A couple weeks ago, a woman from the Netherlands contacted me about her insomnia. She’s a new mother who, after a few hours of sleep, gets caught in anxiety until the alarm rings. She was bedraggled, couldn’t think, and started to fear her bedtime. After chatting for 20 minutes, she told me she really loved everything about the program. Except for one thing: I couldn’t guarantee that she would sleep. She wanted the non-pharmaceutical equivalent of “fall asleep every night in three easy steps.” If only! The paradox of my work is that focusing on a finish line keeps you perpetually in the muck ..read more

Do you ever feel lonely or isolated? Maybe it’s when you’re by yourself, or feeling sad, anxious, unwell, or beating yourself up. We want to love ourselves, but sometimes we feel like a dog chasing her own tail. “I know love is there, but I can’t reach it! What’s wrong with me?” If your inner critic chastises you for not loving yourself (“You are so messed up for not feeling better about yourself, you stupid twit!”), you’re looking for love in all the wrong places. Spinning down the trail of self-yuck When you’re in an “I’m bad” spin, it’s like you’re driving a semi truck with bad brakes down ..read more

As I went to bed after sending last month’s newsletter (Your Sense Memory and Gratitude), I realized I missed something. I had suggested doing a two-part gratitude as the first step of your night’s bedtime lullaby—the transition between wake and sleep. The first part was thanking your mind for something it did during the day…. That might be managing a complicated conversation or more simply remembering to take your medicine. The next step was to appreciate your body by remembering a sense memory: the taste of food, laughing during a card game, a mental memory of the cold, a hug, or the shape o ..read more

How do you transition from awake to bed, then to rest and sleep? It helps when you say hello to yourself during the day—through gratitude. Gratitude can connect you with your body and ease the path to let go into rest. Gratitude reduces depression, anxiety, phobias, dependence on chemicals; and it increases optimism, happiness, empathy, and brain health. While gratitude may start with remembering things that protect and soothe you (warm house, clean clothes, enough food) or those you love (family, partners, friends, doggies and kitties), there’s more. A couple of years ago, I talked about goin ..read more

How do you live in your body? Do you drop in for occasional visits when showering, getting a massage, or walking in nature? Do you give your body the bare minimum (nurturing food, movement, and rest) so it’ll keep carrying your mind around? Maybe you are curious about more embodiment: learning to connect to yourself and the earth through experiencing the living body. I just returned from a profound week, studying and experiencing Somatic and Relational Transformation, the work of Sharon Stanley. While I’ve yet to put words to my personal journey, I wanted to share some ways to put the mind (th ..read more

Picture this: One of your body’s organs is spasming. It’s spewing mucus, hurting, and giving you chills, fever, and aches. You’d be anxiously at urgent care in a hot minute, right? Except what if it’s a cold? Your lungs and body are just doing their job: trying to encase and eliminate the virus that caught you unawares. It’s easier to tolerate colds because you know their expected course. While your brain and body might stress over what you can’t get done, you trust you’ll be back on course in a week or so. When your body is uncertain Unknown illnesses are more unsettling. Many of my clients m ..read more

Working on yourself, as you probably know, has many benefits: better/ clearer relationships with yourself, with those you love (or have to put up with), clearer sense of social justice, more connections with what’s beyond you through the earth and spiritually. However for some of us (present company not excepted), you can overly focus on healing so much you live in “woundology,” as Carolyn Myss calls it: “Becoming overly identified with our emotional wounds, so that it’s hard to heal and move on.” Where does woundology come from? You may, like me, have experienced denial grow ..read more

So many people feel great after a good cry—do you? Crying can release  endorphins, which eases pain and stress in the body and emotions. For a long time, I wasn’t able to cry very easily. I would feel sad for days, but couldn’t flip the grief switch to get the tears out. Mental chatter (why are you crying, it’s not that bad, stop it…) froze melancholy just below my throat. But on Mothers Day, I changed how I relate to my mental chatter. I heard that my “other” mother died and was flooded by the depth of my appreciation for her. Arline was the mom of one of my neighborhood f ..read more

As a sleep coach, I find there’s always more to uncover about rest. It might be daydreaming, relaxing before sleep, listening to podcasts, reading books. Or as Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey says, we fight back against grind culture by resting one moment at a time. In her book and as creator of the Nap Ministry, Tricia powerfully describes how rest is a tool for healing—not just the self, but dismantling our society’s oppressive culture. Tricia puts into words the deep, profound power of rest. She names the truth of how we’re caught in the clutches of impossible, machine-like ..read more

Your poor eyes. If you’re like me, you spend hours behind a computer or staring at your tiny smartphone screen. So much looking, typing, watching videos, messaging, editing pictures, driving, reading! Your eyes may lead the way to feeling tired. But when you soothe them, they can help you feel renewed and to rest. This mind-driven culture affects the eyes. When you are deep in thought, you likely visualize where you’re going, what you’re doing, who you’re talking to. Your eyes unconsciously move as you think, even when your eyelids are closed. That engages a lot of small muscles, con ..read more