If you know you’re good enough but feel haunted by the lie that you lack something, the lie lingers in your unconscious. It is still a lie.

You can replace it with the truth.

How?

Just getting to what’s in our unconscious mind can be the toughest part. We have to realize that it’s there and clearly identify it to let go of it.

I like to exhale and blow it out into space until I can no longer see it or feel it. (Taking a really deep breath before exhaling helps me to release it from a deep place.)

Then I can inhale the truth, welcome it to every fiber of my being. I can get comfortable with it. I can feel it, live it, be it.

And I can remind myself of the truth when I forget. I can repeat the process as many times as it takes.

Love and smiles,
Jan… More

Men have their own brand of “PMS”

“PMS” triggers what troubles us … and so do some other things. Fatigue, hunger, a bad day or a headache can all bring out our frustrations.

Women are not alone in their frustration; they just have a monthly cycle to help them manage it … especially worth noting in the heat of today’s politics.

Women are more apt to let their activity revolve around the men in their lives. Men might hold some stuff in and tough it out, but they’re less likely to spend as much time tending to others as women do. So, during a woman’s monthly cycle she’s apt to scream out (or want to), “I’m a person, too!”

Still, there is that which triggers a man’s frustration, or the pressure he feels. And, I don’t want to overstate our differences, but … when a man is hungry, a woman tends to feed him. When a man comes home tired after a bad day, a woman tends to be there — comforting him, getting him something to drink and picking up his clothes.

No, women are not all the same, and they’re not the same from cradle to grave; and neither are men.… More

If there’s something you’re trying to reframe or heal, you might try this simple exercise:

Sit quietly by yourself, free of distractions. I know — solitude can be as elusive as healing; but they’re almost synonymous.

Now pick up a pen with your left hand (or your right hand if you’re left-handed) and begin to write. Write a letter to yourself or to somebody else who might be helpful in the process; and then lend them your left hand to respond. (And, yes, you can respond to yourself.)

You might just find that using your left hand allows you to tap into your unconscious or revisit a wounded child you only vaguely remember.

“My right hand is my grown-up hand — a writer’s hand, a minister’s hand — but when I wrote with the left hand, I found that what tended to come out was as artless and basic as the awkward scrawl it came out in. It was as if some of my secrets had at last found a way of communicating with me directly,” says Frederick Buechner in “Telling Secrets,” his wonderfully rich memoir.… More