All day that day, on 9/12, Alice waits for the sound of explosions, for the invasion, a hundred soldiers of God landing at the beach a mile from the secondhand children’s store and storming the bike path full of families of tourists on pedal cars who always look like they aren’t… Read full post »

You're in that yoga class. The one you get to when you can get to it.

Slow flow through sitting and standing poses, holding them until they hurt. You fill the places that grip, that grab, that hurt with breath. You send the laser point of the mind away from thoughts… Read full post »

On January 8^th, 2011, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords set up a meet-and-greet at a Safeway store in Tucson, Arizona, with the intention of meeting and greeting her constituents. One of them, an unhinged college dropout and Army reject named Jared Loughner, shot her and 18 others, six of whom have/… Read full post »

I’m sixteen years old. I’m alone in my dim bedroom. On one wall is a mirror. From where I sit, I can see a reflection of my upper torso and my face. Intensely I gaze across the room at myself, turning my face and shoulders this way and that. There, I… Read full post »

 When I’ve said the occasional “That seems surprisingly relevant,” while reading a newspaper horoscope, I’ve chalked it up to the same phenomena to which I attribute surprisingly relevant fortune cookies: 1.)coincidence, or 2.) vagueness adequate to make it applicable to/… Read full post »

Historically, monogamy didn't begin as a way to ensure that two people could relax into deepest intimacy. It began as a way for men to assert their ownership over a woman's body...Our thinking that monogamy is inherently a nobler arrangement than any other has created a nation… Read full post »

Carsick, find the entrance from Rt. 1. You’ve been winding around the curves and telling yourself it’s gorgeous, it’s gorgeous, but you feel like hurling, and you’re overwhelmed with gratitude to see the rectangular wooden sign: ESALEN INSTITUTE.

Wind down through the everg… Read full post »

 She moves through her days. Cooking meals, watching her children eat them, buying more stuff from the store, sitting at a desk doing the work that earns her money. Her actions are dictated by the arising of urges and obligations. She is a responder. There is always something that requires a… Read full post »

In my teens I began to fall regularly into bouts of deep melancholy where I would cry incessantly and write maudlin, self-hating things in my journals. I would sometimes cut myself or smash my own head against the wall. My concerned parents brought me to a psychologist, who, after the usual… Read full post »

Both my parents are Jewish, as were all four of my grandparents; the lineage stretches into Jewishness as far back as anyone has traced it. I was raised in a household where Yiddish words were regular parts of our vocabulary; where menorahs were lit; where books addressing the Holocaust were a… Read full post »

At Yogurtland today:

A longish line. Mostly it's composed of teen and 20-something girls, with a few families thrown in. The families generally include two parents, male and female, plus one or more very excited children under the age of five. (Yogurtland is, after all, the premier destination for… Read full post »

Because I wear a lot of tye-dye and no makeup; because I'm into healthy food; because I practice yoga; and because I like to rhapsodize about things like permaculture, slow food, cheesemaking, and baby goats, people think I know how to grow things. 

I don't.

I'm a… Read full post »

At a friend’s birthday party, two women in their sixties talked about their experiences with the health care system. One had had cancer. The other was considering surgery to try to reduce her disability from back pain.

 As someone who writes a lot about the hazards of modern mainstream me… Read full post »

I only babysat a few times as a kid. During those gigs, I realized that babies and children were completely irrational. They smelled bad. They liked making me angry. And really, once I spent some time with them, I realized that they were not nearly as cute as they’d initially seemed.… Read full post »

When I was a newlywed without any of my own offspring, my stepsons  were five and six. I went to a birthday party for one of them. I remember sitting at a picnic table, the only childless woman in a group of moms. They were talking about the stuff moms usually… Read full post »

I read vegan activist and 31 Flavors heir John Robbins’ book Diet For A New America in 1993, at the age of 23.

Aghast, weeping, I looked at the graphic photos of suffering and dying animals living out their lives in horrific conditions, only to be sent to an equally… Read full post »

I’m one of those non-vaccinating mothers.

(*If you came here from the Editor's Pick page, please note: my kids ARE now vaccinated. Not sure how to point that out to the editors, though...)

In 2004, my 1 ½-year-old son had no immunizations at all and my three-year-old daughter… Read full post »

What, you might wonder, am I doing in the photograph at left—which was taken by photographer Jim Boyden of Ojai, California?

Crawling across the floor in my underwear? Yes. That’s the short version of the story. It wasn’t the first picture I posted here—but when I switched ou… Read full post »

I weaned my second child about four years ago. He’s nearly seven now. My daughter nursed for two and a half years.

 I gave birth at home and both my babies were lifted onto my belly just after birth. Both latched on right away and sucked like champs. From the… Read full post »

Back in the early 1980s, my drug of choice was Simon le Bon of Duran Duran. Remember Duran Duran? They were minimally talented, bright-eyed, smooth-skinned British boys who inspired Beatles-level ardor in thousands and thousands of awkward young things like me. Despite the makeup and fedoras, they we… Read full post »

Last year, I worked on a book project that required me to have a fairly good understanding of Sufism.

My previous knowledge of this faith tradition could be encapsulated in a few words. Mystical Islam. Guys in red fezzes whirling for hours without getting dizzy. Rumi and Hafiz were Sufi… Read full post »

My nine-year-old daughter wants an American Girl doll.

For the uninitiated, these dolls are about a foot tall and can be ordered in a wide range of skin colors, eye colors, and hair colors and textures. (Usually, girls want to order the doll that looks most like them.) The… Read full post »

Conversation should be pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, free without indecency, learned without conceitedness, novel without falsehood. – W. Shakespeare

Do you consider yourself a great conversationalist? Or do you have serious reservations about your ability to hold co… Read full post »

My friend and colleague, Howard Glasser, and I just finished writing our fifth book together. We write about a method he developed called the Nurtured Heart Approach.

This approach is  designed to help adults relate to challenging or intense children in ways that stop energetically rewarding th… Read full post »

Sometimes life feels like this:

the way one feels when swimming laps, almost done, strokes getting sloppy, breath getting more and more ragged:

eyes rhythmically shifting from the peaceful underwater where cellulite-laden thighs and bellies float with the grace of jellyfish; alternating with:

the har… Read full post »