Falling Gently Podcast

There are only so many times a person can be earnestly trying for something Watching other people seem to get it easily And remain chipper in their congratulations Even when those well-wishes are heartfelt and without reproach It’s hard to keep envy entirely out of the equation And curiosity about what makes it unavailable to me This is hard. And tricky. And no one dances through it unscathed. And...

We had a deal with our kids They could participate in pixels (TV, computers, iPads, phones) For the exact amount of time they spent being creative in the day Spend an hour or two drawing, writing, building, playing music or sports I will give you no grief about that game you want to play You want to binge it? You’re going to need to bank some creative time Which often got them into deep-focus proj...

At almost any hour of any day If you ask me what time it is My impromptu response will be within 3-4 minutes of what the clock says And usually right on the nose It’s uncanny But made infinitely weirder by the fact That I have zero precision anywhere else in my relationship with time I’ve never worn a watch I rarely carry my phone I’ve recently heard the term “time drunk” and was a little scared a...

I am a coiner of aphorisms One of my favorites is: “Wonderful capacity. Terrible default setting.” The first time I used it was counseling my nephew about a job interview His capacity to inflate himself would come in handy But be perilous if it was all he brought to the conversation I knew, as I said it, it was going to stick And I’ve returned to it again and again Empathy is a wonderful capacity...

I polish the orb of spiritual devotion as a vocation My belief in the Divine as All is ever-revealed the more softly I look, the more openly I feel Everything in life is singing We are all humming along Creating. Relating. Attention as currency We invest in what we value Or what we’re compelled by Isn’t it beautiful when those two things are the same? When attention isn’t hijacked I’m still trying...

It is very true that my best friend in middle school was a tree I’ve actually had numerous tree-best-friends And even a couple of mystical experiences with trees While the human world often feels foreign to me Trees make me feel right at home So, I totally understood it when forest bathing became a thing It’s a thing because it’s wildly effective in nervous system regulation It’s wildly effective...

When I was 8 years old, the University of Pennsylvania quarterback came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner He didn’t have time to travel home between games and we were happy to have a local celebrity join us After dinner, he’d told us about his summer job at a sugar mill Suffice it to say, I remember every word of that conversation And it is front and center literally every time I encounter whit...

Philip Shepherd tells the story of his niece losing her bracelet at a big family picnic Everyone had been searching the grass of a huge field for ages But when Philip arrived and heard of the quest He looked into the vast field and invited his pelvic floor to find the item And he walked right to it I was skeptical Except not long after reading it My husband and son had made boomerangs And gone to...

I read a book in the 90’s titled “Wholeness or Transcendence” I remember little more than the title And having thought, “Transcendence. Obviously.” Transcendence was my spiritual path to unity with all of life And conceptually, I could get so close But the world and circumstances refused to cooperate. While striving for transcendence, I experienced distinct separation in my body “I” lived behind m...

There’s a tangerine tree in my garden It’s speckled with hundreds of squat neon balls When we moved in, they were still green and many had brown spots from the sun But now they are bright orange and very few show their burn scars This is a beautiful tree and looking at it brings me joy every day It is the centerpiece of the yard And it anchors the surrounding trees and bushes I just love it But, a...

I had an epiphany on the Epiphany, January 6 All these years, especially this last year, I’ve been looking for a job for my values instead of for my skills The window I’d been flying into, trying to break through Has been the self-development/ecological stewardship/social justice (collective trauma healing) world “I’d do anything” to help in this world. See me. Let me help! Slam into the window ag...

My guiding word for 2025 was “Reverence” It was both a resource and a lot of pressure Which shouldn’t surprise me, because as I learn to appreciate the Divine in All I often have to expand my idea of something to include its opposite Dichotemies seem to be the double helix of progress Whether soothing or pressure, Reverence kept inviting me to bow To trust that the Divine is expressing in every as...

One job that did not materialize for me was for a Dark Retreat company Weirdly enough, a body worker I love had suggested spending time in the dark just a few months before I met these folks Just be in the dark, he said, not meditating or chanting, just be I’d been practicing it, with towels at the doorjamb of my bathroom And quite liked it Speaking with friends, I learned of several who had done...

You may recall, 125 posts or so ago, I discussed my extremely productive misunderstanding of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ In the story, Jesus arrives to a sacred temple essentially to take the test to get the title of the Christ And once settled, a couple of men secret into his room and say, “The temple masters are jealous and plan to kill you. Play along until we can break you out” And...

I don’t have a lot of specific, major regrets Having married the wrong person, taken a meaningful wrong turn I mean, I’ve made plenty of odd or suboptimal decisions There are plenty of things I’ve said I wish I had crafted more intentionally to land more beneficially But I’ve softened my approach through my mistakes And while it doesn’t erase the errors, it does parlay them into something contribu...

I’ve been tasked with composing a single sentence description of ‘what I do’ Never have I felt more verbose and less clear What do I stand for? What do I want to say? I stand for so many things Chief among them, remembering our wholeness (which is immediately fractured by naming a slice) Connection, Interdependence, a context of becoming While fully imperfect at it myself, I’ve made tremendous adv...

My favorite at-home retreat is a 45/15 schedule 45 minutes of activity followed by 15 minutes of active rest, all. day. long. It’s beautiful. The first time I did it, I set myself up with timers. Activity. Alarm. Laying. Alarm. Activity. Alarm. Laying. Alarm It took about 5 hours to sync up with the rhythm And then I didn’t need the timers - the pace became natural Tidying and laundry, and then la...

We’re funny when we’re defensive Ridiculous may be a better word We’re all trying so hard We want to be acknowledged for the intelligence in our efforts Even when they’re fruitless or ineffective There is intelligence there And care And that is a beautiful thing And we’re protective of it An inner allegiance The result isn’t nearly as important as the care put into a macaroni necklace When a kid p...

The Vedanta Society was formed around an exemplar named Ramakrishna in the late 1800’s Once, one of his disciples was on a ferry and heard people disparaging the saint When he got to the ashram, Ramakrishna scolded him “You can listen to people speak falsehood about me and say nothing? What do I mean to you? You must defend the truth with all your strength!” Months later, another devotee came acro...

I can’t remember what prompted me, in meditation one day, to shift my upward and outward orientation of devotion by 90 degrees But it’s one of my favorite remembrances Always, I prayed up and out, to the Light, to heaven, transcendent and supreme Even when I knew God Is Everywhere, still I had some sense of preference for an “up there’ home base Illness shifted me down and in, and that has been a...

Surely you’ve heard Alexander Den Heijer’s wise and wonderful: “When the flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower” I’ve had no problem at all applying this to broad issues of the day It’s at the heart of trauma-informed care But it really never occurred to me that it could apply to my life and situation. Today, I was in Thomas Hübl’s community call which is a...

Ninth grade English probably taught me the difference between jealousy and envy But it didn’t stick I just wrote a whole post on jealousy And in speaking to my sister learned that what I’d written about wasn’t jealousy at all! Humbling, but wonderful, to always be learning. So, as you probably already know, jealousy is fearing losing something you have to someone else Which makes sense now with je...

I could spend the next six days getting more and more granular about all of the ways life is supporting me I don’t think I could fill thirty minutes listing the ways I feel life is not supporting me Oh, I know I’ve filled many hours complaining about it But it’s really just a small handful of things. Important things, far-reaching things, but just a few of them Objectively, it is astonishing that...

Landscaping makes me feel guilty I’m sensitive to all the life that’s been pulled out of its natural habitat To be organized to please somebody, to look a certain way, even perform a function It is rare that i actually sense a plant is really unhappy with its location They’re so good at blooming where they’re planted But some of my closest friends have been trees And one of the things I shared wit...

I think it’s fairly proven that we have complex energy centers in the brain, heart, and gut Brains think. It’s what they do. But it’s not all that’s happening. Hearts beat. Relentlessly. The defining motion of life. And the pelvic bowl contains our center of gravity and moves us within the world These three centers work together But for decades I really only identified with my thoughts. Especially...