- anatomy
- answers
- ashtanga yoga
- assumptions
- author
- balanced life
- beauty
- biohacking
- books
- brain
- calm
- change
- communication
- confidence
- content strategy
- copywriting standards
- creative expression
- creativity
- curation
- darkness
- desktop publishing
- distraction
- dreams
- embrace mystery
- emotion
- emotional healing
- encouragement
- energy
- exercise
- fears
- focus
- freedom
- gestures
- happiness
- head injury
- healing the body
- healthy mind
- heart
- hiking
- holistic healing
- hormones
- humor
- ideas
- impression
- inner dialog
- inner wisdom
- intellect
- journey
- legal
- letting go
- life change
- life-saving
- listening
- love
- marketing
- meant to be
- medical
- meditation
- memory
- mindful
- mountain
- my secret innuendo®
- nervous system
- nutrition
- opposites
- organization
- patience
- peace
- perseverance
- physical healing
- poetry
- productivity
- professional
- psychology
- relationships
- relaxation
- secret
- sense of self
- silence
- skincare
- sleep
- spirituality
- surrender
- synchronicity
- technology
- thoughts
- time
- transformation
- transitions
- trusting
- unconscious
- undefined
- unknown
- vibrant
- wholeness
- wine
- words
- writer's block
- writing challenge
- yoga
Truth tuning in: A lifetime with a pen
My morning writing gets more interesting when I wake in the dark. It shows me that I’m coming back to who I thought I was long ago—sometimes from a nighttime journey in a dream, aligning with something bigger and making room for what’s important in my life. Mornings are inspirational and engaging, where dark turns to light, when birds start chirping. I have tremendous trust in these moments.
My thoughts shine the way—here in words, here in solitude—witnessing my best thoughts allow seeds of who I am to come forth. I’m trusting first, sharing second. I ask myself what must be released within my mind to move forward to my best day, ailment-free, while keeping my heart shining. It’s also a time to reinoculate myself with good boundaries, potions and conversations.
When you write yourself back to where you are
The ground is always moving. Stay grounded in who you are. Remembering who I am is sometimes a task. I’m not so good sometimes at receiving my gifts.
I stumbled upon an article I wrote years ago describing who I wanted to be in life—my career, to be exact—but really was asked to describe my identity in the world. I’m amazed to recognize that today I’m doing just what I described. It was eleven years ago.
I felt misunderstood back then. It’s a continual process to gain confidence in my natural talents, as if I need to reign over them.
Healing with Ashtanga: Modulating stress on autopilot
This time of year brings up stress. It’s not always in real time, but rather in remembering…
Not just in the mind, but in the nervous system and in the tissues. As the mornings are darker, the unconscious becomes brighter, and all that is held inside me comes alive in a new way. This shows up as inklings of thought that generate more depth, or sometimes a standstill—a pause too long—that highlights a blockage.
How to identify and get past the stagnant feeling where words or feelings are numbed? Move my body! My Ashtanga yoga practice has been my savior through the years.
Left Brain wrote this | Right Brain approved it
In 2012 I wrote about my yoga brain. Fourteen years later I’ve realized I don’t have just one brain state. I have a whole house of them. There’s a yoga brain and a hiking brain. There’s a writing brain, a romance brain and a networking brain that counts the seconds until it can go home. There’s even a kitty brain. Each room has its own mix of analysis and flow, and I’ve found that the best moments happen in the doorways between them. Wander through with me.
(Fair warning: my left brain drew the floor plan, so everything is labeled)
What a pro writer is worth: What’s going on in my brain
As a professional writer, I write, I edit, and I proofread, to name a few. I find myself also acting as a consultant on health, since my background lends itself to that expertise. Then there’s digital marketing—a service I offered in the past but now only address when it crosses into my writing dominion. My main jobs are as a writer, an editor, and a proofreader. And now I’ll share my methodology for each in reverse order, sharing the best for last; what’s going on in my brain is the key to who I am.
Are you nervous? Ashtanga yoga cleanses the nervous system (2nd edition 10 years later)
It’s good to be proactive and cleanse your nervous system. Ashtanga yoga is one way to do this. I have proof.
I’ve practiced all kinds of yoga through three decades—various methods such as Iyengar, Ashtanga, Vinyasa Flow, Yin—to increase strength and flexibility, to lower stress, and to gain mental and spiritual clarity. I’ve also done it at times just to get out of the house; to soothe an unknown entity rising up inside me, I transported myself to yoga class at the soonest possible opportunity because I had to.
Hidden, practicing cogitation
Hidden in the fog, warm sun shining through, the city by the bay lingers in the fog. I’m practicing cogitation: the act of thinking deeply…
What’s hidden behind the clouds is still there. What’s behind our faces, our actions and our words is sometimes hidden as well. There is silence out there, reaching out into the water. You can listen to what it has to say by just being in it.
Reminds me of a writer I see often
Distraction of emotional trauma: Through undischarged residual energy
I am distracted often. Yes, that gets in my way when I know I’ll disappoint someone if I don’t accomplish a certain goal. Sometimes that someone is myself.
Yet, with my life of freedom—more so, the art of distraction itself—I wouldn’t have it any other way. There is a beauty and inherent intelligence in distraction.
Why does a distracted mind cause anxiety? (My original version of this article was 12 years ago during my graduate studies after the Yoga and Psyche Conference).
We are who we are
Mom & Dad, do you hear me? I know you do. You visit me as birds, usually whenever I’m hiking. You’re identical, like twins, yet are distinguished and separated from each other on respective branches. I like to see you separate—rather than entwined—so that I can speak to each of you as separate identities.
When I was growing up through to a year or so before you died, you were a hybrid person together as one. It was hard for me to distinguish the feelings I was having about the loss of each of you.
Practicing confidence: A metaphorical house
I’ve come alive in some areas that surprised me but that emerged as I was writing—with a real pen in my hand into a mole skin journal; I find special powers in heavy ink pens.
I invited my insecurities and desires to rise up through the prompts.
My favorite is about a room in a metaphorical house representing my life. Mine is the tiniest house of time, which is the subtitle to my book I just published.
Does this sound familiar?
Most professionals I work with don’t have a writing problem. They have a time problem. Or a motivation problem. And sometimes a content decision problem. When you know your field well, it’s not always obvious which details to share with readers, and which only matter to you. Maybe one of these issues sounds familiar?
-Your work changes lives, but your content reads like a textbook
-You have more expertise than time
-You want to publish a book
-Your marketing sounds like everyone else
-Your pitch deck isn’t pulling its weight
-You need your complex legal, medical or technical ideas to reach everyday readers
Psychology of allowing people in
I’m in a networking group, and with that comes lots of education on marketing yourself. What I thought was natural for me has risen to the surface in a new form, now reaching out for my attention.
There is a lot of discernment required in deciding who you are in the face of the public. Your identity—the one you feel comfortable articulating to others—matters.
It’s important for me to connect with people who know how to listen, know how to pause…
Words
As I stare each day at the new vocabulary word of the day on my phone, I’m collecting thoughts or sentences where I can use them.
At the same time, I’ve been putting off a post I had been planning on my social media regarding words and phrases I never use and why. The ones that cause eye rolls because they mean nothing so why use them. I believe in words chosen well.
I finally published my book
I finally published my book. Fifteen years in the making. I needed to emotionally distance myself from the content before publishing.
Click here to purchase: Buy the paperback
Book description:
My Secret Innuendo: In the Tiniest House of Time is a collection of poems and creative expression written during the most raw years of a woman’s life, finally given room to breathe after more than a decade has passed. One angle is a woman speaking to the animus, the inner masculine of Jungian psychology; in another she is speaking to her higher power. Who is listening in any given poem is left open. The title itself is a quiet metaphor: words and memories stored within a house in the mind, timeless yet suggestive and evocative. If you've ever needed permission to feel everything at once—and read or write about it—this book is for you.
Self-publishing a paperback book
Self-publishing a book sounds simple until you're deep in trim sizes, gutter margins, and a section break that quietly corrupts your entire file. The writing is the easy part. The technical side—getting a manuscript print ready—is its own skill entirely.
I offer this service: Self-Publishing, Simplified. Trim size, margins, page numbers, front matter, copyright page, ISBN, manuscript upload (e.g., KDP Amazon)— the fifty small technical decisions standing between a finished manuscript and a published book, handled.
AI, marketing and humor
Sleuthing… Sifting… Mulling… Triangulating… Cogitating… Crystalizing… Honing…
You have a business, vision and you’re using AI to get started. But you can’t quite articulate why anyone should care about your cause. That’s where I come in…
Marketing begs for attention—the promotion of services and products, with an end toward making a sale or gaining a following. I listen to and read articles and books on marketing, but many are dry material and lead to yawning…
But humor gets my attention.
On recovery and intuition
David Whyte, the writer, pops into my Inbox from time to time. Normally, his messages set the stage for great introspection. Here’s the latest:
Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually, but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavour, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals.
I love my Full-spectrum Infrared Sauna
The benefits include increased metabolism, aid in recovery from muscle aches and pains, immune support as the heat accelerates the immune response, detoxification as blood circulation increases and works together with the stimulated sweat glands, reduction in cellulite, ease in joint pain and stiffness, stress reduction and skin improvements. ⠀
Struggling what to call this post about AI when it’s listening
I’ve discovered how much an AI company pays a writer per hour to teach it how to become literate. Actually we want AI to be in the top notch of Highly Proficient, not just Literate. The pay ranges from $20-$100 per hour.
What I didn’t know I’d want to know now
I’m enchanted by myself. I just reread my blog posts from many years ago when my three offspring were teenagers. Some of the posts I deleted. Others I will savor for years to come. The writing was quite snide but only a single parent raising teenagers—ones who are born from their own genes—can relate to me…