We all have a dark aspect to our psyche that most of us would like to ignore or deny, but it exists nonetheless, and for many it is unconscious. This part of our minds is called the ‘shadow,’ a term first coined by the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung in the early 1900s. Whatever we deem […]

Last year my mother passed away at 84 years. She was ready to go and had lived a full life. Knowing this however, did nothing to lessen my grief. My father died 31 years previously, when I was 23. It was a dark time for me and it took me many years to come to […]

Is it time to stop being so serious? In the words of Milton Berle, the late American comedian and actor, “Laughter is an instant vacation.” It’s true! What’s more it’s free and we can do it virtually whenever we want without even having to take time off work! Laugher has been called “social glue” because […]

Most of life is about perceptions rather than ‘reality.’ After all, what is reality? If there was a circle of 360 people and in the middle a husband and wife were having a heated argument each person would literally have a different point of view, which would create a slightly different version of the events […]

When my son flew the nest to go to school in BC last fall, my thoughts wandered back to all the things I used to love to do, long before I started a family. When I lived in London, road biking was something for which I had a real passion. I shudder now when I […]

A couple of weeks ago, I made a quick trip out to Kelowna to visit my son who is in school there. It wasn’t a particularly relaxing 4 days… 12 hours of driving there and back, lots of running around the city buying things for his new home, late nights visiting with friends and catching […]

After reading Gandhi’s, “Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth,” my heart was filled and inspired by the life of this humble, yet extraordinarily powerful man. Literally a few days later, I received an email from a friend giving details of a course on Nonviolent Communication. With thoughts of Gandhi in mind, I knew […]

Most of us are told that conflict is bad and we should try and avoid it. However, conflict in itself is neutral, it’s how we handle our differences when confronted with conflict that can cause the discomfort and emotional pain that we experience. As they say, it’s not what we are resisting that causes suffering, […]