By Amy Phillips-Gary
Practice makes perfect– no, that’s such a loaded word.
Practice helps bring about change, but it can be difficult to actually initiate and then stick to it.
I remember loathing sitting down at the piano each day to practice as I was growing up. This was most definitely a source of conflict between my mom and I.
Today, I goad my own self to practice various things and I experience similar, though internal, struggle.
By Amy Phillips-Gary
Sometimes there’s nothing better than a deep and cleansing cry. It can shake things up and clear out all of that stuff that each of us needlessly carries around.
As adults, many of us don’t give ourselves permission to cry.
Somewhere along the line the message was made known that crying is weak and “for babies.” This is especially the case for boys and men. But girls and women also receive similar messages.
We are subtly or overtly told that there is no room for crying in a successful, got-it-all-together kind of life.
By Amy Phillips-Gary
What do you tend to do when faced with something unexpected and seemingly threatening in your life?
In situations like these, do you tend react to what’s going on without much consciousness about it? If so, you are not alone.
By Amy Phillips-Gary
Today we celebrate the life and contributions to the world of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Although there were certainly scores of people who also articulated their visions for a fairer world and made deep sacrifices in order to bring about significant change, King’s name is almost synonymous with the Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 60s here in the U.S.
Over the course of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke many brave and stirring words that inspired hundreds of thousands of people. As he organized and led non-violent direct actions advocating desegregation and equal rights for African-Americans, he acted in ways that were indisputably courageous.
If you were a warrior on a battlefield or even playing chess or another board game, uttering the words “I surrender” would probably not be a desirable thing to do. There is a definite association between surrendering and failure or weakness in predominant understandings of the concept.
Nobody wants to be considered weak or a loser.
In order to allow the kind of life and success that you want, however, surrender may be the key.
When conditions in your body, your relationships, your job, your bank account– your life– start to feel out of control and are not what you had in mind, you may try to force things back into“line.”
By Amy Phillips-Gary
Recently, I re-watched the late 1980s movie “Field of Dreams.” In the film, Kevin Costner plays a somewhat new-to-the-vocation farmer in Iowa named Ray. One day, as he stands tending the corn in his fields, he hears a voice call to him: “If you build it, he will come.”
Ray ignores the voice, jokes with his wife and daughter about it and loses sleep over it. The voice doesn’t give up! Finally, a vision of a baseball field right in the middle of his corn crop accompanies the words.
