Some of what I thought I witnessed and experienced during ten years of researching my book Sacred Medicine was so out there, “woo,” and mysterious- and some of the healers I worked with turned out to be so corrupt- that I wound up cutting huge swaths of my original...
Since 2016, I’ve been teaching memoir writing as a therapeutic process for healing trauma and improving disease outcomes- “Memoir As Medicine,” as my first writing teacher Nancy Aronie calls it. Morning pages or extemporaneous journal writing can be therapeutic...
Like many women- and like many children of both genders who grew up in religious upbringings- I was raised to be a good, nice, accommodating, compliant, sweet girl who was pleasing to authority figures and didn’t cause any trouble for teachers, pastors, or my...
Right now, I’m sitting on the South Aegean Sea in Kos, Greece, where I was invited to help a group of German doctors renew their Hippocratic Oaths at the Asklepieion temple where Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, started a famous healing temple and his...
Art by Mira KleinI’m preparing to teach a class called Becoming Unfuckwithable: Finding Your Sacred “No” So Your Yes Is A “Hell Yeah,” and as part of creating curriculum for that class, I’ve been pondering what makes people “fuckwithable” in the first place. Part...
Last month’s Conspirituality podcast shared stories of “spiritual heartbreak.” Listening to those stories left me in tears, not just tears of empathy for the spiritually heartbroken who were exploited when they dared to trust, but for my own parts that have been...
When I first got involved with Internal Family Systems (IFS) a decade ago, I did not expect it to wind up being a spiritual path. I started practicing IFS for the reason most people do- as a way to deal with untreated trauma and as an antidote to the spiritual...
Some of the least empathic people I've ever met are the ones who identify as "empaths." But I do not blame these people for their insensitivity that can border on cruelty. I truly believe they know not what they do- because they cannot handle feeling all the feels...