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Stepping Stone or Stumbling Block?
Read more: Stepping Stone or Stumbling Block?Larry’s dear friend, Gordon, once asked a question I’ve never forgotten: Are you a stepping stone or a stumbling block in the lives of others? It’s a simple question. But it has a way of staying with you. Yesterday on our morning walk, Larry and I met an elderly woman on the trail. She noticed…
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To the Protesters, the Dissenters, and the Broken Hearted — This Is for You
Read more: To the Protesters, the Dissenters, and the Broken Hearted — This Is for YouIf you are watching the world right now and feeling the weight of it — this is written for you. Across the globe, people are standing up for what they believe in. Protesters, dissenters, advocates for justice and freedom. The impulse behind that movement is often beautiful — a genuine love for human dignity, a…
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A Free Mindfulness Resource, Anytime, Anywhere
Read more: A Free Mindfulness Resource, Anytime, AnywhereSomewhere along the way, stillness became a luxury. We live in a time of relentless demand. The notifications, the news, the obligations, the mental noise of a world that rarely pauses. Most of us are running on empty in ways we have normalized so thoroughly we no longer recognize them as depletion. We call it…
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Of All the Things I’ve Lost Recently, I Miss My Mind the Most
Read more: Of All the Things I’ve Lost Recently, I Miss My Mind the MostLarry spent an entire morning looking for a set of pliers. He was certain he had just set them down. He retraced his steps, checked every surface, muttered things I will not repeat here, and finally found them in the laundry basket. The laundry basket. We still do not have a good explanation for that…
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What Mindful Eating Taught Me That the Scale Never Could
Read more: What Mindful Eating Taught Me That the Scale Never CouldI spent years doing everything right and nothing working. At 65, with menopause behind me and autoimmune disease as a daily companion, I found myself carrying 40 pounds of weight that would not move. Not for lack of trying. I ate a largely vegetarian diet. I avoided high fat and high sugar foods. I tracked,…
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Mindfulness Was Not the Fix. And That Was the Point.
Read more: Mindfulness Was Not the Fix. And That Was the Point.I did not come to mindfulness looking for peace. I came to it looking for a way to live with pain.Two back surgeries and a neck surgery will do that. When the body becomes the problem, you start paying attention to it differently. That search led me to a 13-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course…
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Beginner’s Mind in a Nation at a Crossroads
Read more: Beginner’s Mind in a Nation at a CrossroadsA few days ago I read the words of a public figure wrestling openly with a question many of us are quietly holding. With America approaching 250 years, he asked whether celebration is the right response when so much of what we see feels like a departure from what we understand as the values this…
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A season of change – and coming home.
Read more: A season of change – and coming home.The past several months have been full. I finished writing and publishing Winds of Change, the second book in the Keeper of the Clearing series. Alongside that, Larry and I made a significant life change — we returned to Baker City, Oregon, a town we have loved for years and where many of our closest…
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In the Flow
Read more: In the FlowThere is a kind of attention that isn’t effort. It’s the state you enter when you’re wholly engaged in making something, when the thinking mind steps back and the hands know what to do. Contemplative practice has a name for it: mindfulness. Not the app-version, but actual present-moment awareness. Full contact with what is happening…
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Something New is Growing and I Want You to Be Part of It
Read more: Something New is Growing and I Want You to Be Part of ItIf you’ve been following along for a while, you know that making things has always been at the center of what I do. Candles. Soap. Flowers. Whatever the medium, the impulse has always been the same: to take raw materials and turn them into something worth holding.Three weeks ago Larry and I made a big…
Mindful Moments Blog
