For many years I have met with a group of women one Friday morning a month. Around our kitchen tables, we light a candle, have a moment of quiet, and then sip tea together as we read from a variety of spiritual works. In recent years, we often turn to poetry. Most of our meetings […]
Falling in Love Again with Your Partner: Love Maps, Friendship, and Staying Connected
When love is new, we ask questions to get to know our partner well. As Mandy Len Catron wrote for The New York Times in her charming summary of a study 20 years ago by psychologist Arthur Aron, we like learning about the person we love, but over time we forget to keep learning. In […]
The New Year: Rebirth and obstacles
By the third or fourth week of January, many of us are reevaluating our lives. We’ve either made resolutions (and perhaps already broken them) or we are resisting this ancient practice with awareness of the years of collapsed intentions when previous New Year’s hopes didn’t pan out. Yet we continue to be drawn to the symbolic cycle […]
Every Ornament Tells a Story: Coping with holiday stress
Two weeks into December, and I had no holiday spirit. I had no desire to decorate or to do what I have done for the last 25 years. I am not a bah-humbug person! I love the holiday season: the tree with its hodge-podge of ornaments hiding in the branches illuminated by colored lights; magic […]
Turning Toward Each Other Every Day: You Don’t Have to Wait for Date Night
Building closeness doesn’t happen only on date night, the subject of my previous two posts. Turning toward each other creates little and big ways to increase closeness—not just on dates, but in the routine tasks of life. It’s easy to ignore the moments in a day when you can make a connection. For instance, when […]
