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There are moments in therapy when someone says something that lands with unusual force in the room. They say, “I do not know why I am always bracing.” Not anxious about one thing in particular. Not panicked in any dramatic way. Just bracing. Bracing for conflict. Bracing for disappointment. Bracing…

There are moments in history that are not “over there.” They cross borders the way weather does, and you feel them in your body before you can name them. Something tightens, something wakes up, something old and unfinished inside us stirs. Iran feels like that right now: not because the…

In many traditional societies, the shaman is not primarily a “mystic” in the modern, romantic sense. The shaman is a community role: a person entrusted by training, lineage, calling, and accountability to help people stay in relationship with the unseen forces that shape life. That includes the land, the ancestors,…

There’s a reason so many of us spend years trying to outsmart suffering. We medicate it, spiritualize it, outrun it, rationalize it, and, when we can’t do any of those, we may try to bargain with it: Just give me one more week of calm. Just let this relationship settle.…

Here in the North, winter is not a metaphor. It is a season you can feel in your bones: the short days, the long nights, the kind of cold that makes you catch your breath when you step outside. And at the same time, it is a metaphor for the…

Mary Oliver, in her poem In Blackwater Woods, offers this fierce and tender instruction for being human: To live in this world, you must be able to love what is mortal, hold it close as if your life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go……