June 7, 2025

When the GPS says, "Recalculating," it's in the process of adapting to our having deviated from the route it calculated. It guides us to where we want to go, but when we veer off course, it is programmed to recalculate a new way to our destination.

June 6, 2025

When we adapt to circumstances or relationships, we find that our ability to adapt to new things was always in us but we were unaware of it. Just as necessity is the mother of invention, it is also the mother of transformation.

June 5, 2025

Living in the now, impressions steer us in another direction from the one we had initially calculated. So, the spiritual ability to be flexible and to adapt in the now is essential. Lucia, a ten-year-old peasant girl in Portugal in the early 1900s, witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary each month for six months. No one, not even her family, believed in her stories of Mary appearing in the wheat fields. People, including her family, thought her to be an attention seeker. 

June 4, 2025

To be granted a Ph.D. degree, the student must complete a dissertation. It was 1977, and I faced that daunting task which included writing a rationale for a research study, conducting the research, writing it all in a book form and presenting the results to a committee of professors in what is called “the defense.” They would grill me with questions about my research, and I would have to defend it.

June 3, 2025

Self-affirmation is a beautiful way to adapt to circumstances that challenge our self-worth. We may lose an election, a job, or a relationship; we may fall short of our aims. We may do something that shames ourselves or hurts others. Despite the many ways we can lose our self-esteem, instead of letting circumstances define us, we can adapt to reality through self-affirmation. 

June 2, 2025

Joyce Landorf's book Irregular People (1982 and 2018) describe those who seem to purposely antagonize, abuse, misuse, and anger us. Landorf described, in layman’s terms, what psychologists refer to as personality disorders. These are hard-wired maladaptive patterns of thinking and behavior originating in one’s biology and early life experiences. 

June 1, 2025

The ego has a bad rap. We typically see it as something that trips us up, leads to narcissism and is hell-bent on getting its way. The ego is even known as our false self. 

May 31, 2025

One of the most challenging things to adapt to is loss. A significant loss is devastating, regardless of how much we struggle to limit our egos. Why is this so? Shouldn't spiritual seekers be immune to the effects of loss? Aren't they so connected to the Divine that they are above grieving? Not so. When we go through loss and adapt to our new reality, we must go through the grieving process, regardless of our spiritual insights.

May 30, 2025

From time to time, we find ourselves in changing circumstances that can completely throw us off. But in the spiritual life, we make changes so that we learn and even benefit from these situations. The changes we make are forms of adaptation to the emotional and/or physical environment. And as we know, adaptation is a vital tool for survival.

May 29, 2025

Dear God, 

Your presence never fails me. In the stillness of the morning, I enter my depths, and you are here— first in the sensation of warmth and then in the awareness that you are everything. You come from inside, outward. You are already in me and have been from the beginning. 

May 28, 2025

Someone I once knew said he likes coffee because it makes him feel creative. How could coffee make us more creative? Studies show that caffeine can remove barriers to creativity by improving concentration, enhancing focus, and increasing the ability to think divergently. But there are other ways we can remove obstacles to creativity. 

May 27, 2025

Sometimes, we hit a mental, emotional, or physical wall. But if we tap into the creative energy available, we push through the walls to unexplored territory. By enlarging our scope and perspective, our heart, body, and mind capacities increase, and we are no longer slammed. 

May 26, 2025

Many people associate creativity with femininity. Portions of our society reinforce women for being creative and discourage men from saying they are creative. Many people who identify as male, seem culturally groomed to say things like, “I leave all the decorating to my wife.” And “I wouldn’t know how to begin to paint or draw.” However, a person who identifies as female is generally encouraged by our culture, to be creative. But creativity is not owned by any one gender.

May 25, 2025

Tapping into the creative flow is easier than we think. But it takes a willingness to stop our ego’s thinking and planning and to “shush” our inner critic. And one of the best ways to do this is to doodle. We can enter the creative flow with a simple pencil and paper. We begin with the blank sheet and, with our hands, make any mark without thinking about it. This one mark sparks us to add another and then another until we are drawing. The doodles don’t have to make sense, and we do not critique whatever comes from our hands and lands on the sheet. The drawing can be shapeless or symmetrical; it can resemble a person, nature, a cartoon, or anything unrecognizable. 

May 24, 2025

As you know, writer's block is an impasse when no new ideas flow from the writer’s mind into their pens or keyboards. One writer described writer’s block this way: “Writing is like swimming in a large lake of ideas and concepts, stories, themes and metaphors. I swim in the natural flow of thoughts. In this state, I can’t write the words fast enough before they escape me. But sometimes, the flow stops, and I am at the bottom of an arid and parched lake bed. At times like these, I can’t write a thing.”

May 23, 2025

As we know, creativity is much more than artistic expression. The word "create" originated with the Latin verb "creo," which has roots in the ancient Sanskrit word "Kriti,” which means "to produce," "generate," or "make." So, creativity is a phenomenon in all areas of existence. Creativity is the capacity to originate ideas, work, or solutions through atypical thinking and doing processes. These generate new thoughts and concepts that are ultimately expressed. The ways they are expressed and applied are infinite. Now we reflect on the question: “What is the source of creativity?”

May 22, 2025

A juncture is when two or more things come together. The word is frequently used to describe a critical point when a decision must be made. This is a type of node.

May 21, 2025

From childhood, I recall the Christmas story in the Bible as it was read in church, school, and home. It was usually read from the King James Version, and a line stood out to me. It was the passage in Luke 2:6 about Mary’s giving birth to Jesus— the words that caught my attention were, “And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.”