Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

 …

The vagaries of love and despair keep our lives in high drama, don’t they? And man! if we could just figure out how to crack the code on healthy, peaceful coupling, we’d have it made. Many times, my clients come to me in the midst of a tangled, painful relationship that has gone septic, or they are in heartbreak hell and trying to conduct a postmortem on the relationship.

I have a naturally optimistic view of love, relationships, and the abundant opportunities …

Sunday, February 10, 2013
California

It’s midnight. The road beneath me is black and the lane reflectors tick past me like pulsing flash bulbs. The ambient glow of my headlights pushes a half circle of warm light in front of my car. 12:03, it’s officially Monday morning.

I drive to kiss my daughters good-night after a six-hour flight from frigid New York. My heart beats warm inside me, swelling with love for them. I can’t wait to kiss their soft cheeks and squeeze them close. Even as teenagers, the girls are sweet and kind.

I remember fearing this stage when …

Many times, clients will come into my practice and, though they don’t know each other, there will be the same general issue going on with all of them. Sometimes the main problem is lack of faith in themselves, or unresolved anger from the past, or spiritual malaise. During one patch of time in 2011, the trend was repeat heartbreak from choosing crappy partners. Both the guys and the girls in my practice seemed to be struggling with this. One Saturday I sat down and thought,”If I could give them …

We’re talking about self love a lot lately. Thank goodness, because we sure weren’t talking about it when I was growing up. It integrates into almost every conversation I’m having with my colleagues, clients, and friends these days. And as big topics go, sometimes things can get a little skewed and dysmorphic as we seek to understand and apply the principles.

Straight up: I think loving yourself is very, very important. It makes you a more solid, happy, centered person. Self love can help you take …

Thomas J. Leonard was my very first coaching mentor. I happened upon his work when I was researching the option of becoming a virtual assistant back in 2002. After participating in the CoachU community for over a year, I decided that my path was to be a life coach/healer. Thank you Thomas Leonard! : )

Thomas had a knack for simplifying distinctions so that anyone – especially the beginner – could understand and apply the tools. I adored him for that. He wrote the following article about …

 
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear.  She let go of the judgments.  She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.  She let go of the committee of indecision within her.  She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go.  She …

I’m participating in Shaytember and working on a personal goal to run 10 miles by Thanksgiving. This is going to be quite a feat, given that I have just been able to reach the one mile mark, huffing, puffing, lungs exploding. There is a special reason why I’m taking on this personal conquest. I explain here (Make a dream happen by picking a bigger problem).

Each day in September I am running 1 mile to prepare myself habitually to run and train in …

When I first started my business, I was working at a  glam PR firm in New York City. I was paid to go to fashion shows, send handsome leather boots to Bradley Cooper, and organize racks of frothy, French lingerie. It was fun, and exciting, made me feel zingy-cool. But my heart longed to coach, and write, and help broken hearts heal. Longed.

On the daily at the PR firm, and on the streets of New York, and in airports across …

A love affair imparts adventure, not merely because it is unsanctioned and risky, but because it proceeds on part-knowledge, like all creative endeavor. And it is risked because the longing to find home is one of the sharpest hungers a human can know. For this a man gives up an empire and sails the open sea….
. . .

Part of falling in love is the heady blend of familiarity and strangeness. Here is someone at once so like you that you have come home, and yet so different …

This is what life does. It throws its arm around you when your pregnant with your first kid and says “Hey Sugar. I know you’re all concerned with your swollen ankles and stuff, but we’ve got bigger fish to fry.” With only 8 weeks of pregnancy to go, I got this sudden, gut intuitive hit that I should go au naturel with my birth. Epidural-free.

Crazy, I know. It seemed preposterous to me too. I was not a “granola type.” I was deathly afraid of pain and had no idea …

What is the difference between the guy who constantly disappoints you on purpose and the guy who constantly disappoints you unintentionally?

Nothing.

Ladies – what is going on that you are putting up with being constantly disappointed? It does not matter if he meant to or not – if he’s incapable of loving you the way you desire to be loved, then it DOES NOT MATTER if he’s doing it intentionally or unintentionally. Stop categorizing.

You being constantly disappointed is a dealbreaker. End of story.

I …

Some time ago, in the middle of the night, I landed in New York. I had 2 suitcases, a twenty dollar bill, some credit cards, and a high school diploma procured in the eighties. I didn’t know a soul, except for the nice recruiter man who had promised me a job interview Monday morning.

This is a (sorta) cool story for a freshly sprung college grad in their twenties. But I wasn’t. I was a 40-year-old single woman with three teenagers, starting over. And …

Last June I decided to take a year off from dating and romantic relationships. It was one of the most ballsy, scary decisions I’ve ever made, but after spending my entire adult life either married or in relationships, I knew that I had to do something radical in order to bust out of the pattern I was in and learn something new about myself.

A yearrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Oh yeah. I went cold turkey. After the first few rocky months of love detox and hugging my cat a …

I love this from Tony Robbins: