I want to share something that supports me to feel a little more grounded when my fear feels unescapable:

If it feels good to you, you can bring attention to your torso area. Maybe the chest or the stomach.

Maybe drop the shoulders.

Maybe wiggle your feet or toes.

If it feels good to bring attention to your breath you can.

You can also just bring attention to your general personal space.

Breathe three smooth and long waves of breath.

Feel your hands or feet or some part of your body touch another part of your body.

Imagine roots anchored deep and sturdy and benevolent flowing from you to the earth beneath you.

In this moment, you are held and supported.

Breathe in, full, Breathe out, slow.

Take as much time as you need.

When I’m scared, like really scared, what I almost always want is a caring hand to hold.

The great news is that we have such an abundance of caring hands to hold all around us.

May we stand together hand in hand.

May we feel the gentle rise and the fall of our warm animal bodies.

May we connect with one another and the earth that holds us all.

“We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.” — Audre Lorde

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” – Ida B. Wells

About the Author: Bre Smith (she/they) is a mental health counselor, educator, artist, and writer with a background in psychology and community-based care. Their work centers on trauma-informed, somatic, and ecofeminist approaches to healing, with a focus on nervous system regulation, identity, and relational well-being. Through their writing, Breezy aims to demystify mental health and support more humane, accessible approaches to healing—both inside and outside the therapy room.

A Pew Research poll from 2021 found that nearly 70% of adults rated their dating lives as “not going well,” and a little over half said dating has gotten harder in the last 10 years.

Be it dating apps, post-COVID society, consumer capitalism, political polarity, or the looming deterioration of our social safety net, something is making love very hard. And setting aside the potential for recency bias, it’s only getting harder.

Love still flourishes in the modern day; I hope you won’t mistake my critique for cynicism. But something’s changed. In nearly every way, our world has been turned over and inside out in the last few decades. Everything exists in context. Love is no exception. Love is just like us: struggling to find its footing in this new world. And ours is a world rife with too much. A constant overload to the system.

Too much, too many.

Too many appointments to keep. Too many bills to pay with too little money. Too many screens and ads vying for every millisecond of our attention. And in turn, too few mental and emotional resources to dedicate to any of it. Painful, overwhelming landscape we have. In this landscape, for the sake of ease, everything gets steamrolled into a product we can consume. A product that can make life a little easier.

Because what is a product marketed to do? Provides a solution to a problem (at least that’s what they try to convince us of!). And to solve a multitude of modern problems, love comes as a neatly packaged solution, heralding connection and meaning and promising the banishment of isolation. Watch any rom-com. You get it!

Love becomes a product we must shop for with the savvy eye of a practiced saver (in this economy!?). A product to hold up against our pros-and-cons list. A product to run through the sieve of our cost-benefit analysis.

Forgive the analogy, but why do we analyze the products we consume? Humming beneath this desire, there looms a question: Will this best meet my needs? And shifting to our connections with other people, one more question beneath that: Will this person meet my needs, and can I meet theirs? And beneath that one, perhaps another two, buried a little further down: Can I do everything in my power to be certain? And can that certainty protect me from pain?

Anyone presented with that question would indignantly respond, “Of course that’s impossible!” The reason being, this is not a conscious drive. Pain avoidance and pleasure seeking are the knee-jerk reactions of a nervous system evolutionarily designed to help us survive. Thankfully, now we have plenty of neurobiology research to validate what Freud (that asshole!) once postulated as the pleasure-pain principle.

So avoid pain, we do. Seek certainty, we will. And to do it, we will mold ourselves and our partners into need-meeting products for each other’s consumption. We attempt to make ourselves and each other understandable and knowable to protect ourselves against the ultimate knowledge that love is beyond our control.

So instead of accepting, we consume each other. We disappear into each other, expecting the other to meet us where we are, to know us fully, and to be known by us.

In Love’s Executioner, Irvin Yalom describes this phenomenon with the language of existential isolation. “Many a marriage,” he writes, “has failed because, instead of relating to, and caring for one another, one person uses another as a shield against isolation.”

But, something so enigmatic as love cannot be pounded into the shape of a shield. So love resists. We push back on the other’s demands; we rebel when the other doesn’t love us the way we want them to. We lob Why can’t you just understand? at one another like hand grenades in the war against our fears. Our relationships become ensnared by this entanglement of our own making. Then nearly seventy percent of us throw our hands up and say, “It’s not going well!”

In Greek mythology, the story of the god Eros (or Cupid) and the princess Psyche (whose name means soul) tells the story of the unknowability of love. Eros and Psyche are arranged to be married; then they fall in love. With one caveat: Eros only visits Psyche in the dark. Theirs is a love that requires mystery, separateness. But the deeper Psyche’s feelings grow, the more she relies on him, the more anxious she becomes to see the face of her lover. One night, while Eros is sleeping, Psyche lights a lamp and holds it up to finally see his face. But nearly instantly, he disappears.

Forcing love into a box of certainty (Psyche’s need to understand, to close the unknown distance between them) made love vanish.

Jean-Luc Marion, a modern French philosopher, writes about this phenomenon. He says, “To love is to accept that one might be loved without being able to return it, and above all without being able to understand it.”

In couples therapy, the concept of “differentiation” is a steady undercurrent of the work. I said up top that much of the work of therapy is acceptance of what we cannot control. Differentiation in this context refers to each individual’s ability to maintain a strong sense of self—thoughts, ideas, identity—outside of the other person while still maintaining their relationship. A couples study conducted in 2021 found that a high sense of differentiated self in both partners was the strongest predictor of overall relationship health. Our ability to allow one another the room to meet our needs (or not), to give to us (or not), to be a whole, complex, imperfect person, not an object, can predict our ability to sustain love.

Try as we might (and we try!), we cannot force the distance between us closed by flattening love into a knowable product or by molding our partners and ourselves into something that will meet needs or solve problems.

In the story of Eros and Psyche, after Eros’ disappearance, Psyche sets out on an epic, painful solo quest of transformation (even descending into the underworld!) to eventually reunite with her lover as her own person. A person who has grappled with the end of certainty and wrestled the ultimate unknown of death and come out on the other side.

It is the shattering of a fantasy that makes way for the real work of love. Because good love is what happens after the bubble pops, after the illusion of certainty completely fades. It is the humble work of self-exploration, of accepting the labor of transformation, and of differentiating.

Because the anxious need to flatten love into a known entity is not the end. It’s the beginning. It’s the door finally opening to a path where love becomes not a solution or a shield against the dark, but instead a liberated acceptance of the wild, untamable unknown.

About the Author: Taylor Arroganté-Reyes is a Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate and the owner of Congruence Psychotherapy. In individual work, she specializes in existential therapy and parts work. With couples and partner systems, she specializes in consensual non monogamy and non-normative relationship structures. Her work seeks to invite an open-handedness to the ever-unfolding mystery of life. Her practice is grounded in the belief that genuine relational contact between us and within us can heal, change, and liberate— allowing us to become who we hope to be. If you are interested in working with Taylor, please visit https://congruencepsychotherapy.com/ or email her at taylor@congruencepsychotherapy.com. 

This year, as I watched them, I kept thinking, I’ve got to do a blog about all the great and pithy sayings from the characters. Such as, inside the Mines of Moria when Gandalf can’t quite remember which way to go, and Frodo laments he wishes the ring would never have come to him, that none of it had ever happened. Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

Or consider Sam’s speech to Frodo, who is about to throw in the towel, and Sam agrees that by all rights, they shouldn’t be the ones in this situation. However, Sam goes on. He likens what is happening with them to a fable, a great story, where it’s the darkest ever, and the heroes, despite the odds, keep going because they are holding on to something. And Frodo asks, “what are we holding on to?” And Sam answers, “that there is some good in this world, … and it’s worth fighting for.”

And the last excerpt, my favorite, is Gandalf’s drawing of a very clear boundary for the Balrog by standing on a bridge and shouting in a guttural tone of pure wizardry, “You … shall not … pass!” And bringing down the full weight of his staff which breaks off the bridge just as the Balrog is stepping on to it and causes the monster to drop into what looks like an endless chasm.

What ties all of these together for me? That no matter what is happening, we all have agency in our lives. We can lament living in such precarious times, we can want to give up, we can express our preferences, but such empty action does not change what is happening. People act inelegantly, the weather turns, the economy crashes, the marriage ends. The most important question is, what do we do at that point?

This for me, is best answered by Gandalf’s response when the Balrog’s whip catches his foot and drags him into the chasm right along with the creature. The scene ends there, leaving us movie-goers to think all is lost … that Gandalf dies. However, in the next movie, Frodo dreams that Gandalf doesn’t just fall, he instead turns head first into the chasm, grabs his falling sword and basically dives after the Balrog. Later in the movie, Gandalf (now the White Wizard) explains how he pursued, fought and smote his enemy on the tallest mountain of the lowest dungeon. He did not succumb to circumstances, he instead chose to finish the battle the Balrog began.

Why? Well, yes, that’s how it was written. But if I project my own interpretation on it, by not giving up, Gandalf found a level of competency, determination, and an absolute resolve to go through what was difficult, disheartening, and yes, frightening. For it is by doing such bold action we prove to ourselves … we can. People may tell us we are capable, however, that can be easily dismissed. We don’t believe them … mostly because we don’t believe in ourselves. But when we go through the fire, and come out the other side, perhaps singed, a bit bloody, and visibly shaken, we have touched, and acted from, our true nature, our true heart, the one that can never be broken. It is such steadfastness that lies at our core when we put down the phones, social media, TV and current culture that instead wants us to doubt and second guess ourselves, and blindly rely on the addiction to external forces to tell us what to do in order to keep us safe. (Which is usually, to buy something, listen to a podcast, or watch a new TV series, anything other than constructive action.) The trial by fire is what transformed Gandalf the Grey into the White Wizard, a far more competent and wise being. This is why, I believe, the Buddha’s dying words were to work on our own salvation diligently. No one can save us unless we want, and take action, to be saved.

How can we embrace Gandalf’s attitude with the Balrog? How can we keep to our New Year’s resolutions or intentions? We can take at least one step, as small as it may be, of mindful action that proves to ourselves we are capable. And if such action helps others, great. We can also find a fellowship, a group of people who can help us take that step. At another point in LOTR, Sam muses if someday there will be a song about Frodo and the ring. As he talks about it, Frodo reminds him he would not have gotten very far without Sam by his side. In Buddhism, this is interdependence, or the idea that nothing exists in a vacuum. We are constantly affected by other people, and affect other people as well, endlessly. It is not so much that one person can change the world … it is that one person supported by several others with the same vision can make a great impact. Looked at from a rather dispiriting side, Hitler couldn’t have done what he did on his own. It took a lot of people supporting him, who had a similar vision, to do what he did. He wasn’t alone.

Which brings us back to something Gandalf says to Frodo in the Mines of Moria right after his pep talk on agency, and I paraphrase, “there are other forces working in the world besides evil … Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and therefore … you (Frodo) were also meant to have the ring. … And that is an encouraging thought.” When we consider that where we are right now is exactly where we are meant to be, it can give us a sense of strength and courage to continue. We’ve made it this far. The Buddha, surrounded by sangha, could not do what he did alone. He said that sangha wasn’t half the spiritual path, it was the whole of it. While we may not be able to solve the ills of the world, we can at least make a constructive difference in our own lives, and that will undoubtedly affect those around us.

And while this last quote comes from The Hobbit series, I offer it as a reminder, something to give courage and strength to whatever you are facing:

“It’s the small things, simple acts of kindness and love,

that keep the darkness at bay.”

Everyone is on a hero’s journey, not to save the world … rather, to defy the darkness in our own lives … to act simply, with kindness and love. Which in turn … might just save the world.

About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.

The clients in my office who change, really change, always embrace one practice: being honest about what happened, and honest about what needs to be different going forward.  In fact, the most powerful explanations for things going awry I hear begin with the words, “I chose.”  “I chose to have unprotected sex and that’s how I got pregnant,” or “I chose to bottle up my feelings and not say anything and now I find myself so resentful I’m on the brink of divorce.”  Granted, it can take a long time for people to get to the place where they see how their choices led to their outcomes.  And, it can take a lot of humility for them to own those choices.  When, and if they do, the changes that follow are profound.  Owning our choices provides a way forward.  In one admission of what we did last time we can also know what we don’t want to do next time.  

The power of seeing our actions as a choice isn’t just in closing the feedback loop, though.  Sometimes making a choice frees up bandwidth for living with the choice.  Finding yourself on the fence about something important?  We don’t tend to realize just how much energy it takes to stay perched on that precipice.  The choice you need to make might be more clear than you’d like to admit, it’s what follows that you’re avoiding.  But owning our outcomes is both empowering for future choice opportunities and for making forward progress.  Perhaps you need to do something you really don’t want to do.  You can spend energy holding yourself in limbo, or that same energy doing damage control and helping yourself cope with hard realities.  At least the latter is moving your life forward.  Your destiny belongs to you.  Choose it. It will set you free.

So back to you, and your New Year’s Resolutions.  Do you really need a goal, or do you need to be honest about what’s happening now?  Do you feel crappy because you’ve eaten every cookie offered and skipped the gym for a month straight?  Perhaps you don’t need to resolve to work out, perhaps you just need to own your choices and their consequences.  “I chose to treat my body like a dumpster for the month of December, that’s why I feel bad.”  I hope you’re smiling when you say this because this exercise isn’t about judgment, it’s about getting in touch with reality.  Yes, yes I did live a large life at the holidays.  Was it worth it once a year? Probably.  Do I need to resolve to be better?  Maybe not.  I already know this isn’t sustainable.  My body doesn’t need a big change, it just needs me to go back to normal.  Continuing to choose this will continue to yield similar results.  When the feedback loop is closed, the problem self-corrects.      

Most of the things we want don’t actually need will power- they need intention.  Do you intend to spend your monthly contribution to your Trip to Greece Fund at the bar?  When we wake up on the first Sunday of January with a headache and less money for Greece we can skip the shame of “failing” at our goal.  Instead we could start with the phrase, “I chose to spend Greece money going out last night.”  That sobering sentence just might snap us into redirecting our fun budget for the following week back toward Greece.  

More importantly though, every moment we feel like our life is off track, like a victim, or even just that Murphy’s Law is always two steps behind us, we come back to ourselves with the words “I chose.”  In those two words is all of our agency.  With those two words about our past we write our future.  May the coming year be everything you set out for it to be.

About the Author: Laura Zwisler is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the owner of Lafayette Couples Counseling.  She specializes in relational therapy and men’s work.  Her practice reflects a deep belief that through corrective relational experiences we can heal traumas, get needs met, and fulfill our greatest potential.  In addition to counseling, Laura supervises interns at People House, leads workshops and trainings, and writes about the human experience.  If you are interested in working with Laura, please visit: https://www.lafayettecouplescounseling.com/ or email her at: laura@lafayttecouplescounseling.com.   

In one sense fate is something that happens to us, or rather, this is how we experience it. It is the bad luck, the road blocks, the limitations and the roller coaster of life. Fate is the pattern that drives your life, originating from your wounding in childhood. Fate gets named when you find yourself time and time again in the same experience, no matter how different the city, person or circumstances may be. Often we are bewildered by and victim to these recurring events and conditions. This repetitive pattern makes us feel trapped by our fate, and we quietly surrender to it as all-that’s-possible, abandoning our will and our hearts in the process.

Simply put fate is our unconscious beliefs played out by characteristics behaviors that we experience as the only way to be and survive in the world. A hidden agenda fulfilled by our assumption that we are separate and broken and require certain conditions to be viable. An invisible road map we follow unwittingly, fulfilling what we made up to be true about ourselves, others and the world in those formative years.

Destiny is an entirely different beast. Destiny, though often formatted to fit different belief systems, is your soul’s inherent tension to create what it loves and why it chose to be embodied. If you’ve lived long enough and have paid any amount of attention, you’ll have noticed that there are things that you’d really love to create or experience but, due to our conditioning, we give these dreams very little runway, either reformat them to something more practical or acceptable to ‘others’, deem them unrealistic, put them off until it’s a better time; the list goes on.

Destiny is an expression of our inherent power and connection to source energy. As science has proven now, energy cannot be created or destroyed. The energy that animates your form (and makes up your body and the world we live in) is the same energy that created the universe. Your soul is a universally unique expression of the creative energy that makes up everything, and it’s come to have an embodied experience on earth for a reason. Living your destiny is simple yet profound. It’s being the soul version of you. It’s expressing the inherent freedom you have and what brings you actual fulfillment and satisfaction in your life. Your destiny is the things that you love, for their own sake. The creation and experience of them brings you joy in the moments you are being them, and that energy cascades through your whole life.

We often only have a connection to the whispers of our hearts, our destiny. It gets so buried beneath our survival that it can take quite an excavation to remember who we are and what we love. Embodying your soul creates your destiny and heals you along the way. There are actually no barriers to you creating your destiny other than remembering and connecting to your inherent wholeness and listening to the language of your soul – your intuition, and following it.

Both your fate and your destiny reside within you. It’s your choice which one you create in your life. When you gain awareness of how you limit yourself, you gain the ability to choose something different. When you remember who you are in your heart, you create the opportunity to create your destiny and live a fulfilled, joyful, connected life. Both of these aspects of your humanness are created by you and are your choice. Which will you choose?

About the Author: Phannie has a long career of being a movement artist, movement and embodiment educator and creator. During her career as a professional dancer, studio owner, and company founder, she spent her time uncovering what is true and real in this world. Originally used as tools to create content for performances with strong messaging about the human experience, she created the embodiment teachings and methodology of the Radical Love Movement. 

Phannie has dedicated her life to authentic expression and understanding how consciousness works. She now has alchemical structure to support others in discovery and application of their authentic selves expressed through the body.

One part I especially love working with is the angry part. Not because it’s easy—because it’s honest. Anger wants you to have boundaries. It wants you to say no. It wants you to stop abandoning yourself. But sometimes that angry part is carrying so much that it needs a safe place to let off steam before you can hear what it’s trying to tell you.

I learned a powerful strategy for this from Robyn Shapiro during ego state training: the Anger Room.

At the time, I had a very angry part—more of a social-justice, what-the-actual-hell-is-wrong-with-the-world part. Robyn asked me to visualize a room that was completely soundproof and emotion-proof, meaning nothing leaked outside—not sound, not energy, not emotion. The room could look like anything. I chose a padded room (I’ve always secretly wanted to work in a psych hospital).

Inside that room, my angry part had 3 full minutes to say and do whatever it needed. And it did. I howled internally, collapsed on the floor, slammed my fists, punched the walls, and even turned into a Tasmanian devil—a tiny black tornado spinning around the room. After three minutes, Robyn stopped the exercise. And I felt so much better. Clearer. Grounded. Like something heavy had shifted.

If you want to try this practice, here’s how:

How to Do the Anger Room Exercise

1. Locate your angry part.
   Notice where it sits in your body. What does it look or feel like? What does it want you to know?
   
2. Create the room.
   Visualize a completely soundproof, emotion-proof space. Nothing gets out.
   It can be:
   – grandma’s house
   – a drum practice room
   – a padded psych ward room
   – a rage room
   – literally anything
   
3. Set a timer for 3 minutes.
   In this exercise, each minute represents an hour. Your angry part gets “three hours” inside this room.
   
4. Let your part loose.
   Inside the room, let your angry part do whatever it needs: yell, cry, smash imaginary objects, stomp, spin, flail. Your job is to observe, not interfere.
   
5. Check in afterward.
   Let your part come out of the room. Ask it how it feels. What shifted? What does it need now?
   
6. Ground yourself.
   Do some breathing, stretching, or a calm-place visualization to come fully back into your body.
   

This is a simple exercise, but incredibly effective for people who carry anger that’s been silenced, shamed, or pushed aside. Especially during the holiday season, when old roles and old wounds tend to flare, having a safe internal place for anger to release can make all the difference.

Your angry part isn’t the problem.
It’s the protector.
Let it be heard—safely—and it will help you come back to yourself.

Annabelle Denmark (she/they), MA, LPC is a therapist based in Lakewood, CO, They specialize in trauma informed (Parts work, EMDR and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy) individual therapy for neurodivergent adults and for adults with dissociative disorders

You can find them at https://www.renegadecounseling.com

The holidays are rarely just about the joy, connection, and magic we see in the media. Alongside those pleasant experiences often comes the expectation to do more: consume more, create more, decorate more, cook more. At the same time, nature is slowing down. Shorter days. Colder air. Animals resting. This seasonal mismatch can create stress, tension, guilt, and overwhelm. 

As a holistic therapist in Denver, I often remind clients that this time of year pulls us in opposite directions. So, it makes sense that you may be noticing tension in your mind, body, and spirit.

A Holistic Worldview: Mind, Body & Spirit as One System 

What does it mean to have a “holistic” worldview? Simply put, it’s a perspective that honors cognitive, emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual experiences. It considers the whole system: how we perceive, process, and experience life as complete human beings. 

A holistic approach especially helps explain the mismatch between our “inner winter”—the natural slowing our bodies crave—and the outward cultural expectations of the season. We feel the tension in all parts of ourselves. 

How the Holiday Season Impacts All Parts of Us 

Even if we aren’t fully aware of it, the holiday season pulls on our mind, body, and spirit. As a holistic therapist in Denver, I see how this seasonal tension shows up simultaneously across all areas. Take a moment to reflect on your own experience as we explore each part: 

Mind 

What expectations have you placed on yourself this holiday season? Is there pressure to make things “special” or “perfect”? 

Are you juggling plans, creating experiences, or maintaining peace in your family? 

Body 

When you tune in to your body, what sensations arise during this season? Headaches? Overstimulation? Chronic fatigue? Nervous system overwhelm? 

How is your body experiencing its natural internal winter?

Spirit 

What do your deeper parts crave right now? Meaning? Slowness? Rest? Are you going through the motions, or allowing yourself to be present with the holidays? 

If expectations didn’t exist, how would you like this season to unfold?

Holistic Practices for the Mind 

Mindfulness: Notice when you begin to feel mental overstimulation. Pausing for one slow breath. And then another if it feels supportive. Creative practice: Set a timer for 5 minutes. Make repetitive marks on the page that mimick your racing mind or thoughts. 

Reframing expectations: Become aware of the parts of you that feel responsible or pressured. Reassure then that you are taking care of things, and that not everything has to be done up to their expectations. 

Somatic Practices That Honor Winter While Supporting Holiday Stress 

Nervous system reset: Take a moment to lay on the floor. Notice how it feels to be held and supported by the ground. 

Restorative movement: Starting with your feet, begin to bounce up and down while standing. Then begin shaking your legs, arms, and shoulders to release energy. 

Nature-based grounding: Get bundled up and go on a winter walk. Notice the quiet stillness of nature and connect to the slower rhythm outside. 

Spirit-Nourishing Holiday Practices

Micro-rituals: Create a holiday ritual for yourself to stay connected with spirit—have dinner by candlelight, start a gratitude art journal, or state an affirmation to yourself in the mirror each morning. 

Choosing meaning: Identifying 1–2 meaningful seasonal values that are important to you. Then, act in accordance with those values and use them as your guiding light throughout the season. 

Creative ceremony: Make a holiday decoration or gift by hand (because you enjoy the act of creating). Notice how it feels to be in relationship with your creativity. 

Integrating Mind–Body–Spirit Practices Into a Season That Demands More 

The holidays can feel like an internal tug-of-war. Winter invites us to slow down, yet the season asks us to do more: plan, create, connect, and show up for everyone else. 

Honoring the season, not the pressure, means remembering that resting is natural and nurturing during the winter months. You can make it simple: take a few mindful breaths before tasks, spend 5–10 minutes stretching or grounding your body, and create one small ritual that reconnects you to what matters. Ask yourself, “Which parts of me need rest, even when everything around me is speeding up?” 

When Support Might Help 

If overwhelm starts to feel too heavy or like persistent dread, irritability, or exhaustion, it’s okay to reach out for more support. 

If you’re looking for a holistic therapist in Denver who takes a holistic approach, I support women and moms who want to feel grounded, connected, and more like themselves again.

You don’t have to choose between slowing down and showing up; you can do both, even during the hustle bustle of the holiday season.

About the Author: Leanne is a Denver-based art therapist, perinatal mental health specialist, and space-holder for deep-feeling women and mothers who long to return home to themselves. Blending creativity, mindfulness, and somatic approaches, she guides clients through the sacred work of remembering who they are beneath the noise of trauma, perfectionism, and overwhelm. Discover more at www.WildSunflowerWellness.com.

Today, fear has become one of the dominant forces shaping our world. It is used to capture our attention, to harden our hearts, and to convince us that retreat is the safest option. In such a climate, courage can feel rare.

But courage, like hope and kindness, is a virtue that becomes powerful precisely when the world feels most fragile.

The Shadow of Fear

Much has been said about the chaos of our times – political tension, social fragmentation, wars, economic uncertainty. Fear seeps into our conversations, our news feeds, and even our private thoughts. It whispers the lie that we are too small, too vulnerable, or too powerless to make a difference.

When fear becomes all pervasive, it quietly reshapes us. We become more cautious, more cynical, more withdrawn. We avoid hard conversations. We hesitate to stand up for others. We shrink from the responsibilities that once animated us.

Fear convinces us that survival is enough and we quickly find ourselves feeling apathetic, indifferent, and isolated. 

Yet, a part of us resists the siren song of fear. It may be but a whisper or a hunch, but is there nonetheless. And I believe this is the steady voice of courage gently inviting us towards meaningful action.

Courage as a Steady Flame

In the classic stories we enjoy, we’re drawn to characters who choose courage even when they feel incapable, powerless, or afraid. Their courage is rarely loud or triumphant. More often, it is a trembling step forward when turning back would be easier.

These stories resonate with us because deep down, we know courage isn’t meant only for heroes in other worlds. Courage is meant for ordinary people navigating the challenges of everyday life.

And courage, like hope, often begins small.

It is a faithful flame that grows each time we choose to act in alignment with our values rather than our fears. It grows each time we decide that dignity, compassion, and justice are worth defending.

Courage in Our Daily Lives

When we think of courage, we often imagine grand gestures or heroic feats. But the courage our world most needs right now lives in ordinary acts such as speaking the truth even when your voice quivers, standing in solidarity with the marginalized even when it’s unpopular, or refusing to dehumanize those you disagree with regardless of how strong your emotions may be. 

These small moments are not insignificant. They are the very places where fear is challenged and pushed back. Courage is cultivated not in rare, dramatic decisions, but in the quiet daily choices that slowly reshape who we are.

The Courage to Live as If Change is Possible

Courage, at its core, is the declaration:

Humanity is not finished. We are not powerless. Our actions matter.

This is why courage pairs so naturally with hope and kindness. Hope gives us direction. Kindness grounds us in humanity. Courage compels us to step forward.

The truth is, courage is contagious. When one person acts with courage, others recognize a path forward for themselves. A single act can ripple outward, restoring faith in what is possible.

In this moment of history, we need people willing to practice this quiet, steady courage – people who will resist the lure of fear and choose instead to move toward the good.

Courage does not promise an easy road. But it does promise a meaningful one.

So to conclude, I ask:
What would your life look like if you let courage lead you, even just a little more than fear?

About the Author: Kevin Culver, LPCC, is a professional counselor, published author, and owner of Resilient Kindness Counseling. Kevin has a MA in Mental Health Counseling and a BA in Theological Studies. With a background in spirituality, philosophy, and psychological research, Kevin provides a holistic approach to therapy that seeks to honor each client’s unique personality, worldview, and life aspirations. In his therapeutic work, he helps clients rediscover their humanity and create greater meaning in their lives, work, and relationships. He enjoys working with individuals from all backgrounds, but specializes in working with men’s issues, spirituality, and relationship issues. If you are interested in working with Kevin or learning more about his practice, please visit resilientkindness.com or email him at kevin@resilientkindness.com

During any trying time in my life, it drops in for me that adequacy and interdependency are two sides of the same coin. And during those days of COVID, I saw this coin being flipped in every moment, with one word or the other, each coming up about 50% of the time.

For adequacy, on a macro level, there was a lot of failing, from government to social structures to “what does the science say now?” However, on an individual level, what abounded on the internet was the ingenuity of people everywhere to take care of themselves, their families, their community. I loved the grandparents who plastic-wrapped themselves so they could hug their grandchildren; I marveled at the private 3-D printer owners who voluntarily made parts for face shields; I laughed at the Tik-Tok videos; sang the hand washing songs; and cried at the online concerts. The list goes on and on with hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of examples of people turning to the thought, “well, what can I do given these new parameters?”

I project the human species didn’t survive and get to where it is today by sitting down with fire in a cave and calling it quits. I mean, fire in a cave must have felt yummy after no fire in a cave. The truth is, we humans are inventive, filled with creative energy, and we actually can’t stop ourselves from trying one more thing that might improve an experience (really, pour over coffee is the bomb, such an improvement over drip, French Press, and yes, espresso).

And yet, as many inventors find out, creating includes mistakes, wrong turns, back steps, riffing off past successes, which leads me to the definition of “adequacy.” What a relief to find it does not include “doing it perfectly, or originally.” Adequacy means, according to Merriam-Webster, “sufficient for the need,” “good enough,” “acceptable.” What I sense can happen for many people during trying times is that they are making the situation they are in acceptable, not perfect, not necessarily original, simply adequate. Again, back in COVID, we saw that with healthcare workers, essential service workers, people who had been laid off, and students graduating into a world of who knows what. It sorta sucked, it was sometimes not fun, and yet, they did it anyway.

Which leads to interdependency. Beyond being a “lone wolf,” the way many people experience adequacy is 1) they accept help, or 2) they ask for help. When we do the latter, we automatically understand we can not do anything alone (and asking the Universe for help is a very viable option). Again, during COVID I saw this starkly in my NextDoor app search for the latest sightings of toilet paper on store shelves. When that proved dicey, I found on Amazon an ebook to make my own toilet paper. Intrigued, I wondered if it would have me collect wood scraps, chip, boil, and mash them, and roll the paste between … something … to create a paper-ish substance that might work (turns out, it was reusable toilet paper made from t-shirts, yikes!).

When I found that unappealing, I flipped the coin and came up with interdependency (or adequacy, crap, either one is good here) and picked one morning as a “treasure hunt” and just drove store to store (finding places I never would have gone in before, real treasures!) looking for toilet paper, and lo, at the fifth one, scored some Charmin (I purchased my allotted 2 packages which is an entire other blog about self-worth, a “spiritual” mindset of not being greedy, yada, yada, yada). And it struck me … the Charmin didn’t magically appear on the shelf. Someone, somewhere cut down a tree. Someone drove it to a processing plant. Someone pushed some buttons on some huge machines that did what I was going to do in my bathtub. And these folks relied on the plastic people to supply the clear wrap. Then someone delivered it to the store where I bought it. Oh, and the checkout person, masked, gloved, and behind a plastic window, sold it to me.

The more I heard from people about their experience during those COVID years, the more I saw how the little linings of silver appeared — the sparks of ingenuity, the new space of time to attend to passions, or simply cleaning the house; the new-found love for family members they can’t see (how many of us thought absence was a blessing and found out we didn’t like that either?!) Many people discovered they were stronger, more capable and wholly adequate. And even those who had a desperate, despairing, miserable time, I propose, they too are still adequate to it because … they made it through.

We can’t have one without the other. Our interdependence works because we each are adequate. And we are most adequate because we are wholly interdependent. With everything going on in the world today, now is a good time to bring out that coin, and start flipping it again.

About the Author: Beth Hinnen came to the spiritual path from the corporate world. After experiencing impermanence and greed, she left to study Yoga and has over 1,000 hours in Yoga teacher training, and ended up specializing in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, spiritual scripture that closely aligns with Buddhism. From there, she studied Zen Buddhism for over ten years, including in-person, month-long monastic retreats, until she earned certification, in January, 2023, as a Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. Currently, Beth is a co-leader of the IMCD Council, and on the Teachers Collective, as administrator. She hosts a Meetup group called Yoga Meets Buddhism, and for the past three years, has held an online Dharma Wednesdays class that discusses the Yoga Sutras while also bringing in Buddhist teachings, along with Sufi poets, Christianity, Judaism and other spiritual paths that reinforce the words of Sri Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga where Beth studied. “The truth is one, the paths are many.” More information about Beth is at www.samayaco.org.

Chances are good that there are one or two things that really make your blood boil. Some triggers cause fight or flight reactions. Let’s talk about the ones that cause fight, in particular, because fight is a really misunderstood phenomenon. It looks like anger, but is actually acute distress that is based in fear. 

My own biggest trigger is disrespectful behavior. I can become very adamant, very quickly, that people should not, and will not, be treated with anything less than basic decency. This isn’t social justice on my part—I think that would show up a bit calmer, honestly—this is trauma trigger. I know because I get into fight. How can you tell the difference between genuine anger and fight, you ask? Anger is used to bring others into compliance with the social contract, it is usually based in self-esteem. Our anger says, “I don’t deserve to be treated this way, and I want you to know I won’t passively accept it. Should you not shape up, our relationship is threatened.” But it has a rational undertone—it is telling the other person you do not consent. Fight is a fear response. Fight wants only to survive the day, so if it can intimidate, surprise, fluster or leave the other speechless, that’s fair game. Fight is gloves-off, and it runs the show.  

You might have milder triggers—around feeling controlled, or people who won’t pull their weight, perhaps blatant entitlement is hard to swallow. They might not get you into full fight mode, but they are hard for you to step away from and consistently prickle you under the skin. We all want to move away from a tendency toward fight reaction, we all want to be “better” versions of ourselves. The question is how.

The reason a trigger gets stored in us is to prevent the bad thing from happening again. Our nervous system needs reassurance that we are truly safe, and our emotional body needs to work through what happened in the first place. Our culture will throw a lot of shade at anger-like responses so we tend to go underground with this work. Having a reliable fight response carries shame, whereas having a flight response elicits compassion and offers of help. You can work on it on your own, though.

First, figure out how these behaviors hurt you in the past. Understand the wound you are trying so hard to avoid. I’ve seen disrespectful behavior do a lot of damage to people’s sense of self and sense of safety, and so my nervous system treats it the same way it would treat physical threats—with a no-tolerance policy. If I go back, I can look at the situations that caused the trigger, and the damage they created.  

Second, find compassion for your younger self. A sense of injustice is usually part of a lingering fight response. Perhaps you were a kid and couldn’t defend yourself, perhaps you were a young adult and didn’t have the ego strength to prevent the bad thing from happening. Either way, you were hurt, and needed comfort—comfort that you didn’t get. Notice that you are safe now, but you are not healed.

Third, make a plan for how you will handle the trigger when it comes up. I like mantras and action plans, but do what works for you. My go-to with disrespect is 1) Recite the mantra “You are reacting to your old wound, not this person in front of you,” and 2) Leave the situation as soon as possible. I do not give into the strong desire to serve others a tongue-lashing. I do not berate myself, either.  

Fourth, find a time to feel the grief and fear. When blatant disrespect happens in my world, it actually brings up a lot of unprocessed emotions like helplessness and sadness. In counseling programs they teach that emotions show up like a bullseye with anger on the outside, fear, sadness and love in concentric circles underneath. Anger is easiest to access, but love is at the core. When I make time later in the day to comfort that younger version of myself, to cry for her, I work through some of what causes the trigger. I also use this time to make meaning of what happened, of why suffering exists in the world, and how I’m supposed to hold it.

Taking those four steps each time the trigger arises tends to diminish it over time, but it will take time.  The average human has a lot of behaviors that are consistent but are unexamined. We call the lot of them our personality. But we can change, if we want. Carrying shame about a trigger response doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. The piece that is missing is compassion for ourselves. We will never be able to change that suffering has always existed in the world, but you can love yourself enough to heal your response to it.

About the Author: Laura Zwisler is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the owner of Lafayette Couples Counseling.  She specializes in relational therapy and men’s work.  Her practice reflects a deep belief that through corrective relational experiences we can heal traumas, get needs met, and fulfill our greatest potential.  In addition to counseling, Laura supervises interns at People House, leads workshops and trainings, and writes about the human experience.  If you are interested in working with Laura, please visit: https://www.lafayettecouplescounseling.com/ or email her at: laura@lafayttecouplescounseling.com.