As life intensifies, what can we do to keep ourselves from feeling swept up and overwhelmed by what’s going on? The answers may be easier than you think.

This week, we’ll consider ways of creating simple, yet significant shifts in how we engage with ourselves and with the world around us. Come join me. I think you’ll be glad you did.

In my work as a counselor, one of the things I encounter, over and over, is that somewhere along the way, people have gotten out of touch with themselves.

Join me this week as we consider ways of living from the inside out without asking any for permission or seeking anyone’s approval to do it.

Can you think of a time when you thought you knew or understood something, but didn’t bother to look deeper? Can you think of what happened when you closed your mind to something because you had already created a story about it in your mind?

Join me this week as we consider what changes when we intentionally open our minds and allow ourselves to learn something new.

While the whole world is focused on finding ways of protecting everyone from the spread of the Corona Virus, it might be equally useful to consider things that are worth spreading. Things like openness and kindness and acceptance. And let’s not leave out our shared humanity.

Join me this week as I share what happened when I opened my mind and heart to something taking place that was better than what I thought I was facing.

What will happen when you stop holding back and allow the world to see and engage with the person you really are? Not the invented story you’ve been telling yourself or the one that someone else constructed for you, but the real and luminous you, the authentic you.

Join me this week as we consider what it means to be authentic and what happens when we think and act from that place.

Once in a while, we’re told a story that is so compelling it stays with us as vividly as if we experienced it first-hand. Today, I offer such a story in the hope that you'll find meaning in it and that it stirs something deep and abiding in you about the good that is still possible in people and in the world.

Stay with me. You’ll be glad you did.

When we're open to them, opportunities to learn something new are always available, opening us to what we couldn't see or engage with before.

This week, using examples from photography, we'll consider ways of getting closer to what truly matters in our lives, including how we see the world around us, and our relationship with ourselves.

Though I may not know your name or your face or where you live, and though I may not know exactly what's happening in your life today, I think about you every day. And as I do, I ask myself the same question, over and over.

“As people go about their lives, often struggling in some way, what can I offer that is helpful and real and significant?”

In response to that question, I’ve written a blessing that I hope you’ll take to your heart. May this week's offering touch you in some positive way.

What would it be like to stop holding back and to live our lives in ways that are vibrant and fiercely engaged? What would it be like to stop making excuses, putting off what best serves us?

Join me this week, as we consider what it means to be fully alive in each moment.

To create healthy change in the world, must we become great pioneers or genius innovators or tireless public servants, or could it be more elegantly simple than that?

Join me this week, as we consider ways of leaning into the common good and then taking real action, right where we are.