On Monday I woke up meditating on being an orphan; at least thinking about what it meant to have lost that earthly connection to both of my parents. My dad died 14 years ago and Monday was his birthday. My mother died about 10 and a half months earlier. I was not so successful at processing the grief of my...
About a year and a half ago, a month after my 50th birthday, I started to practice yoga. My first class was an intermediate one and it was humbling, not because I went in with expectation, but because it was so far beyond my scope of ability. Yet, it was also grounding, and I needed that in that moment. I...
In the past 3 years of work around distributing “All The Rage” I have interacted with thousands of people in regards to mind body emotion issues. I’ve also continued to do a lot of work to become more aware of my own mind body issues and I feel like I have continued to slowly and steadily move down the path...
This morning I was thinking a lot about the idea of "accepting things as they are." It can be very difficult to conceptualize what this means, or how to do it. For me, it involves becoming more present with how my expectations for how things might go shape my reactions to them as they play out. In general these expectations...
Fear often keeps us stuck in ways that we don’t really understand, and aren’t fully conscious of. If we live in a fear mindset, as many people with mind-body issues do, then we are in a state of constantly seeking safety. Often times when we live in a state of general fear, we aren’t even aware of it, because it...
Rage is a very complicated emotion that is commonly understood as a part of our flight or flight response to the world; we go into a rage as a defensive move in order to protect ourselves from danger. However, danger is subjective. While we can all agree that running into a bear in the woods is dangerous, we don't all...
This afternoon we had a little personal graduation ceremony for our daughter outside of our home with some friends. I gave a short speech about ritual and transitions that I wanted to share here. Her speech was great and we are very proud of her. I grew up in this house and I graduated from high school over 30 years ago....
The first line of "All The Rage," our film about the work of Dr John Sarno, is, "The Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape our sense of who we are." The first lines of any story are the foundation for that tale, and this insight into how much our perspective shapes our narrative is central to the story of...
Recently I offered to do a workshop for Sidewalk Film Festival. They asked me to focus on distribution since we have distributed all of our own films. A while ago I wrote a post called "Lessons Learned" about the the lessons we learned from making each film. This post shares some themes, but it is a bit more practical in...
A few weeks ago I had drafted this post about how our learned defensive behaviors might make us feel safer but often at the expense of connection. Finding a way to be present and aware, so that when a threat arises we are able to respond to it is preferable to being on guard. I sat down to edit it...
I started going to yoga classes last year, and over time, it has become an integral part of my life. There are times in our lives when we try to do something new and it doesn't stick. A few years later, we might try it again and still find it doesn't seem right for us. Then, at some point, we...
When was the last time you found yourself really upset about something you couldn’t control, like a cancelled flight, or a misplaced car reservation? Did you find yourself yelling at the person at the desk or on the phone? Or, did you simply accept the fact that you’d get on a plane at some point, or behind the wheel of...