live a SevaLife
Click the image to be taken to the full Instagram post. In today’s post, I will focus on the ways in which fear, which is the foundational characteristic of white supremacy culture, has made it harder for me to live a life informed by my values, and how the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy …
Continue reading "Therapy for white supremacy culture: Fear"
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash In 2012, my hope for the future of the world died. And yet, in that same year, the seeds of a new hope were also planted. On the Berkeley campus, I attended a talk by Aric McBay, Derrick Jensen, and Lierre Keith, the authors of Deep Green Resistance - Strategy to Save the …
Continue reading "The personal is political: You can’t change the world without changing people"
Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash Over the past several weeks, I have been writing about the seven values that make up my personal code. Today I’m going to talk about what the seventh value, community, means to me. The various crises facing humanity today (COVID-19, systemic racism, war, the climate crisis) are all man-made, …
Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash When I first started dipping my toes into the personal development world, one of the things that didn’t sit right with the social justice warrior in me was the emphasis on personal responsibility. In the capitalism-can-do-no-wrong world of traditional personal development, personal responsibility is a bootstraps ethos. No matter …
Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash As a white, left-brained, cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, college-educated, able-bodied man born in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century, and raised by an atheist step-dad, the circumstances of my socialization were ideal for sewing doubt into my consciousness for anything spiritual, new-age, or “woo-woo.” That is perhaps why …
Continue reading "Talking about spirituality is like dancing about architecture"
Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash For years now I’ve said that my top three values are love, humor, and justice. I liked the simplicity of that, and at times I would even say that humor and justice are just different flavors of love, so really it’s just one value. Then at the beginning of …
Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash What is embodied mindfulness, and what does it have to do with love? In a previous post, for Valentine’s Day this year, I wrote about four guideposts on the path to a more nourishing kind of love. In the last two weeks, I’ve delved deeper into the first two of those guideposts: …
Continue reading "Embodied mindfulness: it isn’t all in the mind"
Photo by Camila Quintero Franco on Unsplash Two weeks ago I wrote about four guideposts on the path to a more nourishing kind of love than many of us are used to experiencing. Last week I went into greater detail about the first guidepost, self-love. This week I’ll elaborate on the second, which is mindfulness. …
Continue reading "Mindfulness: Don’t believe everything you think"
Photo by Michael Olsen on Unsplash When I was a kid, my mom told me a story about a time from her childhood when a girl slapped her and, good Catholic that my mom was, she turned the other cheek. What did she get for her piety? A second slap. My younger self listened to …
Continue reading "Forgive me?? Forgive you!! The role of self-compassion in forgiveness"
The standoff between emotions and logic is as old as humankind, and it doesn’t bode well for logic that simply being aware that your emotions cause you to act irrationally already puts you leagues ahead of most other members of our species. Ten years ago, I made a Facebook post in which I said, “When …
Continue reading "Five lessons for improving emotional intelligence"