When the Sun moves from the Tropic of Capricorn (representing the father) to the Tropic of Cancer (the mother), in mid-January, it marks the beginning of the harvest season on the Lunar Calendar. In India, it is known as Makar Sankranti (see Are You Ready To Hit the Ground Running?). It’s when Mother Nature begins to wake up and things…
Category: Self-Growth
Why You Need To Stop Hiding From Yourself
I used to feel invisible. For a long time, my interactions with people left me with the sense that they couldn’t actually see me or understand what I was saying. Especially those I cared about. It was hurtful, confusing, and all around frustrating that the people I loved appeared to speak a different language and refused to see me for…
The Spiritual Power of Grieving
Nobody likes to suffer. We all want to hold on to what brings pleasure, if momentarily, while doing whatever we can to skirt around our wounds and uncomfortable feelings. The external world is very fixated on sensory gratification and avoiding the pain that comes from being human—often disregarding the emotional and spiritual price of such disconnection. But life is fluid,…
What Can You Learn From a Squirrel?
I was on retreat a couple weeks ago, in a cabin surrounded by nature, doing my spiritual practices, writing, reading, walking, and often also sitting quietly doing nothing, just taking the silence in. Aside from birds, squirrels tend to be the loudest in this pristine piece of land, continuously chirping and rustling the leaves as they move and run around,…
Kindness and Empathy Pave Your Path To Freedom
Do you believe people are either good or evil? Humanity seems to have been fixated in the perception of good and evil since time immemorial. Most organized religions have reinforced this polarizing view as well, in an attempt to guide or control the masses with their dogmatic (and sometimes terrifying) versions of the truth. But if you perceive Creation as…
The Battle Between Love and Ego
A client once told me she thought her mother was a narcissist because “she loved herself too much.” But narcissism is not self-love, although it’s easy to get confused since the concept was coined after the mythological story of Narcissus, a beautiful hunter who fell in love with his reflection on the water and despaired of not being able to…
Do you Know Where You Belong?
I navigated most of my life feeling like a stranger in a strange land. No matter where I lived or who I was with, I often had the inner sense of not belonging, of not quite fitting anywhere. It was not just the usual self-perception of being ‘wrong’ that this dysfunctional world instills in all of us while growing up;…