There's a print hanging in my house of rows and rows of colored dots, each one captioned with a tongue-in-cheek moniker. Were I to count, I'm betting each color is represented in equal numbers. But sometimes, I'll look at that print and a red dot will catch my eye. I'll read the name, something like picnic tablecloth, or Maine lobster, or Tide detergent, and relish the wit of it. When my gaze zooms out, all ...

  It feels cliche to talk about rising. The image of the phoenix is played out. We get it. We fall and (hopefully) we get back up. Hurrah. Except anyone who has truly felt themselves rise understands the hype. I’m a perfectionist, which means I’m perpetually aiming at doing things beyond even the best of my abilities. In striving, I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. I realized a while ago how pointless (and damaging) ...

A woman named Lolita stood over me, saying a prayer to the spirits of the North, East, West, and South. She made shushing sounds, and waved her hands in the air above my body, apparently pulling negative energy out of my system. “Do you feel a heaviness traveling through your legs and out of your feet?” She asked at the end of the treatment. Maybe? I wanted to. My sister had left her shamanic healing ...

  “I just had to send you a message,” a client we’ll call Marla wrote to me. “Normally this time of year I’d be feening to shop for myself and other people. Like I had to stay plugged so that I wouldn’t miss major sale announcements, but instead I feel totally unbothered!” We’d worked with Marla extensively to edit her space. We talked at length about how she used every excuse in the book to ...

  We live in a highly produced culture. We’re bombarded with shabby befores snapping to swoonworthy afters. The upgrades are instantaneous, only adding to their impressiveness. We expect our personal transformations to happen as rapidly. We want the results now. We want our current discomfort, our hang-ups, and our emotional turmoil to be dispelled in the span of an HGTV episode. We evaluate our goals impatiently. We wonder how everyone else is managing to pull ...