Category: Oxygen Masks

  • They Had Staff. We Have Technology.

    They Had Staff. We Have Technology.

    They had staff, but we have technology. But we need to learn to make it work for us, instead of falling prey to other people’s priorities.

  • Rhythms of the Day

    Rather than considering the “Ideal Day,” we think about what a series of days might look like in a well-lived life. Playing with the idea of rhythms, we know that we want to do more of some things, and less of others. These will add up to make a life in which more of the…

  • Motivation, Gold Stars, and Knowing Yourself

    This week I’m talking about how to find the motivation to keep going with good habits… or maybe to get started in the first place. Confession Time I was surprised (and a bit embarrassed) to find that my meditation practice improved enormously after I started to use an app that gives me stars. There’s no…

  • Habits that Support Your Growth

    This week, I talked about habits in my FB Live video. In it, I suggested three ways to set up your habit trackers to improve the probability of success. These derive from my own experience of So Many Years of using other people’s planners with only middling success, but also from looking at how other people…

  • There is No “They”

    Let us leave aside, permanently, the possibility that you can do something that everybody will agree on. Who are you trying to impress? Who are you afraid of? When you say, “they” say, who is the formless, nameless “they” referring to? Doctors? Experts? Your parents or your teachers? The other parents at your kids’ school?…

  • How to do More of What You Love

    There is probably a gap between what you most love to do and how you spend your time. This post gives you baby steps to start closing it.

  • Are You Really Stuck?

    Are you actually stuck, or are you unwilling to pay the price of getting yourself unstuck? (In the literal sense of “finding a place to live,” but also in the metaphorical sense.) Come for a walk with me through the snow on the second day of spring, and I shall consider what to do with…

  • Breathe First, Then Act

    This week’s Tuesday Tuneup addresses the question of motivation and difficult emotions. I have heard a lot of people say essentially: their anger is justified, that letting it go lets the people they are angry at off the hook, and (besides all that), if they didn’t have these difficult emotions, they wouldn’t take any action…

  • You Need Whitespace!

    You need to leave space for things to happen. I know it’s tempting to fill every moment of your day with activity, creating the illusion that you are in charge. You know what is going to happen, in what order, and what the outcome is going to be. Yet thousands of years of wisdom teachings…

  • Three Practices for a World in Turmoil

    Three Practices for a World in Turmoil

    Three practices to help you clear grief and find your way back to action. I wish this post weren’t so consistently relevant.

  • Holding onto your Dreams while Drowning

    Holding onto your Dreams while Drowning

    When you have dreams that seem very far away and out of reach, it can feel like a waste of time to connect with them. But you need a north star, at least, if not a compass and map. There are times in every life when it feels like you’re drowning. The roof comes off the…

  • Don’t Give People a Veto on your Peace of Mind

    I’m sweeping my kitchen floor, spraying the bathroom with things, filling the sink, throwing laundry into the washing machine. My to-do list says that I’m writing at the moment, but my house has deteriorated while I’ve been working on big projects, and I really want it to be tidy. I even have, “House beautiful” down as…