We live in a society that is focused on productivity, high producing, and achieving behaviors. We say things like “do more with less” and “sleep when I’m dead”. We see people who are busy as productive, stressed as up to big things, and achievement as the only important measure of success. The result is we are experiencing significant increases in chronic fatigue or its more recently introduced name, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). A 2017 survey shows some 560,000 Canadians report that they have the disease, a 36.7 percent increase over previous results from 2014. The number also suggests the disease may be more common than breast cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis combined. Since March of 2020, we are seeing significant experiences of compassion fatigue, lockdown fatigue, and pandemic fatigue. Continue Reading
Finding some silence between all the noise
I am finding more and more in my own life and the lives of my clients a sense of profound exhaustion. I’ve been spending a lot of time on this reflection lately, wondering what the consistent link was. I always find it funny when what I found isn’t new knowledge; or even something I haven’t reflected on before. More so, I find myself acknowledging what my wisdom already knew. And, what I have been resisting—there is so much that it is easy to get distracted from. Literally. Have you ever noticed how little silence we have in our lives? We are inundated with Continue Reading
What does it really mean to hold space for yourself
As a parent, there is nothing worse than your child being sick or hurt. We recently went through this challenging experience with our son. The fear in his eyes was heart-wrenching and took every ounce of my ability to hold it together. I felt powerless as the doctors surrounded him. As I watched him face this challenging day, I could do nothing to take his pain away. I couldn’t be the hero mom who swooped in and took it on for him. My role was completely different. I need to just be there and hold his hand, holding space for his experience. Which is when I got it, it would be easy to be there trying to solve or fix it. But that wasn’t what he needed. What he needed was to be loved, and I needed to be at my best to do that. Continue Reading