Mindfulness

Watching the Women's World Cup is bringing all these emotions and memories that I have to confront. That I feel needs to be addressed. I honestly do not talk about it too much, but it is a big part of who I am and how I operate. Maybe even illuminates some of my shortcomings as well. Let me start with the macro and I will work my way to my smaller story inside the larger narrative. Which is...it took me awhile to see the power in being a female.  Women, ethnic minorities, or members of the LGBTQ community (or some combination of the three) do not fit the 'normal' power paradigms and therefore rarely feel like they can connect with the people they see on the big or small screen.  This dissatisfaction comes from one of three places:  Lack of diverse ethnicities, religions, and races in general. Meaning these groups are simply not being cast.  Lack of humanizing and giving proper complexity to the diverse natures of these ethnicities, religions, and races when t...

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." - George Bernard Shaw  Change is everywhere in my life. Not that it was not there before, because it is apart of life and we change all the time. But currently everyone I love are going through moves, processing retirement, changing career focuses, ending monumental relationships, or reconnecting with themselves by focusing on health. Change is a scary word due to the fact that it requires some kind of loss and the requirement of taking on something new. I tend to focus on the change, but the conversations I had this week reminded me that change is the outside and transition is the mind. We cling to change without truly examining how our identities handle and transition to the change. "Change is situational. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological. It is not those events, but rather the inner reorientation or self-redefinition that you have to go through in ord...

I am a fan of inventing new phrases to describe common phenomenons that we all go through. Human brains look to patterns to understand the world, to understand human behavior, and to also understand themselves. The reality of the situation though is that patterns are a general rule, but it takes awhile for people to register that the pattern has shifted. Sometimes we never deal with the new shift and we constantly bring old patterns to justify our current beliefs even if we know circumstances have changed. So why in the world am I talking about this? Good question. Glad you asked. I have had major transformations in my life, yet I still judge myself through the identity patterns of my older self. Example A: School was always hard and in High School I started to really apply myself and did really well. I did not trust that to be the truth moving into college, figuring that people would find out I am an imposter resource kid in the world of academia. Truth was my pattern shifted, b...