Category: Article
The Medicine of Walking
How Walking Makes Us Human In his incredible book, In Praise of Walking, author Shane O’Mara writes that walking separates humans from other animals. Walking upright “frees our hands for other tasks…makes our minds mobile…and changes our relationship to the world.” O’Mara even concludes that a baby who grows up in a non-human environment will…
Sensing Another’s True Nature
Often when we meet someone for the first time, we introduce ourselves by saying what we do, where we live, what we enjoy. Rarely do we speak about the most elusive yet most important aspect of our lives: who we are. This is very possibly because we don’t know, not really. This is because each…
Opening Windows
Othering lives within me. The parts of me that I love and the parts that I don’t. What gets neglected in me The corners of my soul that I don’t visit for fear of the unknown Or because I have forgotten. There are rooms in my soul that are filled with dust, Webs, and darkness.…
Renegotiating When Circumstances Shift
I recently got together with some friends for the first time since March. This event was a big deal for the whole group. To ensure everyone would feel comfortable, we agreed to get Covid tests and self-quarantine in the week leading up to our get-together. And yet, I still felt very wobbly about the whole…
The Tiger, The Strawberry, and the Role of Beauty
There is a well-known Zen story about a rather non-conventional response to impending doom. A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him…
I Am, Therefore I Celebrate
What does it mean to celebrate one’s self? How does one celebrate? Since debuting my book, the notion of celebration has been one I’m sitting with. I’ve been through many celebrations in my life, and fortunately, enjoyed a fair share of my own. Mostly, we head out for some nice food, a sumptuous meal outside…
How to Listen Mindfully
This post was originally published on the Mindful Leader blog in September 2020. Many of us spend the majority of our days in conversations of one kind or another. This is particularly true for coaches, therapists, and other practitioners who spend their time supporting others’ development. Bringing greater mindfulness to how we approach conversations with…
Somatics Were Key to My Healing
I heard the word Somatics for the first time during the Professional Coaching Course. Every day after lunch, our group would reconvene for fifteen minutes of dancing before starting the afternoon session. It seemed to me that everyone else looked forward to this part of the afternoon – whether they could move with abandon or…
To Love This Much
I never wanted to love this way. The way in which the heart is wide open and you can feel the rawness of the flesh be touched by the gentle breeze of the morning. I never wanted to love this way. The way in which my heart worries about the wounded coyote I saw this…
Midlife, COVID-19 and Climate Change Crises: What Are We Learning?
Jett Psaris, PhD has written the most beautiful book I know about midlife crisis: Hidden Blessings: Midlife Crisis as A Spiritual Awakening. It is a book I recommend often to clients needing guidance in that stage of life. In it she writes: “Some experience their entry points into midlife as maximally disturbing, with overwhelming levels…
I ➙ We ➙ It: Integral Coaching in Corporate Leadership
This is a case study of an Integral Coaching program that my company, Praxsys Leadership, introduced into a mid-sized construction company. When we began our work together, the leadership team consisted of a half-dozen directors, each managing their individual functions in a siloed fashion. There was little collaboration and even less trust among the leaders.…
The Deeper Invitation in the Story of the Empty Boat
Like the Taoist Farmer story, the story of the Empty Boat is often used by coaches to help their clients gain perspective. Here’s a short version: A fisherman is on the water at dusk with poor visibility. He sees a boat coming right towards him and starts getting frantic and yelling for the fisherman steering…
Autumn’s Concerto
First Movement: Reminiscence The avenues were lined with gold, and the cobbled pavement, buried in brilliant scarlet. Poetically, that would have been how I’d like to describe the scene. Spending my third fall in the US and that clichéd touristy image of fall with its rich amber maple trees remains a fantasy. One reason was…
Shaping Our Presence to Be More Supportive
This article was originally published on the Mindful Leader Blog in June of 2020. In these days of heightened anxiety and insecurity, many of us are drawn to be a safe and reassuring space for those who are in crisis and afraid. And, when we’re in that often unavoidable place ourselves, we’re grateful to the…
Chatting with Your Inner Critic
In a recent post on my blog, I offered some thoughts on how shifting mindset from a place of fear to possibility can help during challenging moments. It certainly helps to approach change and uncertainty with an expansive, adventurous mindset, but doing so doesn’t mean that we pretend we’re not scared. In her book Big…
Sitting in Squares
I now meditate every morning in a little square, my green meditation cushions backed up against the wall under some forest photos my aunt took. I’m the first up in my house, save for the cat playing with my feet. The same friends I meditated with at work meditate, plus some new people. Now we…
In Our Eyes
I had been staying with my mom for a month, nursing her 98-year-old body back to a relative state of health after a downturn. I am not sure what really happened prior to me getting there, but I think she had kind of thrown in the towel. For almost every moment of her life, she…
Balancing Ourselves Using the Six Streams of Competence
This post was originally published on the Mindful Leader blog in April 2020. In these times of massive change and disruption, many of us are looking inward to see how we can be of greater support to our communities and the world. Integral Coaching, which is a sustainable, self-generating framework for developing ourselves and others,…
Our Commitment to Anti-Racism
Dear friends, We live in a society plagued by injustice. The past several days have shone a bright spotlight on just how insidious, systemic, historical, evil and dehumanizing many of these injustices are for the black community. As an organization whose purpose is the flourishing of life, we stand for the flourishing of black lives.…
Turning Toward Sorrow
In the midst of all the suffering that our world is feeling—with the current events in the United States that reveal clearly the ways in which our communities of color continue to suffer directly from discrimination and oppression, while we continue to be in the middle of a pandemic that has people fear not only…