How are your retirement plans going? I’m not sure mine are on track — I’m not quite sure what to call this chapter of my life. I quit my full-time job, so I guess I’ve retired. But it sure doesn’t feel like the retirement I observed when my grandparents aged slowly into their (much later) nursing home chapter. Grandpa worked as a chemist at…

Your Future Self is being created every day by your Current Self; how can we optimize that process? — I don’t know about you, but I can get stuck being me. I get stuck with the same thoughts going ’round and ’round in my head, pretty much like they did yesterday and the day before. What I’ve learned is that I can employ my Future Self to become unstuck…

A gentle guide to getting started with the one thing that reliably makes me feel better and more stable — It’s no secret that exercise is fantastic for blowing the cobwebs out of our heads. And if you’re dealing with depression, it’s crucial to get exercise every day to keep those dark clouds from enveloping you. Of course, there are many different kinds of exercise that are helpful: walking, biking…

If you’re dealing with depression, there are many options for treatment — There’s a lot to be depressed about in our world today, and more and more people are indicating that they’ve fallen into that dark, depressed mode. In the United States, as the global pandemic took hold in 2020, rates of depression jumped from 8.5 percent before the pandemic to 27.8…

What makes a great boss? It’s a lot more than you might think — Have you ever had a boss who had your back every step of the way? I did. His name was Ben. He died recently, and we’ve been reeling from the loss while celebrating his extraordinary life. I worked as a copy editor for a number of years at a daily…

Open up a whole new world in the astonishing space inside your head — I just got back from a most amazing retreat in the Colorado Rockies. We gathered for teachings on lucid dreaming, but we also explored a variety of topics — reality, enlightenment, death, and dying — adjacent to the dream world. Our teacher was Andrew Holecek, an author and spiritual teacher…

Even if you’re really down, gratitude for what IS good can help turn things around for you — With the news around the world being perhaps more unpleasant than usual, we might forget to see the abundance all around us. Sometimes we just have to be really intentional about seeing what’s good. With that in mind, studies around gratitude can help show us how to be more resilient…

We can’t know which practices will make a difference until we practice them — Choices. We’ve made a bazillion of them. Some have been profound, like the person or persons we’ve chosen to take as life partners or best friends. Some have been mundane, like the breakfast we decided on this morning. I made a choice a couple of months ago. It was a…

Our imagination can take us to surreal and surprising places — What do you see when you look at this picture? A wall socket, right? Just your average, everyday plug-in place for an ordinary lamp or another electronic gadget. But one day, while I was doing yoga like I do most days in my bedroom, I saw something completely different. I…