Random acts of violence

The world was rocked yesterday when yet another random of act of senseless violence took place during the Boston marathon. As yet there is no clear indication of who perpetrated this act or why. Some terrorist=st groups have laid claim to it but no one knows who is to blame or what the motives were.

What we do know is that tragedy brings out the best in people. There are stories being told , already, of those that rushed towards the mayhem to assist others , you can read one here.

Comedian, Patton Oswald posted on Facebook and it has gone viral. Best line, in my opinion, of his post?

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

So while we are all still in the state of asking "Why  could this happen?  Why  would any one do such a thing?" and a million other whys, lets pause and ask what we are doing to change it?

Gandhi stated that we need to be the change that we want to see in the world. Edmund Burke said The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

I guess we are all waiting for someone to come along and fix things and all the while we forget that we are someone.

The trouble is we have all gotten so used to playing small, to blending in, to not rocking the boat. We figure someone else will fix it but not us because we can't do anything. But as Marianne Williamson so famously said  our playing small does not serve the world.

It really is time for our brilliance to shine forth. Why? Because the world can not take much more of this; the violence , the rapes, the myriad, small senseless acts of violence every day, the myriad large senseless acts of war everyday.


Yes, we are small but we are many and millions of small acts of kindness and love and hope every day. EVERY. DAY! will change the world. One small thing can cause a huge ripple effect and who knows how far those ripples will spread?


Last year when my accountant had gotten me a nice sum of money back from the tax department I sent her  this as a thank you. No big deal, right? Well I was talking to her recently and mentioned that I thought she was worth her weight in gold, forgetting that it was exactly what I had sent her last year and she told me that she had kept that bucket, on the top shelf of her pantry and looked at it every morning and it still made her smile. She has been an accountant for over twenty years and that was the first time she had received a thank you gift- ever!  Such a small gesture on my part and yet it had made a lasting impact on her.


Now, imagine if we  all tried to do one small thing every day, to make someone's day brighter what impact would that have on the world? So that is my challenge to you. Try it for a week, or a month or a year and then come back and share your stories.

Self acceptance is a fickle beast

Learning to love yourself is a daily quest.

Some days I wake up and love myself completely. I feel ten feet tall and bullet proof, that I am the most fabulous creature to ever walk this Earth.

I KNOW that I am smart and sassy and witty and gorgeous. I feel it in my bones and I spend th day basking in the glow of self love.

But just as quickly as it comes it leaves again without even a word of goodbye.

On those days I wake up feeling that I am the lowest scum of the earth,

Both states are fleeting and most of the time I muddle along, like most people do, neither loving myself completely nor loathing myself, just content to muddle along.

What I want to know is how to capture that self love and keep it around for longer than a few days?

I look deep inside myself, peel back all the layers of self doubt and torment. Peel back all the thoughts of things I should or should not have said or done and look, deeply into the heart of this woman that I am.

What I see is someone yearning to be whole, to be healed, love and be loved, someone yearning for deeper connection to ..........something. I know that I am loved and loved deeply by friends and family and that I love them too.

I know, too, that self love takes time to seep deep into your bones and that the days I awake feeling like I can take on the world are more than those where depression sweeps over me and I feel less than. I alos know that it is like that for most people. The biggest gift we can ever give ourselves is forgiveness.

Forgiveness is like water that washes through you and makes everything clean and forgiving our selves is always harder than forgiving any one else. In all the years that I have been working as a therapist it is the one thing that I see over and over; people can forgive others for the most heinous of things and yet....... and yet when it comes to forgiving themselves they struggle.

"I should have done..... I should have said.... Why didn't I.....? "And on and on it goes.

And yet...... the sweet balm of self forgiveness will soothe all of these cares and worries and you will discover that , truly, you did the best that you could at the time. Sure maybe now you know different and you look back and shake your head, but then you did what felt right.

At the heart of all of us is light and love and on those dark days when we see nothing good about ourselves if we could just pause and pull back the layers, even if only just to lift the corner a wisp, we would see the light of our own heart and then ( as my darling often says) What is not to love?

I am learning everyday, in a myriad different ways, to love myself as the flawed, loosely stitched together mass of insecurities that I am ....... and I hope you are too, for what the world truly needs now, more than anything, is for us all to wake up to our own magnificence, to realise that we may not be perfect but we are perfectly ok.

Love really is an inside job.



There is a crack, a crack in everything, thats how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen