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Video Summary: I want to work with a metaphor of a river flowing through us. When we walk with our hearts open, we allow ourselves to be emotionally touched by more things. We're allowing the energy of various experiences and relationships into our hearts. In this way, a river of life energy is able to touch us at a deeper level. And as the river flows, it encounters boulders in the stream. Extending my metaphor, the boulders represent wounds. They're incomplete experiences.

Video Summary: In last week's video, I used the metaphor of a tender sprout to represent a new aspect of ourselves. This could include being part of the community, speaking our truth, or walking with our hearts open. This week, I want to talk about considering this new aspect when we're making decisions in our lives. A fun way to think of this is to see all the different aspects of yourself sitting around a conference table at a board meeting. And so when we are making a deci

Video Blog Summary:Video Summary: When we make a change, we're awakening something new in ourselves. My truth is that the new thing is already kind of latent inside of ourselves, and we're allowing it out. Perhaps we're allowing more intimacy into our relationships, speaking our truth more, or allowing ourselves to be part of a community. If we’re allowing this part of ourselves to awaken, then it’s important to nurture it. I compare this type of nurturing to a seedling. We w

Video Summary: What determines if your heart is open or closed at any given moment? When you get mad at someone, do you close your heart to them? When you're attracted to someone, do you open your heart to them? When something triggers you, do you close your heart and shut down? So, is it my true nature and my intention to walk with my heart open that's determining whether my heart is open, or is it more randomly determined by things outside of us? People piss us off, we get

Video Summary: I want to talk about sacred space. The way I'm using the word sacred here is when something is really precious and matters a lot to us. It's something that we're willing to stand up for and take action over because it matters that much. A question that's often asked is, “What is sacred to you?” I want to reframe that question as, “What is sacred about you? What is precious? It might be being open-hearted, loving, and vulnerable. It might be your beauty, honesty

Video Summary: I want to talk about the feeling of security, the internal security of feeling safe and secure. I'll start with the premise that we were conditioned to find security and even safety outside of us. The way we were raised in our families as little kids, we were very much reliant upon our parents. And so security and safety were outside of us in a very real sense. And as life went on, we found things outside of us, such as a job, a place to live, things, friends,

Video Summary: At some essential level, everything is a relationship. Obviously, we have our relationships with our significant others, family, friends, and community. And then that extends spiritually to a relationship with nature, a relationship with the planet, and a relationship to God or Spirit. And at some level, we have a relationship with ourselves in terms of how we treat and relate to ourselves. And what came next in my inquiry is that each of us tends to have a pri

Video Summary: I'm going to talk about projection. It's a term or a concept that was invented by Sigmund Freud, and then later developed by Carl Jung and other psychoanalysts. Projection is when we take part of ourselves and project it onto another person. And we're unconscious that it's actually that issue or thing in me that I'm seeing in the other person. I want to break it down into two types of projection. The first is when we take someone from our past, such as a mother

Video Summary: I want to talk about a concept that I called attachment to the outcome. Here I'm using attachment similarly to how Buddhism uses it. The Buddha was big on non-attachment and taught that attachment creates suffering and bondage. Accordingly, the intention of this video is to learn about our attachment to the outcome, and how it creates suffering and bondage- so we can experience more freedom and liberation. For the outcome part of this, the first part of an inte

Video Summary: Happy Summer Solstice! My favorite word for the energy of the summer solstice is dynamic. It's energetic, life-generating, and active. And it has clarity. The time of the day that it would be is high noon, when everything is in the light. During the time of the summer solstice, we can draw upon the dynamic energy of the earth and ourselves. It's ultimately a way to align yourself with the dynamic energy of the time and inside yourself so you can access it and b

Video Summary: For this week's video blog, I included one last clip of a Q-and-A session on Zoom for Chapter 4 of my book, Natural Way of Being, which happened on May 4. It begins with Kate asking me a question regarding thought-based emotion and pure emotion. Kate (summarized): So it sounds like anger tends to be thought-based. And passion too. But then, as you were talking, I started to think: well, can't any emotion be both? For example, fear can definitely be thought-base

Video Summary: I spoke about collaborative creation in last week’s video. By this, I mean when we offer an intention, the energy of our intention goes out and interacts with the universe, life, or spirit. What really struck me is that this is already happening, because it's the natural way of things. Even if we didn't offer this formal intention, it's still happening. And so even a thought or idea is an intention. Even if you didn't sit down and light sage or do a meditation