Thoughts on Taking Care of Yourself When Life is Hard
It’s okay to feel exactly what you’re feeling. You don’t need to feel any different than you do. (I often forget this and try to fix what I’m feeling rather than witnessing and welcoming.) Raise your arms up overhead. Exhale long and slow. Relax your shoulders. You are here and it’s going to be okay. […]
Continue readingThe wonderful wild mysterious life changing adventure of turning pro
For some of us, there is an essential passage in our creative lives that, if not reckoned with, leaves us frustrated, stymied, and feeling vaguely lost like we’re searching for something we can’t quite name. We may feel we are blocked from becoming our full selves blocked from following what calls to us. I first […]
Continue readingChoosing You
My mom died last week and I’m heavy with sadness. My mind is dull and my sleep is riddled with troubled busy dreams from which I emerge holding only an odd detail like the texture of the blue shag carpet from my childhood home. There was a moment when I was alone with mom, watching […]
Continue readingWhen Death Comes Like the Hungry Bear In Autumn
I am writing this beside my mom’s bed. She is dying and her breath grows quieter and quieter. Her face is like a child’s, soft and without a wrinkle. I was with her just last week and, four days after I left, her brain stopped knowing how to instruct her body to swallow. My sister […]
Continue readingWhat to do when life is pushing you to grow
I’ve been bubbling lately with an intensity unusual even for me. I’ve had a hard time sleeping. I often feel uneasy, like I’ve forgotten something important, but I have no idea what. I’ve journaled about this twitchy feeling and meditated with it; greeting my thoughts and feelings as we do at the Oasis. Yet why […]
Continue readingLife Wants You to Begin Again
If there is one thing I hear constantly from the creatives and writers I work with at my recommit to your art, recenter in your heart Oasis, on retreat, or in my writer’s mastermind, it’s the lament of what didn’t happen. The cry of “I didn’t make my page count” or “My best friend’s mother […]
Continue readingMaybe Failure is Just Another Word for Compost?
You may or may not know this, but last April I realized I’d spent four years writing a memoir that wasn’t going to work. Ever. As hard as I had worked to shape the material and find the central insight I wanted to share with you, it just wasn’t there. What was there was a […]
Continue readingOnce Upon a Time, There was a Woman Who…
Once upon a time, there was a woman who stood on the cusp of the new year and grinned. She grinned at all her past selves stretching behind her. Where once she would have judged those selves for their choices, now she bowed to them. They had brought her to this moment. Who would she […]
Continue readingHow to take a healthy break from your creative work
I received a great question from Ann who is attending one of my retreats next year: “How do you make sure that a ‘nice break’ from writing (for example, over the upcoming holidays) doesn’t become a block to writing? As in, how do you prepare yourself ahead of time? Do you ponder it much during […]
Continue readingWhat I learned from losing my dog
My fourteen-year-old dog Luna died last week. She had been in failing health for two years and it was clear over the weekend she was suffering and it was time to let her go. Bob and I cuddled her that last morning and fed her bits of cheese and told her how much we loved […]
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