How do we define ourselves as working mothers not working in the time of COVID?
I have been working since I was 16 years old.
My first job was as a grocery store clerk, but it quickly morphed into cleaning computers for my local school system, a strange job for a teenage girl, but I loved it. After college, I was employed immediately and because I living and working in New York City, away from my parents, I was acutely aware of how work equaled rent and food money.
Even when I wasn’t “traditionally” employed, I was actively building my own business. The entrepreneur hustle of meeting with potential investors, gaining buy-in, plus constantly looking for new clients was more work than I have had while being employed by someone else. …
How Learning to Paint Helped Me to Recognize Misplaced Emotions
“You have to paint what you see, not what your brain tells you.” She told us, deep into teaching the online watercolor tutorial.
“Wow,” I thought “That’s a metaphor for life.”
As a person striving to overcome the automatic negative thoughts my brain is constantly spitting out and instead rely on the feelings and emotions my body is sending up, this felt even more apropos. But how do we do it? How do we not see the world as our brain sees it when we first try to paint, with flat lines and two-dimensional perspectives? How do we instead paint it as we see it with our eyes, before the interpretation of the brain? The subtle yet crucial color change from yellow-green on the sunny side of a tree to the dark-blue-green on the shadow side. …
Finding Divinity in Stories as an Adult
“Mom, what religion are we?” piped up the little voice from the backseat. I had just told him his Monday was free from third grade because of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. “Are we Jewish? I thought church was on Sundays.”
“Ummm…” I took the moment to breathe and wondered — how do I age-appropriately communicate the intense spiritual journey I was on, which involved reading literature from every religion, but not finding one home in any? “Both Mommy and Daddy were born into a Christian religion. We still believe in a higher power, a God or gods, a universe, but for me at least, the details on which religion is the most true is a bit fuzzy. …
Helped Me Go Further in Science-Based Talk Therapy
Seeing a therapist is known for its many benefits. Millennials and Gen Z accept it as part of life, even the Gen Xers are getting onboard. I, personally, am one of the time-specific Xennials, born between ‘78-’82, and I’ve been going to some kind of therapy since I was fourteen.
But it wasn’t until I opened myself up to a spiritual practice, done in conjunction with “regular” therapy, that I saw the most breakthrough in self-understanding.
Living the Woo-Woo Life
Perhaps you’ve seen it on social media — more references to astrology and crystals, people of all genders getting in touch with their internal knowing and connecting with other like-minded people. …
I saw a dragonfly funeral today.
I didn’t wake up expecting to see that. I didn’t have any expectations for the day at all, only the same vague sense of unease that has accompanied me since COVID-19 entered the US and we were locked down in March six months ago.
That sense of unease grew this week as our local school district went back to school. 80% went back in-person, and we were part of the 20% that chose to do e-learning from the onset. My son’s high-risk immune status was the defining factor in that decision, but it was weighed heavily against his need for other kids. …
“I am thinking positively!” I shouted into the void.
I was caught up in trying to manifest something, anything really, that was “better”, but I hadn’t yet accepted the truth of the power of thoughts: if you keep looking for something, you will attract more things/people/situations that are also searching. And since searching indicates that you don’t already have it, you are coming from a place of lack. It is only when you believe you have everything you need that things open up. It’s the most frustrating of paradoxes.
How do you get to a place where you don’t want them to change so that they will? …
“Just call him back! He wants to hire your business!” I was arguing with myself about returning the call of a potential client. That made me stop and really think. Why was this something I didn’t want to do?
It seems counter-intuitive, right? Part of owning a business — service-based businesses especially, as mine was — is always having new clients in the funnel. But I was at a tipping point, one of many, at the moment I was arguing with myself. …
Inner Child is a term used in the spirituality and mindfulness communities a lot. It has origins with the divine child archetype by Carl Jung and was popularized in the ’70s by Lucia Capacchione. In the 1990s through today, the term and healing as a therapy module have grown in popularity in traditional therapy as well as the alternative wellness circles.
For me, this topic was brought up as a way to help counteract and heal strong feelings of abandonment and unworthiness. …
It struck me that you were conceived, gestated, and born in the space immediately before, during, and after 9/11. Someone on social shared that she heard her graduating seniors heartbeat for the first time the day the towers fell. The hope and fear that must have brought, feelings that perhaps you felt growing inside your mothers.
And now, the spring of your senior year of high school, gone.
It came to me that maybe this is happening to you as a group for a reason. As you turn 18 and start your first legal foray into adulthood, maybe this is your push to help the collective good. You see, with one foot still in childhood and one foot into the next phase, we need you. We need you to stamp your feet and recognize that this isn’t fair. That some of this could have been avoided. …
The debris of glass and electronics was a marked contrast amidst the natural landscape of the stone and grass where the ruined phone lay.
I had dropped and shattered my high-tech fancy smartphone while trying to escape the house and be outside on week 3 of COVID-related quarantine.
That phone was my lifeline at this point. It connected me to work, friends, information, distraction, and even mindfulness. You see, I, like so many others, had a myriad of meditation and mindfulness apps on the phone to help me find peace amid all the chaos. I had been using Headspace for about 2.5 years at this point, that was my nightly go-to meditation practice. I had expanded to purchased meditations and mindfulness podcasts in the other hours, but it was all on my phone. I believed that meditating without prompts just didn’t “work” for me. …
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