CAPITAL SELF-DEFINED The ability to be Self-defined is a superpower. Please note the capitalization of that Self. I grew up in a family where I was robbed of the privilege of learning what it is to be self-defined. As a result, a big piece of my personal evolution has been learning to be Self-defined. It has been a rough and rocky road. Part of Part of a healthy maturation process includes detaching from parental or other authority figures and learning to think, decide, and define from a place of choice and autonomy. Though inextricably part of a tribal system we are each born to grow into a place internally where we decide what is right and what isn’t right for us as individuals. We are to take

REALLY GONE I guess sometimes when they leave, they are really gone. My mother left her body four years ago today. That is 1460 days. Not one of those days has passed that I have not thought of and felt her absence. When my mother left, she was gone. I have experienced the deaths of many significant people in my lifetime. It began at a young age and has been a constancy that I have learned to live with. I have become increasingly friendly with grief as a result of these many losses. I have also become increasingly comfortable with the ongoing vibrational relationship with those who have moved on. I cherish the ongoing “visitations” with people who are no longer on this plane of experience. Those

LOOKING AT I am always looking at what I am looking with. I heard that phrase for the first-time decades ago. After pondering it for months I thought I knew what it meant. After grappling with it for years I realized I did not know what it meant. And all these decades later I still dance with what I suspect is one of the most confounding and yet liberating notions that I have ever heard. I am always looking at what I am looking with. We as human beings are emotionally imprinted and carefully programmed and conditioned. We are not responsible for these imprints or filters. We are, however, responsible TO them. Human consciousness evolves via the way we relate to our imprinting, programming, conditioning. We are

PRECIOUS ATTENTION There are few gifts as precious in life as someone’s undivided attention. There are few things rarer in life these days as the gift of someone’s undivided attention. The need to be paid attention to is universal and unmistakable. Though we may not frame it as such, it is built into our hardwiring and even into our DNA. We need to be seen, heard, acknowledged, and appreciated. When we are not, we suffer. We need to pay attention to others. We need to see, listen to, acknowledge, and appreciate fellow living beings. When we do not do that, we suffer. We have an intrinsic need to connect. We need to experience a felt-sense connection within our own being to ourselves and to our surrounding world.