Wedding/marriage transition | Conscious Transitions

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...

A Moment in My Marriage

By Sheryl Paul, on May 20th, 2018

There are moments in my marriage that take my breath away.

Last Sunday on Mother’s Day, the four of us spent several hours working on my garden. My garden is one of my sanctuaries, but every year the grass from the lawn finds its way into my vegetable beds and by mid-summer they’re overrun with weeds. Last autumn we realized that we needed to make a border around the garden to prevent the grass from crawling over, so my request for Mother’s Day was my family’s help to create this barrier. This required renting a heavy piece of equipment to cut the sod then transporting twenty, sixty-pound bags of rock from the store into my garden. I’m all for women’s empowerment but I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage this one on my own. My husband was more than happy to help.

We worked all day together. While my … Click here to continue reading...

Season of the Fallen Flower

By Sheryl Paul, on July 9th, 2017

It’s the season of the fallen flower. It’s the season of heat when the rising temperatures cause the petals, so vibrant and alive just a few weeks ago, to wilt. It’s the season of paradox: we bask in summer light and longer days yet the hands of darkness are stealing away the light minute by minute; we revel in the heat yet when it reaches a crescendo and breaking point we seek shelter indoors. The winter of summer. The emotional paradox of this season is that when there’s heat there’s an expectation of joy – beer and BBQs, swimming pools and parties – and yet there’s an undercurrent of sadness because we sense, especially the highly sensitive ones, the loss of light that begins after the summer solstice, and we feel in our bones the interplay of life and death.

We live in a culture that desperately seeks to avoid … Click here to continue reading...

The One Essential Question that Lives Inside Relationship Anxiety

By Sheryl Paul, on May 28th, 2017

One of the most challenging elements of relationship anxiety to understand is that, if you’re in a healthy, loving relationship with no red flags, the anxiety is projection. This means that the parade of intrusive thoughts that tortures the anxious mind and sensitive soul are actually pointing to areas inside of you that are crying out for your attention. This is such a reversal of our literal, read-everything-at-face-value culture that it can take a while for the shift of mindset to sink in.

There are many areas that need our attention: old pain from early abandonments, loss of loved ones, faulty beliefs that form as a result of being the child of a narcissist or suffering from bullying or teasing, unrealistic expectations about love and relationships that we absorb from the mainstream culture, fissures of psyche that were created because we didn’t receive the guidance, tending, and rituals necessary to … Click here to continue reading...

A Root of Anxiety

By Sheryl Paul, on May 21st, 2017

One of the spokes of the relationship anxiety wheel – or any type of anxiety, for that matter – is the question of where were we hurt. Psychology has done an excellent job of attributing the majority of this hurt to our primary caregivers (usually parents), but it’s not that simple. In my work with clients, I see over and over again that one of the major sources of pain and often the moment when we stop liking ourselves happens at the hands of our peers. I’m talking about overt bullying, yes, but also much more subtle and often overlooked forms of social pain that include ridicule, criticism, and attack on physical and character features and learning styles/challenges. Even one moment of this kind of ridicule can lead to a shattering of self-esteem.

Thankfully, bullying has received a lot more attention these days than ever before. When I was … Click here to continue reading...