A standard message for motivational speakers and writers of self-help books is to promise that, if you do what the book suggests, you will have success. Often there’s an element of magic […]
Meditation for Skeptics
Depression is (Still) a Trip
In honor of Mental Health Awareness Week, we are re-posting this. And sending out our wishes for safe weathering of all storms, inner and outer. You stay alive you stupid asshole […]
Cat-Assisted Meditation
Meditation teachers will tell you to find a room and shut your animals out before you sit down to meditate. Too much distraction, they say. You should concentrate on yourself, they say. […]
How Can We Get There?
I recently got back from vacation (see my last post!) and one of my friends, as friends will, asked how I was readjusting to being home. I said, “On vacation, every day […]
Anglophile For Life
Yes, my friends, I went to England this summer. I went during July, when the temperatures in Memphis were sweltering in the humid 90s. I went with my husband, who is English, […]
How else do you want to live?
A Doubter in the Church of Poetry
Originally posted on The Literary Life:
Friends, I have a confession to make: I lose faith. Often. Sometimes multiple times a day. And I’m not talking about religious faith, though I have…
Inner Weather
Today is the 12th day since I stopped taking my anti-depressant. Before that I went on half the dose for a month. Before that I was on that particular drug for perhaps 5 […]
On Meditating Through Being with Animals
It’s Not Your Fault (You Don’t Suck)
Originally posted on The Literary Life:
I talk to people all the time—inside and outside of academia—who don’t have the faintest sense of why it’s so hard to make a living teaching…
The Gloria Sirens 