I live in an affluent area in an old rambling house with many things wrong with it, and every now and then I feel a glimmer of envy at all the new nifty big houses and everyone seems to have a brand new SUV or hummer or whatever…everyone seems to have satellite TV, a brand [...]

I am always growing and changing and learning as I grow. Thriving can be a painful and scary experience because it can mean cutting off the dead weight in your life, or forcing your mind to consider new ideas and ways of being, or even finally, finally, picking off the old scabs of ancient wounds. [...]

My days are so busy lately, it seems like I wake up and it’s time to go to bed. the days just fly by. Today I exercised, went to the bank, the post office to drop off site orders and orders for my amazon store, came home and worked on writing projects for close to [...]

Do you find it hard to make friends? How about meeting new people? Do you wait for other people to make overtures of friendship to you, then feel ignored or left out when they don’t? Are you ready to take responsibility for putting yourself out there and actively trying to make new friends? Ok, read [...]

I was reading over at Ariel’s blog, she recently got back from The Global Well-Being Forum where they talk about happiness around the world and economics and psychology and stuff. She posted that she’d been asking around about women and happiness, and asked on her blog, How happy are you? Here is part of my [...]

Last night I briefly visited a community website for moms that I am a member of. I haven’t been able to visit the site in a bit because of my writing and work schedule, and as I skimmed the pages of posts I have missed I noticed a lot of crisis threads. A few in [...]

If you ran the world, what changes would you make?free food, education and health care for everyone! and I’d put a cap on personal income, like the most anybody could make would be a quarter million dollars a year. Any excess would go into the general fund for everyone to have free food, education and [...]

I’d like to discuss how you allow your religious or spiritual beliefs to guide your lives. I know so many people who claim to be this or that religion but who don’t live by the tenets of their faith. It’s like their religion is more of a social outlet or community outlet for them than [...]

I limit my interaction with toxic family members. I really just started doing this last year, and the benefit to my mental health, to my very life, has been amazing!! I would recommend this to anyone who has family like this. Something that has helped me with maintaining or setting up boundaries with my family [...]

I have read a lot of good books about communication including body language and personality styles and shyness, all of which helped me to understand how to talk to people, in particular to American culture. There are things I have learned that still make little sense to me. For example in this culture most people [...]

Do you get in your own way socially? I sometimes do. I will give you an example. I used to assume that all the people in my town were aloof and social snobs and just didn’t/wouldn’t like me. So by getting in my own way I just mean by assuming that people in my town, [...]