The Daily Ascent

At a spiritual retreat this week, someone asked my teacher if she believed in the power of prayer. She didn't answer. She turned the question around: do you believe in the power of an angry mob?  Because if collective negative energy is real — if you already feel it in a room before a single word is spoken — you can't logically close the door on prayer. Our final night in Lourdes gave me something...

I was on a spiritual retreat in Lourdes when a woman in my small group started doing unsolicited therapy on me. She was kind. She was well-meaning. And it took me ten minutes in a full fawn response before I could finally say I needed to go get a cup of coffee and walk away.  Today's episode is about that cup of coffee, and about something I feel strongly enough to say out loud.  This is an episod...

This one is a crowd favorite, and it might ruffle some feathers. I'm taking a hard look at one of the most overused phrases in spirituality, "everything happens for a reason," and asking whether we're actually using it to avoid feeling our pain.  Because sometimes that phrase is a spiritual bypass, a way of tidying up mystery instead of sitting in it. And sometimes "for me" looks like comfort and...

My friend threw me a welcome party when I moved to Connecticut. It was Labor Day weekend, and genuinely thought nobody would come. Twenty-seven women showed up — twenty-five of them complete strangers — and went around a circle wishing me something for my new life here. I have wondered ever since how much of loving it here started in that room.  Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging says it like this...

This one is a crowd favorite, and honestly, I think you'll see why. My goddaughter was 15. One dinner-table moment and I was catapulted straight out of adulthood and right back into my teenage self. A Celtic prayer helped me find my way back to love.  Whether it's parenting, friendship, or just life being life, this episode is about the messy magic of being human and the peace that comes when we s...

A client of mine had a really hard year. When she told me she was heading out on a hiking trip to celebrate making it through, I told her to give it to the mountains. She came back transformed. Today's episode is about why transitions need ceremony — and what we lose when we just drift through them.  To Bless the Space Between Us: "We have fallen out of belonging. When we stand before crucial thre...

I went to Lourdes with a plan. I was going to do the bathing ritual. I was going to get dunked in the sacred water and it was going to be transcendent. And then I looked around at the line I was standing in and heard something very quiet and very clear. This is not yours.  Everything Belongs says it like this: when you can get little enough, you will find that the little place where you really are...

When I arrived in Lourdes for an eight-day spiritual retreat, my first thought was: I made a terrible mistake. This happens to me every single time I go on a spiritual retreat.  What happened next — a voice memo to a friend, and something my teacher said in the opening — is what today's episode is about. When Things Fall Apart says it like this: "To stay with shakiness — to stay with a broken hear...

A coaching client said something to me recently that I have heard a hundred times in a hundred rooms, and I finally want to say out loud what it actually means. "I'll try my best" sounds like effort.  It sounds like earnestness. But underneath it, it is an exit — a door built into the back of the commitment before the commitment has even been made.  The hedge is not humility. It just looks like it...

I used to tell myself I was going to put away the laundry before I went to sleep. And I knew, even as I was saying it, that I wasn't going to. That small comfortable story — repeated in hundreds of tiny private moments — was costing me more than I realized.  Martha Beck writes in The Way of Integrity: "To be in integrity is to be one thing, whole and undivided. Know what you really know, feel what...

I was on my way to Lourdes, sitting next to a man who coughed the entire flight, and I was catastrophizing at altitude in a way that was decidedly not my wise mind. My friend Karen said five words to me in the airplane aisle that I have not stopped thinking about since.  Viktor Frankl writes in Man's Search for Meaning: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freed...

The night before I left for Lourdes, I was depleted in a way I hadn't fully admitted to myself. I went to my women's circle and I did something I don't always do easily. I asked to be held. And what happened on the way to the airport the next morning reminded me of something I thought I already knew. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love: "Loving friendships allow us the chance to revel in community...

I did something recently that was genuinely hard for me — not complicated, just vulnerable. I needed to ask about ten people for something, and every single ask was nerve-wracking. And then the universe made me ask again. And again. And what happened on the other side of all that asking was not what I expected. Kate Bowler writes in No Cure for Being Human: "We are as fragile as the day we were bo...

Last week I sat in coaching session after coaching session hearing people make declarations about their lives with complete certainty — certainty that came not from experience but from fear. A business coach I worked with years ago had a question he would stop me with every time I did the same thing. Nine words.  It stopped me cold then and it stops me now. Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall...

I have been saying the same thing to people for twenty-five years — in treatment rooms, on retreats, seventeen miles deep in the forest with someone who desperately wants to be out of it. And last week my social media coach said it back to me, and my mouth dropped open.  Urgency is never wisdom unless there is a lion chasing you. Everything else is your fear of trying to speed up the process.  Que...

Last week Danny, my seventy-five-pound lab mix, accidentally ran a little experiment for me. I had been giving him these yak milk bones and then taking them away before he overdid it, and every single time I gave him one, he went at it so frantically he would sometimes make himself sick.  So I tried something. I put five or six of them out on the floor at once, just to see what would happen. And t...

In today's episode, I'm sharing a conversation I had with my best friend during her surgery recovery week, when the house unexpectedly went quiet and she started running through a list of hobbies to pick up to fill the silence.  Tricia Hersey writes in Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto that we don't have to be everything, that we don't have to know everything, that we don't have to do everything, th...

In today's episode, I'm sharing something I have been carrying for a long time and have not really known how to talk about, the loss of a friendship that was a main character in my life for decades, and the strange, unnamed ache of grieving someone who has not gone away in a way our culture knows how to recognize.  Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow that grief was his gateway back in...

In today's episode, I'm sharing the trip I almost didn't take, the inner voice that told me I had to go anyway, and what was actually waiting for me on the other side.  Melody Beattie writes in The Language of Letting Go that courage and strength, ability and resourcefulness are never lacking when we follow the guidance within and trust in its direction, and that all doors will open and our steps...

In today's episode, I'm sharing what I noticed while I was with my best friend the week after her major surgery, and the moment when one of our friends, who had had the very same surgery a few years ago, came over to take her on a walk and then sat down with her for coffee.  Vivek Murthy writes in Together that human relationship is as essential to our well-being as food and water, and that loneli...

In today's episode, I'm sharing what happened the day my calmest friend in the world finally yelled, after the accumulated weight of all the well-meaning advice she had been getting during her divorce became too much to hold.  Megan Devine writes in It's OK That You're Not OK that some things cannot be fixed, that they can only be carried, that grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solu...

In today's episode, I'm sharing the call I made to my spiritual advisor twelve hours after I drove my new car off the lot, the way she gently laughed at me, and the pattern she has been watching me run for eight years.  Jack Kornfield writes in A Path with Heart that we live in a sea of conditioning patterns that we repeat over and over, yet we rarely notice this process, and that the work is to d...

In today's episode, I'm sharing what happened the day a recruiter called for a reference on the assistant who'd stolen from me and refused to talk to me on her way out, and the one line from my friend Billy that I have not been able to put down since.  The Daily Reflections reader published by Alcoholics Anonymous says it has been said that anger is a luxury I cannot afford, that we are not asked...

In today's episode, I'm sharing something I've never talked about on the show, what happened with my last assistant, and the deep inventory work I was doing with my spiritual advisor at the same time her betrayal was unfolding.  Melody Beattie writes in The Language of Letting Go that we look at our behaviors and patterns with love and compassion for ourselves, and that we perform this examination...

In today's episode, I'm sharing what happened when I heard a wildly successful comedian say something so honest about his early days that it made me think differently about the runway we give ourselves for the things that matter to us.  Anne Lamott writes in Bird by Bird that not one of the great writers we love sits down feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident, that none of them write elegant f...