STAY IN TOUCH WITH OUR NEWSLETTERSEntries tagged with “Personal Essay”
7 Ways to Take Care and Take Action
What do we do when facing what appear to be insurmountable challenges of our time?
A Dear Friend and a Dazzling Inner Light
What does a meaningful friendship look like and do you value it when it comes along?
A Solo Journey for Radical Self-Care
A self-described mother martyr goes on a solo journey and rediscovers the value of her own joy.
And This Is How Our World Will Change
Those who have deeply suffered know the only way to attain authentic and lasting contentment is to turn our hearts outward in service to those who are suffering. Here are two stories…
Awakening at the Sunrise Suite
“Someday,” I promised Iris, unable to completely quell my bourgeois roots, “I will take us there in grand style.” It didn’t happen like that.
Book Review: Love Hurts
Love HurtsBuddhist Advice for the HeartbrokenBy Lodro RinzlerShambhala PublicationsThis book, by 34-year-old author and meditation teacher Lodro Rinzler, had an unusual genesis: fo…
Breathing through Untangling Myself
Discovering yoga and embracing the constant transitions that come with the practice.
Discovering Gold on the Gold Coast of Australia
How a Trip to the Land Down Under Shifted My Perspective from Hole to Whole
Exploring the Power of Intuition
Within the quietness of mind you hear a kind of deeper process, a deeper wisdom.
Get a New Perspective on Your Regrets
A close encounter with a powerful force of nature gives writer Steve Lewis a new perspective on his regrets.
God is Everywhere
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Sacramento, California. I was always fascinated to go next door to our neighbor's, an older couple, who had the exact same house as us, but …
Growing Elder
I thought a lot about Gladys’s comment, secretly hoping I could avoid dying from the head down or the feet up…
Have I Lived
When our inner critic oversteps its bounds, pause with true reflection and rest in your radiance.
Heal Yourself, Heal the World
Drawing from the wisdom of spiritual teachers, writer Emma Pearse focuses on healing herself to heal the world.
How to Break the Spell of Fear
When you take control, you break fear’s spell. The concept is simple, but is difficult to accomplish because fear is the ultimate enabler. I saw that clearly when I went blind.
Is Your Yoga Class a Stanley Milgram Experiment?
Perhaps the hardest pose—and greatest enlightenment—is to sit comfortably.
Make Your Story a Gift
To come to know and to make sense of and to share our stories is not an act of selfishness, but an act of growth, healing, and ultimately, generosity. But what is a writer to do with a violent story she cannot narrate—when it’s her own?
Mother Mary Moves In
The author of the best-selling memoir Riding in Cars with Boys was a self-described “East Coast cynic with a rich vein of sarcasm” when she began visiting Virgin Mary apparition sites for an NPR documentary. She was also in trouble. The deeper she delved into her fascination with Mary, the more she found her life changing.
My First Five Hours in Prison
Finally visiting my old friend, a murderer who plea-bargained for life without parole.
My Solo Whitewater Rafting Retreats
Maybe it is a substitute for the psychedelic mind-altering drugs of the Sixties.
Our Community Journal: “Come with me, little lady.”
The shop owner motioned toward the back of the shop.
Our Community Journal: A Mother’s Legacy
I picked up my mother early on an April morning last year to begin her birthday celebration. She was ready and waiting dressed in a gay blue-green polyester blouse with neat …
Our Community Journal: Meet Me on the Mountain
"With the snow falling and wind howling, I stand up with certainty and clarity. I meet myself on top of the mountain. I celebrate the energy of my life."
Our Community Journal: Restoration to Flight
One woman's journey with Rheumatoid Arthritis has served as a spiritual blessing and teacher.
Our Walk in the World: Field Notes on Living
Columnist Mark Nepo shares his field notes on living and insights found in his lifelong conversation with the Universe.
Our Walk in the World: Heart and Path
Beneath all our noise and trouble, the secret of life is waiting to be discovered, the way a pearl grows in a shell at the bottom of the ocean long before the diver enters the water.
Our Walk in the World: Making Our Way
When we find each other stranded, the exercise of compassion demands that we interrupt our lives to return each other to our own true nature
Peace Lessons From A War Horse
Could you teach a peace-loving and exquisitely sensitive animal to carry you across a battlefield into enemy fire? What would that teach you? A true story…
Prayers for Our Children
A soon to be mother asked me what prayers she could do for the child in her womb. It brought me back to my days as a pregnant lady. There was a sensation of something incredi…
Rabbi Julie Take One
“What should we call you?” I tell them my name is Julie, but they can call me whatever they want.
Do they want to call me Rabbi Pelc? I don’t feel like Rabbi Pelc. It sounds like someone old, someone wise, someone male. Many of my colleagues would choose to be Rabbi Julie, a nice compromise. But this begs the question — if I were a man, even a male student, would I still flinch when they called me Rabbi? Or would I shyly smile, knowing the title will be mine soon enough?
The First Child in History Diagnosed with Autism
Adapted from In a Different Key: The Story of Autism
The Gift of Mistakes
Yes, it is true, we make mistakes. I have made plenty and as my husband often reminds me—it’s alright! In fact, he says I'll probably and we'll probably keep making mistakes. It is…
The Happiness Track: The Flow of Being
As children, we were one with each moment—crying one moment, laughing the next— always intensely present and going along with the flow of being. As a result, we had an …
The Real High
My definition of a drug is any substance which alters your senses. I include alcohol and marijuana in addition to hard drugs. The following thoughts are a conversation I fantasize having with some of my friends who practice yoga and meditation and use drugs.
The Self-Loathing Look
In a public place thousands of miles from here, a stranger identified me as someone who lives in the same town as himself.I happen to hate this town, where the person behind you in…
The Wrong I Needed to Write
In the last two issues of S&H, I’ve written two articles. This is the one that was trying to get out…
We Don’t Have to be Perfect
A lesson learned: be true to yourself and to be grateful for who you are.
What Is Your Crazy?
When I was twenty-one, my grandma was bedridden and needed full time care. She was worried that the lady living with her and taking care of her was crazy and asked us to get someon…
Yoga and the Journey to Sobriety
I grew up in a household of teetotalers. The only alcohol anyone in my family drank was at the altar during communion—until the church switched to grape juice. Despite my par…
