This morning the tag on my teabag advised me, “Let your energy be used to build, not to destroy.” And that brought back a memory… When little Patsy was about six and sitting on a kitchen stool having the night’s tangles painfully teased out of her hair, her mother told her a story to distract her: “Many years ago your grandmother visited the site of a famous, long-ago battle in Scotland between two clans, the Camerons and the MacDonalds. And there the Camerons, who won t

It’s February again. Heart Month. Hard to avoid all those reminders—in the streets and the stores, in our mailbox and inbox, on the TV and the internet—that our emotional heart is every bit as important as the physical one… Whether that heart feels open or closed right now, whether it feels full or empty, whether we feel inclined or disinclined to love, here we are again in Heart Month. My plan had been to write this month about the healthy heart’s various functions as I h

Though I wouldn’t willingly come within 100 feet of a bungee jump, I’ve been flinging myself off metaphorical cliffs just about ever since I can remember. Sans bungee cord. Sans parachute. Not for the thrill of it, oh no. It’s just that over and over, taking a big risky leap into the unknown seemed to be the only way I could create real, needed change in my life. Over and over it seems to have come down to this: leap fast, or continue to die slowly. And so I did. By my

“A tiny crystal in your inner ear, smaller than a grain of sand, moved the wrong way and pressed on the nerves that tell you which way is up,” the earnest young ER doctor explained. I had been sitting quietly at my kitchen table when the world turned into a gigantic tilt-a-whirl ride, with no up or down and everything in motion… That was Thursday midnight two weeks ago. Six rather dramatically unpleasant hours later, it took me another hour to travel, inchworm-style, the 2

It was my turn. Eyes closed, I felt the purple velvet mantle of the Master Hypnotherapist drop onto my shoulders and heard my revered teacher Ilene invoking my new role as helper and guide. But instead of rejoicing, I was filled with doubt and terror… Did I dare take on the responsibility of helping people heal themselves? Could I really help others listen to their own inner wisdom? And most doubtful of all, could I—failure-dogged, rigidly shy, a corporate castoff whose wo