There’s a lot of focus on “mindfulness” these days, but what does it really mean? I prefer the term “present moment awareness” to describe that state of mind where we are so focused on what is directly in front of us, the rest of the world literally disappears. Whether you’re ice climbing, knitting, or walking…
When I drove down the parkway to climb my first frozen waterfall, I was a young woman with an uninterrupted story since childhood. My inner narrative consisted of thoughts about myself (I am unloved, life is painful, I no longer want to live) as well as the emotions that accompanied these (hurt, anger, unhappiness.) I…
After decades of healing work, I am convinced that power is at the core of our personal and planetary issues. That is why when people ask me what I do, I tell them I am a Guide to Self-Empowered Healing. In our society, men are trained in the expansion and uses of their power, but…
Several years ago, I worked as a guide in Antarctica. While it was standard practice to do everything for our clients, I made mine as self-sufficient as possible believing this would elevate the true wilderness experience they had come for. On one such trip, some of my clients wanted to take turns navigating the ubiquitous…
The word addiction comes from the Latin addicere, ‘to surrender oneself.’ The opposite of surrender is to conquer, from the Old French conquerre, ‘to overcome.’ If you talk to enough addicts, or work with them as I do, you will notice a common current running through our stories: we lived through painful events that left…
For decades, I lived in chronic, deep depression. I had no idea why I was there, or how to get out from under the black cloud. So I did what a lot of people in that situation do: I self-medicated with drugs to numb the pain. Then, one day when I was twenty-eight years old,…
We live in a hyper-materialistic world, one that directs our consciousness to focus on the outer at the expense of the inner. But if life happens from the inside out, this basically hijacks our internal navigation system and replaces it with mindless conformity to a uniform reality. Anyone who steps outside of this reality is…
In 1992 I began what became a two-year process of letting go of street drugs so I could spend more time with my new-found love, climbing. When I give presentations, I inevitably get asked the same question: “Didn’t you just trade in one addiction for another?” And I always give the same answer: Yes, and…
This post was originally published on April 16, 2019. By August of that year, the central bankers would meet in Jackson Hole Wyoming to vote for their Going Direct Reset. The following month, the U.S. Federal Reserve would intervene in the overnight lending market, and by March 2020 the world would be swept up in…
As World War II came to an end, Nazi psychiatrists interviewed families to see if there was a difference between those who had sent their children to the safety of the countryside to live with relatives, and those who kept their children with them in the cities as bombs dropped around them. What they found…