The Daily Ascent

It's my birthday week, and birthdays make me honest. I lost a lot of my life, years of it, to my eating disorder, to addiction, to depression, long stretches where I was here but stuck behind a glass wall, unable to feel any of it.  What put the first crack in that wall was realizing I could think differently, though at the start choosing a new thought felt like pushing a boulder uphill. With prac...

Two years ago I was completely sure I hated hot yoga. My best friend Josh twisted my arm, I went, and I hated every single minute of it.  And then I had one small thought: what if I could teach myself to love it? Not tolerate it. Not white-knuckle through it. Actually love it.  So I got a two-week pass and went every single day. Whether I felt good or terrible. Whether I wanted to or not. Just sho...

A friend of mine was apartment hunting with an agent who kept insisting there was nothing good out there, and this genuinely positive woman started to catch his hopelessness.  So I stopped her. You don't need fifty apartments, you need one, and there's always one good one, so don't make his belief your belief. And I told her what my spiritual advisor used to tell me: God is the ultimate real estat...

A client and I came up with an analogy years ago: she's the unicorn in a family of horses. And if you've ever felt like the different one, the too-sensitive one, the one who just doesn't quite fit, you already know exactly what that feels like.  A unicorn is still a horse. Just a magical one. This episode is about how to love your family without expecting them to be something they're not, and how...

I hadn't cut my hair in eight months and had convinced myself that perimenopause had hijacked it. I finally went in and stood there complaining to my stylist about my dry, unruly hair, when a stranger came over and told me it was beautiful.  I brushed off the compliment. And she said, I'm losing my hair, I'd do anything for hair like that. Every single thing I was complaining about was something s...

I'm out in Long Island with my dearest friends, where I go to my meetings a few times a week and everyone knows it. One Sunday night at dinner, I said I had to leave early for a second meeting, and as I got up, my best friend Jason quietly pulled me aside. He asked if everything was okay, said he'd noticed that was two meetings that day, and put his hand on his heart: I just wanted to check in wit...

I started a podcast with two dear friends. It was magic. And then slowly, it wasn't. But I kept pushing through, telling myself good friends and good projects deserve endurance.  Then one of them sent an email saying it was time to come to a natural close. My stomach dropped. And after a long walk with Danny, I realized the truth: I'd just been too scared to say it first. This episode is about the...

I've been collecting rituals for years, from different teachers and traditions. Full moon ceremonies, burns where I write out what I'm carrying and set the paper on fire, nights with friends where we say our intentions out loud.  I don't do all of them and I skip whole seasons. But every time I do one, I get calm and I get connected. I had a boyfriend once who thought it was bizarre and asked why...

My friend Michelle pulled up to teach our class together holding her laptop, completely fried, planning to keep working in the car. And I said, put it down. Let's just talk.  By the time we got to class, I could see it. So I told her, let me teach the whole thing. Just rest. She cried in the closing circle. She said she didn't realize how badly she needed to not be in charge for a minute. This epi...

I was staying with friends in North Carolina, and every morning I took all three dogs on a walk. It was my contribution, lifting a real thing off my friends' plates. And at first it was chaos: three dogs, tangled leashes, wet dogs climbing all over the car. But almost a month in,  I noticed it had become the most peaceful part of my day. I even took all three to a roadside coffee shop on the trail...

I was in North Carolina watching a friend's dog, and my mom was supposed to come stay with me for the week. Then she got the stomach flu. I was so bummed, and I told my friend Michelle I was stuck in the monastery. Michelle has two kids and a life so full I get tired watching her Instagram stories, and she said, "Oh my God. What I wouldn't do for four days alone."  So I used the monastery. I journ...

A client came into my office completely depleted. People around her were sick, dying, falling apart. She was holding so much suffering that she was disappearing inside it. And she kept saying, "I just can't fix it. I can't fix any of it."  And I said quietly, "What if fixing isn't the only option?"  This episode is for everyone who has ever felt helpless in the face of someone else's pain, and nee...

I'm away with friends somewhere beautiful, and I got here more tired and stressed than I want to be, doing all the restful things and still feeling empty, because I was never actually present for any of them. At dinner but thinking about work. On the walk but in my head.  My friend Sarah, who just came through a hard season, cracked it for me: self-care was never the activity, it's the presence yo...

You're trying so hard to do something meaningful. Something good. And it just falls apart. This episode is about what happens in that moment, the hot flush of shame, the stories we tell ourselves, the voice that says maybe you should just stop, and why staying in the room anyway is the whole point. There's a difference between humiliation, which makes you want to hide, and humility, which opens yo...

My friend and I took a yoga class where the teacher would not tell us what to do. He just kept saying "maybe." Maybe you'll take the triangle, maybe you'll hold it longer. It got on my nerves, until he explained that yoga was meant to be a personal practice, and he didn't want us obeying him, he wanted us listening to ourselves.  And it cracked something open, because I once read the research on s...

Two hundred episodes . I can hardly believe it, and thank you for being here for it.  Here's what's perfect: today's episode is about not waiting for the good day to start, which is exactly how we got to two hundred. I'm living in the mountains with three dogs right now, where the weather does whatever it wants, sunny one minute, pouring the next.  So I stopped checking the forecast and made a rul...

I was sitting at brunch with one of my oldest spiritual advisors, telling her I was in a hallway. Gray, heavy, can't see what's next.  And she looked at me and said, in her British accent, "Molly, you are not in a hallway. You are ascending. This is what it feels like to ascend." Something cracked open.  This episode is about what happens when we stop labeling hard seasons as regressions and start...

My friend Michelle and I built a movement together called Connecticut Women's Club, and we were planning an event with my friend Jess. From the first second it felt like the easiest, most aligned thing I'd done in ages, like we were simply meant to be doing it together.  And then we sat down to plan and immediately started gripping the wheel, whose house, how many people, how do we manage it. So I...

I was at the beach, surrounded by my favorite people, with the ocean as my backyard. And inside, I was completely empty. So I prayed. Hard.  I was ready to spend money, travel, do whatever it took. And the answer came as a quiet woman in one of my fellowships, two lattes, and a Tuesday morning at a coffee shop.  This episode is about what happens when we stop waiting for the burning bush and final...

I had a night I'm not proud of. Depleted and scared, with a dog who can get aggressive around food in the house, I roared when my dog stole something, and I scared everyone. I apologized, Michelle said there was nothing to repair, I called my spiritual advisor, and I still couldn't shake it. I even started planning to leave two weeks early.  Then the next morning, Michelle thanked me for emptying...

In November I'm going to Bhutan, the one place that's topped my bucket list for years, where my singing bowls come from.  When the trip walked into my kitchen, there was an immediate, quiet yes, and then all the reasonable doubt: the money, the time. But the yes came first, and it was truer, because I never want to look back as the woman who skipped her dream to save a little money on a Tuesday. ...

One of my closest friends has the biggest heart I have ever encountered. And it was hurting her.  She'd done the healing work after a painful relationship, brought her ex back into her life, and found herself carrying their fears and health concerns as her own. So I asked her something simple: "Of course you can handle this. But do you need to?"  This episode is about why your heart doesn't always...

After my episode on making hard decisions, a listener wrote in with the other half of the question: what do you do when you've already decided, but your mind won't stop spinning?  She's unhappy at her job and staying on purpose, for the insurance, while she goes through fertility treatments to have another baby. Smart, clear, loving decision. And her brain still runs a mile a minute. As the reigni...

A friend read me one line from a Substack and I felt completely exposed. "Casual indifference protects you from joy."  This episode is about the sneaky way we soften our excitement, downplay our dreams, and act like we don't care, just in case someone doesn't respond the way we hope.  It feels like self-protection. It's actually self-abandonment.  Question to carry into your day: Where are you sti...

My friend Eileen and I were making a very practical, very sensible plan for our trip to Nepal — and then I heard something a teacher of mine says about levels of thinking.  Stone thinking. Water thinking. Wine thinking.  And I realized we were being stone thinkers when water thinking was right there. What happened next is today's episode. Happiness Now says it like this: "Circumstances and situati...