A few years ago I was facing a big, life-changing decision. After completing my studies and ending a three-year commitment to volunteer at a non-profit organization in South Africa, I needed to decide what to do next. I had complete freedom to do anything I wanted. I could leave South Africa, return to Los Angeles, go […]

Our lives are a series of neverending journeys of quest after quest. Deep within our hearts, we all seek experiences that will help us grow, expand, and become more of our true selves. Our journeys shape our characters, our characters, our choices, and our choices, our destiny. We go on all kinds of journeys… Physical […]

Grief: the deep and complicated process we all go through each time we lose a person, place, condition, or thing that we cherish, value, or love. It’s an unavoidable part of the human condition designed to help us become more loving, kind, and compassionate towards ourselves and others. Having gone through so many cycles of […]

There’s a magic that happens when you start facing the fear of being yourself and begin to fully and unconditionally accept yourself as you truly are. There’s a lightness you feel inside when you give yourself permission to ‘unpack’ your heart and acknowledge to yourself and others your own inauthenticities, mistakes, flaws, dualities, brokenness, and […]

For a rose bush to achieve its highest potential of beauty, fragrance, and growth, a good gardener knows that it must be carefully trimmed. Having a clear vision of what a beautiful bush looks like, the gardener prunes the rose bush when: 1) the plant produces more flower buds than it can sustain, 2) parts […]

THE PARADOX OF LOVE: The more you try to get others to love you, the more unloved you feel. The harder you try to communicate a loving and likable image of yourself so that other people won’t find out how unloved and unworthy you really feel, the more unworthy and unloved you feel inside. The […]

Our consumer-driven culture encourages us to believe in what is typically referred to as the “lie of scarcity” or the idea that there’s not enough material goods or resources to go around. Buying into this belief system traps us into thinking that who we are isn’t enough and that no matter how hard we work, […]

Disney’s 1994 classic, ‘The Lion King’ introduced us to many African cultural and linguistic references. The most iconic phrase used in the film is without a doubt ‘Hakuna Matata,’ an expression in Swahili which roughly translated means, “no worry.” What makes Hakuna Matata a “problem-free philosophy” is the deeper understanding from which it stems: that […]

One of the main reasons the majority of us are not able to transcend our problems is because they have become part of our identity or set of beliefs about who we are. Deep within, there’s a part of us that refuses to let go of the story we’ve grown so used to telling ourselves […]

Starting a new relationship, getting engaged or married. A breakup, a divorce or the death of a spouse. A major illness, disability or change in financial status. A sickness or the passing of a good friend, family member or co-worker. Starting a new job, being promoted, fired or retiring. Changing career paths or deciding to […]