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I just have to scroll through my Facebook feed each day to catch a glimpse of some of the suffering going on in our world right now. Many of my Facebook friends are visibly distraught and anxious. They share articles, cartoons, memes - anything they can to show their friends how messed up they feel everything is. Underlying all of this is a sense of powerlessness and despair.

And this is understandable. It is understandable that we may feel powerless when we hear about an atroci…

Eastern philosophy talks about the impermanence of all things. That is the people in our lives, the places that we live, the experiences that we find ourselves in - are always changing. We can also look to the stars in the sky, the trees in the forests, the cells in our bodies. Everything is coming and going - being born and dying. It applies to everything in the physical realm and to all of human experience. Even in the West, Heraclitus said "the only constant in life - is change.…

One of the greatest contributions we can give to others is to help them grow. We help them grow - by empowering them. Empowering them to make positive changes in their lives. They are able to do this, when they are able to gain new insights or shift their perceptions.

This requires an openness from both sides. When we truly wish to help someone empower themselves, we also have to be open and come from a loving place. I'm sure you've all experienced times when someone you know is…

One of the most common struggles I hear from my HSP clients is how often they are feeling overwhelmed. So in this blog post, I want to share a quick "tool" to help overcome overwhelm, which is to simply apply the idea of creating a "temporary limit."

I'm personally a big fan of to-do lists. Every day, I have a to-do list with about a dozen tasks that I want to accomplish that day. But sometimes, when I'm looking at that long list in the morning of things I want to get done -…

Intellectualization is a defense mechanism in which we use our mind to try to keep ourselves from having to experience uncomfortable emotions. It's a kind of emotional suppression where we try to use the mind to analyze an emotion, understand why we're having the emotion, and then try to think of a way in which we don't have to experience the emotion anymore.

However, when we focus on what we don't want, we actually feed what we don't want with more energy and actually end up cr…

I would say one of the harder lessons I've learned in life is that we live in a world where people often like to commit to things - but frequently don't follow through. They break their commitments. Whether it's something small like a lunch date or going to the gym - to something bigger like starting a new goal or pursuing a new business idea. As someone that likes to trust people and take them at their face value, I've learned the hard way that people often just aren't able to kee…

There are some days as a kung fu and tai chi teacher where I don't feel inspired or motivated to teach. But I show up anyway. And, inevitably, within a short period of time, I begin to feel motivated.

Through my years of teaching, I've had my fair share of students who use the excuse of feeling uninspired or unmotivated, as a reason why they can't make it to class. Or why they feel like they need to take a step back from their training.

And typically, they don't necessarily s…

I know a lot of HSPs that need to take frequent breaks from social media due to feelings of overwhelm and overstimulation. While I definitely encourage this if needed, I feel it's an invitation to explore deeper - as far as our relationship to social media itself.⁣
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Taking breaks could be seen as more of a self-soothing technique - more of a band-aid solution. Similar to when people temporarily delete social media apps from their phone.⁣
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They may feel better. But why? What is …

Many of us can sometimes feel like we have a very antagonistic relationship with time.

We often feel like there's not enough of it. That there's so much that we want to do each day - that we start developing a kind of scarcity mindset. It can feel like time is always going by too fast - and that we're always behind on whatever projects we're working on. Or that we don't have the time to properly take care of ourselves or to exercise. It can also feel like we don't have enough time…

Are you firm with yourself? Or are you gentle with yourself?

Well, for personal growth and things like productivity - you really need both. But you need to know when is the right time to apply one over the other.

I believe that we must be firm about showing up - but be gentle about the outcome.

Many of us have goals or other aspirations we want to achieve or manifest in our lives. Oftentimes these don't have external deadlines. Meaning, deadlines that are imposed upon us…