I didn’t mean to fall in love again. I really didn’t. I had already given my heart to Muir Beach—the fog that tucked me in at night like a damp wool blanket, the way the ocean hurled itself at the rocks with such theatrical despair, the sense that the land itself...
Like almost everyone else I know, I loved Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I read it right after I blew up my own life by quitting my stable job as a doctor to pursue an unknown life of God knows what, and I wanted to be Liz Gilbert. I hadn’t published any books of...
Many spiritual teachings, self-help messages, and therapies focus on forgiveness as either a spiritual virtue or a way of freeing ourselves from seething resentment and freeing others from the bitterness of our judgments. Forgiveness is viewed as a noble act of...
Kids can grow up with developmental wounds that put them on one end of the unhealthy entitlement spectrum or the other. On one end, kids grow up too entitled. They feel entitled to things they’re not actually entitled to, and this can put them at risk of...
Stories, especially stories about our most traumatic experiences, tend to take on a life of their own. They often run away with themselves, rendering us helpless. But taking charge of how we tell the story, finding our voice after having been silenced, and being as...
As I wrote in Navigating The Space Between Stories, many of us are experiencing more change, more quickly, with more uncertainty, than we’re used to. To meet this need for support during times of change, Dr. Jeffrey Rediger and I are hosting a live, in person...
In Healing The Doctor-Patient Relationship, I wrote about the traumas that can happen for both patient and doctor, when the doctor-patient relationship is a patriarchal, hierarchical “power over” structure. But what’s the alternative? How else might we consider...
When I was training to become a physician, the rules of the broken, outdated, patriarchal medical system were made clear to me. They went something like this. As your doctor, I will sacrifice everything in my personal life in order to fix what is broken in you. I...