practices for maintaining your emotional self care
skill weekly
Your Mind-Body Vehicle: A Holistic View of Resilience
This blog series is all about taking a holistic view of you, your life, and your wellness. The goal of Mindful-Mastery is to help you gain the self-awareness, understanding, and skills you need to be successful on the road of life. Mindful-Mastery is a personal...
Happiness Is a Skill: A Cheat Sheet for Daily Practice
Happiness is a Practice FACT: Emotional well-being is NOT the human default mode. We may stumble upon moments of equilibrium when there are few or no challenges in the environment. But, most of the time, and certainly if you want to do something interesting with your...
Preventing Burnout and Dysregulation with Self-Care
We tend to overlook, or minimize, the role of self care on our mental health resilience. When I first began my psychology studies, the idea that one's health habits could influence the psycho-biological substrates of emotion was considered fringe and radical. But...
The 4 Core Mind Habits helped by Mindfulness
What is your mind habit? Habits become autopilot when 1) they are in some way rewarding (increase pleasure or decrease pain) and 2) are practiced repeatedly. There are four typical habits, which become apparent when we practice mindfulness. Can you identify your Mind...
Ya Gotta feel BAD to feel GOOD
More good feelings -- less bad ones. All humans want to feel good and avoid feeling bad as much as possible. But over time we can loose our willingness to experience the later in the service of the former. When people come to my practice for help, it is usually, and...
Willingness Skills for More Regulated Emotions
Willingness Skills Willingness, the ability to enter into and allow our internal experience, is one of the most powerful skills you can learn, and the most difficult. Willingness is difficult because our emotions have such a strong connection to our automatic...
No Drama Assertiveness
Why we don't assert ourselves and forfeit our due???? In any interpersonal interaction, the moment we ask for something or have to say no, we are making a choice; my discomfort or theirs? Too often, we choose the former. In some way, this makes us feel in...
Your Body-Mind Vehicle: Connecting Mind-Heart-Feet
Your Body-Mind Vehicle: Connecting Mind-Heart-Feet A good way to think about your journey through life is to think of yourself as a vehicle. There are lots of different kinds of vehicles of coarse. Some can go really fast, but they are not very good at going off road,...
The Castle and the Villagers Metaphor: Two common coping styles
Imagine a world that is populated with small fiefdoms all throughout the land. Each has a Castle, with a king or queen, and Villagers. The Castle and the Village metaphor represents two poles of psychological coping: over regulation and under regulation. Each has...
In case you needed MORE reasons to practice
Going into the weekend (as well as beginning a New Year) is always a good time to recommit to taking personal responsibility for our self regulation and coping. Here is a short concise review of what mindfulness can do to our brains and ability to improve performance...
Emotion Regulation: CHEAT SHEET
Regulating our emotional reactions to stress, in a healthy and adaptive way, does not happen easily or magically. But, it seems most of us assume that it “should" happen easily and effortlessly. Like any skill, it is only from PRACTICE, PRACTICE,...
Awareness is not enough: Behavior problems, need behaviorist solutions.
Moving from Awareness to Action: Awareness is an activity of the mind. Behavior problems need behavioral solutions. “Awareness is the first step!” We hear this expressed a lot. Okay. This is true. It is the “first step.” But Awareness – knowing – acknowledging –...