Anxiety can easily run away with us if we are merely reacting to it’s jitters. The best way to halt the runaway fear before it begins is to sink down, breathe, and take the reins.

As with all trauma, pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to become incredibly small. All the details and to-do lists evaporate and life slows to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”

We’re almost there my friends. We’re at the finish line of 2020: the craziest, weirdest, most tumultuous, contentious, painful, scary, exhausting year that most of us have ever seen.

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.

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.

Here’s a holiday pop quiz: Do you remember what you received for Christmas last year? Do you remember what you gave? Me either.

I seldom do what I’m about to do, which, I hope, will make what follows jump out at you and grab your bathrobe.

One of the more interesting phenomena of middle age is the recognition of just how very stupid and arrogant you have been up to wherever you find yourself near the halfway point.

Our lives are being diverted and led away from what is most urgent and important, which is a meaningful relationship with living, breathing, animated life.

Expanding awareness and allowing yourself to be fully present to whatever appears leads to all sorts of intriguing questions … awareness might just change your life.

It’s completely normal these days to be busily elsewhere in the midst of our current activity. The problem is, this busy, divided attention causes us to miss out on life.