After I started speaking again—following two weeks on a bed of ice in a medically induced coma—I was told that some of my first words were in Spanish. For the eight weeks prior to my coma, I had been working at a mission organization outside of Ensenada, Mexico. Upon returning home to the Bay Area…
Category: Reset Tools
How Hope Might Help Us
Hope was an amazingly brilliant option then, and it might also be an amazingly brilliant option now. While I’m reflecting specifically on my personal trauma recovery, I think many of us are bewildered by the amount of darkness and suffering in our world (personally, locally, nationally, globally). Of course sometimes even if we take the…
Finding A Good Path Forward In the Midst
When my community and world have been on fire, I’ve needed to adjust my expectations, for one, as well as try to honor the needs of myself and my family. One evening in February, when my youngest was asleep by 7pm (which rarely, if ever, has happened), I had a moment of stillness and creativity…
Learn these skills to emotionally help us, now: the Help Now Skills
Maybe you need a nervous system reset? Seems like many of us do right now. In addition to the election, there are many individual and world stressors that might be bumping us outside our Resilient Zone in this moment). Try this! Push your hands against the wall. Pushing our hands against the wall is actually…
Grow in Being Less Reactive: Guided Inspiration
Imagine being way below the ocean’s surface, peering up (especially on a hot day like today!). The oceans’s surface could be still and serene, like this feature image. However, it could very well be choppy and wild– depending on all sorts of reasons. But from the depths of the ocean, you’re unaware and unaffected by…
Let our Internal Resources Strengthen Us
Resources can regulate us. They can make distressing things a little more bearable. They can help our nervous systems sink into relaxation (whether momentarily or for a sustained period of time). They can help us when we are totally dysregulated (ie. and not in control of our emotions at all). They can also help us…
Make Room for the Possibility of Light–Join Me!!
Where do you see light? Could be sprinkles of light or an outpouring of metaphorical sunshine and delight. I’m fully aware that depending on all sorts of things, it can be easier or harder for us to see light alongside the darkness. So my new idea is this!: I’m gonna post where I see light…
Celebrate When We Make Effort to Take Care of Ourselves
I exclaimed to my husband one night, “Way to take care of yourself!” And, though I was hoping he would laugh a little, I was also genuinely joyful in my praise of his effort to take care of himself. (For those of you who know me well, you can probably envision my wide-open eyes, outstretched…
Evaluate Doing “More” This Holiday Season
I was flipping through one of my past journals and noticed an entry reflecting on my accident and all the ways I’d been changed because of it: I was journalling that before my traumatic brain injury etc, I could do a lot more than I could do now [the date that I wrote this entry]….
Invite Good Truths into Our Beings
We weren’t made to believe we are inadequate or unworthy or abandoned or powerless (or any of the other lies that our society or past experiences have wrongly made us somehow believe about ourselves). So, let’s intentionally work towards inviting strong, beautiful truths about us into our beings! Well, that’s my deep hope! Wherever we…