Rebel Buddhist

This week is about why we hurry. Not the kind of hurrying when we are trying to make it on time to a party or a meeting, but when we hurry towards our  goals . Why we rush. Why we feel pressured to achieve our goal – like  yesterday .   I speak from experience here when I say feeling that pressure to achieve our goals faster feels pretty crappy. So let’s jam about freeing ourselves from this sense...

Doubt it a totally normal experience. It’s comes with the territory when you’re a human born with a brain. It functions to try and keep us safe...to assess potential danger and protect us. However, it keeps us from experiencing true inner – and outer – freedom.   In Buddhism there is he concept of the Five Hindrances, which are mental states that impede progress in our meditation practice  and  ou...

Correction: The original source for the quote about "The Man in the Arena" was incorrectly stated as Thomas Jefferson - opps! Didn't have my chai yet! The correct author is Theodore Roosevelt.   One of the hardest parts of starting the Rebel Buddhist Podcast for me was anxiety around receiving possible criticism. If someone says something on a social media post or a blog post, I’m able to respond...

I was reflecting a lot on my life when I grew up in the ‘hood with so little, and when I lived out of my car for 7 years as a climbing guide and how my life was so simple and I  made  hardly anything and  bought  hardly anything and I was so so so  content .    And  while  I was content, I admit that while I had  confidence  in many areas - guiding and my dreams and purpose and my power as a wild...

If you haven’t realized, I have a bit of a stubborn streak. I like to be right. It’s a thing I do. Once, when I was arguing with someone because I  knew  I was right and I just couldn’t let it go, he said, “I can tell you really like to be right.” It was just an observation - not a judgment. He even said it kind of nicely. “You really like to be right.”   And I was like, “YES, I like to be right?...

There’s a saying, “People will doubt but you say but they will believe what you do.” And this is because it is well-known that what we say isn’t always what we mean. What ultimately matters is what we DO. How we show up in the world.

Here we are - at the end of the year, maybe looking back and wondering how it all happened the way it did. Maybe holding some grudges or deep resentments...or shame about how we showed up. The good news is, if we want to, we now have a chance to do things differently.     Ultimately, we all get to  choose  how we want to show up every  day , but there’s something significant about how we move into...

We’ve arrived at the final few days of the year, and how we participate in this transition will set the tone for the next one to come. If we want to be active  creators  of our own life instead of massive observers of our life (letting things happen TO us), it’s important to get clear and move, think, and feel with  intention .   One of the best ways we can do this is by trying to think of a phras...

Lovingkindness is foundational to cultivating wisdom and compassion in our mindfulness practice. A lot of people feel like mindfulness is a peaceful and relatively sterile thing where we are aware of our surroundings, but I’ve found that at deeper levels of mindfulness, there is also an element of love.    So yes, we can mindfully move through the world with love. But when you’ve had life challeng...

We are all complex beings, made up of contrasts. Discipline and wildness. Security and freedom. Worldly and divine.   There are dichotomies everywhere. It’s part of nature, and we are all a part of that.   Yet often we are asked to choose only one aspect of ourselves and lose or leave the other. And for many of us, our culture believes it’s hypocritical to stand with one foot in each contrasting s...

Today is about one thing that could make a huge difference in your life - with relationships, health, creativity, and especially our mental health.

What we talked about in Part 1:  // Attachment theory and mindfulness of emotions and thoughts // How patriarchal society predisposes us to certain thoughts + beliefs and filters our relationship experiences // How it makes sense that anxiety leads to crazy thoughts and actions // Why those actions could end up leading us to lose ourselves in a relationship // The FIRST step in healing: offering o...

Does this sound like you: // You obsessively check your texts to see if so-and-so has replied yet // If they don’t, you start to spiral about if they still care about you, or what might be wrong. // When you receive an email, you have a sort of mini-panic because it could be bad news about someone being upset with you - even though you haven’t even opened it yet. // You overreact to minor feedback...

There are lots of forms of grief and loss. The most obvious is when someone has died, but we can also grieve in many other ways, like the end of a relationship, the diagnosis of a serious illness, not being able to have a baby, or the loss of a dream.   We all will go through some form of loss at some point. It’s inevitable. I get emails regularly from people who are grieving or even holding thems...

This Episode is all about change – and your ability to adapt to it. We all know that nothing is permanent, but we still like to hope that things won’t change too quickly. And while we know we’ve made it this far in life, we still often question our ability to be able to handle what life might send our way.  The inevitability of change and your ziji – your inner radiant confidence that you will be...

I love sharing my daily adventures… especially when they involve a gorgeous, sunny day in Hawaii or an epic alpine lake in Alaska! But social media shows a filtered version of peoples’ lives - sometimes literally. No one has this super happy blissed-out life where it’s gorgeous views and amazing fulfilling adventures all the time. That’s only half the picture. And while we may not see the messy si...

“I’m sorry I made you mad.” “I’m sorry I upset you.” “He hurt my feelings.” We hear these things and say these things throughout our lives and assume they are true. But they are not. In reality, believing that we can control how people think and feel actually keeps us from accessing genuine compassion and kindness.   Over the past few months, I’ve talked a lot about how other people and external c...

In my life, there is almost NO consistency. Which can be awesome for spontaneous journeys or trips and fun nights-in doing silly things with my daughter and husband. But it can also be an absolute pain in the butt when it comes to the simple things in my marriage like who is cooking dinner, or who is picking our kid up from school or even who is going to be home that weekend!   To minimize the cha...

I get asked a lot where the name for my podcast, “Rebel Buddhist”, came from. Often people will say, “Wow - I can’t imagine a rebel Buddhist with like guns, or weapons - isn’t that the opposite of Buddhism? Isn’t that a kind of...oxymoron?”   And I’m thinking, “That’s not exactly the definition of ‘rebel’ that I had in mind.”   Here’s where I’m coming from:   My main motto is, “Free Your Mind, Fre...

“Work is love made visible.”   Beautiful, right?   But for a lot of us, it might also sound like a load of bullsh*t.   After all, work environments can be super unhealthy, both in their culture and environment. And I know that a lot of you Freedom Junkies want to have freedom of time, money, energy, and location, but your work place may not offer that.   You’re not alone. These days there are a lo...

I have a lot of Freedom School students who come to me stressed out and anxious because they have no idea what their life purpose – and they’ve been waiting a long time to figure it out.   They have a longing – as we all do – to know what and who and how they are “supposed to be” in this world.   I know it’s totally cliché to for a life coach to be talking about life purpose - but it actually make...

I’m currently caught in the middle of a fairly common decision: what fun thing do I want to do this weekend? If you have FOMO, you know you can spend some serious energy debating all the options: outdoor music, road trip, camping with friends, and outside of a pandemic, which party/band/event to go to.   Lots of times, when we have a decision to make, we sit and debate because we want to make the...

As a life coach, I dislike - maybe even loathe - seeing business coaches talk about “making six figures off your first launch.” Or when they use cheesy marketing ploys that promise six-figures... but only if you study their blueprint, map, or 6-week program. Why?   Well, who came up with 6-figure earnings being THE GOAL anyway?   I recently took a good look at my own finances with the goal of find...

For me, when I’m not in alignment with my truth and my values, I feel hollow inside. I feel that sinking feeling and my heart feels restless. I can’t sleep as well, I am quick to lash out or exaggerate truth, and my body tenses up.

Today, we talk about adventure and being devoted to it. Adventure is essential to our evolution. When I was a child, I would get soooo bored. I was an only child in a poor neighborhood that had so much gun violence I wasn’t even allowed to play in the front of the house because of all the drive-by shootings…let alone walk to a friend’s house. I made a promise to myself that when I grew up, I would...