Category Archives: Stress

Recipe for Sanity: How to Keep the Holidays Bright!  

It’s a time of celebration! You are busy and happily making a list and checking it twice. Trees are being decorated and lights are strung around the house which brings a glow to the season. The delicious smell of baking cookies is wafting through the house. The stockings are being hung with glee. You’ve fought

I Love Yoga: Why You Should Too

I love yoga and I love teaching and sharing yoga with others. Why? The simple answer is: It makes me feel good and I think it will make you feel good too. The complex answer you will find below. If you don’t know a lot about yoga, you might immediately conjure up images of people

The Heart of Mindfulness – Remembering the Key Components of Practice

Teaching mindfulness to beginners for many years, I’ve learned that people tend to focus on certain aspects of the teaching and forget or have a harder time grasping others. Specifically, people focus on the “being present” part of mindfulness but quickly forget both the intention and the heart qualities of kindness, compassion, and nonjudgment that

Who Needs Some Extra Resilience?

The quality of resilience is something particularly important during these challenging times that we are all facing. Everyone I know has had friends or family members fall ill or die, encounter difficulties through employment and housing, feel the loss of hugs and other benefits of intimate relationships, and much more. According to the definition, people

Generating Hope in the Face of Difficult Times

Do you find yourself feeling a little a little blue, impatient, angry, sad, or lonely because of pandemic living? I’m right there with you. The Sunday after Thanksgiving was a grey day, and my mood was reflective of the color. The holidays had been small, but lovely, but the joy of being able to cook

Don’t Just Overcome The Odds—But Thrive as a Result

There is so much to be learned by his story about not just overcoming, but actually thriving against the odds. The two parts that stood out to me was the idea of finding new tools and opening to wisdom that had been inaccessible before.

Mindfulness Meets the Full Catastrophe: What sustains you during difficult times?

You might not have noticed, but my weekly blogging took a decided pause in the last few weeks. It seems like there was one catastrophe after the other in my life and it was hard to keep up emotionally, physically, and mentally. There was simply not the psychic energy to put words to paper. Sometimes

Be Mindful About What You Practice

Whatever you practice, you get better at. So, think for a moment. What are you practicing every day? This includes the thoughts you entertain, the emotions you focus on, and the behaviors you repeat. Sometimes the things we practice make us feel better and some of them definitely don’t. Let’s take it one at a

A Marriage of Intuitive and Mindful Eating

When I was asked in 2007 to develop a program for people who struggled with how to eat and with the relationship they had to their bodies, I had some research to do. At the time, I worked at the University of Missouri for the wellness program for faculty and staff. A survey we conducted

Changing Habits with Mindfulness

Have you ever tried to change a habit? It’s pretty hard, right? You make a commitment to yourself that you’re not going to eat as much, drink as much, shop as much, swear as much, be angry as much, etc. You might even write down your goals and post them in a prominent place. But,