For many people, love feels good, but it can also feel scary! For some, commitment is terrifying - primarily relational commitment. For others, the thought of losing the one they love can leave them feeling panicked. Attachment theory is a helpful lens for understanding our feelings about relationships and commitment.

Spring Equinox, March 20th 2022, marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. It is a time where we celebrate coming out: coming out of the darkness, out of scarcity, out the harsh cold stillness of winter. It also marks a time of coming into: coming into the light, into dreams of summer growth and fall abundance, into possibilities. It is a time where we wake from the deep sleep of winter, crawl out of our dens, and stretch into the sunlight that falls upon our faces - waking us to the possibilities that may come.

There is a ton of great research that supports the many benefits of walking for physical health as well as emerging research to support the mental health benefits of walking. Like many during the early days of the pandemic, I found myself taking more walks as a way to break up my day and get out of the house, but it soon turned into an essential part of my routine and well-being. Walking is a simple but powerful practice that can yield benefits in many areas of life.

Loneliness is an experience often associated with feeling alone, unwanted, and empty. You can have people in your life and still feel lonely. It is thought that loneliness is painful because human beings need each other to survive as social animals, and the pain of loneliness pushes us to seek out connections with other humans for the survival of our species. Social isolation is rarely survivable.

Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves the care we need? The care that fills our cup, rather than drains it or numbs it? How you view self-care, and whether you believe you are deserving of it or not, points to many internalized messages about your self-worth, agency, and cultural social narratives. It also contributes to the subconscious ways in which you might self-sabotage or self-neglect - leading to further burnout, anxiety, and/or depression.

We make these decisions and set these goals with good intentions, but we actually end up setting ourselves up for disappointment. We set the bar high for ourselves and end up feeling defeated and discouraged when we aren't getting the results we want, and we begin to lose momentum. So how do you get yourself out of these moments and moods where you feel stuck and disheartened? You give yourself the gift of grace.

Losing a pet can feel traumatic, and it can be especially hard to cope with when the death of your pet is unexpected. When your pet’s passing is sudden or has occurred in traumatic circumstances, it can be hard to cope. When this happens it is very common to get stuck in various stages of grief.

Self-care is not a new term, however, how we use it now is. Self-care started gaining traction in the digital age and really gathered steam during the pandemic. In a session, when I ask clients how they might practice self-care, they often report that they don’t. They don’t have time for self-care or they can’t afford it. That they need to finish their to-do list in order to relax enough or to be worthy of self-care. That self-care feels like a chore.

Setting boundaries is often not something we are taught directly but rather learn from others as a byproduct of our formative relationships and environment. By definition, boundaries refer to the outer limits of marked bounds of an object or place. Personal boundaries are multifaceted and can describe physical, emotional, and social perimeters. Reflection, awareness, and communication are all key skills in setting new boundaries and respecting those of others.

A trigger is something related to a past trauma that happens externally or internally or both that affects your emotional state, often causing feelings of overwhelm and/or distress. When you are triggered, it affects your ability to remain present in the moment, and you may notice specific behavior or thought patterns come up. Words, phrases, tones, sounds, smells, people, and places can all be triggers for people who have experienced trauma.

We have four seasonal markers each year: Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Fall Equinox, and Winter Solstice. These seasonal markers have long traditions that range from the logistical (preparing food, herd migration, and farming for the season ahead) to spiritual (celebration of coming light, birthing season, abundant harvest). Regardless of how you think of these seasonal markers of change - or if you think of them at all - they influenced our ancestors greatly and they are a wonderful time for us to explore our own lives.

By directing your conscious attention toward the positive events and feelings you experience, you can begin to address and balance the negativity balance. One simple and powerful way to do this is gratitude. Gratitude is the conscious focus on what is going right in your life, who and what is meaningful and important, what feels kind, loving, supportive, and evokes a sense of love and wellbeing. Gratitude also has positive emotional and physiological impacts on the brain and body.

This blog post looks at more global topics of change that we might struggle to accept and offers ways in which we might work towards reconciliation. If the past two years have taught us anything with a global pandemic, unprecedented weather events, financial and/or job insecurity, political upheaval, and more, it’s that there are many things we are not in control of - or many things that are outside our locus of control. And while some of us might rationally know that there’s a lot outside our locus of control, the American narrative is that we, as individuals, are in control of our lives.

In our busy, bustling, modern world we have come accustomed to our experience being full of noise at any given time. When we find a pause in our day we pick up our phones and are bombarded by news and notifications. We are in a constant, unconscious pursuit to distract ourselves from silence. This begs the question, why do we fear silence? What about it makes us so uncomfortable that we are willing to do almost anything to avoid it? By finding time to be silent and quiet the mind we are creating space for ourselves to listen to reflect into our inner world. When we create space between the stimulus and response, we can make more embodied and conscious choices and decisions that are aligned with our truth.

For trees, fall is a time to conserve energy in preparation for surviving the stress of winter, surviving change. You can learn that change and transition are inevitable, and adapting and coping with change can benefit you. Resourcing yourself prepares you and supports you during times of transition. You can use this time to go inward and reflect on what is nourishing in your life and what is not.

There’s an old saying that “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This means that when we do certain things over and over again, the neurons that are used to complete the task wire together and start to create neuropathways. The more we do something, the stronger the neuropathway becomes. This is great if we are learning a new skill we want to get better at. The more we do something, the better we get at it. Hence the saying: practice makes perfect.

Depth psychology broadly refers to a range of approaches that are focused on researching and exploring the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. If we think of ourselves as a tree, so often we seek growth and understanding in our conscious world (above ground) but yet we fear putting our roots down for we know not what lies underneath us in the deep, dark, earth. When we seek growth but fear the unknown, we become rootbound, constricted, tied up in our thoughts and feelings, and cut off from our truest sense of self.

Anyone who has experienced grief knows that it is an authentic, strongly felt experience. The void of loss comprises a multitude of emotions. Grief is the experience we have when we have lost something. This loss can be a former self, a friendship, a job, a relationship, a way of life, or the death of a loved one. Grief is like a wound that gets opened up repeatedly, causing waves of feelings, sometimes all at once, and sometimes one emotion will rush through like floodwaters. Life does not stop for grief, so the big question is, how does one cope with the intensely felt experience of the grief process?

Season change has been counted on, followed, and celebrated for generations. We plant in the spring, grow and tend in the summer, harvest in the fall, and rest in the winter. There is a rhythm in it. Season change marks a time of transition as we slowly and then rapidly move from one season to the next. It’s like a wave in the ocean. It seems to move in slowly, rising to a crest, and then rapidly coming to shore, only to retreat back and do it all over again.

Our brains are powerful and complex tools that help us navigate our lives in so many important ways. The brain keeps us alert to danger, it reminds us to breathe and to eat, it helps process the world around us, and form relationships with others through communication and language. Our brains do so many wonderful things for us all the time but what happens when the mind betrays us? Our brains start to make connections that aren’t accurate or based in reality, providing us with a distorted and unreliable picture of what’s going on. These deceptive patterns of thinking and information processing are referred to as Cognitive Distortions. These distortions can easily work their way into our world view without us noticing, thus it is important for us to recognize these kinds of thoughts and challenge them before they become a problem in our lives.