The Daily Ascent

A woman said a sentence to me on a call last week, and it's the one I hear more than any other: "I think I can probably do this myself." She'd spent decades and a fortune trying to fix her relationship with food alone.  And I said six words back that changed the whole conversation: "Here's the thing. You already would have."  Today's episode is about why "I can do it myself" is almost never a plan...

The world was feeling heavy. My nervous system was doing what nervous systems do.  And then I looked out the window and saw Danny, flat on his back in the yard, sunbathing like it was his full-time job. Something shifted. That's a glimmer.  And this episode is about why those small, ordinary moments of safety aren't distractions from the hard stuff, they're the antidote to it.  Question to carry i...

I'm staying with friends whose older dog resource guards. We kept the food and toys put away, and he was still growling at my dog over nothing.  So I read about it late into the night and learned there's a third thing dogs guard: closeness. The person they love. And I recognized it, because I've felt that same quiet math start up at a dinner table when an old friend of mine pulled up a chair for a...

I spent five days with my godkids, which I love. And I came home steady, present, and not crashed. That had never happened before. The difference? I included myself in the circle of care before I left. This episode is about the line between caretaking and overgiving, why what we call love is sometimes just fear, and why your steadiness is actually your greatest act of generosity.  Question to carr...

I hadn't been on a date in seven months, and those were good months. I wasn't hiding, I just wasn't called to it. Then, packing for a few weeks in the mountains, a quiet thought arrived: maybe I could date a little there. See what I'm even like dating as this person, because I've done a lot of work and I'm not who I once was. So I did some love cardio.  Three hours, a wonderful man who lives a few...

For years I've told the same story about the three years I lived in Charlotte. Beautiful chapter, met my spiritual advisor, never really made friends, easy to leave. Then last weekend I went back and walked into the women's group I'd attended every Saturday for three years, and the whole room lit up. Hugs, my face in people's hands, tell us everything. And I realized the story wasn't true. It was...

This one is personal. I've struggled with eating disorders my whole life, and for a long time, my body and I were not friends.  A hip injury, a treadmill class, and a moment of choosing to stop instead of push through taught me something I didn't expect: sometimes growth looks like slowing down. This episode is about what it really means to honor your body, not the fantasy of what you want it to b...

My teacher said something at the end of the retreat that knocked me sideways. What I wasn't expecting was what came out of me when it did. This episode is about the last day in Lourdes, a hard conversation, and the moment I realized my healing had gotten strong enough to hold its ground in the hardest room. There's a passage in Consolations about disappointment that I keep returning to. It says th...

I was watching Shrinking when Harrison Ford's character stopped me cold. One line. I paused the show and said out loud: that's the episode. If you're spinning on a decision right now, going back and forth until you've exhausted yourself and still don't have an answer, this one is for you. We're talking about why worry is not a form of preparation, and what it actually takes to get out of the spin...

My social media coach kept saying she couldn't guarantee results. After the third time, I stopped her and said she never had to say that to me again. What I told her next surprised even me — and it's what today's episode is about.  The Awakened Heart says it like this: "Love should come first; it should be the beginning of and the reason for everything. Efficiency should be how love expresses its...

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...