If, due to finances or schedules, you are unable to come for therapy, or if you feel sharing your story, being understood, and seeing your life through the lens of another person will not be helpful, but feel you need some help in any case, please try the following activities. Feel free to try any, all, or none. Nothing here will be harmful and you may find some particularly helpful. None are necessarily rigid or literal. You’ll get the gist. Enjoy!

• Breathe deeply. Notice ‘what you feel’ rather than ‘why you feel it.’ Attend to your interior sensations rather than the exterior event. Breathe again. Notice how 'what you feel' changes.

• Eat food that is grown in soil rather than manufactured in a facility. Bring in calories like you bring in breath: predictably, consistently, in small but adequate quantities, and of good ingredients. Drink water. Lessen the toxins that come in as well such as alcohol, tobacco, and salty-fatty-sugary food-like substances including sodas.

• A short time after sunset, begin to quiet and dim the lights in your home. A short time later, lie down to sleep. Lie down early enough to wake up and arise slowly without an alarm that screams at you, “Time to MOVE!!”

• Turn off the TV, video games, and electronic screens. Notice who and what is around you.

• Practice mindfulness meditation. Be attentive as you rise, sit, eat, walk, and work. As you become distracted, which is inevitable, gently call your attention back to your focus without judging yourself that you are somehow failing and without bearing down to try harder. Simply notice the distraction and return your attention. You will repeat this over and over again. Loving-Kindness meditation or contemplative prayer are likewise helpful.

• Go outside, plant a garden, go for a hike, walk in the woods, find a body of water, sit beside it, listen. 

• Be creative. Paint, sculpt, build something, write a poem, or create a melody. Remember, ambiguity opens an infinite number of possibilities. Certainty rules out all but one. Imagine possibilities.

• Practice yoga, tai chi, aikido, or improvisational dance; play games; participate in non-contact interactive sports such as soccer, basketball, volleyball or baseball; throw and catch (balls, Frisbee, etc.). Find a swing set or rocking chair and sway a bit. Laugh with others. Cry together too. Share celebrations and consolations. Notice how that feels.

• Sing songs, join a choir, play an acoustic instrument, experience harmony. Notice how it feels.

• Receive a massage. Go for acupuncture. Hug someone you love. Let them hug you. Notice how it feels.

• Spend more time with people who are kind and less with those who are mean especially if they also purport to love you.

• Never use threats, fear, punishment, deprivation, or benign neglect as a means to coerce the behavior of someone you hope will love you, or at least do you no harm. If you are disappointed with them or they are afraid, please do the most kind thing next.

• Resolve conflicts peacefully. Incomplete violence always begets more violence and more fear. Complete violence destroys the victim from the outside in and the perpetrator from the inside out. This is an inescapable Truth.

• Practice love for all living beings. This is our best means to protect each other, heal, and live well. Fear is a penultimate condition because without it we would all be dead. Love, however, is the original, most fundamental, condition because without it we would not be alive in the first place. This is also a universal Truth.

• Living is about the process rather than an outcome which is already known for us all. Life is a practice. Attend to it. Then, notice what happens next. Keep practicing. :)

• Teach and share these activities with your children.

• Our relationships with “work,” money, achievement, purpose, and care have become so conflated and distorted that we can’t begin to touch on them here. Suffice it to say, most of us need some help and attention in this sphere.

• If you are doing these things regularly and still struggling through life; or if they seem not so possible or too difficult to do; or if you feel irritation in simply reading them, feel free to call me. Thank you. Blessings to you and all those you love.

“In indigenous ways of knowing, we say that a thing cannot be understood until it is known by all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. The scientific way of knowing relies only on empirical information from the world, gathered by body and interpreted by mind. In order to tell [your] story I need both approaches, objective and subjective. [Our work together] gives voice to both ways of knowing, letting matter and spirit walk companionably side by side. And sometimes even dance.”

Kimmerer, Robin Wall “Gathering Moss” (Oregon State University Press, 2003, Preface vii).