Parenthood transitions | Conscious Transitions

One of the Most Powerful Questions to Cut Through Anxiety (Relationships, Health, Parenting, Friendship)

By Sheryl Paul, on January 13th, 2019

When addressing anxiety effectively, we must attend to all four realms of self: physical, emotional, cognitive, and soul – or body, heart, mind, and soul. Attending only to one of the four realms is helpful, but it won’t help you heal anxiety from the root. By “attend” I mean we need tools to work with all four realms, and the tool I’m going to share today will help you on the cognitive/mind realm.

When we’re caught in an anxious storm, it’s often because we’re caught in a story that is powered by fear. By the way, I prefer to talk about the key areas where our wounds constellate as “stories” instead of beliefs or thoughts because a story is a holistic word that encapsulates our whole self, and stories often live in the emotional body as much as the mental realm. These stories can vary depending on the theme of … Click here to continue reading...

The 3 Biggest Mistakes People Make in Relationships and...

By Sheryl Paul, on November 25th, 2018

For this week’s blog post, I’m directing you to two articles that I recently wrote for MindBodyGreen, one on relationships and one on parenting. Here are the excerpts:

The 3 Biggest Mistakes People Make in Relationships

Over the nearly two decades that I’ve walked people through the tricky terrain of intimate relationships, I’ve seen the same three stumbling blocks arise repeatedly. If one person in a partnership falls prey to the stumbling block, the relationship usually ends with time. But if the stumbling blocks are met with the awareness that they’re an essential part of the journey of learning how to love, the relationship will not only remain alive but will be well on the way to thrive.

You see, the problem isn’t the stumbling blocks themselves. Blocks arise so that you can push through them and create a stronger relationship both to yourself and your partner. The problem is … Click here to continue reading...

The Art of Patient Loving

By Sheryl Paul, on October 14th, 2018

Perhaps the area of our lives to suffer most from the increasingly fast pace of the culture is love, for the expectation of immediate results naturally leads to a belief that love should not only be easy, but that when there’s a problem, it should be remediated quickly. Love doesn’t work this way. The truth is that when it comes to intimate relationships – with partners, friends, and children – very few things come quickly or easily.

As I’m decades away from my own battle with relationship anxiety and many of my long-term clients are now swimming in their own troughs and trials of early parenting, it’s on the front of the parent-child relationship that the need for patience appears most prominently in my life. For there’s a loud and pervasive expectation in the current parenting culture that says that when there’s a challenge with a child, it needs to … Click here to continue reading...

How to Let Go: A Dark-Night Page from my Journal

By Sheryl Paul, on September 2nd, 2018

As I shared a few weeks ago, our older son, Everest was planning to solo for the first time in a glider after he turned 14 (the minimum age you can solo). He had been training all summer and had planned to fly the day after his Bar Mitzvah, but the circumstances didn’t align and it had to be postponed. Every day that week he asked when he would solo, and every day we told him, “When it’s the right time.” The following Sunday night, his instructor called to tell us that tomorrow would be the day. We decided not to tell Everest until morning to increase his chances of getting a good night’s sleep. We wanted him fully resourced the night before he would take to the cockpit without anyone in the backseat.

As I got into bed that night, I could feel fear creeping into the edges … Click here to continue reading...

A Taste of My Own Medicine

By Sheryl Paul, on August 5th, 2018

Our older son will turn fourteen this week, and as part of the Jewish tradition he will be walking through the rite of passage of a Bar Mitzvah. Given that my husband was raised Catholic and now connects most deeply to Source through art and nature and the fact that we’re not raising our boys in a traditional religious setting, this will be a very creative interpretation of a traditional Bar Mitzvah. One of my dearest friends from childhood who is studying to become a rabbi will be officiating, we’ll be celebrating in a tent in our backyard, and my son will be offering a highly unusual drash (interpretation of his Torah portion), which has to do with his passion for airplanes. Like all aspects of our life, we’re doing it our own way.

Nevertheless, forty-five people will be joining us, many coming from around the country, and we need … Click here to continue reading...