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Expert Series: Somebody To Love
By Amara Rose
 My brother is besotted. Molly is his everything: the love of his life, the girl of his dreams, the one he’s waited for forever. When I phoned my dad on Father’s Day, my mother asked if I could call back, as they had company. When I did, Dad said, “Your brother was just here with his wife…” My mind reeled: when and whom did he marry? Dad continued, “That’s how it seems, anyway. He cuddles her and kisses her, she licks him, and it’s just like they’re married.”
Molly is a Boston Terrier. Read more
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The Journey To Becoming A Vegan
By Diana Carr
 Intellectually, I’ve always known where the hamburger sitting on my plate came from. Intellectually. I mean, nobody has ever plucked a side of beef off a bush, we all know that. But denial has such a way of sugar coating everything, of allowing us to stay the course, even when that course is not good for us. Things wrapped up neatly in packages did not compute as having once belonged to a living, breathing creature. I was able to distance myself from the whole nasty affair.
That came to an end 23 years ago, when I was writing for my local newspaper, and doing a story on a woman who rescued Dobermans. Read more
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When All My Dreams Came True
By Michelle Morgan
 I’ve always been a writer, ever since I was a little girl and used to write stories and staple the pages together to make my very own book. I loved reading and everything that went with being a budding author, but quite strangely it took me until the age of 20 to realise that this is what I wanted to be. Until then I thought I wanted to be an actress, and it wasn’t until I realised that I loved writing the application letters far more than I liked the auditions, that I realised that perhaps my future lay in writing, not the performing arts. Read more
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Expert Series: Too Late For Your Dream?
By Noelle Sterne
Do you feel stuck in your job, your activities, your life?
Do you condemn yourself about what you could have, should have done differently?
Do you yearn for more, even if you don’t know what it is?
Do you suspect you’ve got something to give, even if you can’t identify it?
Or do you know what it is but haven’t been able to let it out?
Have you pushed your secret yearnings into the back of your life, like old photos in the sock drawer?
Like many people, maybe you live for the weekends or retirement. Maybe you promise yourself that then—finally—you’ll do what you really want to. Too often, these envisioned golden times never materialize. Why? Read more
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Y Yoga Movie
By Michelle Morgan
 On 13th September 2001, film-maker Arthur Klein received an email from a friend of a friend, who had escaped the collapse of World Trade Center Tower One, and had decided to put his feelings into words. The email was poignant, heart-felt and amazing, and after forwarding it onto some friends, Arthur left his desk in the middle of the day, and walked out into the Santa Monica sun.
“I left the office in my street clothing and went to a 1:30pm yoga class around the corner from work”, remembers Arthur. “It seemed like a far better idea to regain a sense of peace and wellbeing, instead of going to the mall and shop or go on vacation as the American leadership advised. The teacher was Ashley Turner and her words were magic… I went to that class every day for many months after that…”
Walking into the yoga class that day, literally changed not only Arthur’s life but his career too. Read more
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Expert Series: Ten Steps To Personal Transformation
By Amara Rose
 The quest to discover and live our truth is the Hero’s Journey, a sacred pilgrimage home to ourselves. It’s the high road — and a rigorous one. We may try to camouflage our fear of the unknown with bravado, workaholism, or apathy. There’s another way: following the path of the heart. How do we find it? With a transformational road map. I invite you to join me on a mission to remember and reclaim your life purpose.
Step One: Give Yourself Permission to be Passionate
Our resistance is the Refusal of the Call. Change whispers in our ear, and we attempt a high-tech tune-out: call waiting, call forwarding, on hold, voicemail…
We fight change because acceding to it feels like stepping off a cliff into an abyss. Out of touch with our vital, intuitive nature, we panic and crawl safely back into the shopping center mentality. We resign ourselves to buying the leopard print pants because we’re afraid to be the leopard.
How do we answer this call to reclaim our connection to what’s true for us? We start by giving ourselves permission to be passionate, to dream beyond our self-imposed boundaries. Read more
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The Art Of Mistakes
By Heather Klem
 As recovering people, stripped of our destructive defenses and damaging coping mechanisms, we face overwhelming uncertainty. Who are we? Where do we fit into this complicated thing we call life? The most basic decisions confound us.
Beneath this cloud of confusion lies a thick sediment of fear. As a recovering perfectionist, the relentless terror of making a mistake has stalked me through much of my formative years and into my adult life. It is a painful brand of insecurity that stretches from the most basic option offered to me in a given circumstance — paper or plastic at the checkout line — to actual major life decisions, like whether or not a given job opportunity is right for me. Frozen in the paint aisle of Home Depot, the prospect of choosing a color for my living room could lock me in agonizing uncertainty, terrified that Downy was not preferable to Dover White. Read more
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Expert Series: Learning To Live My Light
By Amara Rose
 One of the hallmarks of any spiritual journey is that at some point, you will be asked to surrender who you think you are. The Call seldom comes in an obvious form. For me, the invitation to reawaken to my true essence, to reclaim the sacred feminine within myself, wore a brilliant disguise: debilitating arm pain. I was being asked to lay down my arms, to relinquish all the roles I’d been taught that had enabled me to arm myself against knowing who I am, in order to embrace something I couldn’t outwardly touch.
It was a colossal summons. And I wasn’t willing to answer — at least, not without putting the caller on hold a few times, letting it go to voicemail, or pretending I’d erased the message.
I lost the use of my arms for over a year at the start of 1993. The pain had been building for some time but, stoked on my burgeoning marketing communications business, piano lessons, and a ninety-miles-an-hour lifestyle that spelled “freedom” from the drudgery of nine-to-five, I ignored the warning signs. I was too busy; business was too good. Read more
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Transformed By The Re-Newing Of The Mind
By Marilyn Hurst
 It was a quiet spring day in March 1990, the day my father died. I had visited him at home just the day before and though it was apparent he was in the last stages of the “disease”, I was still expecting that any time he’d reverse the diagnosis and pull out of this horrible thing that was consuming his life. His passing hit me so hard I could barely remember to keep breathing myself.
Over the following months, slowly at first then like a speeding train coming at me, the past, present and future closed in and I felt I was staring into a black hole. I could see no light at the end of the tunnel. Although it appeared to everyone around me I had lapsed into depression, I knew that a major life-altering event had occurred and the pain was so intense, I wanted to die myself.
I looked at the shambles of my life and realized I’d been sleep-walking through it for the better part of 40 years. My marriage was only held together because of our 9 year old son and were it not for my job as a flight attendant, which took me away for long periods every month, I probably would have ended it years before. This empty void wasn’t just the passing of my father; something within me was desperate to “get out”. At the time I didn’t recognize this as a symptom of a transformational process that was in the beginning stages. Read more
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Expert Series: Family Type-Casting
By Dr. Barbara Sinor
 We tend to create similar situations in our lives until we become aware that the same experiences keep “happening to us.” When you recognize a particular negative circumstance seems to repeat itself over and over, or a certain type of person re-enters your life several times to your dismay, take a hard look into your childhood and search for the pattern or script which may be embedded in your subconscious mind which invites the same unwanted experiences into your life. Read more
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“Nice To Meet You. I’m Lesbian”
By Reilley Olexson - 16 Years Old
 My favourite colour is red. It always has been. My hair has always been curly, and my eyes have always been hazel. I am not a science experiment, or some new invention. Don`t introduce me as if I am some new species you have discovered. To exploit one aspect of who I am to the magnitude of a flying pig, reduces every other ounce of my body. Do not refer to me as “the lesbian”. I would even rather to be referred to as “curly”. Read more
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My Journey From Chronic Fatigue To Publisher
By Lynn Michell
 I had been jokingly told by friends about the shock of the big 40, but no one had warned me about a nightmare scenario that began on that day and continued for fifteen years.
I invited a few friends to a party, and afterwards, several of us came down with the flu. At least, we thought it was the flu. But we did not get better. For eight of us from the same academic department, including the lively American Head of Department and Irish Administrator, what we faced was the long, long haul through a poorly understood illness called ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Personally I would re-name it No Idea Syndrome because the ignorance and dismissal we all faced from the medical profession was appalling, insulting and hurtful. Read more
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Familiar Faces
By Dawn Lyons
 I recognized the moment as one that I would always remember. I was watching a children’s movie and my dad had settled into his favorite chair to watch it with me. He didn’t judge me for being a 17-year-old girl who was still in love with a literary character who had become animated on film. Maybe Dad wanted to check the guy out in case I found a real-life version someday. I’ll never know why he chose to sit and watch with me that day. I expected he would make some sarcastic comments, but instead he was quiet. After a while, I glanced over and saw him staring at the screen, enthralled. His face held an expression of joy and contentment, and seeing him like this held me awestruck.
I had never seen Dad with such an expression before, and I was very aware that this was something I needed to focus on so I could remember the details with clarity.
Maybe somehow, I knew something, or maybe it was one of those moments you look back upon and think that “someone” was trying to tell you something. Because in the short span of a few weeks, I found myself sitting in Dad’s chair, devastated by his unexpected death. Read more
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How A Brown Baby Bunny Changed My Destiny
By Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen
 A little brown bunny changed the path of one human life–mine, specifically. But on the day we took him home, my fiance and I just thought he was really cute. We had a mimosa buzz after a holiday brunch, and walked into a pet store on New York City’s Lower East Side “just to look.”
Mama bunny and her litter were all adorable, of course, with their pointy ears and gangly back legs all jostling for room in the too-small glass tank. Read more
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Detach, Survive, Thrive In My Marriage To An Alcoholic
By Linda J Riley
 The world of the non-alcoholic in the midst of alcoholic insanity is difficult. Many succumb to the insanity and become part of the disease itself, and others die from stress-related illnesses. But it is possible to survive. Once the non-alcoholic has learned the survival techniques, the next step would be thriving in spite of it all. It can be done. I am proof that it is possible.
One day I watched in horror as my husband, Riley, stood in the middle of the living room and spewed a stream of urine onto the carpet. Things had gotten bad, but I never imagined they would get that bad. Read more
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Expert Series: ADD(Attention Deficit Disorder) Is Not Who I Am, It Is What I Have
By Brad Worthley
 I had a lot of friends growing up so I enjoyed school from the social standpoint. I went to all the sporting events and if there was a party within 20 miles, I was there. Scholastically, I struggled with my grades, so I was about a “C” student. Out of embarrassment, I masked my inequity from my friends, so you would be hard pressed to find anyone in school that did not believe I was an “A” or “B” student.
As I sat in classrooms, I would try very hard to pay attention to what the teacher was saying because I knew we would be tested on it, but I struggled with retaining the information. I had the same challenges with reading text books in class or at home, because as I was reading, my brain kept drifting away, and I would have to re-read the same page two or three times in order to understand it. Read more
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Reading: A Love Story
By Joseph Longo
 I did not come from a family of readers.
My parents were Sicilian immigrants. My mother read an occasional magazine, but she never read a complete book. My father was semiliterate. Though he bought the New York Daily News every day – mainly to see what horses won at the track.
My first reading memory was comic books. I collected them and had a towering stack in my closet. My hero was Superman. I read that many gay boys growing up in the fifties considered him their favorite because he lived two lives. I also liked True Crime and Classic Comics. As a teenager, I worked for an Italian grocer and spent all my money on comics. I waited each month for my favorites to come out. I still read comics, but now they’re called graphic novels.
My Aunt Josie was the only one in my family who was a reader. She is ninety and she still reads, mostly romance novels. In fact, she keeps a notebook of the books she’s read so that she doesn’t buy the same book again. Read more
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