the unexpected randomness of Life happened. My companion, Baci (whom you may recall from his recent celebrity appearance in this column) had a disc rupture, leaving his back legs paralyzed.

A number of years ago I read a little book titled, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. In it, the author tells the story of being struck by a mysterious condition that left her completely incapacitated, unable even to sit up.

I’ve been dealing with some big issues lately, things that hurt my brain and stir my emotional pot; things that if not kept on a tight rein release a toxic tsunami of anxiety. So I picked up Eckhardt Tolle’s A New Earth to try to get some perspective.

Before we zoom over Thanksgiving on our way to Christmas/New Years/Spring Break/Next Summer, I would like to pause to consider the most basic and greatest of gratitudes: that we have the privilege of being here at all.

There's a country song with the catchy little phrase: "When was the last time you did something for the first time?" Those words have (annoyingly) stuck with me because, well, I haven't done very much at all for the first time in a long time. This is not good.

It’s been two months since my last communication and I feel compelled to catch up. A lot has happened, the first and most significant of which affected all of us here on the West Coast. No, I’m not talking about the demoralizing implosion of the San Francisco Giants and the subsequent, equally depressing success of the Dodgers