Happy And Healthy Lifestyle

“It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.” ~Marcus Aurelius In 2016 I was about to graduate with high honors from a top university. I had mastered Mandarin. Eleven months before graduation, I had secured a job from a reputable accounting firm. I was in a stable relationship with one of the most gorgeous girls on campus. Life doesn’t get any better than this for an international student 1o,000 miles away from home. Slowly, things began to change. Three months before graduation all three members of my family fell gravely ill. When I wasn’t awake talking on the phone with them, I was awake worrying myself into insomnia, anxiety, and stress. Two months before my graduation, the recruiter who’d agreed to hire me wasn’t returning my calls nor replying to my emails. I started to entertain loads of self-deprecating thoughts. Little by little, I was descending into oblivion. Finally,...

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” ~Micheal Jordan   I believe that self-soothing is the key to accessing all happiness and success . All things being equal, when someone is able to self-soothe, they are more resourceful and more powerful than those who haven’t learned that skill yet. Here’s why.    Great success (whether professional or personal) comes with a great deal of responsibility. That responsibility can potentially lead to stress and is often accompanied by failures along the way. Most of us are familiar with that famous Michael Jordan quote—it was even in a ’90s commercial. Resilience is a great skill. In fact, that path is clearly recognizable to anyone who has achieved a lot. But it’s perspective that shows you that those failures aren’t “this is the end of everything and ...

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.” ~Stephen Hawkin I have wonderful family and friends and have always hoped that I would pass along a helpful legacy. Lessons for them to remember, memories to smile about, and love to lean into during hard times. For years, though, it seemed like the biggest thing I was passing down to my exhausted wife, flustered and at times terrified kids, and friends was my struggles with anxiety. As my anxiety grew and the panic attacks came, I grew apart from those I needed the most. Hard for a son and wife to connect to a dad that acts like a bear coming out of hibernation. Grumpy and pissed off. Looking for a fight. Friends being ignored because the alcohol was effortless and it made no demands. My home was not what it should have been, but unfortunately it was what I made it. Expecting the teen to be an adult just like my parents expected of me. Home to a wife who feels she can barely hold the family together and walks on eggshells when she really nee...

“Life isn’t about surviving the storm. It’s about learning to dance in the rain. ” ~ Vivian Greene Compassion is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. During times of suffering, such as following the death of a loved one, sufferers rely on the empathy of others to survive their ordeal. Yet, too often when someone is grieving, we do little more than offer an “I am sorry for your loss ” because we are fearful of accidentally increasing their pain. Speaking as someone who lost her husband unexpectedly after just over three years of marriage—and who has counseled many people who have lost loved ones—I understand both personally and professionally how it feels to grieve deeply. All grievers appreciate the compassion offered them, but there are some expressions of sympathy that are more helpful than others. Here are five don’ts (and dos) for people wanting to comfort grievers. DO talk about the person lost, don’t assume bringing up their name or stories about them will make the sadness wors...

“Wounded children have a rage, a sense of failed justice that burns in their souls. What do they do with that rage? Since they would never harm another, they turn that rage inward. They become the target of their own rage.” ~Woody Haiken Survival mechanisms are ways of being that we picked up along the way to help us cope with what was happening in our reality. Getting mad at ourselves for doing what we do only promotes self-hate. We’re not bad or wrong; in fact, we’re pretty damn intelligent. We found ways to help us soothe our traumas, hurt, and pain and perhaps get love and attention. That’s pretty intelligent, wouldn’t you say? I should just stop eating so much, drinking alcohol, smoking, exhausting myself through compulsive exercise, being busy, procrastinati ng , people pleasing , etc. Easy peasy—just stop, right? Not when we have an “internal fight.” What do I mean? Part of us believes it needs to do these things in order to feel safe or be loved and accepted by others. Th...

When I started Tiny Buddha, one of my main goals was to help us all heal the traumas that haunt us and hold us back in life. In much the same way that our personal traumas hinder us each individually, our collective trauma adversely affects the whole world. And healing that trauma is critical for the future of humanity and the planet. If, like me, you want to do your part to help us all heal the wounds that are passed down through generations, I highly recommend checking out the Collective Trauma Summit , a free, 10-day online event starting on Tuesday, September 22 nd . This powerful summit will bring together over 45 experts on the topic of collective healing including leading psychotherapists, visionaries, researchers, performers, poets, and peacemakers in the world. With panel discussions, guided meditations, and performances by acclaimed poets and musicians, the Collective Trauma Summit will surely help us find strength and healing through this intense period of massive uph...

“Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn’t know you had and dealing with fears you never knew existed.” ~Linda Wooten It was October of 2016 and there I was staring at the wall after yet another sleepless night, nursing my one-year-old, and feeling like a total failure because this motherhood thing still didn’t feel at all natural to me. Why couldn’t I tap easily into my motherly instinct? Why did I feel that, instead of completing me, becoming a mom was actually making me fall apart? I always knew I wanted to be a mother. It was a given in my case. And, like many little girls, I grew up romanticizing the idea. I couldn’t wait to be one. Even when I began to understand that things could get hard (because babies don’t sleep right?), I was still confident that with my love, strength, and sheer drive I could surmount it all. Like many of us, I believed being a mom comes naturally to women, that we’re born to be mothers, so even when we struggle, our instinct eventually kic...

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.” ~Eckhart Tolle Have you ever felt a general dissatisfaction with where you are in life? Ever felt like you can do something better than what you’re doing, but you’re not sure exactly what or how? I have. In fact, I still feel this way, although I am slowly working my way toward creating a more purposeful life for myself. This can feel distressing. Painful. I feel your pain. But take heart that your pain is not purposeless. If these feelings are familiar, this piece is for you. Over the course of a few years, my naïve sense that I was one of those people who would just sail through relatively easily and find my way to fulfilled life, without much effort, was shattered. It left me exposed and vulnerable. Feeling weak and pathetic. It brought the realities of life into sharp focu...