The other day I was hiking silently and slowly, quietly observing nature around me. As I took my first step, I noticed yellow and brown oak leaves scattered across the trail before my feet. Each tiny leaf in its place, like musical notes. A symphony. Everything belonged.

As I continued my hike, I noticed a small palm tree growing in the shade of a sprawling live oak. Dried vines tangled up its branches. Dead leaves. Baby avocados budded on trees, while a ripe one lay bare on the ground, half its flesh eaten by birds or foragers.

Ahead of me, a foot had crushed a yellow wildflower. We cannot take a step without disturbing the ground, perhaps destroying something. But all destruction is creative, a return to the earth, and to abundance.

I reached the summit, a flat outcrop dotted with moss-covered rocks. I could see the freeway, and mountains in the distance. Far from blighting the landscape, the manmade elements simply co-existed. After all, there is nothing left in nature that has not been touched by human life.

As I slowly perceived nature around me, I felt the rising consciousness of “I am” in every part of the landscape my eyes rested on. “I am” this tree. “I am” this rock. “I am” this moss.

My gaze shifted to a distant mountain. “I am” this mountain. Scanning the horizon, I saw that everything belongs, like brush strokes on a canvas. Without this one, the picture would be incomplete. Some of us are mountains, supporting entire ecosystems. Some are bits of moss, growing in the crevice of a stone. All are beautiful. All are the embodiment of essence.

I passed a ladder leaned up on an avocado tree, bifurcating its branches, the remnant of an eager harvester. The tree was growth. The ladder, a tool for us to reach into it. “I am” this avocado tree.

A wise woman said to me: “Leadership is managing people. Management is managing processes.” The trees are people. The ladder is the process. People grow, bloom, decay, produce and reproduce ideas, fruits of labor. They are perfectly imperfect. Processes can become time-worn, trusted, reliable – a map taking us where we want to go, a recipe for reproducing a good outcome, a sturdy ladder.

What if we saw ourselves this way as a community, as a society? Not as ladders to be used and managed, but as living elements we tend to? A large mountain here. A small stone there. Where processes, like ladders or watering cans or stakes, are needed to cultivate, guide, conserve, grow, and harvest? Where all are contributing to a vibrant landscape, constantly growing, shifting, birthing and decaying? Where creative destruction is not something to be feared but a mutual exchange to seed new growth?

When I was 12, I loved can openers. At the time, I was living on the 10th floor of a peach and grey cinderblock apartment building in Beijing’s Jian Guo Men Wai, an apartment complex for wai guo ren, or foreigners. My dad worked at the American Embassy, which meant he read the newspaper in Chinese and sent a lot of telexes back to the State Department about what student pro-democracy demonstrators were up to. It was 1986. Three years later, bullets would graze the windows of our apartment as tanks rolled down the adjacent boulevard.

Canned food was a luxury. A novelty. We would go to the commissary in the basement of the embassy, a small walk-in storage cupboard that smelled like cardboard and packing peanuts, like a pantry, and gaze admiringly over the neatly stacked shelves of American imports. Chef Boyardee Ravioli. Spaghetti-Os. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup. Tang. The whole thing could have been a collaborative installation by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol – I so revered each objet d’art.My mother found creative ways to use canned foods in her cooking. Her favorite recipe for a while was baked pork loin microwaved in Campell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. After a few minutes and the press of a button, bing! presto! The meat and the marinade melded together into a sickly gelatinous grey goop. It didn’t taste half bad.

I consumed many tiny tins of Dole Fruit Cocktail. I loved pulling up the aluminum ring, threading my index finger into it (“Do you take this can to be your lawful wedded slice?” “I do!”), pulling it back and hearing the punch-wheeze of the vacuum releasing. Then, sweet syrup and glistening fruit. The sliced peaches were my favorite. I still don’t know what those bland whitish fruit chunks were. Pears, perhaps?

My dad taught me how to take a can of Kern’s Apricot Nectar and, using the sharp end of the bottle opener, pierce a triangular hole in one side. Then, puncture another smaller triangle directly opposite. The satisfying crunch as the metal gave way, and the gush of canned air exhaling, gave me a sense of achievement. The opposite holes would make a smooth pour, rather than a splashy, sticky glub-glub-glub. This is because as liquid leaves the can through one hole, the air pressure inside decreases. Outside air wants to come in, and rather than forcing its way in through the same spout that is doing the pouring, the second hole allows it to easily enter, restoring harmony and equilibrium to contents of the can.

I relished opening a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli to heat up in a small saucepan after I biked home from school. (Fun fact: Chef Boyardee was created by Ettore Biordi, the former head chef of The Plaza Hotel in New York City, in 1924. He renamed it phonetically, “Boy-AR-DEE,” so Americans could pronounce it). I didn’t mind that the squishy perforated squares floating in too-sweet tomato syrup might have been stuffed with dog food, or, if I am being gracious, liver paté. Lining the can opener up just so, I squeezed the black plastic handles in my white-knuckled grip until I heard a guttural crunch. Then, I diligently cranked the knob until a jagged circle began to form. The final punch through the last attached bit of aluminum was thrilling – like picking free a scab.

Four years later, when my dad retired to Eugene, Oregon, I enrolled at South Eugene High School and wrote my first English essay, a screed against the American supermarket. Why, I railed, did you need TEN brands of toilet paper? Floor-to-ceiling rows of boxed goods! Canned goods! Bagged goods! Frozen goods! Refrigerated goods! It was all just a spectacle of excess!

What I failed to mention was just how much I loved the icy breeze against my bare legs as a supermarket freezer door squiffed shut on a hot American summer day. Or how the crisp, bright bounty and generous aisles of the Cub Market near my grandma’s house in Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota filled me with optimism and joy. Or, the condensed beauty of a comforting can of Chef Boyardee.

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Confession #1: The Vitruvian Man was our backup costume.

Confession #2: In my family, there’s no such thing as “going too far” for Halloween.

Confession #3: Our first idea was to re-create The Creation of Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Now, hear me out: My son, whose shoulder-length wavy mane could easily go thunderbolt grey with baby powder, would be God.

We would paint the sky on a double-wide canvas attached to a PVC pipe stuffed into his backpack – this technique had once worked to hover an alien space craft over his head.

Easy, right?

It was Adam that stumped us. A logical option would be to have a friend play the role.

My son demurred. Too easy.

How about a mannequin?

I resisted the urge to search up “inflatable mannequins,” lest the algorithm peg me wrong.

(I did discover a quiet curiosity about Roxy Display in New Brunswick, NJ, with its 5,200 body parts.)

Deflated, I described our costume quest to my sister.

“Are you insane?!” she scoffed. This stung, coming from a fellow crafter who has been known to hand-dye moth wings and home-make satyr legs.

So we pivoted to our less ambitious backup option: Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man.

Once again, my son’s hair was the gateway, bearing a striking resemblance to that of Michael Hutchence of the ‘90s band INXS. Perfect for our Renaissance man.

The first question: how to construct the iconic circle and square, depicting the ideal proportions.

For the circle, an obvious answer seemed to be an over-sized hula hoop. It turns out none are big enough for a full arm span.

Gemini rescued me with the suggestion of fiberglass tent poles – which are both lightweight and bendable.

Within days, I was piecing together a flexibly-sized, sturdy circle and square, which we wrapped in brown electrical tape for a vintage drawing-on-parchment look.

Next , we were onto crafting the man himself.

A flesh-colored body suit was out. There was no way a middle schooler would don anything with even a whiff of nudity.

“How about we give him some funny boxer shorts?” I mused, “Maybe printed with spam cans (‘Vitruvian Spam’)? A pair of pajamas? A Hawaiian shirt?”

My son flicked each of my suggestions away with a dismissive wave — too declassé.

An Amazon search for “Muscle shirt” returned a padded shirt. It was minimally suggestive or embarrassing — perfect.

We decided to studiously ignore the lower body for now.

Next came the extra limbs. Fresh from my “mannequin arms and legs” search for Adam, I knew that option would be both creepy and impractical (too heavy).

Then I remembered visiting Weta Workshop in New Zealand. Sculptor Kim Beaton had demonstrated how to make light-weight sculptures out of aluminum foil and a substance called Pal Tiya. I ordered a bag of Pal Tiya and some bulk tin foil.

Within days, I was sculpting flesh onto aluminum foil musculature.

As I made my way through my 50-lb bag of Pal Tiya, I realized that while aluminum may be lightweight, Pal Tiya is basically cement.

No way that tentpoles would support it.

I imagined my son dropping a cement arm on a preschooler during the Halloween parade.

I heaved a sigh to match the weight of the limbs, and headed back to the drawing board.

My sister, in her infinite wisdom, suggested the ultimate crafting material: cardboard.

I sketched arms and legs on an old box, cut them out with a box-cutter (after a futile search for an Ex-acto knife which is no doubt in the same black hole that eats every. single. pair. of scissors.)

A coat of flesh-colored acrylic paint, and some permanent marker details later, and we were done.

Except for the nude bottom.

That’s when my son had a genius idea.

“Mom,” he said, “I have an extra pair of blue jeans, and two pairs of the same sneakers. Why not put the jeans and shoes on the cardboard legs?”

Done.

Not to mention, this solved the question of how the extra legs would stand up. We simply slipped a belt through belt-loops of both pairs of jeans, buckling it tightly so the extra legs were strapped to my son’s body.

Now came the final assembly. Zip ties did the job, tying the circle to the square, the hands and shoes to the circle. Fini!

But how to get the thing to school? The width was at least 5 feet. Our solution? Stick it on top of my husband’s midlife crisis sports car and hold on to it while driving to school at 15 miles an hour with flashers on.

Eh voila! The Vitruvian Man costume was a triumph — if by “triumph” you mean “required its own zip code.”

Still, for one glorious Halloween afternoon, my son embodied the perfect proportions of art, science, creative problem-solving, and DIY ambition. Happy Halloween!

Vitruvian Man Costume How-To

Materials

1 package of fiberglass tentpoles

1 package of zipties

1 men’s muscle shirt

1 roll brown electrical tape

2 - 4 large pieces of cardboard for arms and legs

Scissors

Box cutter

Ruler

Pencil

Cutting mat or cardboard

Hot glue gun and glue sticks

Brown fat-tip marker

Flesh and ochre acrylic paint

Paint brush

2 pairs of pants

2 pairs of shoes

1 belt

How-to

1. Measure your arm span to determine the width of the circle’s circumference.

2. Connect tent poles into a circle. Secure the connections with hot glue (optional). Wrap in brown electrical tape.

3. Connect tent poles to create a square with a side length equal to the circle’s circumference. Wrap each length in brown electrical tape.

4. Cut four T-shapes out of cardboard. Fold each T in half lengthwise, making four L-shaped corners. Apply hot glue to the insides of the cardboard, stick the tent poles in and press down. Wrap with brown electrical tape.

5. Draw the arms and legs on cardboard with a pencil, using the picture of the Vitruvian Man to calculate proportions and conversions.

6. Cut out the arms and legs with a box cutter. If needed, cut out an extra piece of cardboard to connect the two arms so that the entire span matches the width of the circle.

7. Mix the flesh and ochre acrylic paint until you get a skin tone you like.

8. Paint the arms and legs with acrylic paint.

9. Once dry, add an outline and details with a brown fat-tip marker.

10. Place the jeans and shoes over the legs. Thread the belt through the belt loops, leaving it unbuckled.

11. Cut two slits into the back of the muscle shirt and slide the arms through it.

12. Secure the circle to the square with zip ties where the shapes intersect.

13. Secure the hands and feet with zip ties. (Alternatively, put on the muscle shirt, and then ask a friend to secure the cardboard hands to the circle).

14. Get into the second pair of jeans.

15. Slide into the muscle shirt, if you are not already wearing it.

16. Have a friend put the belt ends through the jeans you are wearing, and buckle tight. This belt will now hold up the cardboard legs.

17. Hold the circle and square up with your arms stretched out at an angle, as in the picture of the Vitruvian man.

18. Hold the pose for as long as you can. The longer you hold it, the buffer you’ll become, just like the real Vitruvian Man.

Feeling estranged from your child is one of the most difficult and painful experiences that any parent can encounter. Here is a person who we love more than anyone in the world, and yet we sometimes we can feel helpless to repair our relationship.

And, the pain often extends well into adulthood. With adult children, it can look like: boundaries in the form of ultimatums. Refusing to call or visit you. Keeping a cold and distant tone. The feeling that you are walking on eggshells and can’t do or say anything right. Labeling you a narcissist. These actions and feelings are incredibly painful.

I know, because I used to do all of these things and more to my own mom — both as a teenager and as recently as a year ago, as a fully grown adult.

Under Anger is Wounded Love

The first thing to know is that your kids love you, deeply. They are angry at you precisely because they love you so much, as expert in emotional intelligence, anger management, and emotional regression John Lee explains in Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately (Random House, 1993).

Babies and young children innately love and are defenseless against their parents. That all-consuming love and lack of separation makes them vulnerable to even the slightest — often unconscious — attack. A critical word, a demeaning look, expressions of disappointment, offers to help that carry the message “you’re not good enough” – all of these cut children to their core.

Children’s resulting aggressive or distancing behaviors can therefore be seen as self-protection mechanisms. Your children are trying to keep themselves safe – and give themselves space wounds to heal. And that is a good thing. They can and should learn to protect themselves from people who hurt them.

The truth is, all parents hurt their children at some point. And children hurt their parents. It's part of being human. Our contract with one another is to allow our failures, teach one another how to grow up, become more compassionate, and embody our authenticity with integrity and gentleness.

How Can You Heal Parent-child Conflict?

1. Take the first step and own your role.

As the parent, your child’s hurt and anger towards you likely comes from the fact that you failed to show up when they needed you in some way. Maybe you were critical when they needed compassion. Maybe you dropped the ball on one too many times – showing up late, forgetting lunches, missing performances, etc. Maybe you didn’t see them for who they were, and sent signals that they were not as good as their siblings or peers, or not living up to your expectations.

In our society, children are generally not taught how to deal with their anger productively. A a child, you may have been shamed for your anger, or you may have learned that anger always leads to pain (Lee, 1993).

As a parent, there is a lot to be angry about – the lack of sleep, the lack of social support for childcare, your child’s unreasonable but totally age-appropriate behavior.
Unless you take the time to learn to recognize the many subtle ways anger shows up and learn how to handle anger without causing harm, you risk becoming alienated from your children over time (Lee, 1993).

Children see their parents as gods when they are young. So when their parents fall from grace, the feeling of betrayal is devastating and the retaliation can be dramatic and hurtful.

While we can't heal the pain for them, we can support their journey by taking responsibility for our part. Patience and compassion are key.

The first step is to accept the truth that you hurt each other, without blame, guilt or self-recrimination. Conflict leading to hurt is a totally normal part of any relationship. It’s how you resolve, learn, and heal from the conflict that matters.

2. Offer a heartfelt apology.

A sincere apology from a parent is liberating and healing for a child. Describe the times you have hurt them. Refrain from justifying your actions. Simply honor and observe that what you did or said was wrong and caused them hurt. Tell them what you’ll do differently next time – then do it.

Give them permission to tell you when you’re not living up to your commitment. Acknowledge that you’re human but you are committed to growing. You are willing to keep learning and growing so you can be a better human and a better parent.

Between being a good-enough parent and being a perfect parent (impossible, fyi), there is a huge amount of room to maneuver. Chances are that, if you’re reading this, you are well within that healthy window – you’re doing a good job, but just like everyone, you have room to grow.

3. Don’t blame yourself or your child.

When you do experience conflict with your child — or realize (like I recently did) that you have been engaged in a pattern of subtle aggression over time that you’re not proud of and would like to change — don’t blame yourself. In the words of Maya Angelou, as a parent, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”

Be careful to steer clear of blaming your child. Especially if your child is an adult now, it might be tempting to blame them or write them off as too sensitive, cruel, lacking in empathy for you, or disrespectful of your culture. But remember, they were deeply wounded as children, and that is nobody’s fault because you were both doing your best. Be gentle with yourself and with them, and keep attempting to connect with an open heart and a willingness to listen and learn.

4. Drop your agenda.

As parents, we often – whether we wish to admit it or not – have a covert agenda. We try to protect and shape our kids into their best selves without them rejecting or abandoning us. But true love has no covert agenda. Love respects the other person’s sovereignty. In the words of Khalil Gibran – “(your children) come through you but they are not for you, and though they are with you, they belong not to you.”

The biggest agendas I hear from parents (including myself) are: “This is for your own good,” “Your future self will thank me,” and “You’re MY child – it’s because I care!”
Each of these assume that the parent knows better than the child. But more often than not, under the agenda is fear and the desire to protect the child from painful life consequences that we feel like we know too well from our own experience.

The reality is that we don’t know. Choices that could lead to “negative” consequences are simply learning opportunities. And “negative” consequences aren’t always bad. When one door closes, another one opens.

This doesn’t mean you should never share your wisdom with your child. By all means do – with their permission, e.g. “Do you want to hear my thoughts on this?” or “Can I tell you about the time I encountered something similar when I was your age?”

And of course, if your child is in physical or emotional danger – such as contemplating self-harm, or exhibiting patterns of behavior such as an eating disorder or persistent negative self-talk – you are duty-bound to show up and step in. Get them support and professional help.

But otherwise, let them. Let them learn from their own mistakes. Let them experience pain and hardship. Let them. You cannot live their lives for them, rescue them from mistakes you wish you hadn’t made yourself, or mold them into your picture of your ideal person. If you try, you are actually depriving them valuable learning opportunities in what it means to be human, which is a disservice to both of you.

Healing is the Flip Side of Heartbreak

Parent-child conflict is heartbreaking and hard. I know, because I’ve been through it with both my teens and with my own parents — with whom I was barely on speaking terms for many painful years. The parent wound is the deepest one most of us carry – and it informs every other social interaction, whether with bosses, friends, neighbors, or political figures. Once you heal it, you’ll be better equipped to approach every relationship in your life with clarity, integrity, and compassion. It takes time and patience, but it is absolutely worth the effort.

Suggested Reading

For a good primer on doing this work, I invite you to check out the following books:

• Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately by John Lee

• Growing Yourself Back Up: Understanding Emotional Regression by John Lee

• The Five Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity by Steven Kessler

• How to Have Better Relationships: The Skills You Need, The Actions to Take, Based on the Five Personality Patterns by Steven Kessler

Thank you for reading, and please share any stories, lessons learned, or questions you have about healing parent-child conflict in the comments!

If so, I hear you. So let’s get a few things out of the way. Number one. I am a huge advocate of good enough parenting. As a good friend wisely said, between “good enough” and “perfect,”there is a huge amount of wiggle room. I am all about wiggling, sashaying, twerking, and booty-shaking in that broad zone of parenting good-enoughness.

I’m also a huge proponent of only giving advice with permission.  If you’re a regular reader here, you may have developed a sense of trust in me. I never want to undermine that trust by sounding preachy, judgy or by painting a perfect — and unattainable – picture of what parents should be.

So, if you’re not in the mood today to contemplate my thoughts on how to become a better parent – accrued through my own years of  blood love, sweat, and tears (lots of tears!) of raising three boys — then I invite you to save this article for another day, which may be never.  Totally fine by me!

If you are in the mood, however, then please read on, and join me in exploring these ideas in the comments!  I am here for all of it – the good, the bad, and the f-ugly – because that’s what parents do. We show up the best we can, whether we feel like it or not, whether or not there is vomit on our best dress, and whether or not our mother-in-law agrees with our parenting style. 😀

Ten Things You Can Do to Be a Better (Not Perfect!) Parent

1. Be in your heart and body.

Thanks to Silicon Valley social media the Enlightenment colonialism industrialization patriarchy pretty much EVERYTHING, we modern humans spend too much time in our minds.  

The mind is a particularly acutely revved-up anxiety machine for parents, who are constantly bombarded with social and familial pressure about whether we are raising our kids right.  Every scary headline reflects the world in which we are raising our kids – and the world they will inherit (no pressure!) – and our natural instinct is to protect and prepare them. For. Everything.

If that’s not a recipe for a nervous breakdown and a powder-keg relationship with your kids, I don’t know what is. So. Deep breaths first. Fear is natural and comes from the body.  It’s okay to express fear to kids:  “I am afraid you’ll get hit by a car and die if you don’t wear your helmet while riding that electric skate board that I regret buying you – because I’m afraid you might die by going too fast, too.”

Anxiety, however, is something different entirely.  Anxiety is when we project thoughts and plans onto the fear, trying to gain control.  Anxiety projects the following message to our children:  I don’t believe in you. You’re not good enough. You’re not safe. You can’t trust me. As in (mashup of things I have actually said to my children, either directly or implicitly):  “If you don’t stop playing video games right this minute, your life will be ruined and you’ll never get a job, and I’ll be babysitting you for the rest of my life!!!”  Ouch. 

Children need calm, compassionate and grounded parents. You can show up this way by practicing being in your heart and body. There is no “one right way” to do this.  Find whatever works for you – from practical to woo.  Move your body, dance, go for a walk, get into nature, (if you’re woo) practice compassionate meditation and breath work, listen to music, cultivate a spiritual practice (woo again!), imagine merging with spiritual guides like Jesus and Buddha (extremely woo!), exercise, cook, hike, garden, etc.

Note: I am woo and I am not ashamed to admit it in certain company, which I includes the safe space of my own Substack, but I totally get and love people who are not woo at all. My teenage sons, for one. 

2. Work on healing your childhood trauma.

When we are triggered by our kids, we lose our shit in ways ranging from the Hershey squirts to Montezuma’s revenge.

Among the various ways that we get the green apple splatters: we become aggressive, controlling, passive-aggressive, critical, collapsed, depressed, passive, withdrawn, or codependent. The liquid lava list goes on. The thing that all of these chocolate fire sales have in common is: unhealed childhood trauma. 

Most of us were raised by deeply wounded and unconscious – e.g. human – parents. They did the best with what they had. Often, they lacked self-compassion and self-awareness, and thus were unable to transmit those qualities to us. In many cases, they were socially conditioned to be fearful for our social and material survival.  They may have tried to mold us (in subtle and overt ways) into people that did not match our essence.  They likely projected their fears onto us.  They might even have used us as their emotional support puppies.  No doubt (especially if you grew up in the 80s or earlier), they behaved aggressively – grounding, yelling, criticizing, punishing, even hitting – that they believed were for our own good.  

Human primates are innately aggressive animals, socially and physically. Our aggression is typically turned on those with whom we have the most contact (and thus the most opportunities to be triggered), and in private: our children.

And yet (cue swelling, joyful, triumphal music!) –  humans also have the ability to transcend our unconscious instincts, rewire our brains, and access our equally innate instincts for compassion and collaboration. So how to proceed?  The trauma equivalent of eating heating heaping amounts of high-fiber cereal includes:  reading self-help, psychology and spiritual books, listening to podcasts, journaling, speaking to a therapist, working with plant medicine, meditating, working with spiritual guides, and more. Just take the first step and stay the course, and notice how your stools become more regular. 

3. Be compassionate with yourself.

I truly believe that self-compassion is the gateway drug to becoming a better parent.   Self-compassion allows you to forgive yourself when you hurt your child, rather than berating yourself and further entrenching negative patterns.  When you can forgive yourself, you will also have an easier time forgiving others – especially the parents who wounded you deeply, and from whom you acquired your inner critic, learned your triggers, and learned the shadow side of your survival patterns. 

4. Learn the 5 Personality Patterns.

The 5 Personality Patterns, developed by Lynda Caesara and written about by Steven Kessler here and here, are a powerful framework for understanding our unconscious survival patterns in order to unlearn their shadow sides and strengthen their light sides.  They are acquired in childhood.  They are:

1. Leaving / Flight – leaving physically or into our own world, tuning out, or dissociating.

2. Merging / Fawn – dropping our boundaries and becoming the other person in order to contort ourselves to please them and get our way.  This has an aggressive overlay because people don’t like to have their space invaded or be manipulated – the initial pleasure of being fawned over turns dark when they realize there is an agenda. 

3. Enduring / Freeze – hunkering down, passively resisting, and stonewalling. 

4. Aggressive / Fight – attacking, violating others’ boundaries, taking over. 

5. Rigid - insisting on strict rules and order at the expense of compassion, truth, reason, and integrity.

Each of these patterns takes us out of our essence of compassion and integrity. To be in integrity is to have complete alignment between our mind, body, spirit, and heart – to speak our truth with compassion and respect for others’ boundaries and an accurate, empathic read on what they are ready to hear. Each of us has our own truth and deserves to be respected. 

5. Laugh at your shadows. 

Shadows are not bad. We all have them.  We all become needy, manipulative, aggressive, pouty, grumpy, grandiose, and more when we feel wounded.  Learn to recognize, embrace, and laugh about them. Laughter is the best medicine because it blends compassion and release. 

6. Communicate with your children.

Let them know you are working on yourself. Tell them you love them. Admit when you make mistakes, and repair.  Tell them about your childhood, the ways you were harmed, and the ways you are proactively working to heal.  It is never too late to communicate. If you are estranged from your child, start by just sending them voice memos letting them know you are thinking of them. Do not have an agenda. Do not expect them to forgive you; that is your job – to forgive yourself. You don’t need anything from them. Just show up with love.

7. Respect your child’s and your own boundaries

It is easy to forget that our children are their own sovereign human beings, and our goal all along as parents is to teach them to be self-sustaining, independent, and self-aware. They try to merge with us, and we with them – and in fact mothers are literally physically merged with their children at the beginning of their lives, so this conscious decoupling process is universal.  

Boundaries are not something to be managed with your mind or with rules.  Boundaries are felt with your heart and body and managed from your heart with assertive, embodied “I” communication.  “I don’t like it when you speak to me that way.”  “I don’t have the energy to play right now.”  “I like it when my kitchen counters are clean.”  “I need 24 hours advance notice when you need a ride somewhere.” 

Sometimes Often, as parents we have to make sacrifices and compromise our own desires to be of service to our children.  That’s okay. But remember it is not a boundary violation when you do this – you always have free will, and you are making a conscious choice.  Children are needy. They need us to show up as parents.  Their needs are not a reason for resentment. They are an opportunity to step into our power as compassionate servant leaders who model care, kindness, and healthy boundaries.

8. Let go of your agenda. 

Love is neutral, present, and respectful. It has no agenda. It trusts and doesn’t need to be in control.  When you find yourself showing up to your child with an agenda, stop.  Check yourself. Revert to the embodied “I:”. Name your fears, and ask questions with genuine curiosity that empower your kids to find the answers for themselves: “Why did you choose to drop that class?”  “I am afraid your friends aren’t treating you well. How do they show their kindness?” “I am scared that your grades will hurt your future job prospects, and I want you to be financially secure when you are an adult. It feels really good to be independent and self-reliant. How can I support you?”

Notice in the last example that I said “I am scared that your grades will.  . . .” rather than “I am scared that your lack of attention to your schoolwork will . . . “  The latter contains blame and projection and thus violates the child’s boundaries.  There might be a lot of things happening that are leading to low grades.  Attention might be one. Underneath that might be a social issue. Or a learning difference. Or a poor fit with a teacher. Or conflict or stress at home. Or a negative self-perception.  Or  . . . 

9. You are a template for your children.

You know the flawed adage “Do as I say, not as I do?”  Kids do what you do. They are who you are (in that they mirror you. But it doesn’t go both ways! They are not you!).  They can read your mind. They can feel your thoughts.  All of your unspoken fear and anxiety?  They feel it. And they react.  

All you need to do (ha ha!) is shift your energy into grounded self-compassion with respect for boundaries – yours and theirs. Relax, breathe, and fully embody your personal space with your highest self. This instantly gives them permission to do the same, and you will see them relax, shift, and express their truth and begin to embody their highest selves, too. 

10. The most important thing is that you’re trying. 

You’re flawed, and that’s okay. You’re human, and I  wouldn’t have it any other way. The art of being human is what we are here to teach our children.  Your flaws, triggers and missteps are a gift to your child when you are self-aware and self-compassionate in relationship to them – maybe not always in the moment, but upon compassionate reflection.  When you are able to self-reflect and share it with your child – apologize and course correct – you model a powerful skill for them.  It shows them that they can mess up, too. That they don’t have to be perfect, either.  It teaches them how to be resilient and respond compassionately to themselves when they fail or cause hurt. Keep showing up for yourself. Because when you do, you are also showing up in a powerful way for your kids. The ultimate betrayal is self-betrayal – ultimately, only you can heal and rescue you. Your kids need to learn the same lesson – blame, guilt, or defensiveness are not the answer. Self-compassion and continuous growth and learning are.

I believe in you. 🫶

The journey of being a parent is one of the most important and healing journeys any of us will ever take, if we choose it. Kids and parents provide one another with powerful, daily motivators and mirrors to awaken into their true nature and essence, to become their highest of high selves. 

Having been on the journey for 15 years myself, raising three boys and distilling some of my key lessons into children’s books and music, my experience is that it is intrinsically worthwhile and the results can even be miraculous.

A final note: Turning inward and taking care of yourself is not selfish, especially as a parent raising children in this rapidly changing, challenging world. The turmoil and shadows we see in our society are fragmented reflections of the turmoil and shadows within each of us. By healing ourselves and our families first, I do believe that the world we collectively live in will eventually reflect the inner and inter-relational peace we create.

“How was your summer?” 🌞 That’s the question we’re all answering these days.  Me? My summer was busy. Our family traveled to about a dozen places between family trips, work trips, internships, and camps – and I hosted no fewer than three major gatherings: a family reunion, an anniversary party and a college reunion. Ten weeks felt like six months – with life lessons to spare.

Here are some of my key take-aways:

1. Building in Quiet Time is Key to a Good Family Trip

Our family took a European family vacation trip this summer. Yay! And. Being among crowds of sight-seers, visiting with relatives, and spending a week non-stop together as a family – including sharing rooms and meals, sight-seeing, and navigating new cities – is hard.  Family vacations trips are social, because people are everywhere.  To stay happy, you have to build in downtime to recharge.  And if you do, maybe your next family trip will actually be a vacation!

2. Intention Setting is the Secret to Happiness

Every experience I had this summer could be measured by the clarity of my intentions, and the quality of my follow through (aka planning and execution).  Did I intend to deplete myself on my family vacation trip?  Hell no. It happened because instead of being clear about what I wanted from the vacation (and asking my family to do the same), I fell into the unconscious trap of trying to cram in as much as possible. Classic rookie move. When intentions aren’t clear, we end up with unspoken expectations, which don’t get met.

In contrast, when I hosted a weekend reunion for my college singing group, I started with an intention-setting call.  One of my intentions?  To feel energized, rather than depleted, by the end of the weekend. (Yes, I learned something from my family vacation trip!)  What would that look like?  Moving my body every day.  Starting each morning with meditation. Connecting deeply with everyone feeling equally seen and supported. And that’s what we did. Everyone had a great time – because clarity is kindness, and intention breeds clarity.

As an aside, giving voice to fears is an important part of intention setting.  As they say, you’ve got to name it to tame it.  For our college singing group reunion, someone voiced the fear that she would screw things up because she hadn’t sung in a while.  We reassured her it was okay, and built in lots of vocal warm-ups.  By voicing her fear, she was able to get the help she needed.

4. You’re Not Responsible for Other People’s Reactions

Sometimes you need to say that difficult thing.  I found this to be the case when I needed to tell my college singing friend that I was scared that if she brought her teenage daughter along, it would take attention away from our rare singing time – and that her daughter might feel left out.  I said it directly, with care.  My friend responded well – her daughter still joined us but happily read and worked on puzzles.  It could have gone another way – she could have taken offense or felt hurt – and if it did, that would have been okay. So often, we don’t say what needs to be said because we’re afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings.  But in reality, clarity is kindness.

5. Ask for Help Before You Need It

As I wrote about here, this summer, I hosted a family reunion to scatter my dad’s ashes. This was a more complex project - logistically and emotionally – than I could ever have anticipated.  As a result, I found myself needing help.  But asking for help in the moment is hard. It makes me feel flustered and self-conscious. Like I’m making my emergency someone else’s problem.  While this can’t be entirely avoided – we’re human and can’t control everything – assigning jobs like “Dinner clean-up on Saturday night” means you won’t find yourself trying to enlist help at the last minute or feeling resentful if people aren’t pitching in – and others won’t be asking what they can do or wondering why you’re mad.  Next time, I’ll delegate ahead of time so everyone can relax. Did I mention that clarity is kindness? 😊

5. You Bring Your Own Experience

One of the highlights of my summer was returning to Chef Scott Peacock’s kitchen in Marion, Alabama, for a Peach Cobbler Experience. His kitchen felt to us like a sacred space, and cooking with him a transcendent experience.   The peaches literally seemed to come alive in his hands – the love and care he puts into his food is so palpable.  And yet, Scott told us that we were unique in the way we were experiencing his kitchen.  That we were bringing the experience.  “Not everyone has this experience,” he opined, somewhat cryptically. “Every Biscuiteer brings their own experience – and you bring the very best!”  This was quite a revelation for me – and reinforced the old adage that you get out what you put in. As in Biscuiteering, so in Life.

6. Graciousness is Not Ingratiating

Have you ever felt like you were being too gracious? (In Chinese, we say “ke-chi.”)  Guilty as charged. With all my hosting this summer, one of my big breakthroughs was realizing that I tend to over-host.  Over-hosting looks like this: trying to make everything perfect. Not letting anyone help. Taking too much responsibility for everyone’s experience. 

When this happens, graciousness turns ingratiating (and grating). What do I mean?  Graciousness is being freely thoughtful and generous, with no strings attached. Being ingratiating is expecting something in return. In the case of hosting, it’s wanting to be perfect. Wanting to control the guest’s experience. Wanting accolades. Wanting to achieve a multi-billion dollar media empire that eventually lands you in jail (sorry, Martha, I still love you.). Ironically, being ingratiating makes people uncomfortable, because what on the surface appears to be all about them is really all about the host. 

By summer’s end, I’d embraced the concept of casual hosting – lowering my standards, focusing on what is truly important (the quality of the connection!), giving people jobs to do, and even setting the intention to not over-host, and asking my guests to help me.  At my college singing group reunion, this approach worked like a charm!

7. Don’t Crush the Baby Bird

Kids change a lot over a summer. By August, both my sons were taller than me, and one was cooking shakshouka.  One busy day after school, I was rushing them out the door when my chef-son demanded to make beef tacos.  But there was no beef. “MOM!” he shouted at me, a recently-converted pescatarian. “START BUYING BEEF!”  “I’m sorry that the whole world doesn’t revolve around you,” I replied, coldly – then quickly apologized. We found a pack of beef at the back of the fridge, he made his tacos, and we healed the rift by listening to sad songs on our drive (note to parents of teens: Put “Everybody Hurts” or “I Won’t Give Up On You” on the car stereo next time hit a rough patch, and watch what happens.). Turns out, he still needed me to parent him: look out for his needs and schedule events with enough time to eat real food.  I had mistaken his adult-like knife skills for being an adult. 

I recently read a great analogy by Susan Dennard that underscores the lesson. In brief, it’s this:  Relationships / projects / children are like baby birds. Hold them too loosely, and they’ll fly away / flop / fall.  Hold them too closely, and you’ll crush them.  My son needed me to find that balance – and the whole summer was about finding that balance, too.

Our souls are like that baby bird, too. We need space. Freedom from judgement. Support. We need time to rest before we can fly. 

What Counts as a Family Reunion?

Family reunions come in all shapes and sizes – from intimate gatherings to college-reunion-like affairs complete with matching t-shirts.

My first taste of a reunion was my grandma’s 90th birthday, a casual BBQ on her Lake Minnetonka lawn, when I was in my 20s. The organizers added a boat ride on the historic Minnehaha steamboat and a theater outing. The absolute highlight? Someone made hilarious paper masks with her face on them! (Seriously, they were a hit.)

Last summer, I pulled together a girls' weekend for my sister and four cousins. Though I'd admired my cousins’ lives on Facebook, we hadn't really connected since childhood. Just six of us, we spa-ed in Napa, reconnected over dinners, and chilled in Stinson Beach – a simple joy that felt like a true reunion.

This summer, I gathered 30 family members to scatter my dad’s ashes in Lake Minnetonka, site of his childhood home. We booked a local inn and a couple of Airbnb’s, and spent a glorious long weekend riding bikes, boating, and playing board games.  The youngest generation, aged 5 – 18, some of whom had never met, hit it off immediately and are now clamoring to reunite every summer. Success!

Sonya’s extended family has been hosting reunions every two years since the 1976, when her dad decided to reconnect family who had dispersed from their home state of Alabama during the Great Migration.  This summer, she and her cousins organized a reunion of over 70 family members in Birmingham, Alabama!

Why Should I Host a Family Reunion?

As Ram Dass famously quipped, “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family.” And let's be honest, headlines often paint a picture of fractured families. So, the idea of hosting a reunion might seem... well, a little treacherous. Yet, that's precisely why a family reunion can be a surprisingly ideal way to forge common ground. With an explicit purpose – especially when honoring an elder or celebrating a life – these gatherings have a unique power to help us put differences aside and gain perspective.

So, why brave the potential chaos? Reunions offer incredible opportunities to:

• Celebrate a milestone birthday

• Celebrate a life

• Celebrate an anniversary

• Get younger members of the family together to (with luck!) form lifelong friendships – optimal ages are 10 – 18

• Appreciate and learn about your shared ancestry (and all the quirks that go along with it!)

• Build connections across different branches of the family tree

  

The why of your reunion will help decide the who, where, and how. Want to build connections with distant relatives?  Plan to make it big and incorporate lots of structured activities to help people get to know each other.   Focused on helping the youngest family members forge friendships?  Limit your guests to families with children – though part of the joy of family is the intergenerational connections, so consider including a few grandparents, aunts, and uncles, too.

Ultimately, the most profound 'why' is the deep sense of grounding and belonging that only family can provide. For most of human history, we lived in tribes, close to our kin. It's only in our modern era that we've dispersed and often disconnected. A family reunion can be that vital first step in re-weaving those threads, building bonds that echo powerfully across generations.

How to Host a Family Reunion

First, let's get one thing straight: a family reunion is not a family vacation. On vacation, you kick back with a mai tai by the pool. At a reunion, your focus is squarely on bringing people together. As the organizer, you're not just a host; you're a mega-host, stage manager, matchmaker, logistics guru, camp counselor, and sometimes, even a therapist. It's a hugely rewarding job, but trust me, it's a job!

10 Steps to Hosting the Ultimate Family Reunion

1.        Set an intention and build a guest list. 

You might want to specifically consider intentions like:  connecting your California and Florida relatives; learning about your family history; building intergenerational bonds; honoring elders; helping family members share their talents and interests with one another (family talent show? Yes, please!),  

Based on your intention, build a guest list. This might require tracking down email addresses from far-flung relatives.  Resist the urge to exclude anyone! Sometimes the most surprising and meaningful connections bloom where you least expect them – people (and relationships) can truly evolve.

2.       Create an organizing committee and decide on roles.

A family reunion is something best taken on by two-to-four competent family members. Lean into your strengths and divide and conquer.  Roles include:

• Accommodations (booking, assigning rooms)

• Meal planning (e.g. picnics, buffets, seated dinners)

• Activity planning (e.g. museum or theater outings, board games, bike rentals, boat rentals, kids’ activities)

• Communications (pre-, post-, and real-time updates during the reunion)

• Transportation (e.g. driving people to / from events)

• Social Hosting (e.g. making sure elderly attendees are comfortable, attending to families with young children)
  

3.        Pick a date and time (6 months to a year out!).

A long weekend is best – ideally a 3-day weekend so guests don’t have to take time off work.  A good amount of time is 2 – 3 days – either Thursday – Sunday or Friday – Sunday. Depending on the size, reunions can take a long time to plan and it’s best to give everyone notice — 6 months to a year or more! — so they can arrange their schedules.

4.        Decide on a budget.

 It’s important to ensure that cost is not a barrier to participation – which can exacerbate family divisions. Consider privately asking more affluent family members to help underwrite expenses.  If that’s not an option, you can consider fundraising. Sonya's family, for instance, got creative and even sold popcorn a year in advance!

If you’re hosting at a hotel, choose one with all-inclusive breakfast to minimize the number of expenses attendees need to incur.   Decide in advance what attendees will need to cover themselves (e.g. getting themselves there), and what you will cover. You can also ask each attendee to pitch in to cover shared expenses, if that feels appropriate. The key expenses for a reunion are:

• Accommodations

• Meals

• Transportation – consider renting a van to shuttle guests to and from activities

• Activities – for example, bike rentals, a museum visit

• Swag – for example, family t-shirts, a welcome bag

• Flights - if relatives aren’t local
  

5.        Choose a location.

Ideally, the location is easy to get to, meaningful for the family, and doable given your budget. Consider factors like: 

• Are there reasonably priced accommodations available that can house everyone? 

• Are accommodations accessible to family members of all abilities and ages? (e.g. camping might be hard on elders). 

•  Is it a “destination” that will be attractive?

•  Is travel to this location reasonably priced?  

• What types of fun activities are available?

If booking multiple accommodations, it’s best that they are within short walking distance to minimize transportation costs and logistics.

6.        Make a schedule. 

Balance organized activities with down-time (particularly in hot weather).  A possible daily schedule might look like:

9 – 10:30 am – Breakfast at a central gathering place

11:00 – 2:00 pm – Broadly inclusive activity and box lunch, e.g. boat ride, museum visit, picnic with outdoor games

2:00 – 5:00 pm – Free time / downtime, optional activities

5:00 – 9:00 pm – Drinks and dinner reception; consider including a talent show or ceremony to honor elders

7.        Make it special.  

Once you have an initial schedule, think about what you can do to make the reunion special – and seamless for your guests. For example, given the large size of her reunions and the fact that guests are coming from all over, Sonya hosts a hospitality suite on arrival day. Guests know they can grab a snack and see a friendly face, no matter what time they roll in. 

For larger reunions, consider offering a menu of optional activities for different age groups, for example, a bar crawl for people in their 20s; water sports, mini-golf, or board game night for teens.

If your reunion is centered around a celebration of life, anniversary, or milestone birthday, give people the opportunity to prepare and give toasts or share memories – with plenty of notice.  If any family members are uncomfortable with public speaking, consider having someone read a toast for them.

At her reunion, Sonya gave a presentation on family ancestry before an all-family dinner reception.  At the dinner, she presented awards (traveled the farthest, youngest, oldest, etc.), and flowers for the elders of the family. So inspiring!

Don’t assume that nuclear families want or need to stick together. At my reunion, I assigned all the teens to bunk together in a carriage house. It became the teen lounge and they stayed up late watching movies. They were thick as thieves by the end of the reunion!

Sonya also creates welcome bags, including reunion t-shirts, snacks and water, and color-coded pins denoting their generation, which guests can wear all weekend to help make connections. Isn’t Sonya just the best? 😊

8.        Communicate.

Send out invitations and an itinerary well in advance.  Make a Google form for activity sign-ups and to collect guest’s contact and arrival information. You can even create a reunion website, especially for family members who may be less technologically savvy. Be forewarned that people are generally very slow to respond, so expect to follow-up frequently.

During the reunion, set up a WhatsApp or other messaging thread (note that iPhone text messages groups cap out at 20), and expect to send out a daily reminder of the day’s activities.  You can also use the thread to share updates and photos.

9.  Delegate.

As a reunion organizer, make sure you and your co-organizers have clear roles and responsibilities during the weekend. Assign organizers or family members to be on-point for elderly relatives who may need to be accompanied to and from activities, or who may not be tech savvy enough to be on the reunion WhatsApp.

It’s also a good idea to delegate photographers and/or create a Google Drive or photo album so attendees can share photos easily.

10. Work Your Ass Off.  

When the reunion finally comes around, be ready to be on call, and to play the role of host – setting aside your own desires. Remember, this is not about you.  While family members are catching up, you’ll be stocking up on beer, following up with the caterer, driving people to activities, or listening to an elderly relative reminisce – and that’s okay. Check your FOMO at the door. You're giving your family the invaluable gift of connection. If you manage to sneak in a beer and catch up with your favorite cousins? Bonus! But don't get too attached to that idea.

Fair warning: family tensions can bubble to the surface. Old resentments, sibling rivalries, unresolved conflicts – they all might make an appearance. Be prepared to hold space, practice patience, and know when to let go of what's beyond your control. Your co-organizers will be your sanity-keepers if things get sticky; definitely schedule a debrief with them after the festivities!

A Worthwhile Labor of Love

So yes, this sounds like a lot. Because it is a lot. But truly, it's worth every bit of effort. The priceless memories and renewed connections—not to mention discovering all the quirky, wonderful things you have in common—are irreplaceable. And, while the heavy lifting often falls to the 'sandwich generation' (us 40- and 50-somethings juggling kids and aging parents), reunions can, equally, build the connections that get us through tough times. And who knows? By modeling the fun, we might just inspire the next generation to put down their devices and pick up the reunion planning themselves!

Ready, set, reunion!!! 🎉

Have you ever received an out-of-the-blue email that upends your week in the best way possible?  Mine came last week from the parents of a three-year old:

Hiya! Our 3 year old is OBSESSED with all of your books! And as her parents, and graphic designers, we couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome one (or several) of your books into our bedtime routine.

Sloth and Smell the Roses has been on repeat in our house lately. We spend the most time on the space spread: When life wants you to rush and race, slow it down and make some space. This speaks so deeply to us and our little unicorn. We would so love to be able to have this spread printed and be displayed in our home to encourage not only ourselves, our children, but also our visitors that in our home we don’t rush each other and we make space for everyone. I’m not sure if you take on special requests, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask.  

Of course, our answer this request was “Yes! Yes! A Thousand Times, YES!” What’s more, her words ignited all the ways I’d been thinking about spaciousness lately, like a string of Christmas tree lights.  So, what is spaciousness—and how do we create more of it?

What is Spaciousness?

First, let me note that the word “spaciousness” is deliciously onomatopoetic — simply saying it feels spacious! The dictionary defition is “the quality of being large or having ample space for people or things.” Like a flowy mumu that hides all the blobs while letting one’s imagination do the rest (I own a couple!). Spaciousness isn’t just for wardrobes, though. It’s an overall vibe for mind, body, schedule, and spirit. We need more of it . . . just not too much (hello, shapeless lounge wear!).

Why Spaciousness Matters

Physical Spaciousness

Moving your body (especially outside) isn’t just exercise—it rewires the brain and boosts well-being. According to research, physical movement improves neuroplasticity and behavioral plasticity (while stagnation stiffens everything from joints to attitudes).  In particular, moving outdoors in nature has been shown to boost self-esteem  As the wellness saying goes, “motion is lotion” – keeping everything in flow.

Takeaway: Five minutes of dancing-behind-locked-doors is a science-backed brain boost.

Mental Spaciousness

Mental spaciousness is a vacation from our thoughts. Meditation provides relief from that relentless bumpy terrain, reducing anxiety and helping us zoom out from the proverbial rock in our shoe to the full mountain view. From breath work to guided visualization — meditation creates perspective shifts.   One way I like to describe it is moving from “point focus” (goal-oriented concentration) to “field focus” (relaxed receptiveness).  It also feels like opening a faucet to creative flow.

Takeaway: Two minutes of deep breathing = more calm, less chaos, more creativity.

Temporal Spaciousness

There is something SO viscerally exhilarating about filling up Every. Single. Space. in one’s calendar, isn’t there?  It’s like putting in the last few pieces of a puzzle. Except the picture on the puzzle is of a lady with her hair on fire, questioning her life choices. Without giving up our love of puzzles, we can proactively cultivate empty spaces. My friend Erica Smigelski, a coach and strategist, sets aside Fridays as “me time” for catch-up and self-care.  Leadership expert Michael Hyatt recommends designing your “ideal week” and allocating certain days for certain activities – e.g. external meetings, long-term planning, and/or lunches with friends. Each of these strategies for creating space on crowded calendars can work wonders.

Takeaway: One blank slot a day = sanity preserved.

Spiritual Spaciousness

For us bleary and weary parents, breathing in the idea that we’re part of something bigger – a benevolent oneness that forgives our failures and allays our fears – provides deeply needed spaciousness from the mental load of managing a family. Even a daily intention can feel awe-inspiring. Whether or not you believe it, research shows that spiritual connection has mental health benefits.  (Side note: I once woke up from a dream with repeating the mantra: NOTICE THE ONE. NOTICE THE ONE. I told my kids and they’ve been gently mocking me ever since. Yes, mom is a little woo like that, because noticing the oneness of all things WORKS.).

Takeaway: A morning pause = reminder of connection and support.

My Practice Experiments

I wrote a whole book dedicated to slowing down and spaciousness, Escargot For It! A Snail’s Guide to Finding Your Own Trail and Shellebrating Success, but there is always more to learn. Here are my latest experiments in cultivating spaciousness — from the weird to the woo, I am always trying something new!

The Rider Stance – Five minutes of grounding—heels rooted, arms open—using this ancient qigong pose reminds that I am in charge of my own space and power. A friend taught it to me on a walk recently, as we pointedly ignored passers-by while squatting on invisible horses. Yes, my kids will be mocking me, and I’m fine with it, because —

Playful Pause – In a recent workshop with intentional living coach Scotty King, we learned about how taking a playful pause before responding (to, say, the mockery of my kids at my Rider Stance)—just long enough to find the humor.

Energetic Containers – My teacher recently taught me a ritual: calling in support from Earth, ancestors, plants, and more—a mental and spiritual vessel holding the day so I don’t have to.  It’s a little a lot woo, but you know how cathedrals and certain natural spaces just feel infused with calming support? That’s what this practice does.

What Now?

We can create more spaciousness into our lives, with intention, open-mindedness and whimsy. And because visual reminders help, we created a $5 downloadable print of the “make some space” spread — thanks to that wonderful out-of-the-blue email!

So what gives you space these days? Lock-the-door dance parties?  Cat videos?  A disco nap?  Share your favorite tricks below . . . for anyone who needs more space!

Before I get into the hows and whys, you can listen to the single on Spotify and Apple Music (more platforms coming soon!). Be forewarned: it’s an ear worm. If you end up brushing your teeth to it in your head for the next five years, I’m sorry!

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The Accidental Songwriter — Except there Are No Accidents

So how did I end up writing children’s music? Like all overnight transformations, it turns out that, in retrospect, this one has been on tap since childhood, in circuitous ignore-all-the-signs kind of way. This year, I just decided to let go and fully embrace it.

I chalk this breakthrough from flight-of-fancy to “it’s happening, people!” to a few key things: low-stakes musical involvement over a long period of time; 10 years of writing rhyming verse for kid; serendipity; and fantastic creative collaborators – Christian (Chano) Tizon, my musical collaborator and producer, and my sister and creative collaborator Eunice and the Hello!Lucky team.

So how did this happen? Let’s start at the beginning.

A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

As a toddler, I sang constantly. My mom has tape recordings of two-year-old me singing A Tisket, A Tasket! and Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star — I felt a deep longing for that little star, by the way. I also longed to be Snow White singing “I’m wishing for the one I love” (minus the Prince Charming rescue fantasy). A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes was my Don’t Stop Believin.’ So, let’s just say, there was a lot of musical longing from a young age (Thanks, Disney!).

Throughout school, I joined choirs and belted my heart out in musicals. I was an alto, so mostly got the supporting roles, like Domina in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum. I was never encouraged to make music professionally. In high school, I was most definitely not invited to join the elite jazz band; I did not make the cut to join the super-cool funk band; and I crashed and burned at many a karaoke night (not the private room kind, the embarrass-yourself-in-front-of-a-room-full-of-hyper-talented-gay-men-who-sound-exactly-like-Barbra-Streisand kind).

In college, I started an a capella group with some friends — it was a life-line and these are still some of my besties. We were good, but mostly we loved singing. (Though my room mate, who was in the group, and I did kill Four Non-Blondes and Joni Mitchell at a couple of coffee houses.)

In business school, I performed in the musical and joined the student band, singing funk songs to lightly buzzed classmates. But once I graduated in 2002, that was kinda it. From 2002 - 2015 – what I’ll call the Bleak Musicless Period – I didn’t touch music.

Except I did, in little ways. When my twins were born in 2010, I sang to them at bedtime. My sister and I busted out a cover of Cee Lo Green’s Forget You on a tiny red toy piano at a mom’s talent show. I them to music classes. And I got involved with The Mosaic Project, a non-profit that creates original music for all its lessons.

I consumed a lot of music, too, including hauling my breast pump to an Aerosmith Concert at the Oakland Coliseum, pumping for my twins all the way there and back while driving in rush hour traffic (and ignoring sidelong glances).

Are you seeing a pattern here? Basically, while I didn’t do music “seriously,” it was always in the background.

From B-school to Band School

That changed in 2017. The organizers of my business school reunion sent an e-mail blast asking interested alumni to form a band to play at a reunion happy hour. A few of us responded, and pulled together a set of covers, which we played to an enthusiastic — though admittedly friendly — crowd.

Afterwards, we all had the same realization – playing music is fun! And, we really liked each other. We should keep doing this! So we did. Going on a decade now, we’ve met every month or so, scheduling around work and family, and gigging a couple times a year.

(Despite vociferous, outraged lobbying by my preschoolers to name the band MouseTrapDragonPants, we settled on the more staid Stinson Family Band.)

For the first five years, we mostly played covers. We were all learning. But then, after years of building trust in a friendly, low-key, low-stakes way, we started to play some originals. Turns out we had a lot of music in us!

How Do You Hear It?

My first song showed up in the middle of the night in 2016. I woke up to what sounded like a volume-11 serenade by heraldic angels. I tip-toed to the bathroom, and recorded a hushed rendition into a voice memo to an audience of moonlight and a toilet paper roll.

The next morning, I listened to the memo. It wasn’t half bad. I wrote up some lyrics, which came easily, since by that point I’d been writing rhyming verse of children’s books for a couple of years.

Since I don’t play any instruments particularly well (yet), my band mates added instrumentation and vocal harmonies. Soon, songs were showing up all the time — while I was driving, in the shower, meditating. Not unlike in my favorite movie, A Star is Born, where Bradley Cooper asks Lady Gaga, “How do you hear it?” I realized that songs are not something you make up – you listen for them.

I also realized that making music is collaborative. This can feel extremely vulnerable at first. But music requires multiple voices and instruments, so you need to learn to trust your collaborators and the process, while also staying true to how you hear it.

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From Voice Memos to Polished Tracks

In February, my marketing team and I were discussing the launch of our new book, Yum, 2, 3! An Ice Cream Counting Book, when I blurted out, “This book needs a song!”’ and started to sing the song you hear on the single. I abruptly hung up and recorded a voice memo.

Earlier in the month, I jotted down a couple other children’s songs, also inspired by my books, and connected with Christian (Chano) Tizon, who I had met through The Mosaic Project, where was a resident musician and had contributed to their latest album. Would he be interested in collaborating? The answer was yes!

I began sending Chano voice memos, lyrics, and reference tracks (existing songs that capture the vibe of the music you want to compose). Within a few days, he sent back rough demos – often building on my ideas and adding his own. It was thrilling to have my sketched out voice memos transformed into polished tracks.

Next, I visited his home recording studio to record vocals. We also played the songs for preschoolers at Mustard Seed Preschool, where he is the resident musician – seeing the children’s responses was exciting, and they inspired even more music.

I’ve written about the art of creative collaboration – and how my sister Eunice and I have forged a productive creative relationship. This experience played no small part in my ability to instantly collaborate with Chano. For each of us, there has been no ego — just an openness to play, delight kids, and give each song whatever it needs to shine.

Garbage Trucks, Bananas, and Animation-a-go-go!

Yum, 2, 3! is just the first of many tracks we’ll be releasing this summer, including dance tracks (Potty Dance! Bananas for You!), and a song called Garbage Truck, inspired by Johnny and June Carter Cash, soon. Y’know, something for everyone – age 3 and under.

In addition, Eunice is working on an animated music video of Yum, 2, 3! (and will be animating all of our songs, eventually!). She is teaching herself frame-by-frame animation the old-school Walt Disney way. Here’s a quick clip of the initial sketch animation:

Our vision is to create a musical, joyful, space for kids to grow and play, one that amplifies the inspiring ethos our children’s books. We couldn’t be more excited!

Creative Detours and Discoveries

Have you ever stumbled into a new passion? I’d love to hear about your unexpected creative detours and discoveries. Share your tales in the comments!

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“Grandma!” I shouted, running to the tiny woman with wispy white hair, ruddy cheeks, a labyrinth of wrinkles, and twinkling blue eyes. As I threw my arms around her, I received an iron hug that could almost break me. Though I was twice her height, she was multiple times stronger, in muscle and will. This woman could lift a truck if she needed to.

Her olive green car smelled musty, like her basement.  As she and my dad chatted in the front seat – we were back from China, where he worked as a diplomat – my sister and I picked at the faux leather upholstery, seat belts loose around our waists, jostling together as we swerved, like a couple of loose apples.  Grandma sat on a booster seat, barely able to see over the dash – but she insisted on driving anyway.

Eventually, the gravel would crackle under us as we pulled up to her house in darkness, illuminated by moonlight and Lake Minnetonka. The garage door, once opened, was a cave, and her house, a portal.

A portal. You know: the kind of place you could walk into and feel instantly at home, every worn surface steeped in memories, seasoned with history.  Once you walked through the door, you became one with it, entirely at home, slipping into its rhythms as easily as Lake Minnetonka’s gentle waves lapped her yard. 

This black and white clapboard house was built as a summer cottage in the 1800s, but my great grandparents, having lost everything in the Great Depression, made it their year-round home. They raised my grandmother here, along with her three brothers, and she in turn raised four children there, since by then her parents had moved to an alfalfa ranch in Lancaster, California.

Inside, the house held stories, none more present than my grandmother’s pottery. My grandmother loved clay, and kept a kiln in her basement alongside the fishing rods and tackle, a metal canoe, oars, tools, and a washing machine and dryer. Her blue, green and brown pottery was everywhere – planters hanging in the window, a butter dish, heavy plates and mugs, wind chimes. 

In the living room, a knobby blue woolen couch gave just enough when you sat on it to be comfortable for a read, until it started to get scratchy.  The worn leather lazy boy squeaked when reclined. My grandmother could be found there most evenings, poring over a book by a dim reading light. She loved to read, and every Christmas would send each of us a book inscribed with a message, wrapped in newspaper and twine.

Mornings brought us to the front porch, facing the lake, where we would arrive at the old farm table to find slices of cantaloupe with a tiny wedge of lime, and an ancient toaster making toast that we would butter and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar from one of her handmade pots.   In the corner was an old wooden doll house, dolls, and blocks.

Just off the kitchen was a small greenhouse. My grandmother loved plants, and my grandfather’s family had once owned a nursery in Wisconsin. It was humid and smelled like dirt, with cobwebs and spiders, and dust on the glass. Outside, my grandmother kept a garden of orange tulips and tiger lilies abutting a walking trail – once a train track which, as my dad told it, used to rattle everyone awake at night as the train hurtled past.

Music lived here, too. A corner nook contained a piano, and on it, a basket of instruments - rattles, drums, harmonicas, and tribal pieces from my Aunt Ginny’s Peace Corps days in Ghana. My grandfather had played the violin and piano, and was known for gathering the family around the piano to sing folk songs and ditties, popular in their day.

On a small shelf next to a round black Civil War era dining table, my grandma kept her birding log and binoculars.  She was an ornithologist by training, one of the first women to graduate with a Masters from the University of Minnesota. Despite raising four children on her own in an era when laundry was done with a washboard and basin, she kept up her intellectual pursuits, observing birds, reading, writing letters, even penning a pamphlet on ambush bugs and photographing wildflowers for a guidebook she co-authored with my grandfather.

At the top of the narrow stairs leading up to the second floor were murals painted by my Aunt Ginny, an angel weighing good and evil. That my grandmother had encouraged her daughter to paint the walls, which most parents try to avoid, was testament to who she was: a supporter of the arts and of her children, never precious about material things.

Books were everywhere, with thumbed pages and frayed and faded spines. A built-in bookcase in the narrow upstairs hall was packed with stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. These pages helped inspire my dad to travel abroad, join the army, and then the Foreign Service.

At day’s end, we grandkids found our place in the upstairs sleeping porch, crammed into four single beds on creaking metal frames, wrapped in worn out quilts, heads resting on flat pillows that had seen fluffier days. One side was all screen windows; at night, we could make out stars through the huge whispering tree, waves breathing us to sleep.

This modest, timeworn house was a haven for books, art, music, play, nature — and the wide, wondering world. It was steeped in water, trees, land, snow, and sun. Freezing in winter, covered in snow banks; steady through Midwest thunderstorms and tornadoes careening across the lake; quiet in summer sunshine as we grandkids ran barefoot across the grass to lay belly-down on the neighbor’s dock, searching for sunfish, and for ourselves.

That house held us, shaped us. Its magic lives on in memory — and in the questions it leaves behind.

Today, I ask myself — and I invite you to ask yourself:

How can you create a portal like this in your life?

A space for nature, art, music, conversation, curiosity, and care?

How can you become that kind of spacious home for yourself and others?

Thank you. Thank you for love, kindness, acceptance, compassion, forgiveness, support, dedication, boundaries, strength, clarity, and silliness.  

Thank you for listening. Thank you for being there. Thank you for bringing onto this planet, and for being with us on this wild adventure — and for doing it all without a manual (though maybe ChatGPT is that manual now?!)!

Thank you for showing up when we were (literally) covered in sh*t. Thanks for letting us puke on you, and laughing about it (maybe after crying a few tears of despair, and tossing your favorite shirt in the hamper, irreparably stained).  Thank you for your endless patience as we learned to sit up, walk, crawl, talk, and share everything – including you!

Thank you for showing up for yourself, too. Beyond being a mother, you are an incredible human – even though mothering has been one of your most defining roles. You are creative, fearless, visionary, loving, capable, active – a leader, supporter, guide, and friend.

Today is your day to remember what it was like to be a little girl – to play and have fun, free of any responsibilities!  🧚🏽 To be celebrated, because it was YOU who gave children the gift of love and joy and play and laughter  – the most precious gift!  

Today is also your day to honor yourself as a mother – grounded, present, strong, fiery at times, a guardian, a protector, a cheerleader, a comforter, a playmate, a muse, a confidant, a guide. You come from a long tradition of mothers, and are part of a global community of amazing women dedicated to protecting, nurturing, and raising children. 🌍🌱

Thanks to who you are, future generations can trust that they will have creative, curious, moral, courageous, humble, grateful, and compassionate elders.

Thank you for keeping us safe, for teaching us that we can keep putting one foot in front of the other, and for showing us that we are strong enough to handle a world that contains as much darkness as it does light.  

Thanks for giving 100% of what you had to give; even when it didn’t feel like a lot. It was and is always enough. Thank you for your commitment to self-love and self-improvement. When you do better, we all do better. 

Thank you for making every day so special. You are truly magical!  We love you!

soxo Your Magical Kids

P.S. We’re sorry about all the sleepless nights, meltdowns, diaper blowouts, sticky fingerprints, mystery stains, and kitchen “experiments” gone haywire.

And the glitter. All the glitter.

Audio version:

The sun glowed through the curtains and over wooly throws in my inviting library on an April Saturday.

“Rainbow books!” a woman exclaimed as she entered, pointing to my bookshelves, where stacks of books were arranged in columns of color—tucked alongside my sons’ preschool clay projects, a flea market ceramic lion, and favorite family photos.

I laughed appreciatively. Today was all about noticing.

We settled into our seats, like women in days of yore gathering to quilt, knit, or weave baskets.

“I love hosting gatherings,” I confessed, as the women took in the comfy sofas, letter-writing kits, and signed books. “But I always feel a sense of dread right before. You know, the pre-party panic: ‘Is my house clean enough?’ ‘Will anyone show up?’ And then I remind myself—the people who are meant to be here will be here. And I’m always so glad I did it.”

Everyone laughed, and Willow Older, co-author of Today I Noticed: A Little Book of Mindfulness that Will Change the Way You See the World, began thumbing through brightly tabbed pages.

“I have the perfect page for you!” she said, opening the book and reading aloud.

“Today I noticed ‘I think of you as family’ also means ‘I invited you for dinner, but I didn’t clean the house.”

The group erupted in laughter. It was the perfect segue into Willow’s origin story—with her friend and co-author Deborah Huber.

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The Story of Today I Noticed . . .

“Deborah and I met when our kids were in middle school,” Willow shared. “We instantly clicked and decided to be each other’s ‘YES friends.’ You know, the friend who always says ‘yes’ to your quirky ideas?”

We all laughed—either because we had a YES friend or knew we needed one.

“One day,” Deborah added, “we made a date to meet at SFMoMA for an exhibit—only to discover it was closed! Instead of going somewhere else, we took a mindful walk around the neighborhood.”

They started pointing things out to each other—a daisy in a sidewalk crack, a colorful mural, a quirky hat. Soon they were in the best mood, feeling lighter and closer.

What if they did this every day? They headed to the art store and bought paper, pencils, and watercolors—even though neither considered themselves an artist.

Each day, they wrote and sketched what they noticed, then called to share their often humorous reflections.

Then COVID hit. Their tradition became a lifeline—keeping them grounded and connected. They realized they were onto something the world might need. So they pitched the idea to an agent. And just like that, Today I Noticed was born.

A Mindful Afternoon Brunch

The instigator of our gathering was Jill Daniel, founder of Happy Women Dinners, who dubbed it “A Mindfulness Women’s Afternoon Brunch” celebrating women’s friendships, gratitude, and letter-writing.

Happy Women Dinners brings women together to connect in small groups with amazing female guest speakers in a beautiful private home (my rainbow shelves!) and a delicious organic meal. Guests range from established to emerging voices—from Elise Loehnen to Roxanne Gay to Lori Gottlieb—and the common thread is healing. “Eat. Give. Heal.” is their motto.

Now it was my turn to share.

“I love Today I Noticed because it brings mindfulness into the everyday,” I said. “In Western culture, we often reduce mindfulness to watching our thoughts. But it’s so much more than that.”

“Mindfulness is relational,” I added, inspired by a recent episode of The Emerald, a podcast that reconnects modern life with myth, story, and animate tradition. “It’s about our relationship with each other, with the Earth, and with everyday things.”

I pointed to a sparkling water can on the coffee table. “Even that can has a story. It came from minerals. Someone designed it, made it, shipped it. So much care went into it—and even something seemingly throwaway holds energy and intention.”

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Gratitude, Kids, and Elephant Underwear

Next, I read from Thanks a Ton! A Book of Gratitude, which I wrote with my sister Eunice, seated beside me. In it, a little elephant struggles to find the right words to express gratitude, so instead piles “grateful stuff” into a red wagon—like a big baboon, polka-dotted underwear, and a Saint Bernard.

Kids are concrete. Gratitude is not.

The first time I remember truly feeling gratitude was in college, in a class on the history of everyday objects. My professor explained how everything in the “built environment”—from a No. 2 pencil to a corkscrew—was designed. And that design affects our lives in profound ways.

Everyday things led me to write Thanks a Ton!—and to the gathering I was hosting.

“What a wonderful way to teach gratitude to kids!” Willow said warmly as I finished reading.

“By the way,” she added, “Today I Noticed works wonders with kids, too. It gets way better responses than ‘How was school today?’”

The moms in the room groaned and laughed in recognition.

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Letter-Writing as Connection

Inspired and grateful, we passed out Write Me Back! pen pal kits—a new Hello!Lucky product made in collaboration with Egg Press—along with Today I Noticed prompts like: “Today I noticed that having a friend like you feels _________.”

After twenty minutes of quiet writing in cozy corners throughout my house, we reconvened.

“So what was that like?” Willow asked.

“Cathartic!” one woman exclaimed. “I realized I had so much I wanted to say to my friend, but just hadn’t had the chance.”

More laughter.

“My handwriting is a disaster,” another woman confessed. “But it felt intimate—like my friend was getting the real, messy me.”

Heads nodded all around.

“Yes!” I chimed in. “Real relationships are one-to-one. And lately, with AI everywhere—even in my inbox—it felt so good to know that these words were undeniably mine.”

Several women said they’d be using Today I Noticed from now on. We hugged goodbye, each of us noticing small, sweet things about one another as we parted.

A Little Practice That Opens Big Doors

The next day, I was still glowing from the warmth of it all—old friendships deepened, new ones sparked.

That Monday, while merging onto the freeway after school activities with my 15-year-old son beside me, I said, “Wow. See those vines climbing up that tree? They’re so voracious!”

To my surprise, my normally don’t-bother-me, earbuds-in son lit up.

“Yeah!” he said. “You should’ve seen the trees in the San Juan Islands—there was moss growing all over them! It was AMAZING!” He’d just gotten back from a school trip, about which details had thus far been in short supply.

I beamed. In that moment, Today I Noticed had created an opening for connection—and gratitude—that might have otherwise passed us by.

And I noticed my heart felt very, very full.

P.S. Today I Noticed and Thanks a Ton! are available wherever books are sold. Write Me Back! Pen Pal Kits are available here for $22. You can connect with Deborah and Willow at todayinoticed.com and on Instagram. Learn more about Happy Women Dinners at happywomendinners.com. You can listen to The Emerald podcast’s episode on Mindfulness here.

Audio version:

Happy spring! Today, a story about trees, growth, and the quiet wisdom of nature.

Last month, we cut down a big old cedar tree in our front yard. It had been losing branches and leaves for a while. Our gardener delivered the quiet verdict: it was time.

As I went out to give it a final hug, my husband fondly chuckled to our boys: “Mom’s going to hug the tree.”

“I most certainly am,” I said, with a broad, unapologetic smile.

Ten years ago, I would have chuckled at me, too—and my husband might have backed away slowly. Thankfully, we’ve both grown since then.

For most of my life, trees and plants were just scenery. A flower was something you picked and tucked behind your ear.

Twenty years ago, as a newlywed, I casually remarked to my husband how proud I was that our houseplants stayed alive despite never needing water. He stared at me, incredulous.

“What are you talking about?! I water them! It’s not like there are magic plant-watering fairies!”

I was stupefied—and delighted. My new husband turned out to be a garden gnome in disguise, magical in more ways than one.

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Fifteen years later, we moved into a Mediterranean-style house with a modern facade and pristine box hedges. It screamed polished perfection. I imagined golf bros in boat shoes leaning on their clubs. Not quite my vibe. This garden needed to grow its hair out.

I called Leslie Bennett of Pine House Edible Gardens. She said, “You need to talk to my client Hana for inspiration.” Days later, Hana and I were wandering through glowing tulips, cherry blossoms, herbs, and redwoods in her Atherton garden—instant friends, like chia pets when the water hits.

Over many months, Hala and I met in her garden to play. We’d scoop up flowers from Trader Joe’s, gather more from her backyard, and spend an hour arranging: balancing blooms with “faces,” gestural flowers, and filler.

As the seasons passed, our friendship grew, and my garden filled in. One day, looking out my bedroom window at the old cedar and my now-lush front yard, I felt something unexpected: held. The plants were alive. Pulsing. Loving.

“Oh,” I thought. “They literally give me the air I breathe. Of course.”

Being the distracted human I am, that feeling faded. But like a perennial, it kept returning—quiet, persistent, alive.

On vacation in Fiji for my 50th birthday, a massive tree outside our bedroom stopped me in my tracks. Rooted deeply, branches twisting skyward, thousands of leaves shimmering in the breeze.

“Wow,” I thought. “I want to be just like that tree.”

To my surprise, I was already learning how. As a birthday gift to myself, I had enrolled in a two-year energy wisdom course. A core teaching: grounding.

“Connect to the Earth,” our teacher said. “Or water. Or air. Ground to anything in nature.”

I imagined merging with that grandmother tree. Then standing on a mountain, steady and expansive. Even my wooden floors felt like old friends saying hello.

Nature—and support—was everywhere.

I wanted more. “I need houseplants,” I told Hana. We bee-lined to Flora Grubb in San Francisco and packed my car like a mobile jungle.

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My husband chuckled again. “Who’s going to water all those?”

“Don’t worry,” I replied, grounded in a new knowing. I couldn’t ignore them. We needed each other.

Now, over a dozen houseplants thrive in my home. The front yard bursts with roses, foxglove, and pink strawflowers. Even when my attention drifts to the news, I know how to ground through it. The more I notice nature, the more my connection to it grows.

Nature is always present—steady, yet ever-changing. Like us, it moves through seasons of growth, decay, and renewal. A little nourishment goes a long way.

Because as my husband will tell you, there are no magical plant-watering fairies.

But there is love. And sunlight. And you.

Just like a seed, here’s what you need:
patience, warmth, a caring heart—
so you can bloom and play your part
in Mother Nature’s brilliant art.

Audio version:

Carpe Diem

During World War II, Winston Churchill famously employed red stickers marked “Action This Day,” translated from the Latin “Carpe Diem,” to mark his most important memos. Churchill’s courage and clarity stand out as hallmarks of great leadership. With chaos today echoing that of the 1920s - 1940s, we can all benefit from reflecting on what it means to be a good leader.

Dr. Becky Kennedy has famously asserted that a good parent is a “sturdy leader” who knows that we are all “good inside.”  A parent’s job is to teach their children how to transcend their lizard brains (fear-based, me-focused) and to thrive physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually both as individuals and in community (love-based, we-focused).Unfortunately, during times of global crisis, it is all too easy to fall back on the lizard brain’s survival behaviors.  A good summary of these behaviors comes from The Mosaic Project, a non-profit that teaches children to be leaders and peacemakers, in the form of the Three Peace Blockers:

The Three Peace Blockers

• Blame:  “It’s all THEIR fault” – we give away agency and let others determine our self-worth

• Guilt:  “It’s all MY fault” – inner collapse and self-blame; self-betrayal is the ultimate betrayal

• Defensiveness:  “It’s NOT my responsibility” – denies both interconnectedness and individual responsibility

According to the Mosaic Project, the antidote to these three patterns of behavior are the Three Keys to Peace: 

The Three Keys to Peace

• Listening:  Paying close attention, and expanding one’s perspective beyond dualistic thinking, accepting that multiple things can be true at the same time.

• Empathy:  Opening your heart to others. You can be empathetic without agreeing or taking responsibility for others’ feelings or suffering.

• Assertive Communication: Communicating with “Embodied I-Statements” – in which your words, body, energy, and feelings are all in alignment.

When the outside world brings turbulent news, we can ground ourselves in the Three Keys to Peace, and orient ourselves to our inner knowing.  The Serenity Prayer is a good summation of this inner orientation:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

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Beyond Survival: Becoming Wise Elders

Historically, children are a source of inspiration and motivation to the world around them. However, well-meaning, anxious adults often project too much power onto children, when they are for the most part powerless — while abdicating some of our own.  When we pass powerlessness and anxiety to them, today’s children become tomorrow’s anxious and disempowered adults.  If the purpose of education is to help children become wise elders, as author Vanessa Ochado de Olivera argues, adults must first become wise elders themselves. 

So how do we parent with sturdiness and love through a global crisis?  It starts with taking care of ourselves.  Here are a ten ideas that have helped me stay steady as a parent:

1. Energy follows attention. 
   Your attention is your most precious resource.  Focus it on your heart (self-compassion) and being present.  Avoid allowing your attention to go to fear, negativity and things that are beyond your control, especially when you are tired or underresourced.  When you are well-resourced and feeling centered, do tune in to trusted, evidence-based, and wise news sources to stay informed — for example about the impact of tariffs or House’s bill to curtail voting rights — so you can make decisions that keep your family safe and healthy.  Recognize that a lot of what appears in the news is fear-based projection.
   

2. Reinforce positive behavior.
   Parenting wisdom tells us that when a toddler is having a tantrum, it is best to ignore the behavior. Instead, we praise positive behavior by ‘catching kids in the act’ of doing something right. The same goes for events in the world around us: the more we give attention to fear and negativity, the more we encourage those patterns in the collective.

   

3. Go inside for answers.
   When you feel anxious, go within. What is right for you, not just now, but up and down your timeline (how will you feel next month if you make this choice today?)? What do you need to move forward (help? information? a boundary?). There is an unshakable core of self-worth and inner knowing within each of us, which can be felt in the solar plexus, and up and down the spine. Inner knowing is a felt sense, not analysis. Rather than looking outside for answers, go inside to find out what is right for you.

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4. Life is a spiritual school.
   We can embrace life as a spiritual school by looking for spiritual, ethical, and intellectual lessons in the day’s events.  Every painful event in our outer world holds up a mirror to the inner areas where we need to grow spiritually.  Sometimes this means moving towards pain, rather than away from it.  The difference between pain and suffering is that suffering is a story we tell about pain. Feel the pain, but then move back into presence and love.
   

5. Humans are here to serve.
   Just as Galileo proved that the Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth, global crises show us that the Earth doesn’t exist to serve humans - it’s the other way around. Living in fear, greed, separation, and violence is a form of abandoning our true nature. Times of crisis are times to heal, love, and grow.

6. We cannot control the outer world, but we can influence it.
   Global crises are collective. No one is individually to blame, and no one can individually fix it.  Part of living in an interconnected world with peace and equanimity is to accept and bear witness to pain, taking appropriate actions to remain calm and centered. To the extent that we do influence the outer world, we do it first and foremost through the quality of our presence and lovingkindness.

   

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7. What is yours to do?
   Porous boundaries keep us in crisis. They can also lead us into righteous certainty, on the one hand, and anxious uncertainty, on the other.  Understand what is yours to do, and only do what is yours.  Put your attention on your heart center and breath, feel energy coming up from the ground to support you, and notice your energetic boundary. The first job that is always yours to do is to be in presence. Beyond that, you can take small meaningful actions that are right for you, such as: doing your work, taking care of your body, having a spiritual or creative practice, spending time in nature, educating yourself, spending quality time with friends and family, volunteering, listening to music or dancing, reading books and poetry, etc.

8. The soul is infinite. 
   Global crises can bring us face-to-face with the fear of losing everything, which inevitably includes fear of death. When we come to peace with death and dying, the prospect of losing a job, home, savings, or freedom becomes less terrifying (though no less painful and thus deserving of compassion). World spiritual traditions teach us that the soul persists beyond the physical body. Even if it cannot be scientifically proven yet, there is comfort in embracing this possibility.
   

9. Trust. 
   Trust that everything is as it should be for our collective growth and learning. I prefer not to hope, which carries the subtle valence of fear, but instead to trust. Connect with Earth (ground and body) and with Love (heart and spirit)– the two true sources of power – and stay connected as much as you can. Never lose trust. The mere fact that you are alive shows that your presence is needed. You are “incredible, brilliant, one-of-a-kind, the only YOU we’ll ever find!”

10. Be a peacemaker. 
    Peacemaking is both active and receptive. It listens to all perspectives, and asserts the values of love, open-mindedness, mutual respect, individuality, community, and interconnectedness.  Assert these values whenever you are in community with others. Practice the Three Keys to Peace and stay aware of the Three Peace Blockers. Have an open mind, a grateful heart, and strong boundaries.

    ---

When the world is hard to love, love it harder

When global leaders appear to be letting us down, a strong leader steps up. No one can hurt you if you refuse to hurt yourself.  The answer to any perceived attack or betrayal is to love yourself and those around you, especially children.  When the world is hard to love, love it harder.

In her podcast, Wild, author Sarah Wilson always asks her guests, “what is left after you have lost everything?”  One of the most common answers is “Love.” Children intuitively see and know this in their bright, playful energy. This is the spark that my sister Eunice and I seek to amplify in our books.  We trust that the parents, teachers, and leaders who read our books will be strong, joyful, and present with children, so that they can be grow up to be sturdy leaders, too, and help make this world more beautiful. Carpe diem!

Audio version:

The other day, I met up with my dear friend David Barnes. David serves as the Youth Minister at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, and is one of those people who simply beams. He remembers everyone’s name – including Lotus, the lovely barista taking our order. As we linger over our tea at our sidewalk cafe table, we are interrupted several times by people stopping by to say hello.

You might think that someone as busy and in-demand as David would be scattered, but he is not. He is extremely centered. He describes it to me this way:  “I like to move quickly without rushing.” 

I let David’s words sink in, along with another of David’s aphorisms: “When you let all the stress and anxiety get the better of you, it’s like putting a basket over a candle. You put out your flame.”

I began this post intending to write about the art of letter-writing, but then found my thoughts turning to David, and my gratitude for his friendship. I realized that two have a lot in common — just as letter-writing helps us feel more present, grateful, and connected, David embodies these traits as well.

Why letter-writing has fallen out of favor

It's not at all surprising why letter-writing has fallen out of favor in the last decade. Email, social media, and texts allow us to reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. Why write a letter when you can send an email or text that’s guaranteed to arrive almost instantly? 

Not only that, writing a letter takes time. Most of us have lost the muscle memory for handwriting — mine has certainly atrophied along with my ability to get to the grocery store without GPS — making the idea of putting pen to paper even more daunting.

And then there’s the generational divide: to digital natives, letter-writing can feel like something fusty and formal that old people do (as I hear myself nudging my kids to write thank you notes!).

20 Reasons to Write a Letter

And yet, there is something profound about writing a letter. For one, the time, effort, and thought that go into crafting a letter show a level of care that a quick text or email can’t match. Here are 20 of the key benefits of writing a letter:

1. Letters are personal and meaningful

2. Letters are a tangible keepsake

3. Handwritten letters are rare, which makes them special to receive

4. Letters strengthen and deepen relationships

5. A letter gives you perspective on what someone means to you 

6. Letter-writing takes time; the process helps us appreciate the people we love 

7. A letter is a shared object

8. A letter is a shared experience

9. Handwriting is more personal than typewritten text

10. Handwriting helps us generate creative thoughts and ideas, according to research

11. Letters give us a reason to be creative and expressive. They can include words, pictures, quotes, lists, poems, questions...

12. Letters help us stay connected to people who don’t use computers often

13. Letter-writing is a form of contemplation

14. Writing a letter helps you know yourself 

15. Writing a letter helps you develop your voice

16. Letters give us a reason to express gratitude, which is scientifically linked to happiness 

17. Letters let us say things that would be hard to say in person or on social media

18. A letter is a more meaningful gift than most material things

19. Letters are 1-to-1 instead of 1-to-many

20. Letters re-humanize relationships

So those are the benefits of writing letters. And while I certainly don’t write them often, I do hope that I’ll continue to take the time to write them when I have something meaningful to say. And I hope that others will continue to do this as well. Just like David, it’s possible for us to move quickly without rushing, and keep our own flame and those of our friends burning bright. And I can think of no better way to do this than by occasionally slowing down and writing a letter.

If you have a story about letter-writing you’d like to share, I hope you’ll do so in the comments!

P.S. If you want a simple, fun way to jumpstart your letter-writing, check out our new Write Me Back pen pal kits, available here for $22. 💌. You can also read about how the magic that happened when we used them at a women’s mindfulness, friendship and letter-writing brunch!

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Audio Version:

Like many of you, I keep a secret stash of letters and cards people have sent to me. In my case, it’s a woven basket buried in my closet, under the hems of summer dresses (wistfully purchased, but never worn because: Bay Area).  The lid is bursting off, and I frequently feed it letters like some sacrificial offering to future generations. I sneak in thank you notes, quick hellos, and even heartfelt letters that I myself have written to my husband and children, snatched from the dustbin after a birthday or Christmas melee.  I hold these letters dear, as more than just scraps of paper, but as Exhibit A in my life’s work: mementos of love – both giving and receiving.  

My love of letters came more of a project than a byproduct of living in 2014, when Tess Darrow and I co-founded the Write_On Campaign, a challenge to write 30 letters in 30 days during National Letter-Writing Month, the month of April. It was Tess’s idea originally, and given that she is an exquisitely generous and talented artist, weaver, designer, gardener, baker, and mom — we spared no detail in getting it off the ground.

We designed and printed special letterpress card kits and offered them at cost to get them into as many hands as possible.  We partnered with Sakura of America, who generously donated jelly roll pens to make the letter-writing experience more creative and fun. We wrote heartfelt extolling the virtues of hand-written letters and why we write.

The campaign attracted a wonderful community of letter-writing enthusiasts and, over the years, we explored every avenue we could imagine, including:

• Hosting a letter-writing gathering with The Dinner Party, which supports grieving young adults, where we wrote and read letters, many to the deceased. We made this video, Dear You, to capture the experience.

• Writing Happy Mail, a do-it-yourself book in which Eunice and I explored techniques for creating beautiful hand-made cards.

• Writing a letter to a homeless man with my then 5-year-old son, and receiving the most beautiful response in kind.

• Hosting Kindness Card Challenge Zoom calls during COVID with journalist Adrienne Bankert, with brought together artists and writers from around the world to share their stunning paper and calligraphy creations.

As time went on, however, we slowly realized that urging people to write 30 letters in 30 days is not just a challenge — it is verging on the impossible. The 30 letters was built on widespread wisdom that it takes that many days of repetition to build any habit. But letter-writing, in our era of instant gratification and distraction, seemed like a near impossible thing to fit in every day. If we were honest with ourselves, even we couldn’t do it. 

Not to say that letter-writing is not still important. It is. As we experience overwhelm and loneliness, slowing down to write a letter is still one of the best ways to simultaneously reconnect with our own source energy and that of another. It is like meditation, but with benefits — the recipient gets a delightful card at the end. It’s just counter-productive to make letter-writing a “should” or add it to a check-list. Like any spiritual or creative experience, the motivation must come from within. It is not for me, or anyone else, to tell you when or where to write a letter.

As a result, this year we are bidding a grateful farewell to The Write_On Campaign, and saying hello to a new approach to writing letters.  Again, led by the ingenuity of Tess and her Egg Press team, we are introducing a simple new way to write: The Write Me Back Kit.

The Write Me Back Kit is a simple letter-writing kit that includes two cards – one to send, and one for the person receiving the card to write back. Writing prompts, instructions for the recipient, and decorative stickers are all included. They can be sent whenever, wherever. The kits are $22 and will be available in April, and feature a variety of wonderful artists’ designs, including Ashkahn, Suzy Ultman, Egg Press, and Phoebe Wahl.

We’ll be giving the kits away at a Happy Women Weekend lunch at my house on Saturday, April 26th from 12 - 2:30 p.m. Together with Deborah Huber and Willow Older, creators of Today I Noticed: A Little Book of Mindfulness That Will Change the Way You See the World, we’ll reflect on mindfulness, write letters together, and enjoy the company of many wonderful women, in person. Registration is $150 and includes signed copies of Eunice and my book of gratitude, Thanks a Ton!, and Today I Noticed, plus Write Me Back kits and a delicious organic brunch. If you’re in the Bay Area, please join us and RSVP to jill@happywomendinners.com We’ll consider this to be a farewell celebration to the Write_On Campaign! ❤️

We are grateful to everyone who participated in Write_On over ten wonderful years and we look forward to continuing to support heartfelt letter-writing in the days and years to come! 💌

Note to readers: I’m adding an audio version for those who have more time to listen than to read. Enjoy!

Audio version:

Yesterday was a beautiful day, full of both sadness and joy – the same sentiments that Christians experience as they move through the Easter season.

On the one hand, I finished reading Sarah Wilson’s beautiful but aching Substack book, Collapse, about how to live consciously through human-wrought environmental, societal, and democratic loss, returning to our innately magical human-beingness, including love, self-awareness and, I dare say, Hello!Lucky’s very mission of joy, creativity and connection.

On the other hand, I spent a delightful morning at Mustard Seed Preschool in Berkeley, reading books and singing songs with musician Chano Tizon, known to the littles as “Music Man Chano.” The children’s bright eyes, dance moves, and laughter lifted our spirits to the skies. Chano and I are presently in the throes of composing several children’s songs together, inspired by Hello!Lucky’s books, which we plan to animate and share on Hello!Lucky’s YouTube channel.

Here’s a sneak listen of one of those songs, My Mom is Magical!, inspired by the book of the same name ✨:

Curious eyes beamed at me as we sang together, the children and I filled with mutual wonder. We exclaimed all of our favorite ice cream flavors out loud, and giggled as we brushed our feet🪥, slept through a dance party 🪩, and jumped into our mom’s clothes first thing in the morning (all lyrics in songs we sang — you just had to be there!). On my drive home, I sang all the way, composing new lyrics and melodies that I can’t wait to bring back to the children.

The experience reminded me of not only that Easter is upon us, but also of the role children played in Jesus’s teachings. He famously said:

“‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

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As a child, I remember all the joyful traditions of Easter. I remember visiting a mall in New Haven, Connecticut, and petting tiny chicks and bunnies contained behind a white picket fence. I remember singing “A Tisket, A Tasket, a Green and Yellow Basket” as I searched in freshly cut grass for hidden Easter eggs. I remember my dad tucking colorful foil-covered chocolate eggs in all the most unexpected places around our house – his favorite being the cross-bars of chairs and the under-ledges of our dining table.

As an adult, having sent my children to a Christian preschool and having taught Sunday school for a few years (all despite not being religious – I am more a follower of Jesus’ teachings than a church-goer), I came to appreciate the message of both grief and renewal that permeates Easter as a universal human pattern that is as natural as the changing of the seasons.

So, when our publisher approached Eunice and me to create an Easter book for toddlers, my heartfelt answer was “yes.” Easter is Egg-cellent! was hatched.🐣

As a jumping off point, I framed Easter is Egg-cellent! as part of our series of holiday books for toddlers, which includes Christmas is Awesome! and Halloween is a Treat! Toddlers, after all, love repetition. The book follows the very same structure of rhyming couplets, naming all of the wonderful things that Easter is. . .

Like our earlier books, Easter is Egg-cellent! also follows a child character, in this case a baby bunny, and includes a humorous side-kick, in this case an anthropomorphized “good egg.” The bunny discovers the traditions of Easter (as the good egg chimes in with punny quips) – especially his mother’s love and the ultimate theme of unity and joy.

As Eunice and I mapped out each spread, we intentionally included children’s favorite Easter elements, which are simultaneously infused with spiritual meaning for adult readers, whether Christian or secular, including:

• Eggs, as symbols of renewal

• Daffodils, the first flowers of spring, symbolizing re-birth

• Lambs as symbols of innocence and Jesus Christ

• Hot cross buns as symbols of the death of Jesus, as well as symbols of phases of the moon in earlier pagan traditions

• The Easter Bunny, which comes from early pagan spring traditions

• Rabbits as symbols of new life (due to their prodigious procreative tendencies!)

In doing this, we hope we have created a book that speaks to Christian and non-Christian families alike about the joys of this special spring season.

Particularly during these days when parents are shepherding their children through so much societal change, we need to stay deeply present and grounded in our connection to nature, I believe — and there is no better time to experience this than spring. In addition, we need to stay awake to the possibilities of joyful renewal with each passing season. Easter thus feels like a more meaningful holiday now than ever. We hope that you and the little ones in your life enjoy Easter is Egg-cellent! And, Chano and I look forward to bringing you the accompanying song soon! 🎶

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Today, we’re going to dig into where negative stories come from and how to get out of them.  This is a huge topic – entire religions and self-help empires are built around it! – but I’m going to do my best to synthesize what I’ve learned over 20+ years of working on my own stories, raising children, and being on a mission, through Hello!Lucky, to spread joy, creativity, and connection. 

Let’s dive in . . . this is heroic work, and it’s going to take guts.

The vulnerability of children

The first thing to notice is that negative, self-sabotaging stories typically take root when we are the most vulnerable – as children.  If we were present, well-resourced, and able to self-advocate, we wouldn’t let them. Unfortunately, as children, we are not. We are dependent, naive, and vulnerable, and don’t have a strong sense of what stories are “mine” vs. “not mine” – which is maybe why, from an evolutionary standpoint, one of the first things toddlers start to learn is “mine!”

Negative stories typically ride on the coat tails of emotional wounding.  In my case, “I’m not a writer” was a subset of a bigger story I told myself: “I don’t deserve to have a voice.”  My dad had a dark sense of humor and used to call out “Hey, stupid!” to see if I’d react (his twisted version of “made you look!”), or wryly quip “Children should be seen and not heard” when my sister and I were boisterous.  My mom, an artist at heart, wielded criticism like a sculpting tool – attempting to shape us and reveal the masterpiece in the slab of marble.

Emotional wounds vs. physical wounds

In his TED talk and book Emotional First Aid, psychologist Guy Winch astutely observes that emotional wounds are just like physical ones – but instead of on the outside, they’re on the inside. A broken arm is impossible to ignore. We obligingly take the patient to the emergency room, set it in a cast, and tell them to rest.  If the person is emotionally wounded, however, we turn the other cheek.  We might even patronizingly dismiss the symptoms (acting out, withdrawing, insecurity, etc.) as inevitable personality traits or signs of weakness. “Oh, that Petunia was just born with a bad leg.”  In reality, emotional wounds can be just as deep and harmful as physical ones.

The five childhood safety patterns

This may sound outlandish, but self-sabotaging stories are actually attempts to stay safe.  Infants and toddlers have no verbal skills and crap themselves constantly. As a result, they learn to keep themselves safe by directing their attention and energy, rather than using words. 

There are five basic ways children learn to direct their energy, called the 5 safety patterns (Kessler, 2015 & 2024).   They are:

1. Leaving  - the child’s energy leaves their body into the intellectual, creative, or spirit dimension. Energy moves up and out of the body, a form of dissociation. The child does not develop a strong energetic core or boundaries.
   

2. Merging  - the child’s energy merges with the threat (e.g. pleasing, fawning, charming). Energy moves towards the threat and tries to incite the person to take care of them.  The child does not develop a strong energetic core or boundaries.

   1. Compensatory Merging – in families where it is not safe to be vulnerable, the child may develop a pattern overlay, typically the Aggressive pattern, in which they try to rescue the threat or fix the problem – often framed as “helping.” The child cannot sustain the compensatory pattern for long and eventually collapses into the Merging pattern.
      

3. Enduring - digging in, resisting, passive aggression. “You can’t make me.” Energy moves down into the ground. The child has a strong energetic core and boundaries.
   

4. Aggressive  - using willpower to get their needs met in an aggressive, domineering, or charming way. Energy moves up and at the threat.  The child has a strong energetic core.
   

5. Rigid - insisting on rules, order, or a “one right way.”  Energy moves inward and stiffens. The child has a weak energetic core and rigid boundaries.

Most children adopt two patterns, a primary and secondary – which they choose will depend on their natural gifts and temperament, as well as their parents’ patterns (for example, if a child’s parent does the Aggressive pattern, the child who is not strong-willed might decide it’s futile to go up against a bigger, stronger adult, and thus adopt the Leaving, Merging, or Enduring patterns instead of the Aggressive pattern.)

Each safety pattern also develops into distinct gifts, which the child learns to exploit over time.   For example, a child who does the Leaving pattern might become a brilliant artist or intellectual; a child who does the Aggressive pattern might become a badass CEO.

The parenting pattern trap

Any human relationship is a relationship between two people’s respective essence (who you are when you are fully present and embodied, being your essential, best self) and their patterns (the safety patterns  you do when you encounter stress). 

In the ideal world, a child experiences parents who are in presence most of the time.  The child is thus able to template what it means to be in presence.  They still develop safety patterns, but they hold them lightly.

However, since life is full of stress and challenge, most children experience parents who are often in pattern, rather than in presence.  They become wounded by the patterns, and develop strong patterns in response.  I call this process the Parenting Pattern Trap.

1. The child acts out.  Young children threaten a parent’s sense of safety because children are helpless and lack self-regulation, cognitive, bodily coordination, and verbal skills. Some children cry a lot or have trouble regulating their bodies. Throughout their childhoods, they can and will “act out” in ways that cause the parent stress.
   

2. The parent reacts from childhood safety patterns.  The parent reacts to these incidents using their childhood safety patterns. These might look like: 

• Leaving – ignoring the child’s behavior and hoping it will go away

• Merging – escalating the problem by taking on the child’s problems and feelings as one’s own, trying to fix the problem, being overly indulgent or permissive. Expecting the child to meet the parents’ emotional needs.

• Enduring – being sullen or negative, saying “fine” when upset, shutting down communication, accommodating the child but then complaining.

• Aggressive – escalating the behavior by getting angry, criticizing, blaming, shaming, guilting, or punishing the child, e.g. “You did this on purpose.”

• Rigid – imposing harsh or demanding expectations, rules and consequences. Refusing to admit when the parent made a mistake.

3.   The child is wounded and responds by adopting their own safety patterns. As both the child and parent repeatedly do patterns, the child (and parent) are repeatedly wounded.   In most cases, the wound is repeated, not treated.

4.   The child becomes an adult  The child carries their patterns into adulthood, and reproduces them in romantic and workplace relationships.  Childhood patterns become entrenched if wounds are repeated and not treated.  The now-adult exploits the gifts of the patterns, for example in their careers, which leads to attachment and fear of giving up the negative aspect of the pattern. 

5.   The adult has children.  The adult has children of their own. The cycle begins again.  

The biggest reason parents stay stuck in the trap is because parents in pattern react to the damage they are doing by going further into pattern.  Going from being the victim to being the aggressor is awful – parents viscerally understand the child’s pain because they experienced it as children, too.  The parent spirals into shame, guilt, and anxiety – causing them to double down and reproduce the same patterns again (this time, the child is not the trigger, it’s the parent’s inner critic). This can look like parents attacking and blaming themselves, dissociating, or running away from confronting and healing their patterns into work, alcohol, social media, school volunteering, and other distractions. It’s a terrible cycle, and many parents don’t realize what is happening until something calamitous happens – a child develops an eating disorder, falls into depression or self-harm, or cuts off contact.

This way out: from pattern to presence

There is a way out of this cycle.  Parents can learn about their patterns, seek help in the form of therapy, couples counseling, spiritual teachers, parent education, and commit to practices that keep them in presence rather than in pattern – such as meditation, yoga, qigong, somatic practices, plant medicine, reading and listening to self-help books and podcasts, taking classes, and spending time in nature. Because patterns are unconscious and we are deeply attached to them, it takes patience and work to recognize and unlearn them.  This is the process of self-realization.

It’s also never too late to break your patterns. Any time you notice yourself going into pattern, you can pause and bring yourself back to presence. And if your pattern harms your child, you acknowledge and repair the harm, and re-commit to changing your patterns for the better. Remember, patterns are things we do as parents, not who we are, and we learned them for good reason – they kept us safe.

You can help others, such as your co-parent, break their patterns by being in presence. Any relationship is like a dance. When you change your dance steps, your partner has no choice but to change theirs or leave the dance. You can never break another person’s pattern by being in pattern, only by being in presence.  Often, the most liberating and challenging patterns to break are those of our own parents, who, despite their advanced age, may still be stuck in the same patterns they did when we were young.  You know you have broken your own patterns when, as an adult, your parents don’t trigger you any more. Now, that’s the stuff! 😀

How patterns become stories

When a safety pattern works, it reinforces an inner story.  For example, if the Leaving pattern keeps a child safe, they might tell themselves a story “I don’t belong here.”   To heal, you need to direct your attention at your essence, rather than at your story.  When you direct your attention towards your essence, you tune into your higher self, and you can ask yourself if a story is true or not.  You can also receive insight and translate that into thought and intention, which can become a new story.  

When direction attention to your essence to inquire about a story, ask the following three questions:

STEP 1:  Is it mine?

Where did the story come from?  Is it my story, or did I pick it up from somebody else?  A story that is yours will resonate with your core in a positive way. Stories that carry a negative or self-harming charge are never yours..

STEP 2:  Is it true?

The next step is to ask whether the story is true. “I’m not a writer” was simply not true for me. A true story will resonate deeply with your essence. “I am love,” “I am peace,” and “I am kind,” are examples of universally true stories. 

STEP 3:  Is it serving me?

If it’s motivating and encouraging you to express your potential, then it is serving you. If it’s holding you back, it’s not.  Stories that serve you never harm you or others.

Telling yourself new stories

Telling new stories is not just about making up words. You actually need to feel the story with your whole body. And you need to start doing the actions that will make that story true. If I want the story “I am a writer” to be true, I have to write.  In my case, I have to commit myself to getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. to write for two hours every day, and do my best to publish my Substack weekly (or in the case of more ponderous essays like this one, every two weeks!).

As Dr. Wayne Dyer notes in The Power of Intention, passion must be married with discipline – the will to learn a craft and the inspiration to experience joy while doing it.  Every person’s worth is innate and not comparative. For each of us, the stories we tell are the ones that allow us to be the co-creator and hero of our own life story (link to your life is a story).

The labyrinth and the bicycle

In my experience, 10 years is a good amount of time to break the majority of your patterns and create new neural pathways in your brain.  The process is like entering a labyrinth – you follow your patterns and stories and unlearn them, until you arrive home, at your center, core, or essence.  You then follow the path back out into the world, the path being the practices that help you stay in your center, core, or essence.

Being consistently in presence is like riding a bicycle. It is difficult to learn – very wobbly at first – but once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature.  However, no matter how good you get, it always requires continuous attention as you take your bike on new adventures. As you ride, you need to stay aware of your balance, your surroundings, the path you are on, your destination, other cyclists, and bumps in the road in order to stay in fluid motion.  Your bicycle (your body) might get a flat tire. You need tune-ups from time to time.

For the kids

If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering: that sounds like a sh*t ton of work. Is it worth it? I’m here to say it is. As a I write this, I can honestly say that my patterns are mostly healed, and parenting has become a pleasure. I now have a great relationship with my mom, who I was not on speaking terms with for years. Seeing my kids — and the kids who read my children’s books — sparkle solidly in their presence, core, and creativity — is the stuff of dreams. There is nothing more satisfying or worthwhile than helping human beings of all ages realize their amazing potential. 💫

In that modern worship hall, we clacked through the plastic cases, slipped squishy headphones over our ears, and listened.  That’s when I first heard Bob Marley and the Wailers.  Their album Legend was the first CD I ever bought.

The song that moved me the most was Redemption Song, specifically the lyrics, “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”  It pounded my heart as some kind of truth, though I had no idea what it meant.

The First Roadtrip: Epictetus and Elvis

In 2000, I picked up the phone. I was in my 20s,  living in Somerville, MA.  It was Petrea. She had just landed an environmental consulting job in Sacramento (turns out this California valley girl is a total bad-ass!). I had just been accepted to Stanford Business School. Did I want to drive cross-country with her, back to California?  A  few weeks later, she was standing on the decaying front step of the Victorian I shared with five roommates.  We crammed my worldly possessions into my VW Golf, including a vintage sled that proceeded to hurtle forward and decapitate us every time I tapped the brakes over the next 3,000 miles.

Tucked next to my parking brake was a slim volume of Epictetus: The Handbook, by the Stoic philosopher and Roman slave, a parting gift from my friend Colin, a philosophy Phd student.  Colin, a stern and somber but wryly funny guy, loved to ask deep questions like “What does it mean to lead a good life?” At college parties, he would interrogate attractive women about their values and views on marriage and children, making my job as wing woman exceedingly difficult.

Petrea and I were scattered with nerves and anxiety.  We quickly fell into a self-soothing ritual of reading Epitetus aloud as we drove, belting out Elvis at the top of our lungs whenever we needed a power-up.  Bizarrely, Elvis and Epictetus seemed to have slavery in common, as evidenced by Elvis’ Teddy Bear: 

Oh, baby let me be, your lovin' teddy bear

Put a chain around my neck, and lead me anywhere

Oh, let me be (oh, let him be)

Your teddy bear

Unlike Epictetus, Elvis was far from emancipated. 

After ten nights and ten days, we emerged from the wilderness of The White Mountains, The Adirondacks, Glacier National Park, and The Badlands, and pulled into Petrea’s childhood home in Davis. Our minds felt free and clear.

Petrea invited me to check out her new apartment and meet her roommate, John Dorsey,  a college friend and medical resident at U.C. Davis. John had already moved in, but you couldn’t tell. He lived like Epictetus. Suffice to say there was no vintage sled to be seen.  

A few years later, as John tells it, he found himself in rural Alabama in a storm. His job at a local hospital had just been canceled.  Rather than leave, he took it as a sign. He checked into a motel and asked the clerk if there were any nice towns nearby. The clerk pointed him to Greensboro, population 2,500. John moved there and founded Project Horseshoe Farm, a community health non-profit that provides everything from afterschool activities for kids to Bingo nights to housing and elder home visits. When I showed up to visit for the years later, I would discover that, as improbable as it may sound, John is now the de facto mayor of Greensboro.

The Second Road Trip: Alabama Dreaming

In 2021, I picked up the phone. I was in my 40s, living in San Francisco, raising three boys.  It was Petrea again. She had just come back from Alabama with her teenage daughter. “Alabama?!” I said in disbelief.  “WTF were you doing in Alabama?”  She said, “Well, we were doing a slavery and civil rights tour. And visiting John Dorsey.” 

Petrea is an industrious traveler and she had researched the crap out of the Civil Rights Trail, a National Parks website that tells you about all the civil rights sites across the United States.  She had then taken it upon herself to organize a trip to visit some of these sites, and to take her daughter along with her. I’m less industrious, so after glancing at the website, I picked up the phone and called my travel agent. Could she help me organize a 1-1 mother-son civil rights trip?  “Sure,” she said.  A couple months later, we were on a flight to Atlanta to begin our journey (spoiler: there are no direct flights from San Francisco to Alabama).

What blew me away about going to Alabama was not the sights, but the people. It was and is the fact that there are still so many people alive who were young activists involved in the Civil Rights movement.  This is remarkable because they have so much perspective  – I had no idea that this living history was all around us.  And I had no idea there were so many people continuing to advance the legacy of civil rights and social justice in Alabama today.The first such person was John Key, at a non-profit called Alabama Civil Rights Tourism.  They mostly cater to large groups of college alumni, but John was kind enough to take us on and design an itinerary for us.

The second person was the driver and guide that John connected us with.  His name is Willie Williams, and he is an arts educator and choral director who lives in Atlanta.  He is a warm, wonderful and generous man, and, as we navigated highways and backroads, he was kind to tell me about his experience growing up there, dispelling some of the stereotypes that I had about the South, while at the same time sharing stories about how segregation and racism is still very much alive and well in Alabama, as it is through the United States and the world. It was such a gift to be able to spend hours talking to Willie as we crossed Alabama.

Tuskegee

Our first stop was the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, in Tuskegee, where we got to meet with a lovely National Parks Ranger who told us the stories of the accomplished Black airmen who served in World War II. Their achievements are credited with motivating the U.S. to integrate the military.  We also swung by Tuskegee University, founded by Booker T. Washington and where George Washington Carver, a Black inventor and renaissance man made his reputation. There was something profound about just walking on the soil of a historically Black college that had been founded in 1881, just after the Civil War.

Montgomery

Our next step was Montgomery.  While we didn’t get to meet him in person, Bryan Stevenson, the public interest lawyer best known for his book Just Mercy, looms large in Montgomery.  He created the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

With its rows of suspended blocks carved with the names of lynching victims, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice stands as a visceral and immersive memorial of loss rivaling the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

The Legacy Museum is dedicated to helping people experience the journey of African Americans from the Middle Passage and slavery to mass incarceration, and ends with a beautiful and poignant reflection room of Black artists and luminaries – allowing visitors to reflect on how pain and suffering, in no way justified, has given birth to Black excellence.  

Speaking of excellence, we got to meet the inimitable Wanda Battle, a modern-day griot who simply beams with loving energy, and a steward of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, nestled along the avenue that connects the Alabama State House to the central plaza in Montgomery that used to be its slave market. Surrounded by beautiful dogwood trees, Martin Lurther King, Jr. often gave sermons here.  Wanda unlocked the door, welcomed us into the empty sanctuary, and sang her favorite spirituals while my son stood awestruck at the pulpit, the lights shining through the stained glass windows with ethereal transcendence.

Next, we met Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of the former Alabama Governor George Wallace, who infamously stood in the school house door and declared “segregation now, segregation forever.”  She is in her 70s now and married to retired Alabama Supreme Court Justice Mark Kennedy.  Her riveting story is detailed in her memoir, The Broken Road, and we got to meet with her in our hotel room, where she told the story of her childhood and her journey of reconciliation and redemption of her father’s legacy and how she has worked so hard to repair the damage her father had done.  One of her best friends was the late John Lewis.

Birmingham

Following Montgomery, Willie drove us to Birmingham, where we met two more incredible women.

The first was Carolyn McKinstry, who survived the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and met with us at the historic Bethel Baptist Church. Quietly and intently, she sat down with my son to tell him about her experience that day when, at the age of 15, she went to church and her good friend was killed in the bombing.  James listened to her with rapt attention. She also gave him a copy of her memoir.  I was struck by her grace and presence.

The second was Dr. Martha Bouyer, an educator and curriculum developer who specializes in civil rights education.  We met her at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where she made the exhibition come alive, asking my son engaging questions, and walking us through the plaza opposite it, where protesters had been attacked with dogs and fire hoses.

Civil Rights and Social Change: Past, Present and Future

My first trip to Alabama was transformational in helping me understand the physical enslavement of Black Americans, the segregation and violence of Jim Crow that preceded the Civil Rights movement, and the transcendent forces that aligned to allow Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates to create major social change.  It was inspiring to walk the ground where that organizing had happened, while at the same time recognizing that a lot of the issues that they fought about are still present in our society, and they are much more ethereal and difficult to pin down today.

My second trip, the following year with my second twin son, helped me understand the role of mental liberation in the civil rights movement. This time, we went to Selma to visit with JoAnne Bland, one of the young people who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. JoAnne says that in today’s world, the quest for civil rights and respect for Black people is much more elusive. The actions of the Jim Crow era were more obvious and blatant. Change was easier due to a more concentrated media. In today’s fragmented, rapidly changing, and reactionary society, sustained collective action of any kind is more difficult. 

JoAnne’s words were sobering, and inspiring. She and her peers are not daunted by the challenges. In many ways, they have all arrived at the same place as Marcus Garvey: emancipating your mind.  Freedom starts with liberating ourselves from internal suffering that we impose on ourselves in part by insisting other people change or rescue us. Forging reciprocal and authentic connection is one thing, judging and directing others without their consent is entirely another.  In Gandhi’s words, the only option we have is to be the change that we want to see, and to light the way for others by serving as a template.  At the same time, we need to understand systems and recognize injustice. Once you change yourself, you can work collaboratively with others who share the same emancipated mindset.

I could see this in what appears to be a new model for social change that is playing out in Alabama today:  one that is individual, local, and deep.  It shows up in the way that Bryan Stevenson is transforming Montgomery, creating educational institutions and monuments for learning and reflection.  It also shows up in the way John Dorsey is transforming Greensboro by weaving himself into the fabric of that community, one relationship at a time; many others are now seeking to replicate what John has done.  Change is local, and it is centered around people. One person at a time can truly make a difference, and true change must be deeply rooted in people and community.

Sweet Home Alabama

As I write this, I am planning my fourth trip to Alabama, with my youngest son and his grandparents. Last year, I took my third, where I visited John Dorsey for a second time with Petrea and her daughter, and made biscuits with Chef Scott Peacock, in Marion, who is building community through cooking inspired by his former mentor and companion, renowned Black chef Edna Lewis.  I am deeply looking forward to it.

I recently read that many Black people are moving back to the South from places like California.  I can understand why.  For one, the Alabama countryside, or “Black Belt” as it is known, for its rich, fertile soil, is beautiful, and the cities are as well – not to mention more affordable.  For another, as the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement, Black history and monuments are all around.  As Isabelle Wilkerson documented in The Warmth of Other Suns, during the Great Migration, massive numbers of Black people migrated to the North and West from the South to escape Jim Crow and seek better economic opportunities; yet, the same problems of segregation and racism greeted them there.  In Alabama, however, the soil is rooted in Black experience, buildings all around were built by enslaved and free Black people, and the spirits and legacies of many of America’s most esteemed visionaries and leaders – past and present – are everywhere.

As I write this, I am curled up in bed, raw garlic searing my innards as I desperately grasp at something – anything – to stave off possible flu symptoms, including: sniffing half a raw onion, gnawing on raw garlic until it triggers explosive heart burn, and sipping on a hot ginger-lemon-cayenne-honey tincture.  Tomorrow night, I am supposed to depart for a long-anticipated New Zealand adventure / Lord of the Rings pilgrimage with my family (my youngest son, who we affectionately nicknamed “Wilbo of the Shire” is a HUGE fan).  Succumbing to the flu at this precise moment would be tragic.  So I am doing what all humans do in the face of oncoming danger: bear down and try to regain control, at any cost.  Canceled meetings? Mid-day naps? Cod liver oil? No problem!  Meanwhile, God is no doubt sniggering. As the old saying goes: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

Decisions in Times of Darkness

What choice do you have when you find yourself staring down a tube of darkness? A lot, it turns out, and no one choice is better than the others: 

You can get sucked down said tube. This is completely valid, because, hey, sometimes it just feels really good to wallow.  

You can literally go to sleep, as a friend did last week after contracting food poisoning from a bad oyster.  She left me a voice memo after, declaring:  “Sabrina, it sounds SO weird to say this, but it was so healing just SLEEP for three straight days.  I am so grateful!!”  Gratitude for projectile vomiting and diarrhea. It’s a thing.

You can resist, using whatever safety strategies work for you:  fighting, leaving, enduring, controlling, waiting for someone to rescue you, or trying to rescue others. While these strategies can work in the short run, they often entail not being present to your own experience, bypassing your feelings, abandoning yourself, or not taking responsibility.  

Alternatively, you can try to allow whatever feelings are coming up, face the painful truth (the vacation will be cancelled, I said the wrong thing, I botched the project, my friend broke up with me, my house is full of mold – these are all things that have happened to me, by the way), and respond consciously and constructively.

Humor plays a crucial role in several of these stages.  First, it can allow you to feel painful feelings without being overwhelmed. Second, it can help you acknowledge the truth without getting bogged down. My teenage son explained how this works.  Recently, a few of his friends were dumped by their girlfriends.  After they’d spent time licking their wounds, he noticed them starting to make jokes about being single.  He took their cue and started good-naturedly joking about how they were “single pringles,” and they started a supportive group chat.  Joshing around about their breakups helped them feel their feelings, get support, and move on, realizing that they are innately okay despite their traumatic experiences.

W. Kamau Bell put it another way recently in a conversation with Maiya Evans of The Mosaic Project. “Humor is how we overcome trauma.  Think about everything Black people have experienced in America.  What have we done with it?  We created comedy. We created jazz music. We created hip hop.”   Turning pain into purpose – creative, comedic, or visionary – helps you to take your power back. That said, as Dr. Nicole LePera points out, you need to have some inner resources to transform pain into power. Sometimes that is simply not available due to overwhelming social or economic forces or personal circumstances. There is no one right way to heal.

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The Science of Humor

Scientists have long studied how and why humor works:

• Distance: The saying goes that humor is tragedy plus time.  That’s because humor gives us emotional distance from a painful event – the emotional equivalent of taking our hand off a hot stove. It’s a relief to be able to laugh about something awful.
  

• Connection:  Jokes require the vulnerability to transgress a social norm – which can only be done in a space of relative safety. As a result, sharing laughter bonds people, and makes them feel more secure. This also explains why people sometimes bond by laughing at people – never a good thing. 
  

• Control:  “Getting” a joke usually entails spotting a mistake (often known as the “butt” of the joke).  This can make us feel superior to others and experience a sense of mastery – which can be helpful when life is decidedly out of control.
  

• Release:  Laughter releases nervous energy and anxiety, especially when others are laughing with us (but not at us).

Laughing All the Way

I’m not sure what will happen to my vacation, but I do know this: laughing at myself – and my absurd attempts to stave off illness with nose-wrinkling home remedies – allows me to relax and let go (even if I do get sick, I know everything will be okay), which is ultimately liberating. It’s a relief to know that I was never really in control after all.  Laughing together likewise connects us to our shared experiences, insights and humanity.  I have a lot of faith in humans, despite our flaws, so this in turn gives me a whole lot of hope.  As I write in Hang in There!

Don’t give up. No, never, nope.

Where there is humor, there is hope!

We are brave birds of a feather.

We’ll take this bad day on together!*

So hold on, friend! Do not despair.

When times are tough, just hang in there!