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As I was reconstituting myself toward the end of this past week, I spent some time thinking about responses to hopelessness. There are so many speeches and verses and sayings about the importance of hope. We’re told that it’s an essential part of our humanness, that it’s vital to the continuation of our species, that we can’t abandon it, no matter how dark things seem. I agree with all of that. But, whether I was responding to global events or to conditions in…

Happy Sunday, friends. I had an important learning moment this week when I said something very unkind about myself in front of my mom. To be honest, I didn’t think much about the words as they left my lips. But the moment I observed my mom’s reaction, I knew that I’d been wrong to speak that way in front of her. She looked crushed. I spend a lot of time talking about self-compassionate speech in front of my clients. I actually request that…

This week, a friend of mine mentioned that her mother lives in a part of the world that’s currently seeing violence and instability. In the midst of it, she told me, her mom has rediscovered cooking. Her mom’s children left home decades ago, and she hasn’t taken much interest in experimenting with new recipes in the years since she’s lived alone. In the past month or two, as the world around her becomes increasingly unstable, my friend’s mom has had an unexpected cooking…

Ooof—this was a week! So many goals, so much to do, and so little that went as desired. Weeks like this shove me into two unhelpful mental spaces. The first is overwhelm, which leaves me thinking, “I can’t handle this.” The second is disappointment in myself, which makes me fixate on everything I didn’t, or couldn’t, do. When a client of mine expresses overwhelm around food or cooking or planning meals, or any of the things that tend are affecting nutrition, I try…

I mentioned some weeks back that a local urban garden, the Elizabeth Street Sculpture Garden, has been slated for demolition. This had been public knowledge for a while, though I wasn’t aware of it till September. It felt heartbreaking to learn, as the garden has been a quiet, peaceful oasis for me and many thousands of others. City residents have been coming together in support of the garden, and for the past month its fate has been uncertain. The demolition wouldn’t and couldn’t…

I’m about to articulate something that I neither say nor feel frequently: I’m proud of myself. This was a very tough week for me, but toward the end of the week I responded to a challenging situation in a way that made me realize how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown. It made me glad to be the kind of person I that I am. I thought I’d keep this feeling to myself, let it be private, and write about something…

If at some point you’ve ever found yourself following a bunch of astrology-related Instagram accounts that provide you with a daily horoscope, then you know that they always make big promises of change. Blessings are coming! It’s time to level up! Get ready for the shift! A breakthrough is on the way! I don’t follow these accounts for accurate forecasting, so it’s easy for me to have a laugh when the outsized, ultra-positive predictions roll in. But there have been moments when I…

Each Sunday, I publish a post that includes personal musings and articles on medicine, science, and the human experience. These are reminders that health and wellness extend far beyond what's on our plates.