When you look at your own internal difficulty holding fast to your boundaries, it’s worth asking yourself: to what extent have I internalized, or to what extent have I understandably been swimming upstream, and as a result, not felt entitled to the kind of good treatment, the kind of respect, the kind of reciprocity that other people who are more privileged or more advantaged in society routinely presume for themselves?

There are three factors that lead to privilege, more or less, and they’re really different from each other.

1. Fortune. Just luck, good or bad. The genetic lottery, avoiding certain illnesses, being born with abilities or looks that happen to be valued in your culture. There’s no moral hazard to it either way.

2. Virtuous effort. Privilege can be earned, through expertise, licensure, standing. There’s no moral hazard here either, if anything there’s moral benefit.

3. Advantage. This one matters most for boundaries. Advantage operates by benefiting some and harming others. It’s a tailwind for some, a headwind for others, and the gradual accumulation of it tends to lift some people up by holding others back.

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Who gets to set the boundaries? Who gets to decide who’s in and who’s out of a group? Who gets to determine what people owe each other? That’s a significant question, and the answer is very often shaped by advantage, not by anything either person earned or deserved.

My wife is one of the best holistic health practitioners I know, technical, solid, really good at what she does. She was talking with our daughter once about how much she charges per hour for her work. Our daughter just looked at her and asked, mom, how much would you be charging if you were a guy? That was a real moment for my wife to look hard at what she felt entitled to, in the give and take of the market.

That’s an example of how we can internalize difficulty standing up for our own boundaries, and asking for reciprocity that’s roughly fair, because of this background of privilege, or the lack of it.

Waiting to feel like you’ve earned the right isn’t the fix. There’s a different place this comes from, and it doesn’t depend on anyone else’s opinion of you.

Here’s exactly where I want to take this: a concrete way to define what you owe anyone, a way to stop chasing an impossible standard, and a piece of the Dharma that settles the whole question of who’s responsible for what.

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What they’re describing is really tender and real. We’re trying, and the mind, the body, take a while to catch up, to change. And to acknowledge that and admit that is tender. It’s open. I think it’s just helpful to first realize that this is how growth happens.

One way of thinking about it is four stages. Stage one, we’re doing it and we don’t even know we’re doing it. We’re not self-aware, we’re not mindful, we’re just doing it. Stage two, we know we’re doing it and wish we weren’t doing it. We wish that reaction were not arising, but we can’t help it, or part of it, or we can’t stop that way of feeling. Stage three, the reactions are arising, the tendencies are arising, but we don’t act them out. We have a lot of breathing room from them, even if they’re arising only inside our mind. And then stage four, that reaction doesn’t occur at all. We’ve really, really moved on.

Another way of describing it is unconscious incompetence, then conscious incompetence, then conscious competence, we can ride the bicycle, but we really have to focus, and then unconscious competence. Milarepa talked about this too, in his own way. In the beginning, nothing came. In the middle, nothing stayed. In the end, nothing left.

That’s how learning happens. That’s how the nervous system changes over time. And that change process starts expanding and spreading inside the nervous system, revealed by a growing sense of being untroubled. Often it starts that way with lower stress triggers first. Parents, for most of us, are on the zero to ten potential trigger scale, a ten. Even if we love them, even if it was a secure relationship, secure attachment, because they’re so central to us.

You basically are relatively early in this process of moving from states to traits, growing and healing, which is great, actually, it means there’s plenty of upside potential in the days and years to come. And you ended up with a force five hurricane, mom. I would laugh at myself when my parents were still alive. I was in my 60s before my father passed away, my late 50s for my mother, and I’d done 30 years of inner work. I’m a therapist. And still they would use a certain tone with me and it was like I’m nine years old and pissed off yet again, or hurt, or frozen. So it’s understandable. Give yourself a break. Stick with it. Keep learning, keep growing.

Here’s exactly what I want to walk through: why practicing on your hardest relationship first backfires, a specific way your own mind can quietly set you up to fail, and a real filter for deciding whether to actually say the difficult thing once you’re ready.

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Intimacy supports autonomy. The internalized intimacy, broadly, such as in our attachment experiences as young children, the internalization of a secure relationship with a caregiver, forms over time that secure base inside from which we can venture and explore autonomously out into the world.

Go the other way, though, and autonomy supports intimacy too. If you’re getting invaded and enmeshed and engulfed by another person, so that there’s no autonomy, if me is getting lost in we, that can be very beautiful for some period of time. But on the whole, if you’re getting engulfed and enmeshed with another person, that will eventually undermine the relationship altogether, sometimes because that person, wittingly or unwittingly, will start taking advantage of you. You start becoming an extension of them, rather than an independent, differentiated being in your own right.

Autonomy also supports intimacy in a more direct way. If you know that at the end of the day, or the end of the conversation, or the end of a fun evening, you are going to keep your own counsel, you’re going to decide freely and independently what you’re going to do in this relationship, then you’re going to be more willing to enter into the depths of connection, of joining with that other being. Because you know you can always find your way back to your own secure base. If you’re really confident in your own autonomy, that you don’t have to believe what someone says, you’re going to be more willing to step away from your own positions and your attachment to your own views, to actually be open-minded to what they have to offer.

I had a recording engineer, the very first time I recorded a program, a really wise, no-nonsense, seen-it-all kind of person, Randy Roark. At the end of that first recording, I was kind of nervous about what might happen with it. He said, well Rick, I’ve been with all the big teachers, seen them come, seen them go, and I’ve seen that there are two kinds of teachers: knowers, and learners. And you, Rick, are going to be okay. Be a learner.

If you’re more autonomous, you’re more comfortable with being a learner. You’re more comfortable with not knowing, with acknowledging error, with room for improvement along the way. That supports you in relationships too.

There’s one more reason boundaries are good for relationships, not just for you. Boundaries stop other people from destroying a relationship. If you have boundaries, you can often find a middle place, a more limited but still sustained form of relationship with someone, because you’re halting them, or disengaging from certain things they’d otherwise do. Without that boundary, you’d have to be out completely.

If you want to go even deeper into building this for your own real relationships, join me for the Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop on September 19th, live online! Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off when you register.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

And like a lot of kids who become a little parentified, I was empathic and caring, and I felt a certain influence. It was gratifying to feel like I could cheer her up, and to be her confidant sometimes as I got older.

That can lead, as an adult, to an excessive sense of your own influence. An unrealistic appraisal of your own influence over what is really happening in the minds of others.

Many people have some version of this. A sense of over-responsibility for what’s going on inside somebody else. Caregiving responsibilities, caretaking responsibilities. Alongside it, a sense of being overly to blame for what is happening in the mind of another person. And then, using a loaded word deliberately, a kind of grandiosity about how much you can influence what’s going on in there at all.

The Five Reflections, Turned Toward Other People

There’s a teaching from early Buddhism called the five reflections. It comes from a short discourse in the Anguttara Nikaya. You ask these of yourself, and you bring a don’t know mind to each one, a fresh beginner’s mind.

Is it given to me to avoid aging?

Is it given to me to avoid illness?

Is it given to me to avoid death?

Is it given to me to avoid being separated, one way or another, one day or another, from all that I love?

And is it given to me to avoid inheriting the results of my deliberate actions?

I’m slightly updating and paraphrasing some of the traditional language, but I think those questions stand in their own right as I’ve expressed them here. In the sutta the Buddha talks about those who don’t face these reflections, and then those who do.

The twist I want to put to this is to foreground the fact that these reflections apply to other people too.

They face aging, illness and death. They face separation, given impermanence, from all that they care about and love. So we can certainly have compassion for them. And then there’s the fifth one. They too inherit the results of their actions. Your karma, in the sense of the results of actions in this life at least, is your own, for better and for worse. Theirs are their own, for better or worse. Two truths side by side: oneness and distinction, joining and differentiation, the ocean and the waves.

The Bad News and the Good News

Inherent in those reflections is a compassionate recognition that other people are being affected by streams of causes and conditions that are not your own.

And with wisdom, over time, we can start to recognize that the bad news and the good news is that there’s almost nothing you can do.

What a release. Because if you don’t have power, you don’t have responsibility. If you don’t have the power to change what’s happening inside another person, you don’t have moral culpability either. You’re not to blame. It’s not your fault, right?

Others are the inheritors of the streams running through their lives. The results of their own deliberate actions, and also so many forces affecting them from upstream that you’re not the cause of, and that you have very little power to change. That’s worth recognizing.

Much of this comes up when people try to set boundaries in their own lives, which is what I’ll be teaching in a four hour workshop, Setting Healthy Boundaries, on September 19th. We’ll get into the practical side of it: sorting what’s coming at you, knowing what you won’t put up with and what you’re no longer going to give, and how to hold a line with someone you also love. Don’t forget to use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Setting Healthy Boundaries

In the story of the Buddha’s awakening, sitting under the Bodhi tree, in the middle of the process, in comes Mara, the trickster, the force of delusion, the confuser, the shapeshifter, sending pictures of beautiful, attractive others to draw him away through lust, sending images of horrible demons to trick him with anger. But the Buddha, recognizing what’s happening, simply says, I see you, Mara. I recognize what you’re doing. The Buddha does not fight with Mara, does not get complicated about it, does not feed the trolls, as it were. He just reaches down and touches the earth, grounds himself, and claims his place.

To claim for yourself the right to see clearly what’s actually happening is absolutely crucial. It’s often lost in childhood. Children are often faced with a fateful choice: is there something wrong with you, or with me? For a young child it’s very scary to recognize that something’s wrong with a parent or a caregiver or someone with authority, because if there’s something wrong with them, they can’t take care of you.

Here’s exactly what I want to walk you through: what to actually do with what someone hands you that you don’t want to carry, the much older instinct in you this draws on, and what to do when you realize certain supplies are simply never coming from a particular person or place, no matter how fair it would be if they did.

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There’s a classic suggestion from the Buddha I’ve found personally to be one of the most useful things I’ve gotten from his teachings. Be aware of the gratification, the danger, and the escape. When you’re about to get into it with someone, be aware of the payoffs, what’s drawing you in that direction. Then be aware of the costs alongside the payoffs, the dangers, the cost to you, the cost to others. It’s tempting to pursue a righteous case. Anger itself has reward value, it releases dopamine and norepinephrine, it can feel rewarding, energizing. Anger, as the proverb puts it, with its honeyed tip and poisoned barb. So notice the gratification, then the cost, and then the escape. Turn to your practice. Slow it down. Move into mindfulness.

A subset of differences are boundaries specifically.

What I want to get into now is the actual practical list, five specific things you can do, starting with how to know in your own body that someone else’s reaction is theirs and not yours, all the way through to what it looks like to take real action on a boundary that isn’t working.

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And in that experience, very soft, poignant, wistful, was a knowing that the unhappiness in that home over there was not my doing. There was no abuse, no trauma. There was the ordinary wrangling of two young parents who themselves didn’t have strong family support. There was no village to raise the child. They were under a lot of pressure. I have no rancor for them at all, just, factually, that unhappiness is not mine. I’ve got to deal with it, but it’s not mine. That was very real in me. Okay. I’ve got to take care of myself for the next 10 or 12 years, until I can move on toward more of my own kind of family, my own kind of relationships, out there in the world.

I think many children, even very young ones, have had a sense of that. At some deep level, even if they couldn’t act on it or reveal it, they knew they were differentiated from what was happening around them in their home, and they needed to get on their own side. They were, in some ways, on their own. It was up to them.

That’s the first foundation of healthy boundaries. Self-respect. Getting on your own side. You matter. If there’s no sense of being on your side, if you don’t think you have standing, how could you dare to have boundaries? How could you think you deserve them, if you don’t believe you have standing as a human being? There’s a line from the Buddha I keep coming back to. When faced with a swollen, raging river, if one is swept away by it, how can one help others across? Or, as they say on airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first. You’ve got to take care of yourself to be able to sustain care for other people.

Second foundation, a combination of compassion and equanimity. Compassion means simply recognizing suffering over there, and that you’re not trying to do any harm. That’s real. At the same time, equanimity means recognizing, with insight, that the causes and conditions swirling along to make that other person’s process unfolding over there are, in some fundamental way, distinct from the causes and conditions making your own process unfold. Their mind stream is not your mind stream. It’s really important to pay attention to the ways we sometimes blur that boundary harmfully, taking on the attributes of others to prevent conflict, or to keep them engaged with us, out of a fear that if we don’t mirror them, or become an extension of their will, there will be trouble.

Third foundation, having your own capacity to risk dreaded experiences. To set a boundary, or act on the basis of one, we’re often afraid that bad things will happen. They’ll abandon us. They’ll reject us. They’ll yell at us. It’s sometimes said there are two major roots of psychological difficulty: low distress tolerance, and negative rumination. So the antidote to both is becoming more able to stay centered in your own calm strength, even if you’re a little rattled around the edges, so you can risk experiences like other people being upset with you, or distancing from you.

Self-respect. Compassion paired with equanimity. The willingness to risk what might happen. Those are the parts of this you can start building on your own, quietly, without anyone else even knowing you’re doing the work.

The how is harder to do alone. It’s the actual practical list, the specific things you say and do differently in your real relationships, especially the complicated ones, where you love the person, or you owe them something. That’s exactly what I built the Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop to cover. It’s a four hour deep dive into the practical side of everything above. Use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Setting Healthy Boundaries

Recognizing that it’s the other person’s nature is a good place to start. There’s usually a little bit of work to do internally after that, moving from knowing it to actually being at peace with it and accepting it. That work can show up especially if we have longings for something more from someone than they’re capable of giving. Over time, in a different kind of situation, we begin to realize it’s not that the other person can’t. It’s that they won’t. They just don’t want to. They ain’t gonna. And after multiple rounds, multiple cycles, maybe we’ve been as skillful as we could possibly be, by any reasonable standard, a reasonable standard of care, like in medicine. We’re meeting a reasonable standard in our relationships. So, no blame here. We just realize they’re never going to do that, or they say they want to, but they’re never really going to deliver the goods. The best predictor of the future is the past, especially once there’s been repetition, and a fair opportunity for the other person to shift.

And if you start to recognize that the way a person is is just hardwired, innate, they can try to compensate for it, but even compensating might be out of reach for them, given their biology, or an injury, or whatever happened, there’s just a kind of acceptance available. Sometimes inside that acceptance there’s a grieving, a mourning, a coming to terms with the loss. The loss of hopes.

I’m determined to a fault, myself. If I’ve messed up in my life, it’s often because I was too darn determined to try to get blood from that stone, to find cheese somewhere down that tunnel. It took me a while to realize, ain’t no cheese down that tunnel. That dog won’t hunt. Don’t send a duck to eagle school.

There’s a term, disenchantment, that I think is a very important part of changing our mind. We start to realize, wow, I was enchanted a little bit, maybe often in a sweet and wonderful way. My innocence as a child, or the childlike longing in me, or a sense of possibility, some intuition of a way of being, or a world that could be, draws me into opening up again and again. It’s a little bit like the Charlie Brown and Lucy comic strip. The classic setup: Lucy sets the football down, she’s going to hold it for Charlie to kick, and as soon as he comes toward her, she pulls it away, yet again. We can become disenchanted. Sometimes there’s a real sorrow in that. But then we end up waking up from the spell, and we’re in the cool clear air of reality as it is.

What I want to get into next is the practical part, what actually changes once you’re standing in that clear air. There’s a rule of thumb I use for knowing when a relationship has genuinely told you what it’s going to give you, and something I think is one of the deepest wounds a lot of us are carrying that has nothing to do with the person who couldn’t meet us.

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I came up through the human potential movement in my twenties, and for me it was a huge breakthrough. I was a highly, highly repressed and bottled up person. It felt like there was a valve in my throat. I kind of knew what was going on in there, to some extent, but I just couldn’t let it out. I didn’t know how to say it. And even when I did know how to say it, because I could watch other people saying it, I couldn’t let myself say it. I was too bottled up. So I did a lot of work to deliver all my undelivered communications, to become fully self-expressed.

Then in my thirties and forties and beyond, I learned that you don’t always have to say everything. There are situations where it would just serve no good purpose.

Yes, it’s how you feel.

Yes, you deserve to feel that way.

Yes, they really did wrong you.

Yes, there’s some record to set straight.

And when you really net it out, maybe that boat has sailed. It’s just too late to get into it with that person. Or they’re frail, they’re vulnerable, maybe it’s an aging parent, and it would just serve no good purpose to trouble their mind with that again.

You get to decide.

So there’s a place for some filters. But very often we overfilter ourselves, especially when the conditions are actually ripe to be more fully expressed.

What I want to get into next is the actual fear underneath staying bottled up, why it’s running on information that’s years out of date, and a specific way to claim for yourself the same room you’d grant to anyone else you love.

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^{A quick note before we get into it: if any of this lands, I'm running a live Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop on September 19th, where I’ll go much deeper into this same territory. Use the code substack10 for 10% off if you register this week.}

I’m not talking about putting our head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, ignoring the facts. I’m talking about something more like, how much rent-free real estate do we want to keep providing them, or their behavior, or whatever the latest thing they did was, inside our own heads.

Bad enough they’re out there running the show one way or another, like a landlord you’re furious at. A no here says: not in here. You don’t get to invade my mind. That’s a no.

This isn’t only about other people. Just as often it’s a thought of our own. Something that comes along, while we’re meditating or in life in general, that wants to carry us away. Often, because of the brain’s negativity bias, it’s a resentment of some kind, or a regret, or a worry, or a grievance, or a case we’re building against somebody. We can start to recognize when that’s happening. The conductor is calling, all aboard. Or we notice we’ve already been on the train for the last few minutes, if not more. At that point, can we say no? Nope. Not going to follow after this. The muttering may persist for a bit, but I’m not going to feed and fuel it. I’m not going to follow after it.

Sharon Salzberg has this lovely way of describing mindfulness. In some ways it’s like being in a nice meadow. Flowers, butterflies. There’s an awareness that pain exists, but you’re present, you’re there. Periodically a train goes by that wants to call you onto it. But you stay in the meadow. Then at some point you notice you’re on the train after all, in the middle of the rumination, the distraction. And the moment you realize it, you get to make a choice. Keep going, or come back, come home, to the meadow. Very often, the moment you realize you’re on the train, you’re already halfway back to the meadow.

What I want to get into next is more personal. There’s a particular no I had to build inside my own family, around my own anger, and what I found underneath it once I actually built it. And there’s a much gentler no, one that sounds less like a boundary and more like a blessing, for the voice in your own head that won’t let you off the hook.

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I grew up with loving, decent, really wonderful parents who were traditional, and no was not allowed to come out of the mouth of their three kids, including the oldest one, me. No, no, no was verboten. It was a big no. I recall exactly where I was when I made myself say it for the first time, at about age 22, to my father. It was about a fairly trivial thing. I set it up. I wrote notes to myself before talking with him on the phone, because it was easier to do it that way. And I said no to him. He paused. And then he rolled with it. It was not a big deal, but boy was that hard for me to do.

So if you come from a culture, or a family, where no, especially from certain people, was forbidden, there’s a cultural no wrapped around your individual no. Something in you was trained to block the authentic no from coming out. What can you do about that? Can you soften that inhibition? Can you risk the dreaded experience, and gradually push back the bars of your own invisible cage?

Your No Doesn’t Need Their Permission

How can you strengthen the sense of being on your own side, being a kind ally to yourself, who tells yourself, hey, your no is legitimate? Other people get to say no. They say no to you. You too have that right to say no. It’s okay. You can say no. Probably because if we have the right to say no, then our yes has more traction.

I still remember reading Miss Manners, who said that when you turn down an invitation, you do not need to give a reason. Sometimes it’s helpful to give context appropriately, but you’re not required to. My no does not require their consent. I’m not asking for their permission. I’m giving them the courtesy, or I’m giving myself the self-respect, of declaring for the record my reasons for the no, if I choose to.

Practicing It Somewhere Small

You don’t need to start with the hardest no in your life. It could be as direct as people saying, nope, I’m not going to do more than my fair share of the housework around here anymore. I’m on strike. I’m not going to. Or it might be quieter than that. I’m just not going to add that to the cup I’m really trying to empty, to create more space at this stage in my life for the things that matter, wilderness, deepening practice, time with the people I love.

Every No Is a Yes to Something

If I’m saying no to that, what is that saying yes to? If I’m saying no to killing over here, can I say yes to affirming life over there? If I’m saying no to stealing over here, can I say yes to generosity over there? Every no we make is, in effect, a yes to something else. That’s the yin and the yang of it, the two sides of one coin.

If you recognize yourself in that pause before saying no, or in the exhaustion of always being the one who says yes, I’d love to have you join the upcoming Setting Healthy Boundaries workshop. We’ll go deeper into what’s underneath the inhibition, how to build the capacity to say no without guilt or over-explaining, and how to hold a boundary with someone you love without losing the relationship. You can register here, and don’t forget to use code substack10 at checkout for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

A few years ago, on retreat, a line from Dogen hit me like a two by four right between the eyes. I’m paraphrasing from memory: carrying the self toward all things is delusion. All things coming through the self, and carrying out practice and action, that’s awakening. I’ve spent a lot of my life on the first half of that sentence.

Try a small experiment. For the next ten seconds, notice what it’s like to be you. Not just that the next thing is happening, but that there’s a kind of leaning into it. A reaching for the next moment. We’re not like a candle flame standing perfectly upright. We’re more like a candle flame being pulled forward, always tipping toward what’s next, as if by a kind of suction.

The Buddha had a precise word for that leaning forward. He called it bhava-tanha. Bhava is becoming. Tanha is craving, and the root of tanha, which I love, being neuropsychologically inclined, is thirst. Thirst is a deficit state. Something is missing, something is wrong, and we’re driven to solve it. An ancient part of your brain, the hypothalamus, runs thirst. It also runs feeling too hot, too cold. Very primal. Tanha is primal.

In his first teaching, as best we can reconstruct it, he doesn’t just say craving causes suffering. He breaks craving into three currents. There’s craving for sense pleasures: we want things to feel good, and if they feel bad, we want them to stop feeling bad. There’s craving for non-becoming: wanting to end, to erase, to disappear, to not be here anymore, which shows up psychologically in the subtleties of dissociation. And in between the two is craving for becoming. Which is a little weird. Not craving a particular pleasure, not craving oblivion. Craving to keep on going. To keep coalescing into a future self in the next second, the next minute, the next year. A future self that’s going somewhere, becoming someone, accumulating a story, getting stuff done.

This isn’t the Buddha saying stop changing. Change is inevitable. We’re continually becoming something else, naturally. Even people very far along the path are becoming: their body is becoming older, their mind is becoming maybe more knowledgeable, maybe less cluttered. That’s fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is the clinging. We cling, we contract, we get pressured about who we’re going to become. And we do it to everybody around us too, wanting things to happen in the black box of other people: that they’ll become, fill in the blank, more affectionate, more respectful, more interested, more well-behaved, whatever it is. It’s the pressure. And especially it’s the way the whole thing keeps circling back to me. Who will I be next? Who am I becoming?

The Losing and the Arising

Let me go cosmic for a minute, because when you sit with this, it’s freeing. There’s a plain question underneath all of it: what is now? What is the present moment? That turns out to be a real scientific mystery. One of my favorite books is Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard Muller at UC Berkeley. A serious physicist who can also write. His idea, which I mentioned in my book Neurodharma, goes like this. The universe banged into being about 13.8 billion years ago, and as it banged, it banged into four dimensions: three of space and one of time. We’re living in the expansion of that four-dimensional universe. Astronomers can now measure the stretching of space itself. Muller’s thought is that time might be the same kind of thing. The universe expands into the next moment much as it expands into the next stretch of space.

And for the universe to expand into the next moment, it has to leave this one behind.

So there’s an endless losing-ness of the current moment, built right into things. That drives a lot of clinging, a kind of low background angst. Oh, don’t change. Don’t go. But every moment of losing is offset by an equal moment of arising. The present is passing away, yes. It’s also arising, continuously, brand new. We’re receiving the next moment as it appears. The giftedness of it. When you rest in that, even for a second, who would ever want anything more? And when you lean into the arising instead of the losing, there’s less sense of deficit. Less sense that something is missing or wrong. And a lot of craving runs on exactly that feeling.

The brain, though, hates losing. It’s got a negativity bias, so it’s forever trying to grab what’s changing and hold it still. It can’t. It never will. The sands of time sift through our fingers, and that’s just how it is. How cool, time. The trouble starts when we clench the fist and try to keep the grains that are going to pass through no matter what. That’s when we tip into pressure and demandingness, and into conflict with the people around us.

So it’s not that you’re bad at being present. You’re running a nervous system built to lean forward and hold on. But there’s a particular place you can learn to stand, way up at the front edge of things, closer than most of us live. And a few plain moves take you there.

The rest of this gets practical: where suffering starts, further back than you’d think; how the brain builds the front edge of now; and a few ways in, including a faintly ridiculous experiment with expectations you can run in your next conversation.

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You probably have your own version. Someone who explains things slowly when you already got it three sentences ago. A test result you’re waiting on, for you or for someone you love. Something much bigger and slower, an election cycle, a country, a family member who just isn’t going to see it the way you see it, maybe ever. We don’t usually think of impatience as a spiritual problem. It feels more like a personality trait, or a completely reasonable reaction to other people being slow.

But patience shows up on the classic lists of perfections across contemplative traditions, right alongside generosity and wisdom, and I think that’s worth sitting with for a second. Why would teachers dealing with the biggest questions there are, the nature of mind, the end of suffering, bother naming something this homespun and down to earth? I think it’s because so much ordinary suffering, and so much interpersonal conflict, comes down to exactly this: other people not understanding quickly enough, not moving along fast enough, not getting it.

So let’s unpack the nature of patience a little.

In the Buddhist tradition, patience is likened to the earth, which is strong and can receive whatever lands on it without agitation, the banana peels included. That doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening. It’s not passive endurance either. It’s abiding. And what makes the earth able to abide is strength infused with insight: insight into the fact that many things simply take a long time, insight into how limited your actual influence is over most situations, and after a certain point, it’s genuinely out of your hands. Maybe for a long while. Maybe forever, while you wait for someone else to see the light or act differently.

Strength plus insight. That’s patience.

We’re not suppressing what it feels like, either. There might be real pain in there, physical or otherwise. Disappointment. Even moral outrage, because sometimes other people really are causing harm, or just lollygagging around instead of waking up to what’s actually happening. Patience means feeling those things inside a container that’s stable enough and big enough to hold them, without being ruled by them. Patience is the foundation of inner freedom. Without it, there’s no freedom in how you respond to your own conditions, only reaction.

What patience needs in order to actually hold up, rather than curdle into something cold, is the part worth slowing down for. There’s also something practical about pace that makes the whole thing sustainable, and a piece about the brain’s own appetite for stimulation that I think gets left out of most conversations about patience.

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I have been on the receiving end of some real wrongs in my life. People who ripped me off, betrayed me, let me down. And what I eventually learned, often the slow way, is that the path through was not to win the argument in my head. It was to let myself, including some very young parts of myself, feel the rawness of it.

That is not where most of us go first. Most of us go to the replay.

You know the replay. Something happens, maybe you get ganged up on, maybe you are the one being cut off, and afterward you cannot stop thinking about it. You rehash the scene. You rehearse what you should have said. You assemble the evidence for the hundredth time. It feels like you are working the problem. Mostly you are just going around the track again.

Here is what I have come to understand about that. One of the functions of obsessing and ruminating is that it defends against feelings. As long as you are up in the case, running the analysis, you do not have to drop down into the hurt underneath it. And the trouble is that the track wears in. The more laps we do around the rumination track, the deeper the track gets, because neurons that fire together wire together. You are not getting free. You are practicing.

So the way out is a little counterintuitive. The way out of too much rumination is to let yourself feel the raw feelings, to the degree that you safely can. In a phrase I offered someone recently that I think holds up: feel more, ruminate less.

I want to be careful here. This is not about spiritual bypassing or pretending the wrong did not happen. If someone treated you badly, that is real, and we do not want to lie about reality. We are social mammals. When rejection or betrayal or unwarranted criticism comes at us, of course it affects us. It is understandable to have feelings about it. The question is whether those feelings move through you, or whether they get walled off behind an endless case you keep making against the other person.

This came up recently on a live call inside my course, Change Your Mind, where I walked a brave volunteer through the whole of it: how to resource yourself, feel the hurt without drowning in it, name the wrong fairly, and finally give yourself a pass. It is the part that tends to bring the relief. If you would like to work through this kind of thing with me, the next cohort starts August 8, though you can join anytime. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10.

Below, I will walk you through that same practice, step by step.

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The good news is that we do not have to take every thought at face value. We can take a step back, look at what we are believing, and change our mind about the beliefs that are not helping us.

Below I want to walk through four common places people get stuck, with a real example in each and some suggestions for changing your mind. Feel free to scan them and settle in on the one or two that feel closest to home.

If you would like to take this further, I go deep on exactly this in my course, Change Your Mind. As a reader here you can take 10% off with the code substack10.

When Someone Else Seems Like the Problem

We often project our own insecurities and frustrations onto other people, and build a story in which they are the source of our discomfort. Left alone, that story tends to strain the relationship and keep us circling in blame and resentment.

For example, you might believe that a colleague is deliberately trying to undermine you, because they are often critical of your work. Believe that, and every interaction gets tense, and it becomes hard to work together at all.

How to change your mind: try on some empathy, and consider other explanations for what they are doing. Maybe your colleague is under a lot of pressure themselves, and the criticism has more to do with their own worries than with your performance. Or maybe they are the kind of person who runs on constructive feedback, and in their own way they think they are being helpful to you. You do not have to know for sure. Just holding the possibility can soften how you come at the situation, and that usually makes for a healthier relationship.

When You Cannot Get Yourself to Do the Thing

A lack of motivation can quietly block us from the goals and the activities that are actually good for us. When we decide, deep down, that we do not have the energy or the ability to do something, we tend not to take action, which then seems to prove the belief.

For example, you might believe that you do not exercise regularly because you lack the discipline. That belief alone can keep a healthier way of living just out of reach.

How to change your mind: start with small, doable goals, and build from there. Get clear on the benefits, and on how the activity connects to what you actually care about. Then build a little routine around it, and find ways to make it enjoyable rather than a chore. You might begin with a short daily walk and slowly stretch the time. Notice your progress, and remind yourself of the good it is doing you. Where you can, spend time with people who are rooting for you. When you keep your attention on the good outcomes and make small, steady efforts, motivation tends to grow on its own.

When You Feel Not Enough

Feelings of inadequacy usually come from measuring ourselves against other people, and taking in standards that were never realistic to begin with. Those beliefs wear away at our self-esteem and keep us from recognizing our own worth.

For example, you might believe that you are not attractive enough, because you do not match the images of beauty you see in the media. Believe that, and it colors how you see yourself and how you feel day to day.

How to change your mind: practice some self-compassion, and remind yourself that every person has qualities that make them worth knowing. Rest your attention on what you do appreciate about yourself, and let a little gratitude for your own body and mind come through. Surround yourself, where you can, with influences that make room for difference and individuality. As you come to appreciate your own worth, the feeling of not being enough starts to lose its grip.

When You Hold Yourself Back

The fear of being judged or rejected can quiet our self-expression, until we are hiding our real selves. When we believe we have to fit ourselves to what others expect, we miss the plain joy of living as who we actually are.

For example, you might believe that you should not share your creative work, because someone might decide it is not good enough. Believe that, and the work stays in a drawer, and your talents stay with it.

How to change your mind: let yourself be a little vulnerable, and recognize that real self-expression asks for some courage. Your perspective is worth offering, and it is yours to give. Spend more time around people who welcome you being yourself. As you dare to show up as you are, you tend to find more fulfillment, and more real connection.

You Can Step Out of the Old Story

Our thoughts shape how reality looks to us, and untrue beliefs can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. But we are not stuck with them. When we question the harmful ones and take up perspectives that are both more compassionate and more realistic, our relationships get easier, our goals get closer, and our sense of our own worth grows.

You can step out of old assumptions and attitudes. And you can step into more useful, more hopeful thoughts about yourself and other people. Not by pretending, but by looking honestly and choosing again. Moment by moment, that is how a mind gets changed.

If working with your own mind this way speaks to you, it is the heart of what I teach in my course, Change Your Mind. We slow down and really practice it, so that stepping out of an old story and into a truer one starts to become second nature, rather than something you only manage on your best days. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10 at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Something surprised me along the way, and it may be the most hopeful thing I have learned. It took me years to really see it.

The old reactions do not necessarily go away.

For years I assumed that “getting better” meant the painful reaction would stop showing up. That the flash of anger, the sense of inadequacy, the old “yes, but” would eventually be gone. That is not usually how it works, at least not at first. What tends to happen instead is that the reaction still arises, based on your history and maybe some trauma, and yet your relationship to that reaction begins to change.

Think of it as a playlist running in the background of your mind. Some old song gets triggered and starts playing. “I’ve been cheated and mistreated. When will I be loved?” A good country western song. And for a long time you believe it. Over time, though, you can turn down the volume. And over time, you do not have to believe that song so much. The reaction is there, but you are increasingly less identified with it, less swept along by it.

That is a fundamentally important point, so let me say it plainly: we can shift our reactions to our reactions.

Why does this matter so much? Because most of the ways we see ourselves and other people were learned. We learned them, often as kids, and often they served a real purpose back then. But a way of seeing that protected you at ten can be like walking around in a suit of armor that is three sizes too small. It did a job once. Today it mostly costs you, often a lot of unnecessary cost.

You do not have to keep wearing it. You can actually shift the internal factors, the stuff inside you that shapes how you react to events and situations and relationships. The causes outside you are what they are. But as you come to understand what is inside you that shapes your reactions, you begin to have more control over it. Be patient with this. It may take years to really shift a longstanding habit of being. It still works. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, we can really change our mind over time. And there is a lot of evidence for it, in the research on personal growth and on formal psychotherapy.

There is a lot of material on how to do this. Just think about those really thick textbooks on cognitive therapy. Ways to change your mind, ways to deal with doubts, the cognitive processes that keep us stuck, the general process of forming wiser views. I have tried to summarize all of it into one user-friendly acronym you can actually remember when you are upset: PASS. Through it, we pass beyond old, limiting, harmful, painful ways of seeing ourselves, other people, the world, the past, and the future.

Let me walk you through all four steps, with the specific questions to ask yourself at each one, so you have something to actually reach for the next time an old reaction gets triggered.

Before we continue, I want you to know that I explain this in depth in my course Change Your Mind. You can save 10% with code substack10.

P: Pause

Something has happened. Maybe you got irritated with somebody. Maybe you have become aware of an attitude, a belief, a should, a doubt, a “yes, but” coming at you. You are aware of something.

The first step is simply to pause.

There is an old first rule of warfare: secure a base of operations. We are not at war here, but we are doing something like that for ourselves. We slow it down. We get a little centered. We recognize what is happening: oh, I’m upset. Oh, I’m so mad. Oh, I think certain things. We observe it rather than getting hijacked by it.

If it helps, physically pause. Step back from the other person or the situation. Buy yourself a little time. “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in five minutes.” Whatever it takes to get your head together. This step is very, very important, because everything after it depends on you not being swept away.

A: Appreciate What Is Also Okay

This one gets misunderstood, so let me be clear about what it is not. It is not positive thinking. It is not rose colored glasses. We are not overlooking what is genuinely problematic or difficult.

But it really helps, when you are trying to change your mind, to appreciate what is also going okay right now. It leaves you feeling more reassured, and more willing to budge, to shift an old way of looking at things. To afford to let go of armor that did serve a purpose once, it helps to feel resourced enough in the present that you can spare it.

So you appreciate that you are still breathing. Your heart is still beating. You are basically all right, right now. The lights are still working. There is food in the cupboard. The sun is still rising, the flowers are still blooming, you still have some friends. Alongside whatever the hard thing is, certain other things are okay.

As you do this, you start to rest in what I call the Green Zone.

When you have a sense that your needs are met enough in this moment- not perfectly; there are always things to work on, but enough safety, enough satisfaction, and enough connection- you start disengaging from the Red Zone. The Red Zone is fight, flight, freeze. It hijacks us, floods us, immobilizes us, and it makes changing your mind almost impossible, because it has already carried you off. Even if the edges of you are still pretty agitated, see if you can find, in the core of your being, a sense of basic grit and calm strength, a little gratitude, your own warm heart with some caring flowing out and, hopefully, some flowing in. That is what lets the rest of this work happen.

S: Shift Your View

This is the heart of it, and it has three parts. The first two intertwine, and you can take them in either order depending on the situation.

Get objective. See what is actually the case. What are the facts here? What is the history, the context? Is it really that big a deal? I am not minimizing genuine harm. But put it on a scale of zero to ten, where global nuclear war is a ten and a mosquito bite is a one. Where does this actually land? Usually it is lower than it feels in the heat of the moment.

Understand your reactions. What is driving the bus here? A few questions worth sitting with:

• How has what happened been turbocharged by your own personal history?

• What thoughts are you adding to the situation?

• What intentions are you attributing to the other person?

• What old script is this getting sucked into, about what you are allowed to say to authority figures, what you are allowed to ask for, or what you are supposed to do when someone acts a certain way?

As you understand your reactions, including the deeper layers of them, something starts to loosen. You realize: oh, I have some choices here. Yes, those ways of being were learned. Yes, they may have served a purpose. And as I understand them, I get a little distance from them, some space between me and the reaction. It is there, but I am less identified with it. This is where you can meet the old reaction with some compassion: of course I feel that way, given how I have been treated. That is understandable. And that is not the whole of me. It is one part of me, and I can increasingly establish myself over here among the flowers and fruit in the garden of my mind, while allowing some of the weeds to be there without being carried away by them.

Think again. It is an old instruction, and a good one. Know your priorities. What is actually most important to you? How do you really want to be? Now that you can see the bigger picture, what is the wiser path, the higher road you actually want to walk? Can you take it a little less personally? Can you decide what meaning you want to give this? Can you find the exceptions to the thing you have been telling yourself? Can you know, deep down, what you want to encourage in yourself?

And do not worry about getting it perfect. We go through these steps again and again, so they get deeply learned inside you.

S: Step Into It

You have made a shift. Now step into this new way of being. Embody it. Live it. Help it actually sink in, so it does not just leave again the moment you get busy.

A big part of this is bodily. When you land on a view you want to hold, notice what it feels like in your body. Antonio Damasio called these somatic markers, the felt sense of a belief or a perspective. What does this new way of looking at yourself or another person actually feel like in your chest, your shoulders, your gut? The more you can tune into that felt sense, the more you can find your way back to it later. It grounds the new view in you.

Then anticipate the rewards. We are all drawn to rewards, so let yourself see the good coming: how will this new way of being help your relationships? How will you feel happier, more effective? When you notice that good things tend to come from a new way of looking at things, that reinforces it and trains your brain to keep coming from there.

And take action. This is not faking it till you make it. You are not faking anything. You are deliberately enacting a new way of thinking that is not yet a habit. So you have to do it on purpose for a while. You prod yourself, you encourage yourself, you speak to yourself in the new way and act from it, and over time, with repetition, it becomes your habit.

Let It Become Who You Are

This last part matters more than people tend to think. Once you have made the shift, marinate in it. Do not rush off. Let it establish itself in you.

What you are doing is converting a state into a trait. A passing moment of seeing yourself more kindly, or seeing another person more clearly, becomes, with enough repetition, a lasting part of how you are. And then, instead of having to work at it, you get increasingly lived by it. Carried along by it.

That old song may still cue up now and then in the background. That is all right. You know it now. You have compassion for it. And you no longer have to believe it. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, you really can change your own mind.

If working with your own mind in this way speaks to you, it is the heart of what I teach in my course, Change Your Mind. We slow down and really practice this, step by step, so that pausing, appreciating, shifting, and stepping into a new way of being start to become second nature, rather than something you only reach for once you are already flooded. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10 at checkout. Read more about the course and sign up here.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

That belief didn’t feel like a belief. It felt like a fact.

Here’s what I eventually understood. The meaning of a thing is not actually in the thing. We add it. Something happens, a person does whatever they do, and we decide what it means, and very often what it means about us. And because we’re the ones adding the meaning, we have some say over it. More than it feels like, most days.

Our sense of who we are is also layered. There’s often a surface belief, I’m okay, I’m fine, sitting right on top of a much older and harsher one way down deep: no, I’m bad. And it’s situational. In a work setting, you might think, oh yeah, I’m pretty good, I’m pretty capable here. Then you get dropped into a relationship where you depend on somebody, and a very different view of yourself can show up, something like damaged goods, not really someone another person would want to care for and love. Same person, different room, and a completely different verdict.

Most of these hard beliefs got laid down a long time ago, and back then a lot of them made sense. Something painful happened, once or over and over, and a young mind did what young minds do and drew a conclusion. A reasonable one, from the evidence it had at the time. The trouble is we carry that conclusion forward for thirty or forty years, keep applying it to a life that has completely changed, and rarely go back to check whether it’s still true, or was ever the whole story.

A friend of mine said something to another person once that stuck with me. “I’m sorry I push your buttons,” he said, “but I did not install them.” So much of believing the worst about yourself is exactly that. You take on the blame for buttons somebody else installed long before you got there. Their upset becomes your badness, their reaction, which has a whole history that has nothing to do with you, gets treated as a verdict on you.

This is a lot of what my Change Your Mind course is really about: getting clear on the thoughts that run us, and then learning how to work with them. It starts August 8, and there’s a code, SUBSTACK10, for 10% off if you’d like it. You can find it here.

What I want to give you now is the practice I use for this, more or less the way I’d walk you through it in person. It isn’t complicated. But you have to actually do it, not just read it.

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In a nutshell, the brain is the meat. It’s gushy; it’s physical; it’s made of matter and energy together—three pounds or so of tissue, sitting in the dark inside your skull, doing its work.

The mind, as I use that word, and as most people in neuropsychology basically use it, refers to information that is being processed by the nervous system.

Notice the distinction there. The nervous system is tangible. Information is intangible. Both tangible meat and intangible information exist. And intangible information needs something material to represent it. But the information itself is different from the underlying material substrate, like the nervous system that represents it.

That’s fundamentally what’s happening. As you read these words right now, the experiences you’re having are based on information being processed in your nervous system. The meaning of this sentence, the little flicker of recognition or doubt or interest as you take it in: that’s mind, running on brain.

And here’s something that surprises people. Most of the information in the nervous system is outside of awareness. Forever outside of awareness. Most of the mind is below the waterline. We’re aware of the part of the mind that is conscious, and that part is small compared to everything humming along underneath: the regulation of your heartbeat, the assembling of your perceptions, the old learnings that shape how you react before you’ve had a single conscious thought.

This isn’t a human specialty, by the way. Cats have minds. Any creature with a sufficiently complex nervous system has some rudimentary mind. And of course, we human beings have the most complex mind of all.

So why does any of this matter? Why should you care whether the mind is information and the brain is meat?

Because the mind and the brain are connected. They’re a single, looping system. Which means you can use your mind to change your brain to change your mind for the better.

That’s the whole game. Every time you deliberately rest your attention on something, you’re shaping the information flowing through your nervous system, and over time that flow leaves physical traces in neural structure. What you attend to, what you practice, what you let land in you: it’s all quietly sculpting the meat, and the sculpted meat then shapes the mind that arises next.

So here’s the takeaway. Your experiences are not just passing weather. They are, little by little, building the brain you’ll be living with tomorrow. Choose a few good ones today, let them sink in, and let the loop work in your favor.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

I once asked the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein a question I like to put to people: if you could get a billion people to do one thing for five minutes a day, what would it be? His answer stuck with me. He’d have them spend five minutes listening to another person with no agenda at all. Imagine that much real listening in the world, and that much being listened to. It’s hard to think of a simpler practice that would change more.

We tend to treat listening as something passive, the empty space where we wait for our turn to talk. But real listening is active, and it’s a skill, made of identifiable parts that can be learned and strengthened. It’s worth saying what listening is not. It isn’t agreeing, and it isn’t silencing yourself or letting someone steamroll you. Good boundaries and good listening go together. When listening would genuinely help, though, four things tend to make the difference: being available, attentive, empathic, and responsive.

The most important communication of all is simply this: message received. People need to know they’ve landed in someone.

Learning to listen well, and to be heard in return, is one of the most practical skills in any close relationship, and it’s much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program, which opens again in July. You can learn more about it here and if you decide to join us, use code substack10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll go through each of the four parts of good listening in depth, and then turn it around: how to help the people in your life listen to you.

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It’s a real and common longing, and it’s worth taking seriously. Our relationships with the people around us shape us more than we tend to think. There’s good evidence that our friendships and peer relationships, especially early in life, can influence how we turn out at least as much as our own families do. Friends matter. The people we spend our ordinary days with matter.

When we want more closeness, we often reach for something big: more love, more openness, a deeper bond. But there’s a smaller, and I think more reliable, place to start.

Consider the word lovingkindness. It can sound lofty, even a little exotic, the kind of quality you go on retreat to cultivate. Yet the ancient root of the word, in Pali, simply means friend. Friendliness. Something as elevated as lovingkindness turns out, at bottom, to be a matter of plain friendliness.

I find that genuinely encouraging, for a specific reason. You can’t make another person be friendly. You can’t make them want to grow closer, or open up on your timing. But your own friendliness is entirely yours to offer. It doesn’t wait on anyone else’s cooperation. In almost any relationship, in almost any moment, you can bring a little more of it, and that turns out to be one of the few things about closeness that’s genuinely in your hands.

Ask yourself: In the relationships where I most want to feel closer, am I bringing friendliness, or mostly waiting to receive it?

Start With the Open Hand

Friendliness has a particular feeling to it. At its simplest, it’s approaching another person without giving them any cause to fear you: an open hand rather than a closed one. There’s a groundedness in it. You’re not anxious, not performing, not overdoing things for the other person in the hope of being liked. And you’re not depending on them to return it in order to keep offering it. That independence is part of what makes friendliness so steady. It can survive a bad mood, a slow reply, an off day.

Ask yourself: When I’m with someone I care about, do my tone, my attention, and my body language say, “you’re safe with me”?

Bring It Home to the People You Live With

It’s easy to save our friendliness for new people and let it thin out with the ones closest to us. So picture an ordinary moment. You walk into the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed, and the other person is already there. Is there friendliness in the look, the first words, maybe a touch on the shoulder? For most of us, that small thing changes the whole feeling of the room. The same holds with an adult child, a longtime partner, a roommate. Not a grand gesture, just a plain and reliable warmth in how we meet each other.

Ask yourself: With the person I’m closest to, what would one degree more friendliness look like tomorrow morning?

Offer Small Bids

Friendliness also opens a door. It puts out small bids, an invitation to walk, a question that shows real interest, a bit of easy contact, that can draw someone into a closer relationship if they’re ready for it. The point is to offer without forcing. You’re not demanding closeness or engineering it. You’re simply making it easier for the other person to come nearer, and leaving them free to meet you or not.

Ask yourself: What small bid could I offer this week to someone I’d like to feel closer to?

Let a Friendship Be What It Is

Much of the strain we feel in relationships comes from asking them to be more than they are. It helps to let a friendship be its actual size. A friendly acquaintance, the neighbor you chat with, the person you sometimes walk with, is its own good thing, and it doesn’t have to deepen into something more to be worth having. Held lightly, without pressure to become bigger, these ordinary connections often grow on their own, and they offer a real sense of belonging in the meantime.

Ask yourself: Is there a light, friendly connection I’ve been discounting because it isn’t “deep,” that I could simply enjoy for what it is?

When Someone Can’t Meet You

Sometimes you offer the open hand and the other person, for their own reasons, can’t take it. After a few honest tries, it’s worth accepting that, and grieving it a little. But two things remain. One is to look for more fertile ground: people and settings more able to meet you, including the small, easy-to-overlook contact that’s often right nearby. The other is the relationship you have with yourself. We tend to treat ourselves roughly the way we’ve been treated, so learning to be plainly friendly toward yourself, on your own side and warm rather than harsh, is worth as much as anything. And it’s always available, whatever anyone else does.

Ask yourself: Where might there be more fertile ground for me, and can I offer myself the same friendliness I keep hoping to receive?

A Short Practice

Here’s a place to begin today. Once, offer a small, unforced piece of friendliness: a warmer hello, a real question, a touch on the arm, and notice what happens, in them and in you. Then, just as importantly, let yourself receive one when it comes your way, rather than moving past it. You won’t do it perfectly, and you don’t need to. Each small offering, and each one taken in, adds up.

What’s Underneath It

For most of our history as a species, we lived in small bands, hunting, gathering, struggling, and enjoying life together, held by a web of everyday friendliness. That capacity is still in us. It hasn’t gone anywhere; for many of us it has simply gotten a little out of practice. And friendliness is less a fixed trait than a skill, and skills grow with repetition. Offered again and again, in small and ordinary ways, it slowly warms the relationships you already have, and, over time, a whole life.

If you’d like to go further with this- the practical, repeatable ways of being that help a close relationship feel warmer and steadier over time- it’s much of what we work with in Strong Heart. You can use the code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.