#lifeexpression

An Issue of Interruption

There are few issues related to dialogue more annoying, more prone to misinterpretation, than interruptions. You’re happily sharing the latest and greatest from your mental repertoire, only to have it suddenly sidelined by a variable completely outside your control. It’s like that moment when walking down a city street, minding your own business, when an invisible crack in the concrete trips you…

Enabling others is often more about what we're hiding from ourselves

  Further exploration of Sharon Martin’s article looking at: “How Codependents Can Stop Enabling and Controlling.” Focusing on the habits that enable the behavior of others. Learning how enabling is often concerned with the stories we tell ourselves to avoid the uncertainty of deeper questions and keep us from exploring our lives. We are so much more than what we often let ourselves believe.

Furt…

Our Emotions Are Never Left Behind. They are the agents for our attention guiding the selection of our behavior.

Viewing emotions as discrete entities allows us to box them up, set them aside and ignore them. Or at least attempt to do so. Quite often we look at them as obstacles to overcome, giant boulders on the path of life. The way forward uses the supposed power of reason, swinging the sword of logic and embarking on a quest to change our thoughts. Without this framework for personal progress we assume…

Behavior helps us to see the limits we put on ourselves.

This is the final part of a 3-part series looking into the essential characteristics of Relational-ACT, the counseling philosophy behind the services provided by Life Weavings. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), created by Steven Hayes, considers behavior to be an indication of the direction or Value that one’s life is heading towards. As such, behavior is a source for constant appraisal of…

A greater question than dependency is how our connections influence and shape our behavior.

To cling to someone for support and emotional safety is only a slight shift in perception away from becoming “clingy.” The former inspires sighs of contentment, the latter of exasperation. For those curious as to how the former becomes the latter, there is no concrete answer as the behavior for both is almost identical and further, largely contingent upon the viewpoint of the recipient. All of us…

Our memories are concerned with our futures as much or more than portraying our pasts.

Memory exists as a source of immeasurable joy and pleasure with loved ones and children and laughter and achievements parading across our conscious lives, even as it holds the repository of one of our greatest fears, that of its loss in dementia, alzheimer’s and brain trauma. The very substance of who we define ourselves to be is constructed out of our memories, as they provide a seemingly…

We are not bound to only one way of expressing our lives

All activity demands two forms of projection from us: intention and endowment. Picture someone pushing a large empty barrel up a hill. At each step a mechanism fills the barrel with an increasing amount of water. If the person were to stop, the water would cease flowing but the barrel wouldn’t reach the goal. Consider intention as the desire to reach that goal, with endowment (the water) being…

Active exploration of life means joining with others

Whether sitting down for coffee, watching a form of media or engaging in an online discussion, the shared experience is being felt and thought about in quite different ways. My perspective of the world is both inevitable and a limitation. There are innumerable other possible lenses for viewing my experiences through, an observation born out each and every time I enter into dialogue with another…