Our ability to hold ambivalence is one of the key characteristics of emotional intelligence. Our sentiments are rarely 100% one way or the other. An experience can evoke both joy and sadness within us. An upcoming change could be both exciting and frightening. We can feel simultaneously compelled and repelled by someone or something.
Ambivalence is a measure of emotional intelligence Read More »
Emotions are like little children. Spontaneous, frivolous, disarming. And just like children, they sometimes want to put on a costume, whether eccentric, flamboyant or mismatching, bring on a performance, and have our full attention. Instinctively, we draw back and try to suppress feeling into unpleasant emotions and states—pain, boredom, loneliness, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, hopelessness.
Emotions are like little children Read More »
There’s a Good Wolf and a Bad Wolf. A Mr Hyde and a Dr Jekyll. A higher self and a lesser self. Two polarities, in each of us.
The Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf Read More »
We don’t just create ourselves, we create other people. The way we view them and treat them stimulate and surface aspects of who they are. We can see and react to either their gifts or their so-called inadequacies, to what they give or what they lack, who they are or who they’re not. And
We create other people Read More »
If, in ways we don’t yet understand, we choose the circumstances within which we are born—our parents, our immediate family, geography, our childhood struggles—what are your circumstances trying to teach you?
What’s the gift in your circumstances? Read More »
I connected with a deep sense of loneliness and isolation, buried very deeply within me since my early childhood, during a recent meditation. I attuned to the four-year-old me, and to a sense of feeling unseen and unheard that I experienced at that age and throughout most of my childhood.
We heal as adults when we heal the broken children within Read More »
Acceptance for what is (or absence of resistance to what is) is how we connect to ourselves on the deepest level — and connect in a way that’s loving, nurturing and non-judgemental. And I believe that’s really what this dimension is all about. Experiencing ourselves from that space of profound acceptance. The obstacle to that
The gift in self-judgement Read More »
To experience our true selves, we need to unlearn our conditioned thinking. And to unlearn it, we need to see it first. We have resistance to both because both seeing the truth and unlearning require an openness to the possibility that we might be wrong. And that’s something we are really scared of. The fear
The biggest obstacle to growth is the fear of being wrong Read More »
We search for external approval and validation in order to reconcile what’s already within—our self-judgements and fears. It is that internal dissonance and discomfort created by the voice of the inner critic that we are looking to get a relief from when we seek approval from others.
Compliments dissolve when they are met by internal doubt Read More »
What a fascinating collection of juxtapositions, polarities, controversies the human condition holds. Movement and stillness.
The polarities and controversies of the human condition Read More »