Flower Mandalas Project

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul. – Henry Ward Beecher During my recuperation from a brush with death, a high school friend sent me a letter. In it, he hypothesized that as a survivor of near-death, every moment for me must be exquisitely sweet, a precious gift, in ways he could not imagine. At first, he was mostly right. Despite the pain, my initial response was celebratory. But the celebration was relatively short-lived and bittersweet. As weeks became months and months became years, the glow gradually diminished. Yielding to the numerous problems that almost dying had also brought on, gratitude faded and a more troubled self re-emerged. Returning to that place of celebration has been a process. Grateful people are generally more satisfied with their lives and relationships, cope better with difficulties, and are more generous, empathetic, and self-accepting. But despite these many benefits, many of us have a hard time feeling gratitude. Often, e...

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. – F. Scott Fitzgerald In our success-driven culture, there seems to be no end of helpful adages for dealing with failure. But “failure is not an option” is small comfort to those who believe they have already failed, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” seldom encourages the already discouraged, and “we learn more from failure than from success” is scant consolation when we don’t see a silver lining in the cloud of our defeats. The problem with these guidelines is that the underlying concept of “failure” is flawed. Most of us hope we will achieve what we strive for and believe that when we don’t, we have failed. Striving for what we want is a natural part of our makeup, but attachment to the outcome of those strivings can imprison us. For a young client whose motto was “Number 2 is the first loser,” success meant being the best at anything he tried. The pressure of being Number 1 was constant and he lived in a nightmare...

The first duty of love is to listen. – Paul Tillich Failures to listen are endemic to our species. The most common complaint from parents who bring their children to me for counseling is that “they don’t listen,” by which the parent usually means that the child does not obey. When I talk with children, they likewise complain that their parents don’t listen, but they mean it literally. Failure to listen to children has subtle but enduring consequences. Kids who grow up unheard can pass on what they experienced to their own children. I discovered the value of listening carefully to children, in their words and their behaviors, many years ago. One evening, while visiting one of my brothers, I joined the family for a dinner of fried chicken. My niece, then three years old, repeatedly asked for “an angel.” My brother and his wife told her to stop complaining and eat her dinner. As her requests for “an angel” became more strident, so did her parents’ reprimands. I found myself wonderin...

If you type “self-help books” into Amazon’s “Books” category, you’ll get more than 675,000 hits, and their “Kindle” category lists nearly 300,000. That’s a lot of self-help! But how many of these books have actually helped? And how many books outside the “self-help” category have been even more helpful? Just for kicks, I drew up a list of the 15 books that, over the course of my lifetime, I’ve found most helpful, either personally or professionally. Here they are in the order in which I read them. What books have been helpful to you, “self-help” or otherwise? The Marriage of Heaven and Hell , by William Blake I first encountered this part visionary / part comic / part poetry / part etching long poem in 1969, in an English class, while an Engineering student at Cornell University. I had grown up a kid scientist, and my hope was that I’d become a NASA engineer. I was also very much in my head and not so much in my body, in the world of logic and not so much the world of emotion. Bl...

To stay sane in an insane world , we need more than new tools and techniques . To maintain sanity, we also have to keep doing the things that got us there. The final piece of the resilience puzzle is to build Balancer -enhancing attitudes and practices into our daily lives, so they are as much a part of our routines as breathing. Then we keep watch to make sure we’re staying on track. When Balancer incorporates the new tools ReBalancer uses, it gets stronger. Mini self-care then becomes something we do every day, not just when stress is high. The Experiment becomes an experimental attitude we carry with us 24/7. Meditation becomes a daily activity. Self-compassion and acceptance become the new norm. And so on. But changing habits takes time . If we don’t stay on top of our game, we run the risk of drifting back to our old, less resilient ways. UnBalancer loves when that happens! So we need a method for regularly checking in with ourselves to make sure we’re using all the shiny ne...

  For the last several years, I’ve found myself attracted to the dead leaves I see on the ground as I walk, particularly those in late fall and winter. I’ve taken thousands of pictures of them. A friend’s mentioning to me the concept of wabi-sabi helped me understand why.     For the last several years, I’ve found myself attracted to the dead leaves I see on the ground as I walk, particularly those in late fall and winter. I’ve taken thousands of pictures of them. A friend’s mentioning to me the concept of wabi-sabi helped me understand why. Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese term for finding the beauty in imperfection, and accepting the cycle of birth, growth, aging, death, and decay. I’m 66. It’s about time.     The Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Nhat Hanh talks about this cycle when he speaks of seeing the garbage in the flowers and the flowers in the garbage. “When we look at garbage,” he writes, “we also see the non-garbage elements: we see the flower th...

  NOTE: Trick-and-treat after this essay extracted from a book-in-progress about the impact of a near-death experience I had 25 years ago. My first experience of time as a continuum occurred when I was about ten years old. Before that, I think time was invisible to me. I was riding my bike past Johnny Sybulski’s house and I stopped, suddenly, for no particular reason. I looked at the simple brick facade, the white trim, the unkempt bushes, and I became aware of myself looking. I thought, “This is just one second in my life, and I’ll never remember it again.” But that moment is one of my more vivid memories from childhood. It marked the beginning of my sense of myself as mortal. Both of my grandfathers had died that year. In each case I had seen them nearing death in the hospital some weeks before and had seen their dead bodies in the funeral home. Perhaps that’s why I noticed that moment, or perhaps ten is when most boys begin to understand time and death; I don’t know. What I...