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Four Keys to Contentment: This Present Life
Contentment is a radical choice these days. Our culture is consumer-based which means that the world continually reminds us of what we do not have. We follow wealthy celebrities in part to experience wealth vicariously. We almost always believe we could handle it better than the shallow but beautiful people who live out their private moments in front of a camera. Contentment is not merely radical these days; it is immoral. If we are not constantly striving to be more, have more, and have a greater impact, then we are copping out. The rat race is a moral imperative for many. I see so many couples working so hard to…
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Three Methods that Helped Me Conquer Anxiety
I became aware of my anxiety, ironically, when suddenly I had less to fear. I found myself a single mother of four wonderful daughters and free of a narcissistic and cruel ex-husband. I was so used to feeling numb that when I began to reconnect with my emotions, all the fear I lived with for years came to the surface. My approach to life, similar to my father’s, is to get a few books on a topic and begin to educate myself, but somehow specific methods for curing anxiety proved elusive. The one thing that kept popping up in my research is that the brain is plastic, and we have…
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Me, My Parasympathetic Nervous System, and I
Some people imagine they have the devil one shoulder and an angel on the other, giving competing advice. For me, I have my sympathetic nervous system shouting in one ear and my parasympathetic nervous system whispering in the other. One is unreliable but sometimes right. The other gives very good advice that I just don’t quite want to take. The first has a megaphone and a Chicken Little complex; the other is like an elusive oracle from some ancient myth. You know it said something of earth-shattering importance that will change everything. The problem is you can’t process the information because the horrible voice screaming that the sky is falling…
Healing Through Art & Words
