mental health

I Love Kanye West

January 18, 2020

I love Kanye West. I used to say I liked his music and didn’t really endorse him as a person, but now I don’t feel the need to apologize for the fact that I’m not just a fan of his music, but admire some things about him as a person. I believe he is, as he has proclaimed, a creative genius. He is a gifted producer and an entertaining performer. He creates well-crafted and listenable music which pushes the boundaries of popular music and provokes. Admittedly, some of Kanye’s music is vulgar and offensive, so you may not want to listen to it if that offends you. I don’t listen to it because it is vulgar and offensive, but I appreciate his willingness to provoke and be honest. Read More

Harnessing the Power of Your ADHD

April 28, 2017

We tend to think of problems with focus and attention as impairments in brain functioning. Forgetting things, losing things and not being able to focus on the task at hand are all problematic, but it is important to understand what is actually going on in our ADHD brains and how we can use them optimally. It is not that we are incapable of focus; we may just need to put in a little extra effort to be able to harness all our brains are capable of doing. The ADHD brain is actually moving too fast. In most cases, ADHD is more like “too much attention” than not enough. We can pay attention to too many things at once. We end up focusing on things we don’t need to. Or if asked to do something that is not challenging mentally (doesn’t take much processing power), our minds drift because of the simplicity (or dullness) of the activity. Read More

Resonance and Drag

April 27, 2017

God and universe are system. We are constantly interacting with them – with God, one another and the environment around us. The cycles of interaction (feedback loops) between you and all things in your life can largely affect how you feel day-to-day. If you are getting positive feedback from others in your life and your environment, you feel good. This is what we call resonance. It is the feeling you get when you are doing something you were born to do or when you are spending time with someone who just gets you. You feel vitalized and creative. On the other hand, if you are getting negative feedback from others and your environment, you feel stressed, worn out, and maybe even depressed. Read More

What Your Shame Sounds Like

April 15, 2015

The voices of shame and fear are persistent and numerous. They claw and squawk at you until you gently put them to rest. The only way to do that is by listening to the Strong, Still Voice – the voice that calms and loves you. You long to listen to this voice, but you do not know it because the voices of your anxiety draw such urgent attention to themselves. They are “what you need to do” and “what you need to be” for others. You fear that if you stop listening to them, you will not be worth anything or you will not live up to what you are supposed to do and be, but the opposite is true. If you stop listening to them, you will suddenly be able to hear who you are and what you truly need to do and be. Read More

Connecting with Our Stories

March 16, 2015

It is healthy for us to be connected to and to have a sense of ourselves in our own stories. This means we have “at hand” everything, good and bad, that has happened in our lives in the past and present and we can see ourselves moving into the future with a coherent sense of who we are. This is another way of being “present”. Read More

Being Here and There

November 18, 2014

As we become adults, most of us gain the ability to have self-awareness – being able to look at ourselves from the outside, the equivalent of seeing ourselves from another’s perspective. And many of us know that when you do this sort of self-analysis ad infinitum, you can get lost inside yourself. This is partly because when you are doing your own self-analysis, you don’t need the perspective of others. It causes a serious drag on our processing, though, and it fatigues us from over-thinking (also called anxiety). Read More

Dark Nights (Plural)

April 15, 2014

You have heard it talked about that most people go through some kind of “dark night of the soul” at some point in their lives. Well I don’t know about you, but I feel like I go through some kind of depression/darkness almost monthly (if not more often) when I feel depressed and it feels like there was no way to avoid it. I just need to be depressed, something needs to die. Read More

Compulsions

February 22, 2014

So much of our depression and anxiety occurs because of our constant compulsive behavior. We feel badly and our compulsions crop up to try to help neutralize our pain and help us feel better. It is like our bodies and brains instantly want to heal us, but since these compulsive behaviors have their genesis in our brokenness, they do not help. They only serve to produce more of the feelings we sought to neutralize in the first place and more unwanted behavior is produced. Read More