Always Do Your Best
The fourth agreement is Always Do Your Best. The first three ask a lot of us. This one asks how much of ourselves we actually have to give them today. Always doing our best doesn’t mean we need to get…
Category Elder Wisdom
Don’t Make Assumptions
The third agreement is Don’t Make Assumptions. The second, Don’t Take Anything Personally, asks you to watch what you let in. This one asks you to watch what you make up. We make assumptions every day, all day long, and…
Don’t Take Anything Personally
The second agreement is Don’t Take Anything Personally. The first, Be Impeccable With Your Word, asks you to watch what leaves your mouth. This one asks you to watch what you let in. Personally comes from persona, the mask an…
Be Impeccable With Your Word
The Four Agreements are Toltec wisdom guides as popularized by shamanic teacher and healer Don Miguel Ruiz. The first, “Be Impeccable with Your Word,” speaks to our capacity to have integrity with our words. Impeccable is a heavier word than…
You Already Know This. You Will Learn It Again.
I write these blogs not just because I’m an educator, but because I also need to remind myself what I already know. We don’t live in a world that cultivates awareness, mindfulness, gratitude and a whole host of other qualities…
Is It True? Is It Kind? Is It Necessary?
A sieve is a humble tool. Flour goes in lumpy and comes out fine, and the lumps stay behind on the screen, along with the odd pebble that would have cracked a tooth. The screen holds back what would spoil…
Decide What To Be,
Then Be That
“Decide what to be and go be it,” in that exact wording, is The Avett Brothers, from Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise, 2009. The instruction underneath it is about nineteen hundred years older. Epictetus, in the…
Why Be Humble?
What if everyone was my teacher? What if not only those I respect, but everyone had something to teach me? What if the lover who just left me, the person who cut me off while driving, the people who irritate…
Purpose Survives Being Boring
As a holistic counselor and Dance/Movement Therapist, safety plays a large role in my work with people. We all need a safe harbor to come home to. When we don’t have that, we are never able to fully rest. But…
Six Surgeries, a Dying Friend, and a Divorce: What Gratitude Actually Did
We are biologically predisposed to notice what’s wrong, to look for the negative as a means of preparing for it. It’s an ingrained survival skill which has become overdeveloped, particularly in the Western culture in which we live. I mean,…
Why We Swallow Our Kind Words
Often in my work with adults, I help them to reclaim some of the characteristics that were lost from childhood: the capacity to play with abandon, to be completely engaged in the present moment, to not care what others think…
Don’t Take Life Too Seriously
The phrase “Don’t Take Life Too Seriously. Nobody Gets Out Alive Anyway” is a funny little adage that speaks to an important practical and spiritual lesson. It belongs to Elbert Hubbard, who put it better in 1900: “Please do not…