Triggers are a hot topic these days. Maybe you have become aware you experience unpleasant emotions when you’re exposed to certain behaviors, topics, or words. You might notice you get agitated and reactive and tend to blame the other person for this. “You triggered me!” You then might get controlling and want the other…
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Communication might be the single most important skill we can develop to improve our relationships. However, most of us struggle to communicate in a way that helps us be understood by others. This happens for any number of reasons. It helps if we know why we’re communicating. Are we talking without any point or…
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I’ve been a therapist for over 30 years, and there’s one topic I hear about far more than any other: Relationships! It reminds me of that part in Eat, Pray, Love when Elizabeth Gilbert had a friend who worked in a refugee camp, and all that friend wanted to talk about was relationships. Not the horrors…
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A lot of us don’t acknowledge that we have a relationship with self. I think of this as the invisible relationship, because who’s relating to who? We tend to have the cruelest relationship with ourselves. We often say things to ourselves that we wouldn’t say to anyone else. “Why did I say that?!” “I’m…
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Many of us want to be more spiritual, but we might not know where to start on our spiritual journey. I find it helps to start with the basics. I like to teach my students about the basic spiritual principles from which all spiritual practices stem. It’s just like learning any other subject. You don’t…
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Most spiritual traditions name love as the highest spiritual value. This kind of love is a practice. It is a practice of acceptance, compassion, and wanting the best for the other. When most of us speak of love we are referring about something different. We think of it as an emotion. We think of…
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We hear about mindfulness a lot, but with so many things competing for our attention, we struggle to maintain it. The fact is that few of us practice it regularly. Mindfulness is about being in the moment, and it’s one of the most basic spiritual skills to practice. Mindfulness is a shift from being in…
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As the New Year approaches, you might want to ask yourself the question, “Am I growing through my life or am I just going through my life?” There’s a big difference! We symbolically associate the new year with a time of new beginnings, fresh starts, and new resolve. It’s true that we can step back and take an overview of our life…
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Every day we are faced with countless choices. Minute by minute we make decisions, some big some small. Many decisions seem insignificant, like what to wear, what to have for breakfast, or what time to go to bed. We may not recognize those little things as decisions. But they are decisions, nonetheless.
In order to cope with the sheer volume of decisions we face daily, we go on autopilot. This autopilot is neither “good” nor “bad”. The decisions we make while on autopilot can take us closer to or further away from the kind of life we want to live.
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When we have a decision to make, we tend to focus on making the “right” decision.
We might spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of each choice. Our emotions are in turmoil as we think over and over, “what if I make the wrong choice?”
After all, you don’t want to make the “wrong” choice! What if you marry the “wrong” person or choose the “wrong” career? What if you choose to live in the “wrong” place or buy the “wrong” house?
Notice that I’m using quotation marks around the words “right” and “wrong” here.
That’s because these words are only labels about our opinion about the outcome of the decision.
So what could we do instead?