I have the song, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before, by Julio Iglesias running through my head — playing in a loop. It reminds me of all the writing projects I’ve wanted to take on over the years since becoming a mother. And abandoned, leaving them incomplete or never…

During this safer at home period, life has shifted. Traditional spaces for learning and for working — offices, schools, coffee shops — have closed to the public. Since last March, the work and school lives of the four people in my family have been condensed into the space of our…

There is something magical about a portal. Even the name conjures up childlike excitement in me. I picture a passageway, like in C.S. Lewis’s book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. In the first book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy (and later, her three siblings) stumbles upon an…

Mindful Self-Compassion: Learning to Be Anchor, Boat, and Sea I have a history of working with anchors. Not the kind you throw overboard. But rather the figurative kind used to keep something hyper mobile in a fixed place. I had my first experience with anchors when I was a UCLA…

In the early aughts, a friend told me about a book called ‘Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day’ by Jane Bolker. She was much farther along in the PhD program than I was. And, honestly, I hadn’t given much thought to my dissertation at that point. Not to…

It’s not often that someone preaches the gospel of uncertainty and I listen, riveted to their every word. The thinker, philosopher, critic, and sage Bayo Akomolafe began his address to the virtual SAND Summit 2020 with an invitation to get lost. Or, at the very least, to defamiliarize the familiar…

The name says it all: Why lizards have no necks. Why lizards have no necks isn’t a question you answer, but a game you play. (For easier reading, from here forward I’ll refer to Why lizards have no necks as ‘WLHNN.’ It is a fast-paced game played on a scooter…

I’ve found myself in the enviable position of co-hosting two podcasts with my daughters. This kind of in-house production would probably never have happened outside of pandemic times. Not only do we need new outlets for our creativity, but also for working through the problem of living together 24/7. The…

Light years away in 2017, the yoga world was all about the edge. Instructors were telling students to ‘find the edge’ or ‘play the edge’ in their studio yoga classes. This trendy terminology wasn’t super intuitive for the average yogi, like me. The first time I heard it used in…