Compassionate Moments Of Self-Discovery

“What’s wrong with me?” Gretchen sang, quite painfully.

The high school drama club’s spring production this year was “Mean Girls”, a condensed musical version of the motion picture written by Tina Fey originally released in 2004. It retells the age old story of fitting in and acceptance in the high school environment. Gretchen was in the inner circle of the school’s most important clique led by Regina. In exchange for being somewhat accepted, Gretchen paid the very steep price of essentially sacrificing her authentic self in the process. A painful process which led her to painfully question her own worth and value.

Insecurity is a powerful force. It preys upon our perceptions of unworthiness. It preys up our need to be safely accepted as we are, even if we compromise who we are in the process.

It’s a rather cruel process.

We are exposed to messages of insecurity daily. Our economy needs us to feel insecure about who we are, what we look like, how much we weigh, what we drive, and where we live. Social media is littered

Finding Your Own Sacred Space To Be You

I didn’t intend it to turn out this way.

But I guess it did.

It’s late 2008 and I’m highly annoyed. The world inside me and around me full of frustration and negativity. At that stage of my life I was quite good at complaining, easily adding my highly opinionated voice to the “somebody should do something” chorus knowing that I would not be the one to try and actually do something to change anything.

But for some reason something told me I should try and do something. My lack of qualifications as a writer was offset with a passionate conviction to try and give positivity a little more visibility in the world.

Especially mine.

15 years ago – April 20, 2009 – I anxiously hit the “Publish” button for the first time and this blog went live. I offered my faint voice of optimism into an increasingly negative and hostile universe.

Posting uplifting quotes gradually lead to me to actually attempting to post original content, again, driven by a desire to add my own voice and share some positivity, hope, and optimism into the lives of those who visited the site. And while the goal was to write for others, writing eventually became something I needed to do for me.

Turns out I needed the same positivity, hope, and optimism I wanted to offer others.

Writing these posts over the years has served as a form of self-therapy. Often posts are birthed out of my attempts to deal with my own frustrations, confusion, and pain life at times creates for us all. The

The Magnetic Nature Of Expectations

The quote arrived in a social media feed.

“Expect nothing. Appreciate everything.”

The appreciate everything part…I can learn to do that. But the expect nothing part?

Is that even possible?

I’m not sure where my expectations come from, but they’ve always been there in one form or another. Expectations for myself as well as expectations for others. Especially the ones I had for others. Buddha warned that unmet expectations certainly can be a source of great suffering.

That’s exactly what they’ve been for me.

My problem with my expectations is they would often contradict reality. It was me not accepting What Is in favor of how it is I felt it Should Be. Or needed it to be. Forcing is a form of fear, a need to control that which is out of your control. Yes, a perfect breeding ground for a great source of suffering to flourish in.

Releasing expectations is a pathway towards peace, but for me it’s been a bit of a rocky road. Having no expectations means no one can disappoint you nor let you down, right? But many attempts to expect nothing proved to be nothing more than jaded, passive aggressive attempts to defiantly deal with my

What Are You Saying To You About You?

I forgot I even owned one.

Going through a long-forgotten box in the back of my closet, and there it was. A Brother P-Touch label maker. Perhaps you had one as well? Simply type in the title of your label, hit “print” and out comes the custom label, right in the palm of your hand. It was rather addictive. I labeled just about everything. File folders, storage tubs, canisters of flour and sugar, even the wires coming out of the back of my computer.

I remember peeling off the back of the printed labels to reveal the sticky side of the tape. With large fingers, it proved to be a challenge from time to time, but once the labels were affixed to the surface they stuck for good.

Labels do have a way of sticking around.

Especially the ones we stick on our self.

As humans we are quite good at creating labels about who we think we are and what is possible for us. Have you ever listened to how you speak to yourself? How often do we reaffirm our limitations? How often do we reinforce a belief system which inhibits our growth and expansion? How often do we let life’s experiences define who it is we accept ourself to be, of letting our past determine our future? When we habitually tell ourselves we’re not good enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, strong enough…when we believe we’re unlovable, that we’re “too much’, unlucky, unworthy…those labels will keep us stuck exactly where we don’t really want to be.

These self-imposed labels greatly influence our overall sense of identity, and our accepted identity is our self-fulfilling prophecy.

The labels we willingly accept don’t even need to actually be true. We just need to believe they are true and our world will unfold accordingly. The good news is these labels are only permanent if allow them to

Resurrect Yourself

As I kid I never really grasped the significance of The Resurrection. Easter was always more about a celebration of food than a celebration of the Truth.

With each Easter sunrise, though, I am now reminded of the power and resiliency of the Truth. The truth of a Light, an inextinguishable Light, created to cast out the darkest of all darkness and to illuminate our collective path forward.

Within each of us is also a light. The light of who we are and who we have been created to become. Life has a way at times of dimming that light, and in that darkness we can often lose our way on our path to fulfilling the promise of our own creation.

In our inevitable moments of individual darkness, let us all be reminded that the Light is always accessible if we choose to resurrect our connection to the Source of all Light.

We need never walk in alone in the darkness.

Photo by Claudio Guglieri on Unsplash

The Unexpected Wisdom Of Blueberry Pop-Tarts

My perfectly scheduled afternoon wasn’t running so perfectly.

An upcoming minor surgical procedure required me get a couple of vials of blood drawn ahead of the surgery. The plan allowed me time to get a quick bite to eat after my blood work which would still give me enough time to get back to my desk for a rather important conference call. When the blood work ran much longer than anticipated, eating lunch morphed into grabbing whatever I happened to have in my glove box in the car as I raced back to the office to make my 1:30 call.

In this instance, the only thing to eat in the glove box were Blueberry Pop-Tarts.

I can’t remember the last time I had eaten a Pop-Tart. I’d enjoyed my share of them over my younger years but they just don’t have a place in a more health-conscious food plan I have for myself. As a dad who often transports over-scheduled kids between their over-scheduled appointments, snacks can usually be found in the car to make sure the kids have something in their stomachs before jumping into their next activity.

Not having had Pop-Tarts in quite some time, it was like I was eating them for the first time. I re-discovered the crumbling texture of the crust, the sweetness of the artificial blueberries, the smoothness of the chemically-enhanced frosting on top.

I liked them a lot more before I grew up and knew exactly what I was eating.

When we try things for the first time we do so with a heightened sense of awareness. We notice all the

The Problem With Gratitude

It’s a good question.

We know who we are grateful for in our lives, yet how often do we take the time to remind those who we appreciated that they are actually appreciated?

I was recently the recipient of a random act of gratitude. Unexpectedly, someone had gone out of their way to express how grateful they were for my contribution to a project we had both been working on. Honestly, I didn’t know how to respond, eventually finding the words “thank you” after instinctively attempting to minimize my contribution. The entire interaction, while appreciated, left me feeling a bit uncomfortable.

Why would something as powerful as gratitude ever feel uncomfortable to receive?

Perhaps it’s because we’re so used to not receiving it.

There is a degree of vulnerability associated with expressing gratitude. It’s often an interruption of the expected and usual conversations, and the recipient is left to wonder about the motivation behind why the gratitude was being expressed in the first place. The risk of being vulnerable is mitigated with our

Creating A Safe Space To Not Like Yourself

Relationships are inherently full of challenges, aren’t they?

Including the one you have with yourself.

For much of my life my relationship with me wasn’t particularly healthy. Especially when I would set for myself some often unrealistic expectations and how falling short of them would trigger a disproportionately harsh response within, often bordering on abusive. If I could have filed emotional restraining orders against myself I would have.

My version of self love wasn’t very loving.

It wasn’t that long ago when I surprisingly called myself out for the way I was treating me. After a particularly intense episode of self rage, with a compassionate curiosity I asked myself why I was being so brutally hard on me. To that question I couldn’t find a valid reason. It was just something I habitually did, something I had experienced as a child and perpetuated as an adult. But asking myself “why” was the start of me changing my relationship with me for the better. Because there was no good reason for me to treat me the way I was.

In that moment, a process began.

Gone now is the harshness and the abuse, in time replaced with acceptance, compassion, patience, and encouragement. 

A far more loving version of self love.

One paradox I discovered on the road to loving myself more was the need to create a safe space to not like myself. It’s an important space where I allow myself the room to be human. To be disappointed in

Smashing Through Your Own Glass Ceiling

Instagram reminded me of an experiment I first saw years ago. Researchers had placed fleas into a glass jar and sealed it shut with the glass lid. Instinctively, the fleas attempted to jump out of the jar to their freedom but with each jump were stymied as they hit the glass lid above them. Frustrated, at some point the fleas simply stopped jumping. And when the researchers removed the glass lid, the fleas remained in the jar, now conditioned to accept their captivity even with the barrier to their freedom removed.

I kind of understand the fleas’ take on this. They tried repeatedly to make it out of the jar without success. At some point, when do you simply stop looking for a way out and accept your limitations and learn to live with them?

As part of my journey, I’ve thought a great deal about my own limitations. Specifically, where did they come from and who put them there? Limitations are an extension of a belief system, and my belief system for a good portion of my life was a belief system I inherited. No one ever sat me down and clearly defined the limitations I would eventually accept as my own. Rather, I witnessed them slowly unfold around me in real time, destined to perpetuate a belief system which I knew wouldn’t serve me but accepted none the less.

The glass ceiling on the jar of my life was never actually there. It didn’t matter, though. I never knew I could actually jump.

Until I decided to started jumping.

The things we choose to believe about who we are and what’s possible for us will greatly shape our identity, which will always shape our life. We can accept the limited version of where we are as some sort of fate or destiny, pointing to our life experience as evidence of such, further conditioned to accept our own form of captivity. Or, we can decide to think outside of the jar, out-jumping the limitations we’ve accepted, free to more fully express ourselves as we choose to redefine our self identity as one of possibility and expansion.

Limitations are simply opinions we’ve accepted as truths. But we get to decide what is true for us.

It doesn’t matter how those limitations got there.

What matters now is what we decide to do with them.

You’ll be amazed at how high you can jump…

Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

Honoring Those Mountains You’ve Climbed

Perhaps you’ve forgotten how resilient you actually are?

There they were, relics from a different time in my life. Two good sized pieces of crystal with my name engraved in both. I forgot I even had them. These were given to me in recognition of exceeding sales performance expectations from earlier in my professional career. Actually, these weren’t given to me.

I earned them.

While results get the recognition, they never really tell the entire story of what it took to get those results, of what was endured in the process, of what you had to grow through and who you needed to grow into to earn a symbolic piece of crystal with your name on it.

As I unpacked these towel-wrapped pieces from the unmarked cardboard box which had been in the attic for more than 25 years, this older version of me was reminded of who this younger version of me was when I was received these trophies. I remember the challenges of this sales position and the difficult task I had willingly agreed to take on. My focus then shifted toward remembering the challenges I was facing simply being me at that time. The doubts, the fears, the anxiety, the pressure. Yet, somehow that version of me was able to stand at the base of this daunting mountain of a challenge and reach a summit which had never once felt remotely possible for me. It was a brutal climb, bruised and bloodied, but I guess I just kept climbing.

This older version of me cracked a little bit of a smile. I was proud of that younger version of me.

I try not to look back in life. There’s a lot in the rear view mirror that I really don’t wish to re-experience. The losses, the pains, the regrets, the mountains I wasn’t able to climb. Sometimes, though, looking