A member of my extended family is seriously ill. The past few days have been touch and go. She is in her early thirties. I've been feeling a shudder of fear in my body. Fear: an easy place for my mind to go at a time like this, but not the place I want to stay. Below are a quote and reflection from my 2014 book The Inconceivable Surprise of Living that I reread this week. Sometimes it's good for an author to heed his own words! Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would

After baring his soul to me for most of an hour, a patient cocked his head, screwed up his face, and asked, "Am I crazy?" Usually when people apply that word to themselves, I reassure them that I never use it. Calling ourselves or our lives crazy is generally not a practice of self-compassion. On this afternoon, however, a more playful response came to me. "Yes, I think you are crazy," I told him, "in the way that we are all crazy when we are living from the small self—the ve

“...to honor and love all the days of my life.” Though many couples choose to write their own vows these days, this old language still captures what most couples hope for. But love gets all the glory. It is the focus of the hit songs, the romantic movies, the classic poems. Honoring is the forgotten vow. In over thirty years of working with couples in distress, I rarely consider an absence of love the primary problem. Lack of honoring is what undermines love. Sometimes the ho