Take a moment, notice your breath. Are you breathing into your chest or your belly? In through your nose or mouth? Is your breath shallow or deep? These sorts of questions used to annoy me. I often assumed that people who asked them were a bit stuck up, a bit too “granola” with the tendency to oversimplify things. As a somatic (body)-based therapist, I believed that the breath was important, but I thought of it as [...]
When I moved back to my hometown for grad school, I told myself it was temporary—just a couple of years, then I’d be off to find my place in the world. But grad school came and went. I started dating someone. I settled into the everyday rhythms of Santa Cruz. I had my community, my family close by, a climbing gym I loved, the ocean at my doorstep. Life was good. And yet, something felt... [...]
Flow: “a cognitive state where one is completely immersed in an activity…it involves intense focus, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self”- Psychology Today (2021). “I kind of entered a flow state. I’ve been there before while climbing. You are not thinking ahead. You are just thinking about what is in front of you each second.”- Aron Ralston According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (2017), over 40 million adults in [...]