After George Floyd’s murder, there was a huge spike in the amount of money invested in diversity and inclusion work across the U.S. According to one study which surveyed HR professionals, 85% have expanded inclusion activities and 75% either started or enhanced unconscious bias training. A lot of people started having conversations and doing training that should have happened years ago.

Not long ago, I listened to an interview with someone who’d written a piece for the New York Times on the “empty religions of Instagram”. She was critiquing some self-help social media influencers, and she mentioned that some of them “worship their wounds”. On their Instagram feeds, she said, they make themselves accessible by being wounded people, but then they stay with the wound because it makes them feel special and loved and it gets them more followers. Read more...

A few years ago, I had a pretty big a-ha moment when I realized that the concept of holding space (which I’ve spent the last seven years exploring in a deep way as I developed programs and wrote a book about it) is, at its core, about freedom and sovereignty. Here’s a quote from one of the last chapters of my book…

“If I treat you as someone entitled to your own sovereignty, it means that I assume you have the same right to self-govern your life as I. You get to tell me how you want to be treated and I can choose to accept those boundaries or walk away.

“Sovereignty is what we’ve been talking about throughout this discussion on holding space – that we offer love to each other without attachment, manipulation, control, or boundary-crossing. It’s the starting point to developing healthy, strong social contracts between us.” Read more...

A few weeks ago, when I was teetering on the edge of crawl-under-the-covers-and-don’t-come-out-until-2022 burnout, I was on Zoom with a couple of wise friends. We were checking in about how our lives were going, and I had just unloaded a long list of stressors, fumbles, and mom-worries. I was fighting back tears.

They both looked at me with kindness and one of them said “Nothing is expected of you here.” That’s when the tears spilled out and down my face. Read more...

I turned off the radio this morning, on the way home from driving my daughter to work. It was making me feel a little rage-y and I didn’t want to be in a bad mood. 

In the lead-up to Mother’s Day, the radio station was holding a contest where people could phone in and nominate a mother for a prize. The people phoning in, mostly nominating their mothers or wives, were saying things like “she sacrifices EVERYTHING for her kids” or “she’s ALWAYS available” or “she’s a mother to the WHOLE NEIGHBOURHOOD” or “she’s the STRONGEST and most GENEROUS person I know”. Read more...

Once there was an Invisible Woman. 

She wasn’t born that way – in the beginning she was just like every other child, expressing herself freely and wanting to be seen and accepted and loved for who she was. Sadly, though, it was her quest for love and acceptance that convinced her that, in order to survive in the world as it presented itself to her, she had to become an Invisible Woman. Read more...

“Try not to react when you see her. She doesn’t look good.” That’s what my former husband was telling family members outside of my hospital room before they entered. He was right – I was in rough shape.

Motherhood did not arrive gently at my doorstep. That moment didn’t look anything like those muted magazine photos of rapturous mothers in long flowing white eyelet dressing gowns leaning over equally white bassinettes where cherubic infants lay sleeping. My bloodshot eyes and haggard face wouldn’t be featured in any parenting magazines or diaper ads. 

For the first two hours of motherhood, I was blind. Read more...

I have a three-fold spiritual (and mental health) practice that I like to call “wonder-wonder-wander”. It has become especially relevant to me in recent months while this pandemic winter drags on and threatens to drag me under the waves of melancholy and despair. When I commit time to this practice every day, it helps me stay afloat.

First, wonder as a noun… “a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.” I try to be intentional, each day, to adopt a sense of wonder, to open myself to the unexpected, to pause for beauty, and to marvel at the unexplainable. Read more...

Nebulous [ neb-yuh-luhs ] 
adjective

When the lockdown is over, I will go back to the float spa. When I climb into that white pod, turn off the lights and music, and lie down to float in the warm saltwater, I will drift away into a nebulous field where there are no edges, no beginning and no end, no division between water, air and body. I will be, once again, an astronaut who’s climbed out of the spaceship and is floating in zero gravity. Read more...

On New Year’s Eve, I was contacted by a local radio station to do an interview on how to prepare for the new year. I didn’t get back to them soon enough, so they found someone else. Later that day, on my way to the grocery store, I happened to hear the interview with the life coach they interviewed instead, and while I was sorry to miss the interview opportunity, I realized I wasn’t quite the kind of voice they wanted to hear anyway. I know that I wouldn’t have been able to give the kinds of pithy, coach-y answers they were looking for. They wanted to hear about things like intentions or resolutions for the new year, gratitude journals, vision boards or tips for setting achievable goals.

These can all be good and helpful things, and I might have talked about them myself if I’d done the interview ten years ago, but none of them feel like they’re good enough for us anymore, especially when we’re in the middle of a pandemic and white supremacy is threatening to destroy democracy in the U.S..

Why? Read more...