I read something a few years ago that helped me heal from trauma significantly. It validated my experience. I remember my therapist saying to me that my type of trauma was the hardest to heal … low level trauma. I didn’t even recognize it as trauma until I was well into adulthood and life began to unravel. Here is the passage:  “It’s crucial to remember that no one but the writer can determine what might be perceived as traumatic nor is it essential that the experience be defined as ‘trauma.’ What matters is if the difficult experience produces a stress response––or a complex trauma response––and this can result from surviving an attack, being in a car accident, or fighting in a war. It also can come from the separation from parents, or living with a depressed parent, or being in a household with marital…

As humans, we are naturally feeling creatures. Emotions move through us every day, and unless we pay attention to those feelings, they can rule our very behavior. They can also make us use words to manipulate other people’s behavior. This very thing happened to me this week. A friend of mine, someone I know pretty well, used words in a conversation with me that made me feel uncomfortable. I don’t think she meant for me to feel this way, but I do believe she used her words to achieve a result, to make herself feel better. She was hurt by me, I believe. She wanted something from me I didn’t provide to her. She had needs and looked to me to meet those needs. When I did not meet them, she used words that felt like shame to me, deep in my body, deep…

I’ve been thinking about practices, habits and routines. How are they different? Are they different? How are they similar? Each contributes to who we are, who we become and how we spend our days. Two quotes that come to me often are “How you do anything is how you do everything,” and “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.” But habit gets a bad rap, rightfully so. It’s easy to slip into bad habits and they are hard to break. I also believe that good habits come from practice and practices are filled with intention. We envision who and how we wish to be and put practices in place that support those intentions. Done often enough, they become habits and perhaps routine. Practices are intentional whereas habit and routine can ultimately become less mindful. And I…