Well Being Psychotherapy

Important information if you are a trauma survivor who gets activated by certain calming techniques like breathing, body scan or meditation. It’s not your fault! Pay attention to what happens. Other techniques are just better for you right now. "If you have ever tried deep breathing during a moment of overwhelm and felt your panic rise instead of fall, you are not broken. If body scans make you feel more dissociated, not less. If being told to slow down and go inward sends your nervous system into a spin rather than settling it, that is not a failure of willpower, effort or commitment to your own healing."

When Calming Down Makes Things Worse On why deep breathing, mindfulness and grounding techniques backfire for many trauma survivors, and what actually helps instead

Profound.

Why Trying to Feel Safe Never Works: Winnicott on the Fear of Breakdown D.W. Winnicott's unsettling theory about the catastrophe you're still waiting for

Climate grief is real and deep

We know how to mourn other humans – but what about ecological grief? In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals

This writer explains this dynamic eloquently. I work with my clients to unburden and heal. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1E7WypEn5L/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Has activity become mere busyness?

The issue is not how much we do. The issue is whether, in the midst of doing, we remain intimate with the life that is actually unfolding before us.

Has work become another place where the heart quietly disappears beneath habit, identity, accomplishment or concern?

We rarely ask whether the heart remains alive within our activity.

There are ways of engaging in activity in which the heart gradually disappears beneath the weight of self-concern, until one no longer encounters the world directly, but only one's own momentum moving through it.

Zen invites us to examine not the quantity of our activity but the quality of our participation.

There is no place to live except with the life that is completely before us.

Roshi Joan Halifax quotes, Raising a Broom, 6/27/26

Raising a Broom–Essay by Roshi Joan Halifax Roshi Joan Halifax explores the Zen teaching on work, busyness, and the living heart of practice, drawing on samu, nyohō, raising a broom, and a classic koan.

“A deep acceptance of life “just as it is” allows you to be more fully present in your life moment by moment, no matter how difficult or how sweet it is, and it empowers you to act more from your deepest values. Regardless of the circumstances of your life at any given time, your experience is richer, more alive.”

― Phillip Moffitt, Dancing with Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering

Breathe, you are alive.

"According to a survey from the American Psychological Association, 76 percent of Americans are concerned about the future of the nation. This is now the leading cause of stress, above the economy or work or money." Robert Reich

Ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing leading me to the heart or away from the heart?”