In the first part of this blog, I talked about how we have come to believe if someone has beliefs that don’t align with our own, they must be a bad person.

“This is part one of a two-part blog.

Here we are several days after the most bruising Presidential election in my lifetime, and somehow, we’re all still here. And somehow, we have to find a way to live in the same country with people whose beliefs on almost every issue clash with our own.”

There’s a plant in my garden called Buddleia. Its common name is Butterfly Bush, and it lives up to that name because, once its flowers come out, butterflies (and certain moths) swarm to it. I live in a place with cold winters, and I used to have to re-plant it every year. Because our winters have gotten warmer, this spring, I noticed the one I planted last year had re-sprouted.

Enormous parts of our lives go completely unexamined. For instance, have you ever given any thought to whether your view of life supports you? And if you’ve ever stopped to wonder about this, how would you even know if life were supporting your worldview?

Giving yourself a break always sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?
Why, then, are we so infinitely creative in finding ways to postpone it?

To be clear, what I’m talking about is being a little easier on ourselves than most of us tend to be. It occurs to me part of our genius for putting this off has to do with the notion that we’re just not quite ready to do it yet. Unfortunately, this feeling of not being ready can go on almost indefinitely.

“If I’m Enjoying My Life, Something Must Be Wrong.” I was trying to get to the bottom of what a client was telling me when they gave me a hand and said that line. They’d been explaining the feeling they lived in most of the time, one that suggested a peaceful feeling was an unknown occurrence in their life.

Worry is the Monster in the Closet Adults Still Believe In. The bogeyman under the bed and the monster in the closet are illusions we tend to associate with childhood. They are how a child expresses the absence of a safe feeling. As children, once we’re shown there are no monsters or bogeymen under the bed or in the closet, our belief in those imaginary creatures is likely to evaporate. We see through the illusion that frightened us, stripping it of its power. Those of us who spend time worrying are innocently harboring a belief in a monster in the closet. The most ironic thing about that belief is that

Recipe for a Perfect Day I had a perfect day not long ago. It wasn’t that everything in my day went without a hitch. It wasn’t some lucky confluence of circumstances. It didn’t have to do with something I did. The perfect day I enjoyed was due more to something I didn’t do. How can not doing something give the experience of a perfect day? The answer is simpler than you may think. When I drove away from my house that morning, I noticed I had a judgment about nearly everything I saw. I also noticed that I didn’t like the feeling those judgmental thoughts created. So I made a

What if Anger Were the Only Emotion You Could Feel? What if anger were the only emotion you allowed yourself to feel? Anger has become a drug to vast numbers of people, and it’s not difficult to see why. Anger can only ever come from one place; anxiety, which is a result of only one thing; fear. So angry people are invariably fearful people, and that describes a sizable percentage of the population. But when you take an anxious person and get them really stirred up, you’ve just added the magic ingredient that turns anxiety into anger: adrenaline. Adrenaline is the only difference between anxiety and anger. That shot of