The Wellness Compass Podcast

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It has always been my favorite holiday because of both its simplicity and its focus on gratitude. As I get older, I find that gratitude is foundational to my emotional and spiritual well-being, as I continue to discover the truth of this quote from David Steindl-Rast, "The root of joy is gratefulness. It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude th...

Prioritizing Our Mental Health Through the Holiday Season "Mental health is not a destination, but a process. It's about how you drive, not just where you're going."    Noam Shpancer, psychologist A few weeks ago, I wrote about recalculating our routes in a column that focused on giving ourselves permission to make changes in direction when needed. Today I am writing about something a bit differen...

Are You Handling Your Emotions, or Are They Handling You?   The title question for this column, "Are you handling your emotions, or are they handling you?" is timely given the chronic stress that we have all been facing the last year and a half. My answer to this question is, "Yes!" Yes, there are times when I am handling my emotions, and yes, there are times when my feelings are handling me. One...

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading." Lao Tzu This episode will expand your understanding of vocation and how vocation is an essential comment of mental health and wellness. We took a road trip and because we had some extra time and were in no hurry to get to our destination, we turned to Google maps to help us chart some less traveled and more scenic routes. Seve...

Spirituality is like the roots of a tree; the deeper the roots, the stronger the tree. 
 Spirituality is a part of all of our lives, whether we consciously are aware of it and nurture it within ourselves, or not. We are spiritual beings. As the author and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, "We are not human beings having spiritual experiences; we are spiritual beings having human experie...

Few things affect the quality of our lives than the quality of our relationships. All of us attended a "school of relationships" where we learned certain relationships skills and patterns. If those serve us well, our relationships will benefit. If they don't, the good news is we can always learn new relationships skills if we are humble and open to learning and willing to put the work in to create...

"Resilience is based on compassion for ourselves as well as compassion for others."― Sharon Salzberg. This quote introduces the topic of this show which is about how "the seeds of resilience can only take root in the soil of compassion." Resilience is defined here not so much as "bouncing back," but as "bouncing forward" because sometimes there is no going back, no bouncing back. When loss happens...

This is the premiere episode of the Wellness Compass Podcast.  Scott introduces the podcast and the larger Wellness Compass Initiative. He also introduces the concept of whole-person wellness and what it means to put "your whole self in." Scott also plays his guitar and then used it as a metaphor to learn about whole-person wellness.  He intentionally makes one string on the guitar out of tune, an...