emotions on Homesickness

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on the language associate...

13-year-old Mary is having a tough day and has stretched herself out on the couch to do a bit of what she thought to be well-deserved complaining and self-pitying. She moans to her Mom and brother, “N...

The more I use stuff to fill up my hungers, the more distance I put between God and myself. And as I continue to fill up my infinite hungers with finite things (when I run through the Starbucks drive-...

I cried when I was born and every day shows why.

I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

Have you noticed how difficult it is to remember someone’s name when you meet them? Within seconds of a person telling me his name, I’ve forgotten what he said. I may have even repeated it to myself. ...

The desire to feel loved is the last illusion: let it go and you will be free

What causes anxiety? I offer this list so you can engage in an exercise… genetic predispositions parenting (overprotective, overcontrollers, inconsistent responders) early childhood experiences tha...

When J. K. Rowling created the Harry Potter universe, she naturally drew on her own experiences to flesh it out. This is true even for such alarming creatures as ‘dementors’. These are soulless beings...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

I know a spiritual director who begins each of her sessions with five to ten minutes of silence. Sitting in silence is a new experience for many, and she told me that during these few minutes nearly e...

The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why...

So, how are you feeling?  It’s not a trick question. But it’s more complicated than it sounds. We’re always feeling something, usually more than one thing at a time. Our emotions are a continuous ...

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception...

What Jesus also didn’t do was wear his emotions on his sleeve. I brought my kids up with a mantra: Don’t litter your food; don’t litter your mood. In Edward Docxs Self Help, one of the most interestin...

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you...

Awareness of what I’m feeling generally brings the awareness that I am not my feelings. And then I can begin to see you more clearly and relate to you more intimately. It’s a little like shifting my f...

"Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel."

The more one probes the workings of an emotional life the more he will be convinced of its vacillation and undependability. No one should wonder that a child of God who walks by emotion rather than by...

A group of motion-picture engineers classified the following as the ten most dramatic sounds in the movies: a baby’s first cry; the blast of a siren; the thunder of breakers on rocks; the roar of a fo...

When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. Peopl...

No physical appearance is worth not eating pasta for.

Have you seen The Good Place ? You should. The afterlife comedy TV show, starring Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, offers a quirky take on heaven and hell which offers plenty of grist for the mill fo...

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clench...

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

In navigation, the term reckoning, as in dead reckoning, is the process of calculating where you are. To do that, you have to know where you’ve been and what factors influenced how you got to where yo...

May you refuse to do battle against the parts of yourself that need love the most. Set down your sword. Say hello to every shard. Hello, grief. Hello, sadness. Hello, anger. Hello, madness. ...

Love is not an affection feeling, rather it’s a steady wish for the other’s good as far as it can be obtained.