Laughter is a combination of fear/surprise and safety. You can see this when a child first learns the peek-a-boo game: dad "disappears", then suddenly he’s back and says "Boo". The child's eyes go wide, then the laughter is screaming-joy, like a person stuttering on their exclamations. Even as adults, whatever makes us laugh has an element of surprise. Laughter is one of the best transitions from fear/surprise (and anger and sadness) because it takes the energy of these states of being and "moves" it. Do you know what it’s like to get stuck in a bad mood? Laughter gets us unstuck! After a really intense fit of laughter, you breathe deeply and anything that was troubling you is forgotten, at…

As the parent of a 15 year-old son, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the journey we are on together and how to best support him on his way to becoming a man. Having an obedient child would be easiest, but many children that are complacent as pre-teens become angry terrors in their teen years. Besides, obedience is a quality that I value in a dog, not a man. I looked at the adults that I admired and enjoyed spending time with. What characteristics did they have in common? These individuals were confident, open-minded, decisive, compassionate, positive, grateful, intuitive and had a great sense of humor. And more to the point, these people knew themselves deeply, knew what…

For virtually the entire span of human history we have lived as Gatherer-Hunter peoples within close communities of 25-50 individuals. Modern society is but a blink in the eye compared to our primitive past (people in "developed" nations were still starting their fires with flint and steel barely more than a hundred years ago). Children growing up within their tribe were secure in knowing that their future occupations included 1. Hunter, 2. Gatherer, and 3. Shaman. That's it. They learned by watching their elders and mimicking behaviors. Almost as soon as a baby could close it's hand around something, a grinding stone or bow would be placed in it. When children mimicked adults successfully and dug up an edible root…

Every thoughtful parent eventually realizes that s/he is unqualified for the job of parenting.  You struggle to instill your values, protect your child from harm, and provide her with the tools necessary to become healthy and successful.  Your child resists your teachings and behaves in ways that you find maddeningly opposite to what you want.  She may whine and complain, or be slow, or have temper tantrums, or won’t eat what you make them, or a million other frustrating behaviors.   Why?  What are you doing wrong? You have a problem if you see this as a problem when it is really an opportunity. You are on a journey with your child of exploration, about the world, about love and pain, about…

Become wise like a child.  Imagine that anything is possible.  Be openly enthusiastic about new experiences.  Use your whole body to experience play.  Feel your anger, sadness, joy and fear intensely and completely, then let go to experience the next moment.  Give and receive love with tenderness and innocence.  Experience living with so much excitement that you can’t possibly go to bed yet, until you fall down with exhaustion.  And then do it all again tomorrow.  

The Journey to Wholeness is not a straight line. Climbing the mountain is not a precise metaphor. A better line would look jagged with plateaus, showing the places where we struggled and fell, our breakthroughs, and our “resting periods”. Perhaps the best way to represent our journey, though, comes from some Native traditions through the medicine wheel and the process of medicine wheeling. Medicine Wheeling along the Journey to Wholeness: I’ll present you with a way of understanding how we move through our stuck energies and limiting beliefs via a year around the medicine wheel. As you read about the seasons, try to find yourself within the descriptions. You have more than one issue in your life, so more than…

Today I’m going to talk about relationships: why you’re attracted to whoever it is that you find attractive, regardless of their faults, abusiveness, argumentativeness, laziness, and so on.. I’ll also talk about why relationships fail and how you can create lasting love. Finally, I’ll talk about the big picture of how this is all about you learning your lessons along your Journey to Wholeness. In the first video, I introduced trauma and the vibration and limiting beliefs that accompany it.  When our unconscious mind brings us back to familiar experiences that activate the stored energy of the original trauma, that is called re-traumatization.  Let’s go into some detail about how this works in finding your “true love.” Every time an…

One of the most profoundly liberating realizations is that we have no secrets.  Every untruth and limiting belief that we hold is embodied in us and revealed to everyone we meet.  What we try to hide is observable in our posture, the tension and relaxation of our muscles, our tone and volume and pace of our speaking, our choice of words, the degree of openness of our eyelids, our skin tone, where we focus our eyes, our degree of coordination, our activity level, the clothing we wear, and many more traits. Very few people consciously understand what these outward manifestations mean, but EVERYONE understands them unconsciously and immediately.  We are an open book whose entire story is read by the…