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Beyond Blue

The date night before Valentine’s Day was the evening Eric and I almost got shot. Again, in an effort to put our worries and responsibilities aside for a moment and have fun. Psychologists advice against talking about your kids on date night, so I stuck to my usual conversation topics: our lab-chow’s ear infection and…

Celebrations of all kinds–but preferably without druggie gunmen and nasty brides breaking up over chocolate tortes–have been known to fire up neurotransmitters in the brain and protect brain cells in the prefrontal cortex from shrinkage and death. When people sing, dance, and eat with their friends, they are generally happier than when they are at…

There’s a big secret out there–“The Secret“–waiting to be discovered by all of us who want a better, easier life. Rhonda Byrne, an Australian filmmaker, has repackaged the ancient philosophy of the “law of attraction” and the power of positive thinking into a mysterious, enticing product for anyone stuck with a hardship (i.e. humanity). She…

As an adolescent I loved wearing ashes on my forehead to cover up my oily pimples. In high school, Ash Wednesday got a toast to the beginning of those two-hour Stations of the Cross on Fridays, which shortened each class period by 25 minutes. And in my working days (at an office), my black smudge…

For me Lent is about emptying–a glass, a basket, a soul–so that it can be filled up again…with wine (or sparkling cider), peeps (think Easter basket), and hope. The forty days before Easter is one big humbling exercise–where you remind yourself that without God, you’re nothing but a pile of cinders. “Don’t kid yourselves, guys,”…

I’m sure glad my friend Eileen isn’t asked to give many eulogies, because they’d all sound like this: “It’s a bummer he’s gone, but he had it coming to him.” An avid disciple of medical intuitive Caroline Myss, Eileen believes all illness results from blocked energy in chakras one through seven. I don’t discuss my…

I used to attend a weekly candlelight yoga class. Every Friday evening I would seek courage in warrior pose, stability in tree pose, and peace in lotus pose. And for what seemed like eternity I wondered, “What am I doing wrong?” I recently unearthed this entry in my journal from that time. Here was the…

Today I recognize how distorted my thinking was back then, and I cringe when I read it. But like an anorexic who thinks more weight loss will make her beautiful, suicidal folks are locked on death as the solution. It’s difficult for people who have never wanted to die to appreciate the powerful manipulation of…

No need to buy a parrot when you have an inquisitive five-year-old boy. “What does ‘stressed out’ mean, Mom?” asked David the other day. “You and Dad say it all the time.” “It means…’tired,'” I answered. “Then I’m stressed out,” he said, with no smirk on his face. “What do you possibly have to be…

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t blame stress on technology and taxing jobs. Maybe if we weren’t fretting over 350 e-mails in our inbox, then we’d worry about something else because we have primitive, monkey brains. In “The Emotional Brain,” Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University, explains the “fear system” in laboratory…
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