Yogis, mystics and natural healers have long known that mind and body cannot be separated and treated as two separate entities. Advances in neuroscience and related fields are bringing new evidence and frameworks to our understanding of the mind-body connection.

I recently interviewed poet Jon Boisvert about his new collection of poems, BORN (Airlie Press). The juxtaposition of fantasy and the rawness of the poet’s grief create an energy that drive forward a narrative both strange and familiar.

We may not always know precisely where we are going, but we know we must take action; a movement must occur. But what is the quality of this movement? This is a critical question that is especially important in our times. Is violence justified? Is nonviolent resistance enough?

When was the last time you looked at your partner—really let your gaze linger and take them in? What is it to really see your partner, to hold them in your gaze and attention. Try it. Let your gaze linger just a little longer and notice what happens. 

All soundwalks calls attention to the way that sound influences our sense of place and challenges us to consider what it is to be embodied in a place. In some cultures, the relationships native people have to the local soundscape is central to their survival. 

Trauma is a near universal fact of life. Both popular and clinical literature on trauma are growing as we become more aware as a culture about how traumatic experiences impact us through the lifespan. 

The practice of yoga is expressed in the effort to realize intention. Just touching your toes in a forward bend is not the point. The incremental surrender to the pain or tightness in your hips as you reach to get to the toes is where practice lives and breathes.

The impulse to “move on” is not without wisdom, as it has at points in our collective history been a matter of survival. And yet, the haste with which we transform a loss into a gain, a death into new life, can leave us with a deeper loss, a sense that we have missed the point of our own life. Loss is everywhere.

The ability to turn towards your partner is connected to the practice of turning towards your self. Turning towards your self means inviting awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, behaviors, needs and body sensations, even when they are uncomfortable or undesirable.

Mindfulness has been a part counseling practice and the psychotherapeutic lexicon since at least the 1970s and became more widely accepted as a valid component of mental health treatment in the early 90’s with the popularity of the so called third wave behavior therapies

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn.  --Emerson